Writing Workshop Research Articles

In a Bathroom During an Earthquake

In a Bathroom During an Earthquake David Wagoner (bio) You’re caught in the act and have to decide between two unstoppable simultaneous calls of nature while your small apartment sways two of its doors this way and that between you and nine stairs and a landing and nine more stairs down to a quaking earth being pitched and shaken by its tectonic plates. You’d think (if you could think) that of two panic buttons, half-naked self-preservation would come first because nothing much needs to be rescued here (which only a second ago was over there), still undecided, caught in your own stop-time, remembering in spite of yourself the quizzes and shifts and slips of your geology class, that vertical faults like this can have no heave and horizontal faults can have no throw, that footwalls and hanging walls are the two sides of faults on both sides, but you hang in suspense till the earth in its own behalf comes back to order. [End Page 267] David Wagoner David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008). Copper Canyon Press will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has won the Lilly Prize, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. Copyright © 2011 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Table of Contents

Abstract What's the Best Logo Shape? Profile Of Success What Does Your Brand Promise? Enhance Member Events With Mobile Technology Target Your Audience Host Activities to Engage Community, Build Support Making Connections Humanize Your Communication in a Tech‐laden World Crowd‐pleasing Ventures Video Contest Helps Ambassadors Define School's Voice What a Video Contest Can Do for Your Organization Seventeen Ways to Capture E‐mail Addresses Keep Employee Biographies Brief, Consistent, Focused Personalize Press Kits Add Personal Touches to Online Media Kits External Communications Seven Ways to Punch Up Your Constituent Newsletter Internal Preparation Steps Detailed Planning Tools Make for Planned Giving Success Best Marketing Practices Can Be Inexpensive Outsource Important Tasks Which News and Information Distribution Services Fit You Best? Press Release Distribution Companies One Company's Experience With a Distribution Service Get Face‐to‐face With Reporters Improve Media Connections by Hand‐delivering Media Kits List Cell Phones in Press Releases Online Tools Online Form Captures News Story Info Websites Offer Designer Social Media Buttons Offer Writing Workshop to Engage, Inspire Community Tell Your Organization's Story Developing a Book Educates Community, Raises Funds Tips for Creating a Book to Support Your Nonprofit

A Dog Watching a Squirrel, and: Accidental Delivery

A Dog Watching a Squirrel, and: Accidental Delivery David Wagoner (bio) A Dog Watching a Squirrel She's been told No,meaning Forget about it! meaning Heel! Give up the whole idea of chasinga harmless fellow creature,meaning Stay right where you are, you, and think about something else,but her whole glittering brainbehind her glittering eyes and her whole galvanized body and every brindled hairis saying this cocked tailand all this uncanine chatter here on her home ground is in need of direct action,that although the principal partsof the origin of species may have left them briefly together in overlapping factions,rubbing both of them rawwith provocative, unleashed acts, their destinies belong above for a squirrel and downhere on earth for her,and all she asks from me is to be turned loose in order to bark up the right tree. [End Page 329] Accidental Delivery It was a military termonce used in official reportsfor the gunning or mortaring,shelling or general bombarding of one's own troops. These words seem now even more remote from the facts of lost lives than they must have been back then,but at least are less sinisterthan friendly fire. With the bestof intentions, warriorsof all stripes in the past and present have had their faults uncovered, have made mistakes, and confessed, sort of, on paper. All sides of collateral damageunder analysis seeminevitable to them, thereforeexcusable. How can theypossibly win a war without killing as many as the traffic will allow? And if that means some people have taken the wrong direction,turned right at the wrong timesand were left in the wrong places,it's a euphemistic matterdeserving a Requiescat in pace in memoriam ante bellum et post bellum ante mortem et post mortem, in perpetuum, in perpetuum. [End Page 330] David Wagoner David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Copper Canyon will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets in 2011. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002. He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. Copyright © 2011 David Wagoner

