Facing the Sky. Roy F. Fox

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Facing the Sky - Roy F. Fox Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

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/ Roy F.

      Fox ; foreword by Peter Elbow.

      Description: Anderson, South Carolina : Parlor Press, [2016] | Includes

      bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2015044950 (print) | LCCN 2015045388 (ebook) | ISBN

      9781602354494 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781602354500 (hardcover : alk.

      paper) | ISBN 9781602354517 (pdf) | ISBN 9781602354524 (epub) | ISBN

      9781602354531 ( ibook) | ISBN 9781602354548 (Kindle)

      Subjects: LCSH: Creative writing--Therapeutic use.

      Classification: LCC RC489.W75 F69 2016 (print) | LCC RC489.W75 (ebook) | DDC

      615.8/516--dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044950

      1 2 3 4 5

      Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

      Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, & Jennifer Bay

      Cover design by David Blakesley. Cover image by Roy F. Fox.

      Printed on acid-free paper.

      Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [email protected].

      Contents

       Foreword

       Acknowledgments

       Introduction: An Unfinished Furrow

       1 Composing through Trauma

       2 Beyond “Just Academic Stuff”: The Course, The Teacher, The Study

       3 Lucy

       4 Seven Writers Composing in Word and Image

       5 Kate

       6 Common Threads

       7 Recommendations

       Notes

       Works Cited

       Appendix A: The Course Syllabus

       Appendix B: Research Questions

       Appendix C: Assessing Thinking in Writing

       About the Author

       Index for Print Edition

      For

      Lucy Elicker Stanovick

      Hero

      Foreword

      I’m happy to recommend this book to a wide variety of readers. I find it important and useful—and I admire its strong humane prose style.

      Writing for healing used to be a controversial idea. I remember a time, not so long after my 1973 Writing Without Teachers began gradually to be noticed, when a number of people in English and Composition accused me of wanting to “practice therapy without a license.” I would immediately deny the charge. “Oh no, I’m just trying to improve people’s writing.” Of course I was being disingenuous; of course I harbored the belief I knew many other teachers of writing shared, namely that private writing and exploratory expressive writing, even very personal writing, would help people write better, and indeed, be better.

      In fact out of my own need, I “invented” freewriting for myself—before I’d heard about it from Ken Macrorie. In the late 1950s I’d felt subjectively tortured by an uppity Oxford tutor who made fun of my writing. (It didn’t help to learn that this was just how people act when they think they are at the best university in the world.) I was desperate and instinctively took to my typewriter to pour out my feelings nonstop about my pain and inability to write—all of this of course in writing. It gave me genuine relief. For centuries, really, many journal keepers have used writing in the same way.

      I’m happy to say that now there is ample evidence to show that writing for healing—Writing through Trauma in Fox’s formulation—need no longer be controversial. Ironically, people in the academic fields of English and composition have often been slowest to accept this fact. One of Fox’s most useful chapters summarizes extensive research showing the benefits that come from writing out of pain—some of these benefits being physically and empirically measurable.

      This book is a rich compendium of case studies. It’s full of extended examples of writing from a wide variety of people of various ages. Fox provides extensive commentary where he describes, ruminates, and puzzles about what the writer is doing, how the language is functioning, and how all this relates to healing. (By the way, one of his chapters explores drawing and other visual imagery that people can use to deal with their suffering.) His statement about his original goals is probably right (though I can’t vouch for knowing all the scholarship out there):

      I could not locate anything like what I had in mind—hardly any studies that zoned in on people’s actual writing, thinking, and imagery. I also became convinced that the future will bring much more attention to addressing all types of trauma, some of which we have yet to “discover.”

      Fox is both anthropologist and theorist. Reading his book gives us remarkable perspective—and in the end distance—on how writers have used symbolic systems to deal with pain. Yet all the while he is opening windows that cannot but lead us to experience some of the pain that his subjects write about.

      Fox’s writing itself is powerful for its plain simplicity in treating what is often extreme. His writing

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