Voices Of Writers Research Articles

The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists

The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how the work of these southern or southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South. The Storied South offers a unique, intimate opportunity to sit at the table with these men and women and learn how they worked and how they perceived their art. The volume also features 45 of Ferris's striking photographic portraits of the speakers and a CD and a DVD of original audio and films of the interviews. |The Storied South features the voices--by turn searching and honest, coy and scathing--of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from Eudora Welty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how the work of these southern or southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South.

Constrained Agency in Corporate Social Media Policy

Corporate social media policies construct what Herndl and Licona term “constrained agency,” an ambiguous, contradictory agent function. Drawing on an analysis of 31 corporate social media policies, this article argues that these policies create constrained agency in two ways: they establish contradictory expectations for a writer's voice by requesting both individual and corporate-friendly voices, and they create a seemingly paradoxical situation where employees both do and do not represent the company. These policies shed light on the complex constructions of agency within corporations and encapsulate the workplace tensions that accompany the affordances of social media tools.

The writer's voice? Exploiting oral discourse strategies in the teaching of second language literacy.

The writer's voice? Exploiting oral discourse strategies in the teaching of second language literacy.

Dan as a discourse marker, metadiscourse device and metapragmatic marker: Examples from the evaluation reports of Taiwan's higher education sector

This study explores the Chinese contrastive marker dan in order to better understand how and why it is used to imply a contrast in discourse. It analyzes the marker as used in the evaluation reports on Taiwan's university programs, including their curriculum designs and teaching quality. The data consist of eighteen paragraphs selected from the evaluation reports on nine English Departments. The study shows that dan may be used as a discourse marker to indicate one of five potential relationships between the two discourse segments it conjoins. Based on an experiment, it examines whether such segments have an “inherent” contrastive relationship or contrast is better treated as related to perception and stance. The results support the latter. The study then considers dan as a metadiscourse marker, which has the interpersonal function of engaging and persuading the reader and the textual function of organizing the text. Next, the study proposes to view dan or its equivalent in Mandarin (e.g. wei, danshi, or ran) as a metapragmatic marker inasmuch as it indexes the writer's main concern. Overall, the study shows how dan can be used in the discourse to (i) mark contrast, (ii) mark the presence of the writer's voice, (iii) help the reader interpret two information segments, (iv) counteract a potential face-threatening act, (v) help the writer perform the act of evaluation, and (vi) signal the act of “pre-advice”.

Modeling L2 Writer Voice: Discoursal Positioning in Fanfiction Writing

► I analyze two L2 students’ writing in Fanfiction.Net. ► Three design features in this fanfiction discourse are intertextuality, dialogic interaction, and electronic text. ► These features locate the L2 writers in multiple social positioning for voice. ► Their degree of facility in the design features is visible in their different voices. ► Overall, a range of resources available in fanfiction discourse help them construct voice. Of various online discourses, distinctive design features of fanfiction discourse have given rise to a new social space that holds great potential for the negotiation of identity. In this study, I propose that fanfiction discourse creates a social space that helps shape the voice construction of the L2 writer. In order to understand how the L2 writer's multiple social positions within fanfiction discourse affect voice construction, I analyze a popular online culture-based writing website, < www.fanfiction.net >. Three dominant design features are identified that allow various forms of participation and levels of engagement by its members: intertextuality, dialogic interaction, and electronic text. These three features are actualized in three different positionings (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) that Ivanič and Camps (2001) believe writers take on when constructing a voice. Results suggest that the two L2 participants in my study created voices in multiple positionings made available by re-purposing a pop-culture storyline or characters, communication with audiences, and digital resources. Overall, this study offers a nuanced view of how voice is projected and negotiated within the intersections of multiple online discourses and how it relates to L2 writing in the digital era.

THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION FELLOWS' POETRY PRIZE 2012

This year, this competition with Dickens as its point of reference, raises the question of who the Dickens ‘Dickens’ is. Do we mean the man, all the still only partially known facts (if indeed anyone, however closely studied, can be known)? Or do we mean the oeuvre, the writer's voice, the world, and you would have to say the city, created by the sum of his books? Or beyond that, the thing that is more than the sum of its parts – a quality we call ‘Dickensian’ that could appear in films, on TV, on Christmas cards, even, not to mention other writers' books. These questions were not academic for the three of us who sat down together (well, not literally, but it was a real conversation) to judge this competition. As in any competition, we looked for poems that were individual, whole, achieved and unignorable, intensely themselves – in other words, which worked. We also had to decide which of them addressed the theme, and what they brought to it. Here the interesting discussions began.

Minaret di Leila Aboulela: dall'esilio a una nuova casa?

In recent years, a new literary genre appears to have emerged. It is characterized by the unmistakable voices of writers of Muslim origin who explore, often from a multifaceted perspective, the intricate relationship between their own and British culture, focusing too on the tangled experience of leaving their homeland and of being received by the Western society barely known to them. Sudanese writer, Leila Aboulela, is part of this new literary tradition. In her second novel, Minaret (2005), she employs an ironic, lyrical, and absorbing narrative to depict the fascinating and highly problematic intercultural relationship between Najwa, the heroine, and the other characters, and most significantly between the girl herself and London. The English capital is at the same time a dangerous and cruel stranger who amplifies the geographical and cultural sense of alienation felt by Najwa, and a kind of partner in crime, in which Najwa loses herself only to finally recover her own identity, the spiritual dimension she had long lost, and much sought-after peace of mind.In this essay, we investigate this at times difficult relationship to explore how the cultures that Najwa and London represent – respectively, Eastern and Western – combine and interweave, thus creating a liminal space where a new identity of compromise and dialogue is possible.

Dominant feedback practices: shaping engineer literacy perceptions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how dominant social practices embedded in situated report‐writing activities in an automotive discourse community in South Africa causally shape component engineers' perceptions of literacy. The study explores how the dominant practices of supervisor feedback and report acceptance causally impact on effective report‐writing perceptions during report text production.Design/methodology/approachCritical ethnography is the preferred methodology as it explores cultural orientations of local practice contexts and incorporates multiple understandings to provide a holistic understanding of the complexity of writing practices. This study focuses on data collected during two interviews and a focus group discussion with four L2 component engineers as well as the questionnaires their two L1 supervisors completed.FindingsThe engineers tended to measure or associate literacy and effective writing standards with supervisor feedback practices. These feedback practices interacted causally with the meanings or associations, the participants gave to or associated with literacy and their report‐writing competency. As a consequence, literacy was often described in terms of correct wording or terminology, grammatical correctness, spelling, sentence structures or styles in reports as determined by their supervisors during feedback practices, rather than report content, structure or technical details.Research limitations/implicationsThe participants constructed literacy in terms of correct language, word and spelling use and focused on linguistic errors in their report writing. They tended to perceive rhetoric and engineering discourse as separate entities rather than rhetorically constructed contextual knowledge. Language problems were usually attributed to human being inefficiencies and L1 standards rather than the individual creation of knowledge.Practical implicationsThis paper not only impacts causally on engineering workplace writing practices but on higher education and future report‐writing practices. Digital technologies and systems will increasingly impact on report‐writing practices, what constitutes contextual knowledge and acceptable literacies as varied and different audiences define acceptable writing practices.Originality/valueThe paper shows that on‐the‐job writing research is limited and research that has been done often focuses on criteria for good writing as defined by experts in the field. If all workplace writing‐practice research adopts this expert view, it offers no insight and understanding into what implicitly and explicitly guides writers. Writing‐practice research also needs to focus on the voices of writers so that the influence of human social behaviour on these practices can be understood.

