Developing "sustainable" architectural and agricultural technologies was the intent behind Blueprint Farm, an experimental agricultural project designed to benefit farm workers displaced by the industrialization of agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Yet, despite its promise, the very institutions that created Blueprint Farm terminated the project after just four years (1987-1991).

In this book, Steven Moore demonstrates how the various stakeholders' competing definitions of "sustainability," "technology," and "place" ultimately doomed Blueprint Farm. He reconstructs the conflicting interests and goals of the founders, including Jim Hightower and the Texas Department of Agriculture, Laredo Junior College, and the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, and shows how, ironically, they unwittingly suppressed the self-determination of the very farm workers the project sought to benefit. From the instructive failure of Blueprint Farm, Moore extracts eight principles for a regenerative architecture, which he calls his "nonmodern manifesto."

What does it mean to belong to a place, to be truly rooted and grounded in the place you call home? How do you commit to a marriage, to a full partnership with another person, and still maintain your own separate identity? These questions have been central to Susan Wittig Albert's life, and in this beautifully written memoir, she movingly describes how she has experienced place, marriage, and aloneness while creating a home in the Texas Hill Country with her husband and writing partner, Bill Albert.

Together, Alone opens in 1985, as Albert leaves a successful, if rootless, career as a university administrator and begins a new life as a freelance writer, wife, and homesteader on a patch of rural land northwest of Austin. She vividly describes the work of creating a home at Meadow Knoll, a place in which she and Bill raised their own food and animals, while working together and separately on writing projects. Once her sense of home and partnership was firmly established, Albert recalls how she had to find its counterbalance—a place where she could be alone and explore those parts of the self that only emerge in solitude. For her, this place was Lebh Shomea, a silent monastic retreat. In writing about her time at Lebh Shomea, Albert reveals the deep satisfaction she finds in belonging to a community of people who have chosen to be apart and experience silence and solitude.

Toni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work.

Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment.

Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.

In Transforming Ethos Rosanne Carlo synthesizes philosophy, rhetorical theory, and composition theory to clarify the role of ethos and its potential for identification and pedagogy for writing studies. Carlo renews focus on the ethos appeal and highlights its connection to materiality and place as a powerful instrument for writing and its teaching—one that insists on the relational and multimodal aspects of writing and makes prominent its inherent ethical considerations and possibilities.
 
Through case studies of professional and student writings as well as narrative reflections Transforming Ethos imagines the ethos appeal as not only connected to style and voice but also a process of habituation, related to practices of everyday interaction in places and with things. Carlo addresses how ethos aids in creating identification, transcending divisions between the self and other. She shows that when writers tell their experiences, they create and reveal the ethos appeal, and this type of narrative/multimodal writing is central to scholarship in rhetoric and composition as well as the teaching of writing. In addition, Carlo considers how composition is becoming compromised by professionalization—particularly through the idea of “transfer”—which is overtaking the critical work of self-development with others that a writing classroom should encourage in college students.
 
Transforming Ethos cements ethos as an essential term for the modern practice and teaching of rhetoric and places it at the heart of writing studies. This book will be significant for students and scholars in rhetoric and composition, as well as those interested in higher education more broadly.