Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing foregrounds the present in all activities of composing, offering a new perspective on the rhetorical situation and the writing process. A focus on the present casts light on standard writing components-audience, invention, and revision-while bringing forth often overlooked nuances of the writing experience-intrapersonal rhetoric, the preverbal, and preconception. This pedagogy of mindful writing can alleviate the suffering of writing blocks that comes from mindless, future-oriented rhetorics. Much is lost with a misplaced present moment because students forfeit rewarding writing experiences for stress, frustration, boredom, fear, and shortchanged invention. Writing becomes a very different experience if students think of it more consistently as part of a discrete now. Peary examines mindfulness as a metacognitive practice and turns to foundational Buddhist concepts of no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and detachment for methods for observing the moment in the writing classroom. This volume is a fantastic resource for future and current instructors and scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.

Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing foregrounds the present in all activities of composing, offering a new perspective on the rhetorical situation and the writing process. A focus on the present casts light on standard writing components-audience, invention, and revision-while bringing forth often overlooked nuances of the writing experience-intrapersonal rhetoric, the preverbal, and preconception. This pedagogy of mindful writing can alleviate the suffering of writing blocks that comes from mindless, future-oriented rhetorics. Much is lost with a misplaced present moment because students forfeit rewarding writing experiences for stress, frustration, boredom, fear, and shortchanged invention. Writing becomes a very different experience if students think of it more consistently as part of a discrete now. Peary examines mindfulness as a metacognitive practice and turns to foundational Buddhist concepts of no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and detachment for methods for observing the moment in the writing classroom. This volume is a fantastic resource for future and current instructors and scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.

The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiqui tous in writing programs across the na tion. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Cen tury, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather together contributing experts from both creative writing and composition studies-a discipline rich with a wide range of established peda gogies- to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing work shop. Contributors in this volume pres ent fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogi cal ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either to supple ment the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike.

"My poems are often dreams; my dreams are poems," Alexandria Peary tells us in her marvelous first book. These poems describe a world resembling out own, beneath which she finds endless off-kilter surprise and beauty. "Outside," she writes in one in one startling moment, "the driftwood struggled like arms & legs" and, later, a recorded voice "looks just like a piece of tinfoil lying in the sun / in which you could go swimming." I've long admired Alexandria Peary's intelligence, her evocative skills, and her gift for discovering in the everyday such dreamlike, frequently frightening, moments.

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.

Poetry. In LID TO THE SHADOW, Alexandria Peary writes about spring, referencing classical Eastern imagery of blossoming cherry trees to talk about childbirth, female desire, motherhood, and absence of memory. This book thrives through its artful use of imagery and voice as well as its beautiful meta-moments and allusions. Peary draws attention to the presence of the poem itself, as though the poem were a moment of space and time. She drags words and symbols out of the flow of the text and makes them three-dimensional. In LID TO THE SHADOW, shadows represent the presence of the past, and meta language becomes the presence of the now.