ESL Students' Reflective 'Burning Experiences' at a Writing Workshop

Writing workshops can become a site of igniting a genuine passion for writing. This paper explores how writing workshops can be used to empower and liberate students. It describes the experiences of graduate students in writing a personal book. Grounded in a narrative research approach, this study is a description of ESL students' reflective ' Burning Experiences' at a writing workshop held in a graduate class in the United States. Based on personal interviews and ethnographic observations, a Thai student narrated her experiences and those of her thirteen classmates from seven countries toward the creative writing project in the workshop. Findings reveal that sharing stories that students were "burning to write" allowed them to get rid of the 'I can't write syndrome'. These students also felt empowered, were freed of constraints, and found their own voices. Most importantly, the writing workshop was a site where students used writing not simply as a tool but also as forum to express their real identity. Finally, the compelling experiences in this writing class included the negotiation of writers' roles, the discovery, exploration and identity negotiation and construction. This study provides teachers an alternative way of teaching ESL composition.

A teacher reflects ….. Reflective journal on an activity writer's workshop

A teacher reflects ….. Reflective journal on an activity writer's workshop

Blind spots: what creative writing doesn’t know

The Creative Writing program at the University of East Anglia – the longest established in the UK and the first of its kind outside the USA – was founded in part as a reaction against a Theory-driven conception of Literary Studies that was felt to be indifferent to questions of aesthetic value and the authority of authorship. In this article I trace the history of Creative Writing at UEA and outline my understanding of the nature of the relationship between creative and critical practice in order to examine questions of knowledge that hinge on the following three questions: What does Literary Studies know? What does Creative Writing know that’s different? What might Literary Studies know that Creative Writing doesn’t need to know? The answers to these questions, I suggest, may offer an argument against the incursion into the Creative Writing workshop of pedagogical approaches that derive from Literary Studies and are blind to the importance of ‘non-knowing’ in creative practice.

What's Right and Wrong with the Workshop

What's Right and Wrong with the Workshop

Editorial: Emerging Research Ideas in Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Medicine

The practice of musculoskeletal medicine continues to evolve rapidly. In this issue, we debut a new feature article section titled, “Emerging Research Ideas in Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Medicine.” These articles, spanning a wide array of topics—basic molecular biology, imaging modalities and research tools, healthcare delivery and clinical therapeutics, among others—unify around a common theme: hypotheses with a significant potential to change the practice of orthopaedic surgery and musculoskeletal medicine in the near future. Articles in this “Emerging Ideas” series defy easy categorization. They are neither reports of original scientific studies nor are they review articles. The format of these papers will be new to readers—it was new to us. These papers begin with the authors’ exposition of a novel hypothesis. The authors then define the scientific process to test that hypothesis and the roadmap for eventually implementing the ideas to give the reader a sense of how feasible the proposed program might be and the hurdles which might impede bringing the work to clinical practice. Finally, the authors aim to succinctly place their program in the context of prior work and future developments with a discussion on what establishing that hypothesis might mean to the community of orthopaedic surgeons and musculoskeletal researchers. This series can be thought of as “Proceedings of the Grant Writing Workshops”, as the articles were solicited from participants in grant writing workshops sponsored by the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation, the Orthopaedic Research Society, The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, and the Bone and Joint Decade. Because participation in these writing workshops is limited to researchers with defined research ideas, it is hoped that the papers offered here represent more than idle musings. However, some of the authors, as you will see, are contemplating completely innovative approaches with no guarantee of success. We trust that this series provides a service to readers, authors, and the community of orthopaedic and musculoskeletal researchers alike. Readers, we hope, will be edified and informed by these early reports. Authors, in turn, are offered the chance to “plant the flag” and rightly claim public credit for their ideas. Finally, we expect that these articles can foster a discussion among researchers in the field and perhaps even establish new collaborations. Feedback and suggestions on the endeavor are welcome.