Writer's Voice: The Gateway to Dialogue

Writer's voice is a term that is used almost universally in composition instruction. Despite the widespread use of the term, there is no consensus amongst scholars with respect to a standard definition of the term. This paper offers a new conceptualization of voice with a focus on academic literacy and student writers. Through a merging of Vygotsky's theory of Inner Speech and External Thought with Bakhtin's concept of the Utterance a definition of writer's voice is proposed that honors both meaning-making and text production in academic discourse.

Midwifery

The term voice is frequently used in current writing research. This review gives an overview of empirical studies which aimed to identify voice features in academic texts written by students and/or professional writers. The purpose of this article is to show how the understanding of voice and the aims and approaches used in the studies are intertwined. Many studies build on Hyland’s (2008) interactional model which has contributed to insights into voice-related issues in academic writing. However, the overemphasis on linguistic features, such as the use of first person pronouns, entails the risk that research on voice ignores content-related features that might be more relevant in the construction of voice. In addition, this review emphasizes the need to relate voice features to the specific context where the writing occurs. The reader-based approach used in the studies by Matsuda and Tardy (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) or the combination of different methodological tools, as used by Dressen-Hammouda (2014), allows taking into account contextual aspects such as the insider knowledge of the disciplinary community and/or the genre, thus demonstrating how the writer's voice is always embedded in ways of knowledge making and writing traditions.

James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism William C. Mottolese (bio) James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism, by Daniel M. Shea. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006. 197 pp. $31.90. One surmises, from the title of Daniel M. Shea's book, James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism, that this study cuts a broad swath through Joyce's body of work. The title is freighted with two magnificently unwieldy ideas, and Shea does not retreat from some of the largest, most daunting topics in Joyce studies: myth, modernism, history, theology, philosophy, aesthetics, economics, natural science, anthropology, and publishing. The reader confronts a book consisting of eight unnumbered chapters with no formal introduction or conclusion and no subdivisions in any of them. While the writer's voice is consistent and recognizable throughout, the book's argument, the territory in Joyce studies it attempts to stake out, and a discernable and systematic plan of development are not. Published with a plain orange-and-black soft-cover as part of a "Studies in English Literatures" series by Ibidem-Verlag in Stuttgart, Shea's book enters an ever-tightening academic publishing world as an unfocused study that aspires to fruitful insights but is so sweeping in conception that only in moments does it find its focus. A few chapters into James Joyce and the Mythology of Modernism, I was both impressed and dismayed at how polymathic Shea's approach is and how generalist and broad its orientation. He wastes no time in approaching Joyce via the most consequential and sweeping frames of reference. The book begins with a dual focus on myth and religion, attempting to claim Joyce as both Roman Catholic and myth-maker—a paradoxically loyal apostate who affirms God by challenging him through aspiring to the role of mythopoeic artist-hierophant. In his first chapter, Shea takes an oppositional and rhetorically charged tone in attempting to establish his central claims. In a way typical of the entire book, his sentences are often both grandiloquent and vague. Attempting to read Ulysses as more than a text structured by mythic parallels, Shea writes, "Forty-odd years after [S. L.] Goldberg's observation of the fullness of Joyceana, this study purports to be no different, as I propose a vision of James Joyce as a mythopoeic writer whose agenda was no less than the artistic representation of his entire world beyond the material and towards the divine" (2). He also repeatedly chides "critics" for missing what he, himself, has seen. In the first chapter alone, he offers these statements: "In this respect, Joyce's approach towards mythology is one such item in the current arsenal of evaluations that has been softly, quietly and complacently accepted" (2); "[w]hen this path is taken, though, the critical lens too often blinds itself to the realities of Joyce's own milieu" (3); and "[t]he unfortunate tendency of critics to separate the text from its mythic import has diverted critical attention away from Joyce's own work [End Page 602] in accomplishing what his forebears had done" (6). This "what critics have failed to understand" motif continues throughout the book as if it were bent on exposing a conspiracy. By the end of the first chapter, we have encountered some of the central problems of Shea's study. In chapter 1, subtitled "The Need for a New Myth," he eschews any systematic attempt to define myth and its dizzying multiplicity of meanings by integrating scholarship from anthropology, comparative religion, and folklore studies. Worse, he neglects to address any critics by name who, he claims, have missed the point about myth, failing to engage the vast Joyce critical tradition in any sustained way. Who are they who have missed what he has seen? Out of what critical loam has he crafted his own work? While he cites other scholars periodically, one is left with the impression that Shea has made no attempt to situate his book within the critical context of the present decade; his sparse bibliography lists a mere seven critical works published after 2000 and none published after 2002. Shea's work thus exists in a kind of critical solitary confinement chamber. To his...

