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/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~
