You Can't Write That: 8 Myths About Correct English
People read and write a range of English every day, yet what counts as 'correct' English has been narrowly defined and tested for 150 years. This book is written for educators, students, employers and scholars who are seeking a more just and knowledgeable perspective on English writing. It brings together history, headlines, and research with accessible visuals and examples, to provide an engaging overview of the complex nature of written English, and to offer a new approach for our diverse and digital writing world. Each chapter addresses a particular 'myth' of “correct” writing, such as 'students today can't write' or 'the internet is ruining academic writing', and presents the myth's context and consequences.
A Kind of In-Between looks at the last few years of Aaron’s life (getting divorced, teaching, being a writer, settling into life in the Midwest in his 40s) and also back to his childhood (being adopted, an almost obnoxiously happy and loving childhood, growing up on the West Coast), in curious, playful snapshots that become a whole greater than the sum of their parts. These short essays are about growing up and memory; who Aaron is and who he wants to be; road trips and home and collectibles and family and friendship; how he sees himself, how he wants others to see him, and all the overlaps and incongruencies therein; being a stepfather and son and child and adult and husband and ex and teacher and writer and friend; the things we keep and the things we let go; how to try to make sense of being a person in this world.
Aaron Burch, Editor
A fun and thoughtful collection of previously unpublished essays about skateboarding, riding horses, gardening, delivering mail, shooting baskets, cooking, record collecting, knitting, stitching, running, and many more things that aren’t writing, except that, put in the context of this collection, maybe they are?
The Forbidden Territory of A Terrifying Woman
Fates and Furies meets Melancholia in this ominous and absorbing debut novel about marriage and motherhood in a time of ecological collapse, as mothers around the world begin to mysteriously vanish from their homes.
Confronting the role of motherhood and the meaning of home in the wreckage of capitalism and climate change, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman is that rare, dazzling debut that is both thrilling and profound. It is a mystery, a play on myths of metamorphosis, and above all, a story of love—between husband and wife, mother and child—deeply troubled by the future we face.
Alive with formal daring, the poems in UNDERSHORE examine the speaker’s ongoing grief following the loss of her mother. The book engages the botanical world, shorelines, desire, intimacy, and grief, all to reveal the unexpected and inevitable way these concerns merge into one another through language’s alchemy.
UNDERSHORE is comprised of both a textual artifact and multimedia experience that expand the worlds in which the reader can encounter the poems. To accompany the book, Hoffer constructed a paper quilt of cyanotype-printed squares that draw on language from the poems. Visit the multimodal app that documents the quilt and listen to recordings of the poems here.
In this narrative about making meaning of brokenness and grief, Megan Sweeney reflects on her childhood entanglement with her mother, her loss-filled relationship with her alcoholic father, and her attachment to the clothes that have mended her as she has mended them. Sweeney explores how clothing fosters communication and enables us to cultivate relationships with ourselves and with others, both living and deceased. In dialogue with other clothing lovers, writers, fiber artists, evolutionary biologists, historians, and environmentalists, Sweeney also foregrounds the entwinement of clothing, race, and gender as she considers the ethics and environmental effects of clothing consumption, the history of clothing in the US prison system, and the roles that textiles play as sources of creativity, artistry, and self-fashioning, even within conditions of constraint.