Mapping the desert: Arthur Rimbaud, Charles de Foucauld, and the Société de Géographie, 1884–85

This article focuses on two disparate figures in the French colonial period in Africa, the ex-poet Arthur Rimbaud and the ex-soldier Charles de Foucauld. Between 1883 and 1884, each lived in Africa in self-imposed exile of a sort, and undertook rigorous exploration of the region to which he had relocated himself. Both composed reports on their regions of the ‘dark continent,’ and both reports were submitted to, and recognized by, the Société de Géographie back in Paris. The two geographical texts – Rimbaud's Rapport sur l'Ogadine and de Foucauld's Reconnaissance au Maroc – are watersheds of life-writing, as much as they are representations of colonial Africa observed by Frenchmen. Through comparing the two desert narratives, and considering the two authors' African lives, I argue that the process of writing about the desert actually evokes the essential character of each writer's voice, a voice to which he only found access in the desert. Finally, these voices in turn provide valuable information about the relationship between France and Africa, colonial force and colony, and about the various forms of resistance to each of those roles.

Forms of Literary Pleasure

InThe Writer's Voice, Al Alvarez makes the following complaint: You may read the works of later psychoanalysts, like Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, for their ideas, but you read them with gritted teeth because they handle language so clumsily. Or rather, they handle it with distaste, like scientists on the far side of the divide between the two cultures, for whom language is a necessary but inadequate medium, not worthy of their attention, the straw from which they are grudgingly forced to make their bricks.1 These days, when we are not being told that psychoanalysis is or is not a science, we are, perhaps unsurprisingly, being told that it is an art … When Freud suggested that his studies in hysteria seemed rather more like short stories, or was writing to Wilhelm Fliess about the inspiration he found in Sophocles or Shakespeare, he was acknowledging right at the beginning of what would become psychoanalysis, something like a divided duty, a splitting of affiliations. The psychoanalytic theory he found himself writing was science that sometimes sounded like literature.3

Dissident Syria: making oppositional arts official

From 1970 until his death in 2000, Hafiz Asad ruled Syria with an iron fist. His regime controlled every aspect of daily life. Seeking to preempt popular unrest, Asad sometimes facilitated the expression of anti-government sentiment by appropriating the work of artists and writers, turning works of protest into official agitprop. Syrian dissidents were forced to negotiate between the desire to genuinely criticize the authoritarian regime, the risk to their own safety and security that such criticism would invite, and the fear that their work would be co-opted as government propaganda, as what miriam cooke calls “commissioned criticism.” In this intimate account of dissidence in Asad’s Syria, cooke describes how intellectuals attempted to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it. A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria . She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.