Speaking Out for Social Justice: The Problems and Possibilities of US Women's Prison and Jail Writing Workshops

Through community-based literacy work, writing teachers can encourage the development of prison narratives that counter social and media-driven stereotypes of prisoner identity. Such work thus situates writing workshops and other literacy-inspired programming for women as part of the emergent US prison abolition movement. This is a complicated equation to work through, however, given the sometimes competing sponsors of such literacy work and its reception within and beyond institutional contexts. This essay suggests that a nuanced reading of prison literacy programmes and their sponsors is necessary for contemporary educators interested in contributing to both educational prison programmes and the abolition movement. In order to explore such challenges and to illustrate individual and public tactics for emergent social justice, this essay offers sample texts and commentaries from the SpeakOut! women's writing workshop in the western US as a starting point for a larger consideration of the complexities that literacy educators confront when designing and facilitating such programmes.

Journaling and the Creative Writing Workshop in Counseling and Recovery of Adult Participants

BackgroundI discuss a method of facilitation that I have used in my Creative Writing courses at the University of Lethbridge for many years. I tend to focus primarily on potentials and possibilities in third-year courses and then move on to questions of forms, genre, and structure in the “Advanced” or exit-year courses. These courses rely heavily on rapport and a specific structure which has the effect (most of the time) of opening the spigot of the students’ creative energies. Purpose of Study. Data from this pedagogy is plotted in a qualitative exploration using in-depth phenomenological “prompts” or thought experiments. This data will be presented in order to depict how art making or (in this case, Creative Writing journaling) contributes to mental health recovery and stability. The hope of our team is that this method may be deploy at a downtown satellite program open to street people and all and any who seek help. Sources of Evidence. An interpretative phenomenological approach is applied to data collected in several years of Creative Writing workshops at the University of Lethbridge. This data is broken down into three main categories: explanatory models of how the skills, qualities and approaches of the facilitator assisted recovery, on transformative characteristics of art making in this particular venue, and the wider social benefits of such art making. Main Argument. Using collaborative techniques grounded on the premise that the workshop is unconditionally a “safe place”, a progressive conversation is established in which the matter of the self is drawn into both language that is fresh and control of language that holistically conforms to the group dynamic. In this dynamic, remarkable recoveries may take place. I will focus the discussion on the structure of the collaborative journalizing, the purpose of which is to bring structure into the very production of personal and creative recovery. The journaling is an extended process-meditation, begun on the first day of a half-semester course and finished on the day a final portfolio is submitted for grading. I argue that the dream-journaling should have a basic structure in any case, and discuss several such schema as they have been used not only in Creative Writing but also in the community and in the literature of counselling and guidance. Conclusions. The findings provide a initial but profound exploration into art facilitators’ pragmatic knowledge and wisdom related to the health and recovery benefits of art making in the area of counselling and guidance. It also explores important skills and competencies required by those facilitating art making programs in mental health recovery contexts. Such data may help to inform policy and design of health recovery programs associated with Creative Writing workshops both in the college or university setting as well as the community health unit.

