Creative Writing Commons^™

Canadian Journal Anchored By Excellence: Review Of Antigonish Review, Fall 2018, Lindsay Gerano

The Review Review

The Antigonish Review reveals excellent poetry, fiction, book reviews and a single nonfiction essay in its Fall 2018 issue. Topics wide in range covered seemingly everything from health concerns to marital strife and more. Nearly half a century of publishing some of the best in Canadian prose, including Margaret Atwood, The Antigonish Review (TAR) carries vocabulary thick with glaciers and moraine, morass and Halifax, Adirondacks. More than half of the writers in its pages are Canadian or have close ties to Canada.

"Sharing The Desire To Open U.S. Literary Culture To Outside Perspectives": An Interview With Geoffrey Brock, Anna Vilner, And J. Bailey Hutchinson, Editors Of The Arkansas International, Geoffrey Brock, Anna Vilner, J. Bailey Hutchinson, Ruby Hansen Murray

The Review Review

The Arkansas International is a vibrant space, evident in the recent publications of Anneli Furmark’s comic “Horses” (translated by Hanna Strömberg) and Ladee Hubbard’s essay “Mafolie Hill,” which describes the author's time in the Virgin Islands. The journal, published by students of the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation with Geoffrey Brock as editor-in-chief, seeks to place “US writing in conversation with writing from around the world.” The editors seek more creative nonfiction in translation from underrepresented countries as well as writing in English from underrepresented voices. The enthusiasm of its staff is evident as they describe …

Journal Falls A Bit Short Of Satisfying: Review Of Your Impossible Voice, Fall 2018, Petur Hk

The Review Review

Overall Your Impossible Voice is far from bad, but at the same time, not much comes to mind when I try to think of the pieces in this issue. There is a general over-arching theme of feeling out of place, of trying to find a, as Joanna Ruocco puts it in her excerpt from The Runner, “better solution to the problem of existence.” And this theme is strong throughout, for better and for worse. The majority of narrators and characters feel far away, from each other as well as from the reader, telling their stories at a distance. This …

Fearless Journal Delivers Another Knockout: Review Of Redivider, Fall 2018, Louisa Parzyk

The Review Review

Volume 15.2 of Redivider packs some serious heat with free-verse poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and graphic narratives addressing topics like death, war, racism, and more in its 141 pages. More often than not, the subject matter has a dark bent that gives way to grave themes.

"We Want To Read Stories And Poems That Leave Us Feeling Electric": A Chat With Daniel Finkel, Editor Of The Penn Review, Daniel Finkel, Jennifer Stern

The Review Review

The Penn Review, founded in 1951, showcases writing and artwork from around the world. Daniel Finkel, Editor-in-Chief of The Penn Review, talks to us about the magazine’s writer-friendly focus and its recent new initiatives.

Journal Takes You Into The Dark Well Of The Soul And Delivers Truth: Review Of The Tishman Review, Fall 2018, Matt Koehler

The Review Review

The Tishman Review is not for the faint of heart but that's not to say it shouldn't be read by anyone and everyone. True, it's unapologetically cruel to happy emotions but the assault is necessary to the mission of the journal. Art, here, mimics life and there is no guarantee of happiness or resolution found in Tishman. Rays of hope and humor are found across the electronic pages prose, poetry, artwork, and photography but one shouldn't expect it. Instead, the writing weaves its way through life's infinite number of variables, imperfections, and capriciousness to paint an honest picture.