Conceptualizing the Writer-Reader Relationship in Business Prose

Writers achieve an appropriate writer-reader relationship in business prose not by merely switching from their own to the reader's viewpoint but by artfully interweaving multiple rhetorical and linguistic elements. The writer-reader relationship is expressed through the many possible combinations of vision and voice, which originate in the textual identities of the implied writer, the implied reader, and, sometimes, other characters. By combining multiple visions and voices, writers create what Bakhtin called intentionally hybrid, internally dialogic language that fulfills a social purpose by reflecting human relationships even when the subject matter is impersonal and technical. You-attitude is but one instance of such language and is not always the best choice. Texts written by Sherron Watkins, former vice president of Enron, illustrate how a writer's decisions about textual identities, vision, and voice may affect the course of corporate events in dramatic, unexpected ways. Keywords: narrative theory; implied reader; implied writer; you-attitude; dialogism; voice; tone; point of view; perspective; Enron ********** am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals, Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins wrote in an anonymous letter to Kenneth Lay, chairman of the corporation. My eight years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my resume, the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax (see Appendix A). (1) These words began a chain of events that revealed a dramatic corporate scandal and ultimately led to the demise of not only Enron but also Arthur Andersen, its auditor. Investors lost money, employees lost jobs, and the business world lost public respect. Watkins's prophetic words became famous as Enron collapsed. But what makes these words interesting to those who study business language and its impact is the extent to which they violate a central principle of business communication: you-attitude, the expression of a relationship in which writers or speakers intentionally subordinate their priorities to those of readers or listeners. In trying to influence Lay to investigate further, Watkins focuses squarely on her own concerns, fears, and self-interest. To explore the complexities of the writer-reader relationship, in this article I apply concepts from narratology and linguistics to business prose. I address three questions: How should we conceptualize the writer-reader relationship in business prose? What choices must writers make when they express this relationship in a text? Why are such choices important in business practice? I assert that a complete analysis of the writer-reader relationship in business prose must go beyond the traditional concept of you-attitude, which oversimplifies the writer's options. The conceptualization I propose juxtaposes the metaphors of vision and voice in written discourse. I argue that writers achieve an appropriate writer-reader relationship not by merely switching from the writer's to the reader's viewpoint but by artfully interweaving multiple rhetorical and linguistic elements. Writers must define the textual identities of the characters implied in the text: the I, the you, and, sometimes, the others. These identities then lead to choices about whose vision and whose voice the text will reflect. Vision includes not only point of view but also perspective, distance, and focus. Voice--the instantiation of vision in words--encompasses metaphoric parallels with each aspect of literal voice: pitch, inflection, intonation, articulation, pace, and volume. Juxtaposing the implied reader's vision and the implied writer's voice creates what Bakhtin (1981) called intentionally hybrid, internally dialogic language, one form of which constitutes you-attitude. Whereas you-attitude is often considered the quintessential characteristic of good business writing, I assert in this article that this expression of a writer-reader relationship is not always desirable. …