Beyond Description: Ekphrasis and the Expanding Lens

Beyond DescriptionEkphrasis and the Expanding Lens Vievee Francis (bio) Tell us, Dutch painters, what will happen When the apple is peeled, when the silk dims, when all the colours grow cold. Tell us what darkness is. —Adam Zagajewski, “Dutch Painters” I Ekphrasis, even if simply defined as a literary response to visual art, is rich in potential for the poet. The term suggests a boundless field of images, yes, but what to do with those images? Students in their initial study of ekphrasis seem to begin and end with description. Of course, that is not enough. Our poems fail if we do not utilize the poetic imagination to imbue with further possibilities what the previous artist has already imagined. The poet’s response to the visual imagination is to use the poetic imagination to disclose, unearth, and discover such possibilities, and to lend valences to the piece. In doing so, the poem gains its own set of potentialities. It is an act of revelation. There are several ekphrastic approaches, with varying narrative distances. The bit of Zagajewski above represents an approach that instantly resonates with us. It is thinking of the world as a canvas that we might paint. It puts the poet in the position of the painter recreating the visual piece and supplying the poetic response at once, going beyond mere description. Zagajewski’s lines force the reader, subject (and artist) into our own interrogations. What access to the great mysteries do these painters have? How can we acquire such access? What is “darkness” to us? The earliest type of ekphrasis considers not particular paintings, but the imagined object. Homer’s The Illiad, which contains one of the earliest examples of “ekphrasis,” provides an uncannily detailed description of the imagined object, the shield made for Achilles by the blacksmith god Hephaestus. But it is not the initial poem alone that is of interest to us. We are also concerned with the score of poems that arise from that initial instance of ekphrasis. We know Achilles’ shield does not stay with Achilles, for example. Homer passes it to the shepherd cum poet Hesiod who claims the shield for Heracles. Then, after centuries of movement, the shield is taken up by W. H. Auden who in “The Shield of Achilles” gives it back to the original owner, though the shield is altered to reflect the dark realities of the twentieth century. This speaks to how the culture of an age may shift what an object represents. Each poet reads the object imagined or not variously. A series of interactions occurs over time, space, and culture, creating a dialogue between pieces and poets. Auden [End Page 708] was not speaking to the audience of his day alone; he was speaking to Homer, presenting a new argument, and he continues to speak to us as we consider the poem and perhaps imagine what we see upon the ancient object. And at some point the poems may be said to leave the touchstone of the initial object (imagined or not) almost entirely. So in the writing of ekphrastic poetry as well as in our responses to earlier ekphrastic poems there exists the possibility of engagement with the art (and its referents as well as the artist), the poet writing in response to the art, and any other poets who have also responded to the art. As such, ekphrasis may be used as an effective means of entering a greater conversation across disciplines, and it is these interstices and allusions that allow not a crass self-referential engagement, but fresh modes of acknowledgement and interrogation. II That the 2011 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in Poetry would incorporate ekphrasis seemed inevitable since my co-facilitator, the poet Gregory Pardlo, and I were both in literary work with art institutions. Gregory had recently led a series of poetry workshops sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in which poets engaged objects in that museum’s collections, and I had completed my first semester as a Visiting Artist/ Poet at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, teaching poetry to fine artists as well as students in industrial design. While not...

CHAPTER 12: A Report on the Introduction and Resulting Effects of Novel Teaching Strategies in Increasing Creativity and Independent Thought

ABSTRACT This chapter discusses a report on the results of the introduction of novel teaching strategies to an otherwise rigid and nonconstructivist approach to teaching. The novel teaching strategies are aimed to foster creativity as well as independent thought in both teaching and learning among elementary school students and their teachers. As part of a larger team, the authors taught English at a summer camp in China using methods based initially on the reader's and writer's workshop approach in the United States, which, in itself, is assumed to spur the development of creative minds. Obstacles and difficulties discussed include initial resistance, tremendous need for structure on the part of the students, and lack of exposure to using independent thought. Attention is also paid to successes. Data arose from the authors' periodic reflections throughout the camp as well as on samples of student work. Student work was analyzed for skill of English use, as well as for independent and creative content. Assessment tools included a set of rubrics developed by the researchers to determine level of English proficiency and degree of creativity and independent thought contained in each assignment. Researchers initially coded assignments together to ensure interrater reliability, then coded separately; once complete, researchers met to discuss and compare coding of the data. This field-based research study could serve as a valuable beginning for further research comparing a more constructivist approach, including learning environments where students are creatively at work and teachers facilitate an environment conducive to learning through discovery, with more traditional, structured approaches, where teacher and students follow preestablished patterns for teaching and learning, which may stifle creativity and curiosity in learning.