"Publications In Literary Magazines Validates The Time I Spend Alone At My Desk": A Chat With Author Melissa Fraterrigo, Melissa Fraterrigo, Tanya Perkins

The Review Review

Melissa Fraterrigo has published two books: the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy, and Glory Days, a novel-in-stories. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies including The Rumpus, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, storySouth and Notre Dame Review. She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. Currently, she is director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio, which she founded in 2014 in Lafayette, Indiana. The Review …

"Our Sole Ambition Is To Publish The Best Writing Possible": A Chat With Michael Ray, Editor Of Zoetrope, Michael Ray, Scottie F. Gerald, Becky Tuch

The Review Review

It's hard not to be awed by Zoetrope. In the world of small press publishing, Zoetrope is pretty much The Godfather of Literary Magazines. Zoetrope appears quarterly and offers up a wholly new look—and sometimes texture—with every issue. Guest designers have included Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey, Jeff Koons, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name just a few. Zoetrope has published the likes of Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut and Salman Rushdie, as well as filmmakers like Gus Van Sant and Miranda July. Then too there is the Classic Reprint feature: in every issue, a short story that inspired a movie is …

"The Realms Of Language And Art Are Boundless": A Chat With Kathleen Fitzpatrick And W.F. Lantry, Editors Of Peacock Journal, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, W. F. Lantry, Sanjeev Sethi

The Review Review

Peacock Journal began its creative journey in August 2016. In a short span of time it has caught the attention of the literati. More than 300 contributors have exhibited their excellence. Helming the endeavor is a polished couple: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Managing Editor) and W.F. Lantry (Editor). K.F. in her other role is a gifted coloratura soprano while W.F.L. is a celebrated poet, respected for his layered compositions. Peacock Journal treats the text with extraordinary care. The layout is aesthetic with a visual accentuating the wordings. No wonder this journal is on the list of most contributors searching a home for …

Advice To My Pre-Published Self, Nichole Bernier

The Review Review

Recently at the pediatrician’s office I fell into conversation with a man in the waiting room, the father of a 7-month-old with some undiagnosed problem. We talked as parents do in these situations when you cut to the chase. About the toughness required of parents, developed over time for that limbo of uncertainty and worry. Somewhat sheepishly he told me about a video he’d seen online that had stuck with him. In it, mothers were asked what advice they would offer their younger, pre-parenthood selves. Which got me thinking about the long gestation writers go through for their first book. …

Welcome To The Review Review’S Archive Of Content From Our First Twelve Years, Jeffrey Dodd

The Review Review

While the look will be different from the original website, we’ve endeavored to keep the content as faithful as possible to the first posting on thereviewreview.net. Exceptions to this include correction of simple typos and style errors (often a result of html coding), author photos and graphic content that couldn’t be reproduced, and weblinks that aren’t included because the original url is no longer active. Otherwise, you’ll find the content intact.

8 Reasons Your Submission Strategy Sucks (And What You Can Do About It), Becky Tuch

The Review Review

It's a new year, friends, which means time for some serious resolution-ising. If you've been writing and submitting up a storm lately, good for you. Please ignore everything below and get back to whatever you were doing before. If, though, you feel like something is wrong, like your strategy for submitting to lit mags is not quite working, if you want to be published more frequently and in more venues you love and lust after, then perhaps some of what's below applies to you.

Teaching Guide For My Daily Actions, Or The Meteorites, S. Brook Corfman

Discussion Questions & Study Guides

Discussion Questions, Prose Poem Writing Exercises, Resources Questions for Discussion

The Inventive Work Of The Christian Mind, Jeff Ringer

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Responding to Bizzell’s 2008 JAEPL article, this article argues that the intellectual work of religious minds involves inventing arguments grounded in the religious community’s ethos that advocate for new perspectives within that community. Using Katharine Hayhoe’s evangelical Christian environmentalist rhetoric as an example, this article prompts rhetorical educators to rethink approaches to teaching ethos.

