front cover of Control Bird Alt Delete
Control Bird Alt Delete
Alexandria Peary
University of Iowa Press, 2014
“‘Go play!’ advises Peary in her third collection, and we do, with ‘a tassel of rain,’ with ‘dove-colored sounds’ and ‘starter castles.’ The topos is New England archaeology; it’s Colorforms and Legos; Charley Harper landscapes become interiors; we are delighted to already find ourselves where we couldn’t possibly get to.”—Caroline Knox, author, Flemish: Poems
 
In Control Bird Alt Delete, the reader is invited to explore strange landscapes: some based on the ruins of New England and others following the architectural prints of the unconscious. The reader walks through woods filled with cellar holes, rock walls, and lilac bushes, and is made to think of people gone missing. Robert Frost meets Times Square. Nature intrudes in unexpected ways on domestic settings—and vice versa—domestic and industrial settings appear in bits inside the pastoral. Birds, one-dimensional but strangely wise, flit back and forth and rebelliously tape up their songs. The senses are thoroughly blended, leading to strange combinations and sensory experiences, to states of mindfulness and blizzard distraction.

All the while, the unconscious threatens to intrude, with its underlined places, its trap doors inside ordinary conversations, the mazes it hangs up like “welcome home” banners next to people’s mouths while they speak. The reader follows the first-person I through mazes, office spaces, and coils of highway traffic, hoping for some redemption, some sort of answer to all the deletion.
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front cover of Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century
Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiquitous in writing programs across the nation. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. While the field of creative writing studies has sometimes myopically focused on this single method, the related discipline of composition studies has made use of numerous pedagogical models. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather experts from both creative writing and composition studies to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing workshop.
 
Drawing primarily from the field of composition studies—a discipline rich with a wide range of established pedagogies—the contributors in this volume build on previous models to present fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogical ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either as a supplement to the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike.
 
A fresh and inspiring collection of teaching methods, Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century combines both conventional and cutting-edge techniques to expand the pedagogical possibilities in creative writing studies.
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