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Editor's Note
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Fall is a great time to love nonfiction. Spring may be a time of rebirth for the natural world, summer a time to catch up on writing and research that wasn’t possible during the academic year, but fall is the best time of year for nonfiction. There’s always the cozy feeling of reading as light falls and days grow short, but classes started up at many institutions this week (including mine), from first-year writing courses to graduate creative writing. October also means that the annual Best American Essays anthology is released. For myself, as thrilling as the reprints are, the first thing I do when mine arrives is to flip to the Notables, uncap my highlighter, and highlight friends and writers I admire and magazines I love.
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We have long needed a space for sustained critical explorations of what we read, what we write, what we teach and how we teach it, from all perspectives that claim nonfiction: creative writing, composition and rhetoric, literature, and more. It is, notoriously, the fourth genre, the genre of practical book reviews and the genre of expression for its own sake. Assay’s goal is to be the place where we can have these discussions, from every angle we can conceive of, every subgenre and speciality, every subject and approach.
Nonfiction studies is not a new idea, but the question of how nonfiction studies might take shape in the coming years remains the foundation for Assay. I've heard arguments against any kind of theoretical discussion in nonfiction, writer-friends who have no use for it, which is a personal choice worthy of respect, but as academia moves to replace the terminal MFA with the Ph.D. (to say nothing of requiring published books for entry-level positions), students are being required more often to study and write this type of material, without the resources to do that research and without the publishing outlets for the results. As the product of an MFA and a Ph.D., my classmates and I wrote as much critical work as we did creative work, but in the process I realized just how rare it was to find scholarship on nonfiction texts in general and none on the writers I was exploring. Where were the articles on Joan Didion? On Dinty Moore? It was clear that even if such articles were written, the publishing opportunities for them were very thin. The time seemed right for a magazine like Assay. We conceived of Assay to be a place to publish the kinds of critical scholarship we found missing in our genre, conversations about what we're reading, explorations into the eccentricities of what we're writing, and discussions of what we're doing in our classrooms. Because nonfiction--and nonfiction studies--is so multi-faceted, stretching across disciplines and a myriad of subgenres, we envisioned a journal that would support all of them. Our digital format supports text and images, video and audio. We hope to use these opportunities to advance the conversation in nonfiction studies in a way that is easily accessible to writers, readers, teachers, and scholars. We do not discriminate here: nonfiction studies encompasses creative writing, composition and rhetoric, literature, and more. The unifying factor is the texts under consideration. As the first issue launches, I’m pleased at the depth and breadth of voices and approaches we’re able to offer, from the consideration of critical theory and memoir to humor and personal narrative to prison nonfiction and more. Some of the articles are traditionally structured scholarship, others are a bit looser in tone. We hope that the Conversation section, with musings on subjects like journaling as a genre and digital publishing, and interviews with writers, spark ideas and discussions that you will have with your colleagues and students. We’ve set up a Discussion Forum so that we can continue these conversations in this realm as well. I’m also excited about what we’re able to offer in the Pedagogy section, particularly Robert Brooke’s rhetorical approach to teaching the essay. With Richard Louth’s brief overview, we also look ahead to the Spring issue, where we will get to see a sustained look at the pedagogy and use of Writing Marathons in various types of nonfiction classrooms, from several different perspectives. |
To conclude: classes started at Concordia College this week, where I teach. This place--it's an essay around every corner. For one, our mascot is a cob of corn; his name is Kernel Cob and he is slightly terrifying. Our unofficial motto is "Fear the Ear." We are the Concordia Cobbers. We have Corn Feeds. It's amazing. I was pleased to be a faculty mentor for a group of incoming freshman and I was there on Sunday night when they received their beanies. All the freshman wear beanies for the first week, until the Opening Convocation and the traditional Beanie Toss on Olin Hill. Considering the bounty on beanies from the neighboring colleges (a couple of my freshman had theirs stolen off their heads), this is a feat. There are stories in this place, historical stories to be told, new ones to be written. When classes started up on Thursday, my students had already entered into a conversation of stories and they were working to make sense of what they were experiencing.
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 Memorial bench at Como Zoo, St. Paul, MN
On the other end of the scale, my four-year-old niece started pre-school this week and my nephew is starting to walk (though he's resistant to doing it on command). The season of new and fresh beginnings is upon us. A few weeks ago, the entire family went to Como Zoo in St. Paul, where C. was unafraid of the creepy crawlies--tarantulas and cockroaches were fascinating to her--and she wanted to hold the albino corn snake held by a zoo worker (and was disappointed that she couldn't). In one of the jungle exhibits, I found this memorial plaque on a bench. As Assay enters the world, as the new year begins, I'm going to take this for my personal and professional motto.
A heartfelt thank you to our terrific Advisory Editors, particularly Jim Rogers and Karen Craigo, who went above and beyond. Thank you, also, to Erika Strandjord, for her technical assistance. And with that, I welcome you to the inaugural issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies! -Karen Babine, Editor |