Reading and writing

04–198Chandler-Olcott, Kelly and Mahar, Donna (Syracuse U., USA; Email: kpchandl@syr.edu). ‘Tech-savviness’ meets multiliteracies: exploring adolescent girls' technology-mediated literacy practices. Reading Research Quarterly (Newark, USA), 38, 3 (2003), 356–85.04–199Chung, Teresa Mihwa &amp; Nation, Paul (Victoria U., New Zealand; Email: Paul.Nation@vuw.ac.nz). Identifying technical vocabulary. System (Oxford, UK), 32, 2 (2004), 251–63.04–200Ellis, Rod and Yuan, Fangyuan (U. of Auckland, New Zealand; Email: r.ellis@auckland.ac.nz). The effects of planning on fluency, complexity, and accuracy in L2 narrative writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (New York, USA) 26, 1 (2004), 59–84.04–201Gascoigne, Carolyn (U. of Nebraska-Omaha, USA). Examining the effect of feedback in beginning L2 composition. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 37, 1 (2004) 71–76.04–202Hamston, J. and Love, K. Reading relationships: Parents, boys, and reading as cultural practice. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Adelaide, Australia), 26, 3 (2003), 44–57.04–203Hobbs, Renee and Frost, Richard (Babson College, USA). Measuring the acquisition of media-literacy skills. Reading Research Quarterly (Newark, USA), 38, 3 (2003), 330–55.04–204Huang, Jingzi (Monmouth University, USA; Email: jhuang@Monmouth.edu). Socialising ESL students into the discourse of school science through academic writing. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 2 (2004), 97–123.04–205Johnston, Brenda (U. of Southampton, UK; Email: bhm@soton.ac.uk). Teaching and researching critical academic writing: scrutiny of an action research process. Educational Action Research (Oxford, UK), 11, 3 (2003), 365–87.04–206Kamler, B. (Deakin University, Australia). Relocating the writer's voice – from voice to story and beyond. English in Australia (Norwood, Australia), 138 (2003), 34–40.04–207Kim, Hae-Ri (Kyungil U., South Korea; Email: hrkimasu@hanmail.net). Dialogue journal writing through a literature-based approach in an EFL setting. English Teaching (Anseonggun, South Korea), 58, 4 (2003), 293–318.04–208Kim, Myonghee (Indiana University, USA; Email: mahn@indiana.edu). Literature discussions in adult L2 learning. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 2 (2004), 145–66.04–209Lee, Icy (Hong Kong Baptist U., Hong Kong; Email: icylee@hkbu.edu.hk). L2 writing teachers' perspectives, practices and problems regarding error feedback. Assessing Writing (New York, USA), 8, 3 (2003), 216–37.04–210Lindgren, Eva (Email: eva.lindgren@engelska.umu.se) and Sullivan, Kirk P. H. Stimulated recall as a trigger for increasing noticing and language awareness in the L2 writing classroom: a case study of two young female writers. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 12, 3&amp;4 (2003), 172–86.04–211Luke, A. (U. of Queensland, Australia/National Institute of Education, Singapore). Making literacy policy and practice with a difference. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. (Adelaide, Australia), 26, 3 (2003), 58–82.04–212Mission, R. (U. of Melbourne, Australia). Imagining the self: the individual imagination in the English classroom. English in Australia (Norwood, Australia) 138 (2003), 24–33.04–213Morris, Darrell, Bloodgood, Janet W., Lomax, Richard G. and Perney, Jan (Appalachian State U., USA). Developmental steps in learning to read: a longitudinal study in kindergarten and first grade. Reading Research Quarterly (Newark, USA), 38, 3 (2003), 302–28.04–214Ryu, Hoyeol (Hankyong National University, Korea; Email: hoyeol@hnu.hankyong.ac.kr). Process approach to writing in the post-process era: A case study of two college students' writing processes. English Teaching (Anseonggun, Korea), 58, 3 (2003), 123–42.04–215Shen, Helen H. (University of Iowa, USA; Email: Helen-shen@uiowa.edu). Level of cognitive processing: effects on character learning among non-native learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Language and Education (Clevedon, UK), 18, 2 (2004), 167–82.04–216Shi, Ling (U. of British Columbia, Canada). Textual borrowing in second-language writing. Written Communication (Thousand Oaks, California, USA), 21, 2 (2004), 171–200.04–217Spence, Lucy K. (Arizona State University, USA). Stepping out of the conversation: giving students a space to co-construct writing. Bilingual Research Journal (Arizona, USA), 27, 3 (2003), 523–32.