"Harvard in Hell": Holloway House Publishing Company, Players Magazine, and the Invention of Black Mass-Market Erotica: Interviews with Wanda Coleman and Emory "Butch" Holmes II

In the late 1960s, Holloway House Publishing Company, a niche publisher of adult magazines and erotic paperbacks, emerged as an unexpected center of black literary production. Founded in 1959 by two Hollywood publicists, Ralph Weinstock and Bentley Morriss, Holloway House in its early years published an eclectic mix of high- and low-brow materials, including skin magazines Adam and Knight, biographies about Jayne Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway, and the literature of Casanova and the Marquis de Sade. However, following the Watts uprising of 1965, Morriss and Weinstock changed the direction of the Los Angeles-based company by publishing mass-market paperbacks targeted specifically toward black working-class consumers. The two white publishers recognized the uprisings in Watts and in other black neighborhoods across the country as a crisis of representation, and they capitalized on this crisis by creating a culture industry that catered to a large-scale black readership. This was a major development in the world of mass-market literature. Of course, the mass production of inexpensive and entertaining reading material for the American public has a long history, going back to the dime novels of the nineteenth century. But the dime novel and its early twentieth-century successor, the pulp magazine, were literary commodities marketed to whites and ethnic immigrants who worked in America's industrial centers. The novels created by Holloway House represent an important watershed in the history of American popular literature, as these were the first black-authored books to be sold in black communities and purchased by black consumers on a national scale. Holloway House became successful in part because the company put out adult materials that no other press dared to publish. In 1966, Holloway House released its debut black-themed novel, Some Like it Dark: The Intimate Biography of a Negro Call Girl. Ghostwritten by Leo Guild, the book sold well, earning the company as much as six million dollars, according to former Holloway House employee Wanda Coleman. The book's financial success confirmed Morriss and Weinstock's suspicions that there was an untapped market of black readers living in America's ghettos. They began to seek out writers more aggressively by advertising in the Los Angeles black weekly, The Sentinel, and by sending editors down to the Watts Writers Workshop. In 1967, Holloway House established its position as the premier publisher of underground black literature by publishing Iceberg Slim's Pimp. The Story of My Life. The book sold millions of copies, and it inspired countless black writers to craft their own narratives of pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and junkies for Holloway House. In the early 1970s, Holloway House became an outlet for talented writers such as Donald Goines, Joseph Nazel, Odie Hawkins, and many others to publish their street-themed literature. By distributing these books in inner-city communities, prisons, and military bases across the country, Holloway House bypassed both the East Coast literary establishment and Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher behind Jet and Ebony. Through an alliance of white business interests and black literary talent, black-experience literature emerged as a distinct cultural expression for working-class African Americans whose access to self-representation was limited. Even while remaining virtually unknown to white America and to large portions of middle-class black America, the black-experience novels of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines have had enormous impact on mainstream American culture. In the past decade, for instance, the street literature of Sister Souljah, Vickie M. Stringer, K'Wan, and others has emerged as one of the driving forces of the African American publishing industry, accounting for half of the new titles published by black authors. Although the success of street literature is often understood as an outgrowth of hip-hop music, especially gangsta rap, the opposite is actually the case: the pimp autobiographies and crime novels of Iceberg Slim, Goines, and other pioneers of street literature inspired Ice-T, Ice Cube, The Notorious B. …

Children’s spontaneous play in Writer’s Workshop

Research on the relationship between literacy and play has a rich history. Yet few studies have examined children's use of spontaneous play during literacy events as children are learning to read and write. This case study examines the use of play and the quality of playfulness in a kindergarten/first grade multiage classroom during Writer's Workshop. Data revealed children being playful in three ways: through the use of singing and chanting, the expression of intense emotion, and the use of pretend and fantasy. Children created a “third space' by infusing the academic environment with elements of their more playful social worlds. This “third space” functioned as a particular kind of Zone of Proximal Development, a comfortable, personally authentic and energized environment in which children learned to write.

