Volume 23, Number 2-3, Summer-Fall 2006

From the Editor's Desktops

Heather Graves

hgraves@rogers.com

Roger Graves

University of Western Ontario

rgraves3@uwo.ca  

Fall isn’t really over until you’ve had the first 50cm snowfall of the year, but since we had one a couple of weeks ago here in London we guess that means we’re fully in the grips of Winter. And that makes this newsletter officially late.

As you can see, it is also a combined issue for the Summer and Fall. While it always seems to be a struggle to obtain manuscripts for the newsletter, we wonder if the discussion about the future of Inkshed that Miriam Horne initiated on the CASLL list last week may (ink)shed some light on the current dearth of manuscripts. Attendance at the Gimli conference was down last year; the previous year in Nova Scotia, however, it was quite good. Submissions of manuscripts to this newsletter have tapered off, and that leads us to wonder if this is just a cyclical event or a sign that the Newsletter has outlived its function. Much of the kind of news that the early versions of the newsletter conveyed is now shared on the CASLL list. While it is true that some of the longer pieces—such as Christina Halliday’s review of Personally Speaking in this issue—would likely never see publication without the Newsletter, alternative publication vehicles (websites, blogs, emailed links) fill some of the functions of the earlier printed publication. The print version of the newsletter seems obsolete.

And yet Carolyn Greco, an instructor in the Writing Program here at Western, was moved to contest or write her own reaction to that when it came up in conversation this fall. Her piece is reprinted in this issue. For Carolyn, print is important, as others have argued in the past. Perhaps the lack of a print version showing up in mailboxes has caused Inkshedders to fail to engage the newsletter in a meaningful way just because it isn’t sitting right there when you have a few moments to read it. The response to Miriam Horne’s post to CASLL suggests that the community is alive and well and deeply engaged in writing in that medium. However, several posts indicated that the writers were only able to reply after a few days of reading and trying to find a moment to compose something suitable for the list. We wonder if the time demands on them as writing teachers makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that they would write for the newsletter.

Theresa Hyland reflects on another liminal space—the Writing Centre—in her reflective essay in this issue, another example of the kind of text we just don’t see on the CASLL exchanges. Susan Drain, 3M Teaching Fellow for 2006, graciously allowed us to reprint her “Statement of Teaching Philosophy.” Carl Leggo names names and tames lines in two poems we are pleased to present.

We would like to extend an invitation to join another incarnation of that eminently liminal Inkshed community in London, ON from May 3-6. The call for papers and details about the conference appear in the last two pages of this issue.