The Work That Must Be Done

The Work That Must Be Done Daniel Heath Justice (bio) Although I can clearly recall the first day I met Simon, the memory of that afternoon doesn't quite fit my sense of reasonable time, because in many ways his words have guided me for much longer. I was twenty when I first read Woven Stone, at a time when I was shuffling off the heavy shame I felt as a mixed-blood Cherokee hillbilly from a poor mountain town, and Simon's deep love of land, language, and his Acoma Pueblo community—the substantive concerns of all his work—found a healing home in my spirit. It was a while before I read more of his work, as my focus quickly moved from literature by American Indians in general to Cherokee literature in particular, but each time I returned to Simon's poems, essays, and stories, I listened to new rhythms in his words, and new dimensions to the driving purpose of his writer's voice. Thus it was with no small bit of apprehension that I prepared to meet him for lunch on my first day as an Aboriginal literatures job candidate at the University of Toronto, where Simon was in his first year as a visiting professor in the English Department. After all, it's one thing to be inspired by a writer's work, but quite another thing to risk watching that inspiration vanish if the writer turns out to be something less than generous. I needn't have worried, because Simon was just as I hoped he'd be: kind, thoughtful, and certain in his dedication to the dignified continuity of indigenous peoples. Although I was still a graduate student at the University of Nebraska and felt rather overwhelmed by the rush and bustle of Toronto and the Anglophilic splendor of U of T, [End Page 93] Simon put me at ease during our conversation. He'd read some of my writing and shared his thoughts on it and made clear to me that there was a lot of work to be done in Toronto for whomever was hired for the position. It was my first personal meeting with Simon, and a memorable one, for he provided encouraging support coupled with high expectations. I was fortunate enough to be the chosen candidate for the job, and in the two years since, I've had many opportunities to work with Simon on a number of projects dedicated to increasing the presence, access, and visibility of indigenous people at the University of Toronto. Rather than focus exclusively on U of T or even on Toronto, Simon's attention starts with the local but also encompasses hemispheric and international indigenous concerns. He's given U of T a stronger name in indigenous studies and provided time, energy, and money to developing or enhancing projects like the Indigenous Literary Reading Series and the Aboriginal Studies Distinguished Lecture Series, which bring renowned native scholars, artists, and political leaders to share their knowledge with the city and university communities; an ambitious, interdisciplinary indigenous studies journal; and the development of a critical reference project on the literatures of indigenous North America. Simon's work and life are embedded in the teachings of the ancestors, the traditions and spirits of the land and the people. He has noted that "we are living today only because the generations before us—our ancestors—provided for us by the manner of their responsible living," and this ethic of respect and humility characterizes everything he does.1 He is an energetic mentor to young native writers and scholars across North America, leading us toward good creative and economic opportunities and reminding us by his example that our work is not just for ourselves, but for all our people today and in the days to come. Never content to just stay put and speak from the security of the Ivory Tower, he travels across the world to speak about the continuing indigenous struggle for justice and provides his poetic voice as a powerful healing tool in that struggle. As a professional writer and an indigenous professor, Simon is one of a small but growing group of native scholars...

