"Writing is an Arsenal": An Interview with Colin Robinson (original) (raw)
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Smith, A. (2015). The serious work of writing. English Journal, 105(1).
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Writers are always in a state of becoming; in classrooms, teacher-writers and student-writers are always becoming writers and their social and academic identities are intertwined with their writer identities. In this chapter, I use a methodology of ‘glancing sideways’, to look at the writing trajectories of Stephanie and Kyle . They were nine years old, in the same class, and they engaged in a range of writing activities during the school year; including short pieces about ‘someone I admire’, a favourite winter activity, various journal entries, retelling, and group story writing. I attempted to interview Kyle and Stephanie directly about their sense of themselves as writers, as well as what they thought key others (i.e., parent, teacher, or friend) might think of them as writers but I gained little insight from this approach. As others have found when observing children in play (Kendrick, 2005), a ‘sideways glance’ (Schwartzman, 1976) at writing-in-motion was more effective, as I positioned myself alongside children while they wrote in the classroom and in the computer lab at school, in order to discern what was happening as they engaged in writing practices. This analysis examines what was happening and how writers are constructed through particular practices and relationships.
Artistic Research and Literature, 2018
In recent years, the work of Chris Kraus has crossed over from an avant-garde art circuit into mainstream literature. The self-reflexive stance and the strategies that she deploys to relate her own story to a broader intellectual and political context are reminiscent of certain tendencies in the Anglo-Saxon field of creative writing, but they mark her work first and foremost as an artistic research and performance. Kraus at the same time performs writing as an ongoing practice while revealing the writer as a simulacrum. In so doing, she formulates a strong critique of the male-dominated, capitalist worlds of art and theory at the end of the 20th century but also offers a model for an alternative female subjectivity that is complex, fragmented, and fascinating.