("What if there is intellectual work to be done that can only be done by what [Shannon] Carter calls the “Christian mind”—or Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist mind?" —Patricia Bizzell, Faith-Based World Views as a Challenge to the Believing Game)

Back Matter-Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Back Matter

Front Matter- Jaepl Volume 25, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Front Matter

The Good Enough Teacher, Natalie Davey

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This paper puts forward a pedagogical model of care for K-12 educators that is specifically focused on alternative classroom educators. In conversation with educational theorists and psychologists, a model of care that is translatable to both teachers and students in non-traditional classrooms is presented. Looking first at Arlie Hochschild’s “emotion work” in the context of alternative classroom teaching, a link is made to Nel Noddings’s “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point. The author then riffs on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” the one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world …

Invictus: Race And Emotional Labor Of Faculty Of Color At The Urban Community College, Kerri-Ann M. Smith, Kathleen T. Alves, Irvin Weathersby Jr., John D. Yi

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article shares the counter-stories of four junior faculty members of color, whose lived experiences provide concrete examples of what emotional labor sometimes entails in higher education. Grounded in Critical Race Theory and antiracist methodologies, these academics identify specific ways in which they experience emotional labor: guilt, silence, anger, navigating double-consciousness and liminality, and self-regulating physical and mental health. They seek to buttress their experiences with counternarratives and, consequently, recommendations for how community college leaders may help to alleviate the emotional labor associated with junior faculty members of color through promotion, leadership, mentoring, and recognition of diverse perspectives and contributions …

Seeing Writing Whole: The Revolution We Really Need, Keith Rhodes

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Composition classes have difficulty achieving the aims of the CCCC position statement entitled Students’ Right to Their Own Language, for reasons related to why we have difficulty integrating calls for building rhetorical listening more fully into our curricula. A fundamental assumption that writers alone are responsible for the success of written communication leads to results that sustain privileged discourse and upset any sense that readers, too, have an obligation in any written transaction. A field of Writing, properly constituted, needs to challenge that assumption of readerly privilege overtly so that we can shift toward teaching students better ways to manage …

Stemm-Humanities Co-Teaching And The Humusities Turn, Hella B. Cohen

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Donna Haraway calls for a new Humanities that attends to the role of this traditionally anthropocentric field on a damaged planet. The Humusities, she offers, empower us to teach at the intersections of observation, speculation, and affective reasoning. This article considers co-teaching and interdisciplinary teaching structures as part of the Humusities model. Drawing from interviews and pedagogical materials of professors who have co-taught STEMM-Humanities classes, student feedback from these sections, and current research on interdisciplinary education, I theorize the possibilities and limitations of the interdisciplinary Humusities at the undergraduate level. The article explores how we translate the tenets of Haraway …

Contemplative Wac: Testing A Mindfulness-Based Reflective Writing Assignment, Jared Featherstone

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This qualitative study examines the effects of the Mindfulness Journal Assignment (MJA), a semester-long integration implemented in five different university courses, to understand its potential for teaching and learning. Of particular interest were the patterns found in the reflective writing of students engaging in the MJA and the connection of those patterns to both classroom and Writing Across the Curriculum learning objectives. The most frequent themes occurring in the 111,906-word dataset were metacognitive awareness and self-regulation, both of which are significant for learning transfer and WAC. The findings of this study are promising in that the inclusion of a contemplative …

Connecting: On “Showing Up” In Teaching, Tutoring, And Writing: A Search For Humanity, Christy Wenger, Nicole J. Wilson, Angela Montez, Sara Y. Chung, Christina M. Lavecchia, Cristina D. Ramirez, Patricia D. Pytleski

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The pieces collected in this section of Connecting all exhibit ways of “showing up” in writing. They do so by modeling how we might claim very specific, very material conditions of learning and thinking and speak from the authority of personal experience. They are full of voice. They show up by revealing the presence of their writers and by making intentional space for readers to show up in response, as a writer’s presence begets the readers’. The writing contained within this section also offers practices that might help us think through the dynamics of a pedagogical praxis of “showing up.”

Volume 25 Of The Journal Of The Assembly For Expanded Perspectives On Learning, Wendy Ryden, Peter H. Khost

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), an official assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, is open to all those interested in extending the frontiers of teaching and learning beyond the traditional disciplines and methodologies. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies for learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals.