Slipperiness of Identity

Slipperiness of Identity Mary Pettice (bio) Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Eula Biss. Graywolf Press. http://www.graywolfpress.org. 244 pages; paper, $15.00. A little over a year after the election of Barack Obama, one of my students updated her Facebook status, writing, "Stop saying 'Post-racial,' or I will punch you in the jaw." I wondered who sparked her outrage: A naïve liberal? A cynical racist? Or a lazy reporter, dutifully marking the passage of time with yet another year-in-review story? Her outrage, I'm sorry to say, amused me in a decidedly patronizing way; "There, there," I thought, "good for you for being mad at anyone who thought Obama's election marked the end of racism in America." I began reading Eula Biss's brave collection of essays on race in the US, Notes from No Man's Land, with the same kind of patronizing approval that I had for my student. While I was prepared to agree with Biss's arguments, I reserved judgment on whether she had anything new to offer to the conversation. I weighed the novelty of her perspective as a white, privileged woman whose mother had embraced West African religion against her Iowa Writer's Workshop pedigree, and, for a time, I merely admired her skillful and beautiful writing as I traveled over uncomfortably familiar ground. I read protectively, sparing Biss as long as I could from some sort of final dismissal as too earnest, too sorry, too white to matter. But I was wrong—because I'd mistaken her for myself, reading out of a sense of weary and cowardly liberalism, looking over my shoulder to see if anyone noticed who was really being too earnest, too sorry, and too white. Biss is up to something else, something wonderfully mature, intelligent, and new. In these essays, Biss reexamines not only her own history but that of her country, revealing in both delicate, poetic prose and blunt, necessarily emotionless journalism the truths, both painful and triumphant, of the American experiment. As she self-corrects her earlier reading of a children's classic, she offers us a way to read her own story, writing, When I return to Little House on the Prairie now, as an adult, I find that it is not the book I thought it was. It is not the gauzy frontier fantasy I made of it as a child. It is not a naive celebration of the American pioneer. It is the document of a woman interrogating her legacy. Notes from No Man's Land is Biss's interrogation of her own legacy, one that is at once both distinct within the American experience and distinctly American. Biss positions herself as a member of a self-described "mixed" family, explaining how, through marriage and adoption, she has biracial, black, and Cherokee cousins, and black and Chinese half siblings. She lived for a year in Brooklyn with her biracial first cousin; she taught creative writing in inner city schools in New York; she wrote for an African American newspaper in San Diego; she traveled to Mexico; and she studied in Iowa City, where she considered the difference between media coverage of post-storm looting by local university students and by Katrina survivors. But her most enduring connection to non-white culture was nourished by her mother, who left her husband and adopted a West African religion, the Yoruba tradition, and introduced Biss and her siblings to its art and ritual. Biss recalls, "There were weekends when I stood next to my dancing mother in a small, sweaty room that smelled of coconut oil and pulsed with the batá drums of Yoruba ritual." Biss's memories include "salty beans and rice" and singing "in a language we did not understand." Even so, the experience remains embedded in Biss's consciousness and identity. Except, that is, when authenticity threatens to drift away; Biss hints at the slipperiness of identity as she finds herself missing pieces of her own past. She writes, "In college, I remember, the African-dance class humiliated me. Beginning dance students could perform the ritual dances of my childhood better than I could...

Solutions to Neglected Tropical Diseases Require Vibrant Local Scientific Communities

Solutions to Neglected Tropical Diseases Require Vibrant Local Scientific Communities

