Pirates you don't know, and other adventures in the examined life : collected essays / John Griswold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Griswold, John.

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Physical Description:

208 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Summary:

"Starting in 2005, John Griswold began publishing his nonfiction essays in Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and Adjunct Advocate under the pen name Oronte Churm. This collection contains heavily revised previously published essays but much more new material covering a wide range of topics riffing on the writing life-from the utility of creative writing to babies, and from race issues in a university town to crocodiles. Griswold's tongue-in-cheek tone allows him to discuss this breadth of subject matter in an inviting and entertaining way while still addressing prevalent and important issues. Much of this book has to do with the tenuous and uncertain place of university adjuncts and other contingent instructors in the larger higher education ecosphere. Griswold writes, "After more than a dozen years teaching creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at two universities, I fell into what they call the tenure stream at another school. The worries and stresses have changed, but my interests remain: What does it mean to be educated? To think, feel, write? To be whole? The writing in this book was my own attempt to see if I knew anything at all. And of course that's a lifelong journey, its rewards always temporary and therefore comic. Picture Long John Silver at the end of the movie, his dory filled with stolen gold, rowing and sinking; rowing, sinking, and gloating.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Pirate's Waltz 1

Unemployed, in Greenland? 12

The Art of War 21

The Expulsion of Oronte Churm 25

Tenacity 28

Crocodiles 34

Killing Pirates 40

I Didn't Know 42

The Unknown 46

Desire 53

Confessions 63

Time Monkeys 69

Quid Pro Quo, Dr. Lecter 74

Show, Don't Tell 78

Creative Writing in the Academy 81

Letter to a Former Student Now Graduated 84

You Shall Know Them by Their Music 88

Hardheads 92

Seeing 99

Microgeographies 104

Geedunk and Geegaws 107

Move-In Blues 113

The Recipe in the Writing Class 118

A Remembrance of Gravies Past 124

Being Mistaken for Bookish 128

Notes for an Essay on Race and Class in a University Town 131

Looking for Writers Beyond Their Work 139

Where Your Standardized Testing Money Goes 148

The Unlikelihood of Fathers 158

The College of Hard Knocks 168

Languor 174

We Transit 177

Repose 186

Coming to Know a Place 192.

ISBN:

9780820346786

0820346780

OCLC:

859447088