Editor's Notes

Editor s Notes We are sometimes amused by critics who complain about creative nonfiction's defiance of genre conventions. If the selections in this issue's Essays and Memoirs section are any indication, contemporary practitioners of the fourth genre are forging new routes into subjects that have long defined some of the highest literary aspirations of essayists writing in the past century. Far from defying conventions, contemporary literary nonfiction, we believe, carries on a legacy of the American essay that values introspection and iconoclasm while probing subjects, far from congenial or genteel, that comprise our common, lived humanity. Consider, for example, some ofthe subjects and situations that charge the voices of writers coUected in this issue: the relationship between geography and sensibUity, the struggle to make relationships work (and the hard acceptance that they sometimes don't), and mortaUty (our own and others'). We lead off with Lee Martin's struggle to come to terms with a close friend's awful suffering and death in a house fire. How do we "practice an empathy," he asks, that puts us in the place of those who die? It's a step we rather not take, he admits, "when tragedy's victim is a stranger to us." He takes that step into his friend's last moments by retracing the long lost story ofhis great-great grandfather picking up the pieces ofhis young daughter's life after her mother dies. Somehow, the interleaving and moral reaction of the two tragedies bring him to a realization ofjust "how deeply and richly we're connected." DanieUe Ofri traces another hard encounter in "Positive." She turns over and over in her mind how to teU her patient, a young mother with two chüdren, that she has AIDS. "No matter what poets might say about the power ofwords," she reminds us, "the most deficate and thoughtful prose is quashed by the leaden weight ofa terminal iUness."The duty to speak to the dying about death and the difficulty offinding the words to do viFourth Genre so are also taken up by Jenny Spinner in a portrait of her father dying from pancreatic cancer. Like DanieUe Ofri, Jenny Spinner is tempted to find relief somewhere in the absence ofwords. But no matter how easy it might be to shrug off the topic of death around a man who never took much stock in words, a quote from Tim Brookes sets her on the harder course: "It takes courage to talk to the dying about death, but ifwe don't, we condemn them to gnaw on it themselves." "Place," as a topic for a roundtable ofwriters moderated by Robert Root and a subject for further reflection, is taken up elsewhere in this issue. In "The Enormous Phone CaU" Jane Bernstein peels off the veneer that is often mistaken for place. In doing so, she reveals what one doesn't expect from an idyUic suburb known for its clean streets, good marriages, flaxenhaired kids, and golden retrievers. Elsewhere, Lad Tobin's travelogue into cyber-places shows us how the Internet has complicated what it means to be "present" in a place as he wrestles with the vicarious seductions of taking a vacation through endless screens ofWeb pages. CB Anderson's portrait ofDogtown reminds us how subjects like place, relationships, and mortality can commingle into new permutations and insights. She explores the terrain of a deserted viUage on the outskirts of Gloucester, Massachusetts— once a throbbing red light district later abandoned to a pack of dogs—as a way into understanding her father's travails as age assaults his body and mind. Far from defying conventions, these pieces and their subjects carry on the tradition of the American essay Joyce Carol Oates describes as "springing from intense personal experience . . . linked to larger issues." Even writers like JiU Paterson and Roberta Gates who stretch the conventional boundaries of essay technique are only exercising the independence and mquisitiveness that Emerson, the sage of American prose, had in mind when he challenged future generations of freethinking writers to "insist on yourself; never imitate." We welcome you to spend some time with these and other writers as they decant old wine into new...

The buried astrolabe: Canadian dramatic imagination and Western tradition

Astrolabe / aestrae leOb/ n. an instrument consisting of a disc and pointer, used to make astronomical measurements, especially of the altitudes of celestial bodies, and as an aid in navigation. Over the last two decades Canadian drama has emerged as an important presence in international theatre. In The Buried Astrolabe Craig Walker offers a critical introduction to contemporary Canadian playwriting, providing a context for the study of Canadian drama and showing how it developed from Western European philosophical, literary, and dramatic traditions. Walker devotes the main body of his work to critical readings of James Reaney, Michael Cook, Sharon Pollock, Michel Tremblay, George F. Walker, and Judith Thompson, respecting the distinctive elements of the writer's voice while helping the reader appreciate the cultural context that informs each play. He analyses the poetics or mythological underpinning of the works and investigates the cultural significance of the tropes that typify their works. The Buried Astrolabe stakes the claim of Canadian playwrights to be considered among the most important in the contemporary world.

A Dynamic Systems Approach to Writing Assessment in Students With Language Learning Problems

Speech-language pathologists have not typically included writing as part of instructional or intervention goals. This omission may be related to the sparse research data on writing development in children with a language learning disability (LLD). Like reading and spelling, writing results from complex interactions among the linguistic and discourse systems and changes over time from an oral style of communication to a more literate style. One purpose of this article is to describe individual differences in the phases of writing development, drawing on examples from students who are typically developing, and those with an LLD. Special emphasis is given to the differentiation of audience and syntactic choices during the school-age years as critical elements in communicating the “writer's voice.” Using an illustrative case study of a 10-year-old, the second purpose is to demonstrate how school-based writing samples can serve as a dynamic tool for analysis of interactions among the linguistic and discourse systems. The multiple levels addressed include genre knowledge, concept of audience, clausal and nonclausal complexity, spelling, and punctuation. A major assessment issue is whether the writing problems of individual students stem from an unrecognized LLD, instructional inadequacies, or both factors. Suggestions are offered for better meeting individual needs through combining explicit strategy instruction for composing and self-regulation with explicit linguistic strategies that enhance semantic and syntactic options in writing.