Toward a Dialogue on Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

A long-time faculty member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Marilynne Robinson has been recognized widely and consistently for the quality of her fiction: Housekeeping (1980) won the Hemingway/PEN award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer; Gilead (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home (2007) was a National Book Award finalist and winner of Britain's Orange Prize. In 1987 Robinson's first novel also was made into a film directed by Bill Forsythe, starring Christine Lahti. Three non-fiction works, Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam (1998), and the forthcoming Absence of Mind (scheduled for release in 2010) develop arguments on a wide range of topics from evolutionary theory to nuclear pollution to John Calvin. As Michael Dirda testifies in his review of Gilead, one rereads Robinson's sentences for their beauty, sometimes for their truth. Moreover, Robinson's courage in confronting contemporary culture in a fresh and unabashedly Christian way draws her readers, reviewers, and scholars into dialogue. Dirda touches on the religious dimension of her prose: It is so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read Robinson's stories and characters not only delight and instruct but also deeply move us on matters of Christian faith. Perhaps James Wood best articulates the context in which Robinson's writing sounds the chords of American faith: Gilead is a beautiful work--demanding, grave and lucid--and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville. (Acts of Devotion) To say that we are surprised by the ways in which faith is treated in her narratives is to register our joy at having found in them a voice that echoes such authors yet remains fresh in a time characterized by cynicism, one of Robinson's favorite targets (Robinson). Her achievement has led the Board of the Conference on Christianity and Literature to award Robinson the CCL 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Editors of this journal to devote this special issue of Christianity and Literature to scholarly considerations of her work (Cox). In this issue, Robinson's skill in the essay is apparent in her contribution, Wondrous Love. Here, Robinson urges us to consider our responses to the present cultural moment and reminds us to have faith in narrative, to redouble our confidence in it by avoiding tribalism, resentment, and fear?' As readers also know from reading her nonfiction and essays in Harpers, to name but one of her favorite venues, a Robinson essay is to be savored for the rigor of its argument and the beauty of its textures. As always in her essays, she lucidly revises our understanding of significant texts we should read or re-read, and urges us to resist the conventional. Wondrous Love is no exception and has, among other things, sent me back to my hymnal with renewed appreciation. She urges us to cherish hymn narratives and find the mysteries of our faith anew through them. Robinson argues that like musical notation a also establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. By asking us why we are fearful, she urges us to eschew the narrative of decline and to embrace a more meaningful narrative of origins. The scholars in this special journal issue focus mainly on Gilead and Home as we wrestle with two best-selling novels that have engaged readers and reviewers in a vibrant conversation over the past several years. In Gilead, readers meet minister John Ames as he writes to the young son of his old age. …

The Blackbird Flies: Remembering Carolyn M. Rodgers

The Blackbird FliesRemembering Carolyn M. Rodgers Angela Jackson Click for larger view View full resolution In Memoriam Carolyn M. Rodgers December 14, 1940—April 2, 2010 Photograph by Gloria V. Rodgers [End Page 919] It was the early 1970s, and Carolyn was sitting in her Hyde Park apartment talking about her next volume of poetry. Something outrageous about people would strike her funny as she entertained me with stories, and she'd throw her elegant neck back and laugh joyously. "I can't use it!" she exclaimed with her characteristic sentence. It was as if she were making something of life and throwing away with a good laugh anything she could not implement to make her Something. She was Carolyn Rodgers, slim and dark, head wrapped in a dark scarf, bound tightly; wouldn't you know, her groundbreaking second volume was named after her, Songs of a Blackbird. Of course, she knew about Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy"—"I know why the caged bird sings." Carolyn, this blackbird, was free, determined to stay free inside the city of her birth. She battled difficult climates. You wouldn't know it to look at her—she had resilience, if not physical strength. let uh revolution come. uhstate of peace is not known to meanywaysince grew uhround in chi townwherehowlin wolf in the tavern on 47th st.and muddy waters made us cry the salty nigger blues where pee wee cut lonnell fuh messin wid his sistuh and blood baptized the street at least twice ev'ry week and judy got kicked outa grammar school fuh bein pregnant and died tryin to ungrow the seed we was all up in there and just living was guerilla warfare, yeah. let uh revolution come,couldn't be no action like whati dun already seen. That day in the early 1970s Carolyn thought about calling her new volume Blues Gettin Up, for she, like Langston Hughes, was very much in touch with the sounds and souls of her people. She loved the Blues, all the music of Black people. Like the testimonies of the [End Page 920] Blues singers her song were distinct, singular, her own. Like the Blues singers she knew she could be knocked down, but she would not stay down. She was always gettin up, leaning on her writing hand. Her strength was in her pen. In her songs. She wound up calling that volume How I Got Ovuh, after a gospel song, and that volume was nominated for the National Book Award. She was a quiet queen, given to reflection and profound personal and collective probing, given to irony, humor, artistic innovation, and faith. I don't even know if she would want to be called "queen," though she carried herself with the presence of one. She moved with a kind of regal grace. Carolyn Marie Rodgers was born December 14, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, to the union of Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. Her father was a welder; Carolyn called him "the fixit man." Her mother was a factory worker; Carolyn called her "a sturdy Black bridge." Carolyn started writing in grammar school as early as fifth or sixth grade. She was a natural poet. Carolyn had one brother, Robert, now deceased, and two sisters who survive her—Gloria V. Rodgers and Nina Rodgers Gordon. Carolyn earned a BA from Roosevelt University in 1965, and an MA from the University of Chicago in 1980. Between those years when Carolyn earned degrees she earned a distinct and important place in African American poetry. She earned a seat at the table of excellence. She earned a place at the banquet of posterity. Carolyn's first book of poems was Paper Soul (1967), published by Third World Press, now the oldest and most recognized of African American publishers. Carolyn was one of the founders of Third World Press. She shared that distinction with Jewel Lattimore (now Johari Hudson) and Don L. Lee (now Haki R. Madhubuti). This triumvirate was also founding members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop, chaired by the extraordinary Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest/Black World magazine. Other founding...

