6 Comments

Lovely to collaborate, Alison -- thank you! And I still do hope to talk more about homeschool sometime...

Expand full comment
author

Yes! Thank you, Josh. I have enjoyed this process.

An over-arcing question is the one of: do we change institutional thinking from within or without? But that might be over-simplification. Both/and. But it's the question I had to think about with homeschooling. And with walking away from my position at UBC.

Expand full comment

What a great conversation. And this is why I put all my chips on Substack and have no accounts or intentions to spend time on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TicTok, yadda yadda. Great to know about Joshua. I worked several decades alongside the champion of industry-education projects and saw the magic of gathering academics and industry leaders to focus on a big production or project that told the industry story while providing high quality educational materials for grades K-12. Triple win every time, for the academics, for the industry, for the learners.

Expand full comment
founding

Love this! I always hope the workshop comments will be “brutally honest”. I think carefully about every bit of input. Perhaps this is easier because the closest I expect to get to publishing is Medium. Since I write for my own pleasure in the process first, and to my own drive to improve second, I don’t feel the need to make any changes, even if I do agree it would improve the poem, if it does not fit my personal vision. That makes workshop input very valuable to me. Time spent by others to read my work and comment, is a great gift.

Expand full comment

I have no experience with workshops, and so have nothing to mourn there (or really anything about the classroom), but I’d say you both have done pretty well this side of academe. Substack is new enough that it’s still quite interesting. All those voices writing mere words, teenagers even. The de-academicization of the footnote, revitalized as a place where wit and humor dwell. Who would have thunk it?

I imagine many substacks won’t last long. How can they? It’s hard to write regularly and often and well. And I suspect the form will gravitate toward a couple-three standards in length and approach. But right now it’s fun to be a reader, luxuriating in what’s out there.

Here are 4 gems I bookmarked in case there’s anyone here new to Substack’s many wonders:

https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/last-admission-to-solstice-car-park

https://xpcallahan.substack.com/p/8192023

https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paul-mccartney

https://notebook.substack.com/p/miss-americana-and-the-heartbreak

Expand full comment
author

Frank, I appreciate your reading. And responding.

And sharing links--I look forward to the reads. Thank you!

Expand full comment