The 16 essays in this book provide a theoretical underpinning for freewriting.



Sheryl I. Fontaine opens the book with a description of the organization, purpose, and content of students’ 10-minute unfocused freewriting.



Pat Belanoff discusses the relationship between skilled and unskilled student writers.



Richard H. Haswell analyzes forms of freewriting.



Lynn Hammond describes the focused freewriting strategies used in legal writing and in the analysis of poetry.



Joy Marsella and Thomas L. Hilgers suggest ways of teaching freewriting as a heuristic.



Diana George and Art Young show what teachers learned about the writing abilities of three engineering students through freewriting journals.



Anne E. Mullin seeks to determine whether freewriting lives up to claims made for it.



Barbara W. Cheshire assesses the efficacy of freewriting.



James W. Pennebaker checks the short- and long-term effects of freewriting on students’ emotional lives.



Ken Macrorie notes that freewriting means being freed to use certain powers.



Peter Elbow shows how authors use freewriting.



Robert Whitney tells "why I hate to freewrite."



Karen Ferro considers her own freewriting, showing how it leads to a deeper self-understanding.



Chris Anderson discusses the qualities in freewriting that we should maintain in revision.



Burton Hatlen shows the parallels between writing projective verse and freewriting.



Sheridan Blau describes the results of experiments with invisible writing.

In The Story of N, Hugh S. Gorman analyzes the notion of sustainability from a fresh perspective—the integration of human activities with the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen—and provides a supportive alternative to studying sustainability through the lens of climate change and the cycling of carbon. It is the first book to examine the social processes by which industrial societies learned to bypass a fundamental ecological limit and, later, began addressing the resulting concerns by establishing limits of their own

            The book is organized into three parts. Part I, “The Knowledge of Nature,” explores the emergence of the nitrogen cycle before humans arrived on the scene and the changes that occurred as stationary agricultural societies took root. Part II, “Learning to Bypass an Ecological Limit,” examines the role of science and market capitalism in accelerating the pace of innovation, eventually allowing humans to bypass the activity of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Part III, “Learning to Establish Human-Defined Limits,” covers the twentieth-century response to the nitrogen-related concerns that emerged as more nitrogenous compounds flowed into the environment. A concluding chapter, “The Challenge of Sustainability,” places the entire story in the context of constructing an ecological economy in which innovations that contribute to sustainable practices are rewarded.

Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N, an unrecognized masterpiece of the Soviet 1930s, virtually vanished, together with its author, following its publication in 1935 and the subsequent vilification of Dobychin by Leningrad's cultural authorities. It portrays a fallen provincial world reminiscent of the town of N found in Gogol's Dead Souls, a place populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious, and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of socialist realist novels.