Päiväkirjojen jäljillä. Historiantutkimus ja omasta elämästä kirjoittaminen. (Tracing Diaries. Historical Research and Autobiographical Writing), Editors Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Karoliina Sjö and Liisa Lalu
Vastapaino, 2020.
This is a first book in Finnish that aims at discussing the history, tradition, genre and methodology of diaries. It is an academic refereed book, but also aimed at a wider audience that is interested in the history and writing of diaries. The book consists of a long introduction by Karoliina Sjö and Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, 19 articles by historians and literary scholars as well as an epilogue written by Leskelä–Kärki, Sjö and Liisa Lalu, who all edited the volume together.
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Anna Poletti Stories of the Self
NYU Press, August 2020.
Stories of the Self argues that while there is a strong emphasis on the importance of personal storytelling in contemporary culture and politics, mediation is just as important in establishing the credibility and legibility of life writing. Poletti argues that the very media used for writing our lives intrinsically shapes how we are seen to matter.
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Sonja Boon, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, September 2019.
Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory. More importantly, it addresses the relevance of our past to understanding our present. It shows the multiplicity of identities and origins that can shape the way we understand our histories and our own selves.
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Candida Rifkind, Nima Naghibi and Eleanor Ty, eds. Migration, Exile and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives. Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Vol. 35, Issue 2 (Spring 2020). 295-515.
We proposed this special issue on “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” to recognize the conjuncture of comics and displacement narratives, and to provide an opportunity for comics scholars working on specific texts, problems, and questions to come into dialogue with each other. As the contributions in different ways suggest, comics’ formal properties—the panels, frames, lines, and gutters—offer particularly rich possibilities to represent human migration and stasis, as well as the presence and absence of memory and trauma.
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Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, Edited by: Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind
Palgrave, 2020.
Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors to this edited volume bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of auto/biographical and documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection of 16 essays and 3 original comics that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
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Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation: Overwriting the Dictator
Routledge Autobiography Studies, November 2020.
Overwriting the Dictator is literary study of life writing and dictatorship in Americas. Its focus is women who have attempted to rewrite, or overwrite, discourses of womanhood and nationalism in the dictatorships of their nations of origin. The project covers five 20th century autocratic governments in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Argentina, Cuba, and Chile. The book foregrounds ways in which women’s self-representation produces a counter-narrative that critiques and undermines dictatorial power with the depiction of women as self-aware, resisting subjects engaged in repositioning their gendered narratives of national identity.
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Ana Belén Martínez García, New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights
Palgrave, August 2020.
This book is a timely study of young women’s life writing as a form of human rights activism. It focuses on six young women who suffered human rights violations when they were girls and have gone on to become activists through life writing: Malala Yousafzai, Hyeonseo Lee, Yeonmi Park, Bana Alabed, Nujeen Mustafa, and Nadia Murad.
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The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, eds. Batsheva Ben-Amos, Dan Ben-Amos.
Indiana University Press March 2020.
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization.
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Desirée Henderson, How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers
Routledge, 2019.
How to Read a Diary is an expansive and accessible guidebook that introduces readers to the past, present, and future of diary writing. In addressing the essential questions that surround diaries, this book offers a new critical methodology for interpreting diaries in myriad forms: manuscripts, works of diary fiction, digital diaries, and so on.
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Contemporary Research in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, co-edited by Dana Di Pardo Léon-Henri.
Featuring Dana Di Léon-Henri’s article, “Teaching Communication Skills through Literature: Encouraging Master’s Level ESP Students to Speak Up and Move.”
This article further describes the pedagogical approach to life writing that Di Pardo Léon-Henri’s presentation addresses, and illustrates some of the work that was done by students from a communicative approach.
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On the Reflective Teaching Journal site, you can also find a host of reflective teaching posts, where I encourage the use of journals for teachers, and shares my research and pedagogy with fellow colleagues worldwide while giving back to a profession that has provided me with so much, all throughout my life. There will be many more exciting additions to this website in the near future.
Marjorie Kanter “Small Talk” (The Written Spiral) and “Field Notes/Notas de Campo” (upcoming)
“Small Talk” is a collection of short literary or poem-like pieces largely based on real experience observed and/or participated in and some questions and reflections. “It plays like jazz with improvisations, melody and different tempos. Marjorie Kanter fills the texts with irony, humor and sensitivity. To read her pieces is an expanded experience that changes every time your read them. Small Talk is a compilation of her work over a ten year period.” (Delgado Guitart) La Espiral Escrita, 2016. Copies available of the limited edition, signed and numbered when purchased from the author as long as they last. margiekanter@gmail.com Available on Amazon also.
“Field Notes/Notas de Campo” is a bilingual English/Spanish collection of short pieces from Marjorie Kanter´s journals; each piece is accompanied by an original digital drawing by JL Delgado Guitart.
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Beyond the Food Court, edited by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi.
Laberinto Press, 2020.
A local bestseller, Beyond the Food Court is the first in Labnerinto’s Beyond Series. It features 14 creative non-fiction essays exploring culinary topics beyond the kitschy idea of ethnic cuisine offered in the North American food court. The anthology was launched as part of Edmonton LitFest and FIL Canada, You can purchase Beyond the Food Court online at www.laberintopress.com (we ship worldwide), at Edmonton’s Glass Bookshop, Audrey’s Books, or Tix on the Square.
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Tanis MacDonald
Written in a slippery mix of lyric and experimental styles, Mobile, published by Book*hug in 2019, was longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Award.
The critical-creative essay, “Lectures About Mennonite Literature that I Will Never Give” was published in Hamilton Arts and Letters 13.2 in October 2020.
Four essays on pedagogy have just been published in Black Lawrence Press’ 2020 anthology Far Villages: Welcome Essays for New and Beginner Poets.
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