Unsustainable: Re-imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning, and the University, edited by Jessica Restaino and Laurie Cella, explores short-lived university/community writing projects in an effort to rethink the long-held "gold standard" of long-term sustainability in community writing work. Contributors examine their own efforts in order to provide alternate models for understanding, assessing, and enacting university/community writing projects that, for a range of reasons, fall outside of traditional practice. This collection considers what has become an increasingly unified call for praxis, where scholar-practitioners explore a specific project that fell short of theorized "best practice" sustainability in order to determine not only the nature of what remains-how and why we might find value in a community-based writing project that lacks long-term sustainability, for example-but also how or why we might rethink, redefine, and reevaluate best practice ideals in the first place. In so doing, the contributors are at once responding to what has been an increasing acknowledgment in the field that, for a variety of reasons, many community-based writing projects do not go as initially planned, and also applying-in praxis-a framework for thinking about and studying such projects. Unsustainable represents the kind of scholarly work that some of the most recognizable names in the field have been calling for over the past five years. This book affirms that unpredictability is an indispensable factor in the field, and argues that such unpredictability presents-in fact, demands-a theoretical approach that takes these practical experiences as its base.

In an ethnographic study spanning the last years of research collaborator and friend Susan Lundy Maute’s life with terminal breast cancer, author Jessica Restaino argues the interpretative challenges posed by research and writing amid illness and intimacy demand a methodological break from accepted genres and established practices of knowledge making. Restaino searches their experiences—recorded in interviews, informal writings, and correspondence—to discover a rhetoric of love and illness. She encourages a synthesis of methods and the acceptance of a reversal of roles—researcher and researched, writer and written-about—and emphasizes the relevancy of methodological diversity, the necessity of the personal, and the analytical richness of unpredictability and risk in being who we are in our scholarship at any given moment. Bringing together critical analysis, qualitative-style research methods, close reading, Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness resists traditional ideas about academic writing and invites others to pursue collaborations that subvert accepted approaches to representation, textual production, and subjectivity. Restaino demonstrates a way of writing—the rendering of the academic text itself—that suggests how we do our work has resonance for what we produce. She offers framing questions for use by others interested in doing similar kinds of scholarship that may frighten, overwhelm, or confound. This book deepens our understanding of subjectivity and the gains made by feminist resistance to conventional concepts of objectivity in research collaborations.

Jessica Restaino offers a snapshot of the first semester experiences of graduate student writing teachers as they navigate predetermined course syllabi and materials, the pressures of grading, the influences of foundational scholarship, and their own classroom authority. With rich qualitative data gathered from course observations, interviews, and correspondence, Restaino traces four graduate students' first experiences as teachers at a large, public university. Yet the circumstances and situations she relates will ring familiar at widely varying institutions.

"First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground "presents a fresh and challenging theoretical approach to understanding and improving the preparation of graduate students for the writing classroom. Restaino uses a three-part theoretical construct--labor, action, and work, as defined in Hannah Arendt's work of political philosophy, "The Human Condition--"as a lens for reading graduate students' struggles to balance their new responsibilities as teachers with their concurrent roles as students. Arendt's concepts serve as access points for analysis, raising important questions about graduate student writing teachers' first classrooms and uncovering opportunities for improved support and preparation by university writing programs.