Exciting and beautifully crafted, The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing provides an entirely new way of viewing “ordinary writing,” the everyday writing we typically ignore or dismiss. It takes as its center the diary of Jennifer Sinor's great-great-great-aunt Annie Ray, a woman who homesteaded in the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. Diaries such as this have long been ignored by scholars, who prefer instead to focus on diaries with literary features. Reading diaries through this lens gives privileged status to those that are coherently crafted and ignores the very diaries that define the form through their relentless inscription of dailiness.

Annie Ray’s diary is not literary. By considering her ordinary writing as a site of complex and strategic negotiations among the writer, the form of writing, and dominant cultural scripts, Sinor makes visible the extraordinary work of the ordinary writer and the sophistication of these texts. In providing a way to read diaries outside the limits and conventions of literature, she challenges our approaches to other texts as well. Furthermore, because ordinary writing is not crafted for aesthetic reception (in contrast to autobiography proper, memoirs, and literary diaries), it is a productive site for investigating how both writing and culture get made every day.

The book is truly original in its form: nontraditional, storied, creative. Sinor, an accomplished creative writer, includes her own memories as extended metaphors in partnership with critical texts along with excerpts from her aunt's diary. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing will be a fascinating text for students of creative writing as well as of women's studies and diaries.

Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Contents

I Introduction Writing Place, Jennifer Sinor

II Here
Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy, Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore
The Work the Landscape Calls Us To, Michael Sowder
Valley Language, Diana Garcia
What I Learned from the Campus Plumber, Charles Bergman
M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter, Katherine Fischer
On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College, Sean W. Henne

III There
Levittown Breeds Anarchists Film at 11:00, Kathryn T. Flannery
Living in a Transformed Desert, Mitsuye Yamada
A More Fortunate Destiny, Jayne Brim Box
Imagined Vietnams, Charles Waugh

IV Everywhere
Teaching on Stolen Ground, Deborah A. Miranda
The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not, Robert Michael Pyle
Where Are You From? Lee Torda

V In Between
Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic
Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life, Norma Elia Cantu
Bones of Summer, Mary Clearman Blew
Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World, Janice M. Gould
Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching, Jeffrey M. Buchanan

VI Coda
Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood, Rona Kaufman