Editorial TEXT October 2023 Edition

American, British, and Canadian Studies Journal (De Gruyter), 2015

TEXT, 2012

This book is the first in a proposed international series. The next will be Researching Creative Writing by Jen Webb, with two more planned after that. The titles are aimed at scholars, students and teachers in higher education settings. If this first book is an indication of the purpose of the series, then they will be books that insert themselves in the contemporary debates, the contemporary developments and the 'practical' problems faced by the burgeoning presence of creative writing programs and creative writers in higher education. Vanderslice's book is sharply intelligent, and for its purposes deeply researched, but it is not a book that draws upon philosophy, aesthetic theory, critical theory, cultural theory, post-modern thinking or deconstructive argument. It is a polemical pamphlet produced by a practitioner of long experience who senses crisis in a discipline that, at least in the USA, seems to her to be shambling along too amiably and too smugly. This is a practical book, one that urges all creative writing programs to be more transparent about their philosophy of teaching, to focus responsibly on learning outcomes that give students a chance to find creative lives somewhere in the arts, in word-based professions or in publishing industry, and finally to be more critical of the workshop as a central teaching technique.

English Leadership Quarterly, 2015

In this article, the author argues for the inclusion of creative writing assignments in secondary school disciplines other than English in order to (1) improve the authenticity of students’ written voices, (2) provide new formative evaluation tools for teachers, and (3) create opportunities for meaningful collaboration between secondary English teachers and teachers in other disciplines. The author provides a variety of example assignment ideas, including “time traveler” journals, poetry exercises, scriptwriting, and fictional journalism to further support the argument for creative writing in the disciplines.

Rising Tension is a fictocritical i paper drawn from a late chapter of a current novel-in-progress with the working title, The Balsamic Jihad. The central character is Art Lazaar, a late-arrival academic and holder of a Poetic License, described in an earlier paper as a 'duly notarised certificate long lost to the bottom drawer of his desk which lends him charter to delve into great mysteries' 1. The core conflict of the novel sees Lazaar pursuing the political forces behind a murder no-one is especially interested in. But, also, in his somewhat tenuous role as a university academic teaching creative writing, his dean charges him to 'find compelling evidence … that whatever it is you offer up to the students of this university, it is worth the money we spend on it'. He has already presented his recommendations in the usual manner, but because they included some radical departures from what might normally be considered conventional, he is called to address the curriculum committee and provide answers to questions committee members have. The main purpose of the hearing, from the committee's perspective, is to ensure the proposals can be dismissed without repercussions of unfairness or foul play. It is a hostile hearing. But Art is a thorough investigator. And despite being set upon and beaten badly in the university car park a few days earlier by persons unknown, leaving him with a number of physical injuries, he fronts the committee with the kind of conviction that makes change a thing of a possible future. It is his voice you are hearing. There is nothing quite like physical pain to deliver the empirical knowledge that life is still present. Since I'd left my office and threaded my way to the university's senate boardroom, where I was to ply my trade, every step delivered—doubly going up the stairs. At the top, I rested, allowing my bruised kidney to refresh and disperse its pain among the two cracked ribs, swollen knee, grazed knuckles and dislocated fingers. The brokers, I noted, were already in, traipsing between the coffee-infused anteroom and the inner sanctum, mutual greetings issued in passing, curt instructions delivered to unseen ears among a burr of voices and jibing mobile tones. It was me they were after. I was the cause of it all; I who would dare stake a tenuous claim on scant resources; I who must sit, despised, in a doctrinally disesteemed discipline; I whose eyes now worked the room feverishly in search of allies. Through the door, around the polished jarrah table, those not face-fixed to mobile phones or buried in documentation or engrossed in tête-à-tête near the windows

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2016

Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence-a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play. (173) One of the founders of human ecology, Shepard (1925-1996) conceived of this discipline as an intersectional field, embracing biology as well as philosophy, environmental history along with anthropology and psychology, thus paving the way to what we now commonly call the "environmental humanities." In all of his works, from Man in the Landscape (1967) to Nature and Madness (1982), a very special emphasis falls on the co-evolutionary pathway of our species. The way we experience, know, speak, and imagine the world-even our sense of the sacredhave been shaped, Shepard acknowledged, by this long encounter with nonhuman animals. Perception, language, creativity, culture: this is what happens "when species meet," as Donna Haraway would say a few years later. Once more, the integral role that the "animal humanities" play in this broader trans-disciplinary debate is validated: if nonhuman animals have made us human, as Shepard maintained, then the humanities are unthinkable apart from this radical co-implication. And this mutual predicament is what our Ecozon@ issue titled "Animal Humanities, or, On Reading and Writing the Nonhuman" explores. Here again the connection between the "Special Focus" cluster and the Creative Writing and Art section proves to be extremely strong. As Deborah Amberson and Elena Past write in their superb Introduction, "it is precisely here, in the space of literary language, cinematic image, artistic creation, ethical thinking, and the philosophical imagination, that the nonhuman animal, long defined as being without logos and without reason, might speak most clearly." The variety of creative contributions in our section-two sets of images, a noticeable selection of poems, and a comic short story-could not resonate better with this statement. Let us explore this rich array in full detail. The first contribution is visual, and it consists of a choice of six pictures from the project Great Apes in Feminine by Spanish artist and ecofeminist activist Verónica Perales. The project, which is vividly illustrated in the artist's abstract, is meant to give visibility to the female subjects in primate studies, often obscured by