The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop

The Aesthetics of Generative Literature: Lessons from a Digital Writing Workshop

Connecting Mathematics and Writing Workshop: It's Kinda Like Ice Skating

Second‐grade students struggle with writing about mathematical topics during math class, so the teacher begins to integrate mathematical topics into their Writing Workshop. Content journals are used during math, and students are encouraged to write about personal connections to mathematical situations, as well as incorporate mathematical concepts into stories. As a result, the Writing Workshop is invigorated, and written answers during math class are improved and expanded.يواجه طلاب الصف الثاني الابتدائي صعوبات في القيام بالكتابة عن مواضيع رياضية أثناء حصة الرياضيات فلذلك يبدأ المعلم بإدماج مواضيع رياضية في ورشتهم الكتابية. يتم استخدام يوميات المحتوى في مادة الرياضيات وكذلك يتم تشجيع الطلاب على الكتابة عن روابطهم الشخصية بالأوضاع الرياضية بالإضافة إلى إدماج المفاهيم الرياضية في قصصهم. ونتيجة لذلك يدب في ورشة الكتابة الحياة ويتم تحسين الأجوبة التحريرية وتوسيعها في مادة الرياضيات.小学二年级学生在数学课堂上对有关数学课题的书写感到困难，因此教师开始把数学课题结合在书写工作坊里。教师在数学课堂上使用学科日记，鼓励学生书写个人与数学情境的关联，以及一些带有数学概念的故事。结果，学生在这个书写工作坊里得到激励，而他们在数学课堂上的书写作答也得到改进和扩展。Les élèves de deuxième année ont des difficultés à écrire sur des sujets mathématiques pendant la classe de maths, si bien que l'enseignant entreprend d'intégrer des sujets d'ordre mathématique dans leur atelier d'écriture. Il se sert de revues pendant la classe de maths. Les élèves sont incités à faire des relations par écrit entre des questions d'ordre personnel et des situations mathématiques, ainsi qu'à incorporer des concepts mathématiques dans les histoires. De ceci résulte que l'atelier d'écriture est revigoré, et que pendant la classe de maths les réponses écrites se développent et s'étendent.Второклассникам непросто овладеть навыками математической записи и писать о математических понятиях, поэтому учитель пробует сочетать математическое содержание и «мастерскую письма». В ходе урока математики ученики заносят в «бортовые журналы»‐дневники записи, посвященные своему личному отношению к математическим ситуациям, придумывают и записывают сюжеты, связанные с математическими понятиями. В итоге мастерская письма проходит с энтузиазмом, а ответы на уроках математики становятся глубже и разнообразнее.Estudiantes de segundo grado tienen dificultades al tratar de escribir sobre las matemáticas durante la clase de matemática, así que el maestro empieza a incluir temas matemáticos en su Taller de Escritura. Usan diarios de contenido en la clase de matemáticas. Se anima a los estudiantes a escribir sobre su conexión personal a las situaciones matemáticas y a incorporar conceptos matemáticos en sus historias también. Como resultado, el Taller de Escritura se vuelve más animado y las respuestas escritas en la clase de matemáticas son mejores y más largas.