Book Reviews, Irene Papoulis, Nate Mickelson, Paul Pucccio, Erin L. Frymire, Tracy Lassiter

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

All of this year’s books circle around issues of healing, a richly faceted subject always dear to members of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. Nate Mickelson reviews Burt Bradley’s After Following, in which the poet takes solace in writing his own meditations on the work of other poets; Paul Puccio responds to Peter Khost’s Rhetor Response: A Theory and Practice of Literary Affordance, which explores the potential connections to life that literature could provide readers in our classrooms and beyond; Erin Frymire addresses Jessica Restaino’s Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, which combines rhetorical analysis …

Complaint As ‘Sticky Data’ For The Woman Wpa: The Intellectual Work Of A Wpa’S Emotional And Embodied Labor, Anna Sicari

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

There is rich scholarship on emotions in writing program administration, and the labor this work requires from WPAs (Holt; Micciche; McKinney et. al; Ratcliffe and Rickley; Vidali) and on the feminized nature of writing programs and the way gender informs this type of emotional work (Enos; Flynn; Miller; Schell). Many WPA scholars advocate that our administrative work is intellectual work, yet little attention has been given to the emotional and embodied labor of WPA work as intellectual and as defining components of WPA work. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s recent work on complaint and data I collected from thirty interviews with …

Fyc Students’ Emotional Labor In The Feedback Cycle, Kelly Blewett

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay explores the emotions first-year composition students experience when receiving feedback on their writing. Culling data from 32 hours of interviews with students, as well as two different data streams students provided regarding their emotional reactions to feedback, I argue that students undergo what Arlie Hochschild calls transmutation as they process feedback on their writing. Two implications are suggested: first, that future studies should utilize non-alphabetic tools for capturing emotion; second, that teachers wishing to assist student reception of feedback should be attentive to building rapport in the classroom. Finally, the essay calls for additional study of the impact …

The Toil Of Feeling: Education As Emotional Labor - Teaching At The End Of Empire, Wendy Ryden

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The editor's introduction to the Special Section, The Toil of Feeling: Education as Emotional Labor.

“So, That’S Sort Of Wonderful”: The Ideology Of Commitment And The Labor Of Contingency, Sarah V. Seeley

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This article explores the emotional outcomes related to language commodification within an organizational context: the first-year writing program at Binghamton University, which is a public research university in upstate New York. In this setting, the meanings of effective writing instruction are discursively constructed in terms of a multi-faceted commitment to ‘the process.’ This entails an ideological commitment to both recursive process writing and the process of collaboratively evaluating the product that derives from it. I first offer an overview of the Binghamton context, including the details of collaborative portfolio assessment. I then analyze a specific sociolinguistic strategy: pep talking. I …

Rhetoric And Emotion Save Science: Lessons From Student Eco-Activists, Jesse Priest

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

This essay is a qualitative study of the experience of undergraduate students learning how to teach issues of sustainability to their campus communities through an innovative outreach program at a large northeastern research university, while at the same time learning to navigate complex emotional labor required by their outreach and activist work. While most previous work on science writing and rhetoric focuses on disciplinary, publishing, or genre practices, I examine the holistic student experience by placing outreach, writing, and the classroom in conversation with each other, illuminating how discourses can cross institutional and contextual borders. Additionally, while most previous work …

Inspirations For Awake: Expressions Of Trauma Through Fiction And Autoethnographic Literature, Sophia Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Awake is a novella based on true events in my own life. This capstone project addresses my own experiences with intimate partner violence. While it is inspired by my life, I chose to write a fictional narrative rather than a strictly biographical piece of nonfiction. Instead, this novella illustrates a few of the traumas that I went through from within the lens of a fictional narrative. This enabled me to tell about my experiences by crafting my memories into a story, without the pressure of submitting an accounting of them. Writing Awake has been helpful to me in that it …