Hi Russ and other Inkshedders,
I am on the CASLL listserv, and to a large extent that now does for me
much of what the newsletter used to, including the annual Inkshed call.
The reasons for publishing a newsletter that you cite in your 1st paragraph
do not seem to me sufficient grounds for the effort involved (and I am very
much aware of how much effort that is because I edit, and often write much
of, our faculty assn newsletter). I think we should either let the
newsletter pass into history or reimagine it.
My reimagining would look a bit like but beyond your archives--and I agree
with Roger that the archives themselves are a very useful project (which I
can imagine, for instance, as the basis of seminar discussions). Our email
discussions are very off the cuff, not to mention other-than-lineal. What
I would really like to see in a newsletter--in addition to a bit of news
and announcements of opportunities--is what I think of as the next step
beyond edited versions of our email discussions. I'd like to see articles
that are more of a "summing"--what were the intriguing questions raised,
the various perpectives brought to bear, the implications for further
thought, etc.?--of those discussions of "the literary essay,"
"professional writing" and whether there's such a thing as a "Canadian"
approach to teaching writing. Of course, I'm suggesting this because I
believe such "summing" (I use the term in the Burkean sense, of course) is
both possible and useful. And because I realize I do not actually have any
image or summary of these discussions in my mind anymore--can''t remember
even my own contributions. I'm also thinking of such "summing" as
something that could be an intermediary step between of-the-cuff discussion
and more thorough/finished discussions (of the sort that constitute journal
publication). [I didn't say that very well, but I trust the concept is
familiar to most Inkshedders.]
Rick
At 10:22 AM 1/12/99 +0000, you wrote:
>For reasons you don't want me to go into, I find myself having
>promised to put out an edition of the Inkshed Newsletter in
>November. You may remember that Jan and Amanda announced last summer
>that they weren't going to be able to carry on as editors past the
>fall issue; later on it turned out they weren't going to be able to
>put that out, either. After some discussion I said that I thought I
>could get something out, to (1) serve the people who don't have
>electronic access and (2) placate the libraries and institutions who
>expect journals they've subscribed to actually to appear.
>
>Like Amanda and Jan, and probably for reasons nobody would find
>unfamiliar, I found it impossible to the get the Newsletter out.
>
>My New Year's resolution, though, was to get a fall issue out before
>January is over, and I'm in the process of doing that. So:
>
>If you have anything you want to have in print in the "fall" issue of
>the Newsletter, let me know _immediately_. I expect to print and
>mail at the end of this week. My hunch is that there is nothing
>other than information about the Inkshed XVI conference in Mont
>Gabriel; Jan and Amanda didn't pass any announcements, essays, or
>documents on with the mailing list, and I've looked through the CASLL
>archive for matters that would be of interest to those who receive
>the Newsletter but not the CASLL list.
>
>If there's no particular immediacy about your announcement or
>document or manifesto, Margaret Procter has committed herself and
>Mary Kooy to getting the next "mid-winter" issue out, and my
>expectation is that they'll be more reliable about that than I am.
>
>One thing that's going to be in the Newsletter is a request for
>feedback about whether, and to what extent, we all believe a print
>Newsletter is still necessary. It seems clear that the organization
>is active, at least in a limited way, on line, and I wonder how
>important the print connection is.
>
>I've just looked back through the CASLL archives, and although things
>have been pretty quiet recently, there were a number of extremely
>active and engaged discussions during the last year -- on "the
>literary essay," on "professional writing" and on whether there's
>such a thing as a "Canadian" approach to teaching writing, for
>instance. I'm editing those discussions to make them more readable
>than they are in the archive, and will print the one on the "literary
>essay" in this issue of the Newsletter. But I'm also putting them
>on the Inkshed Web site, as hypertext, in their edited form, and it
>seems to me they're more readable, and more accessible, there than in
>print.
>
>I'm sure we'd all appreciate reflection on this, on the CASLL list or
>in response to my request in the print Newsletter. And maybe we can
>make some decisions about the future of the Newsletter at and after
>Mont Gabriel.
>
>By the way, I'm also in the process of creating a new Inkshed Web
>site, with stolen graphics and layout from the now-defunct York
>site. It's at this address --
>
>
> http://www.stthomasu.ca/inkshed
>
>-- and although it's still very incomplete (for instance, I'm missing
>quite a number of recent issues of the Newsletter), it's ready for
>feedback. What should be there that isn't?
>
> -- Russ
> __|~_
>Russell A. Hunt __|~_)_ __)_|~_ Aquinas Chair
>St. Thomas University )_ __)_|_)__ __) PHONE: (506) 452-0424
>Fredericton, New Brunswick | )____) | FAX: (506) 450-9615
>E3B 5G3 CANADA ___|____|____|____/ [log in to unmask]
> \ /
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.StThomasU.ca/hunt/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
