Facing the Sky: Composing through Trauma in Word and Image

Abstract

Roy F. Fox Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition Edited by Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay Information and Pricing 978-1-60235-449-4 (paperback, $32); 978-1-60235-450-0 (hardcover, $65.00); 978-1-60235-451-7 (PDF, $19.99) © 2016 by Parlor Press. 314 pages with notes, illustrations, bibliography, and index. Bookstores : Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details. Interview Listen to an interview with Roy F. Fox about Facing the Sky by Trevor Mattea at New Books in Education . About This Book At forty-one, Lucy was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Kate lost her husband in a freak accident. These women—practical, intelligent, perceptive—were also language experts who had devoted their lives to the study and teaching of reading and writing. When these traumas shattered their normal lives, they turned to writing. Through extensive interviews, correspondence, and close analysis of their public and personal writing, Roy F. Fox details why and how writing helped these people make sense of their physical and emotional upheavals, exploring such issues as their motivation, fluency, awareness of audience, rhetorical decision-making, focused collaborations, and uses of secondary source material. Praise for Facing the Sky "Fox is both anthropologist and theorist. Reading Facing the Sky 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."—PETER ELBOW (from the Foreword) " Facing the Sky . . . breaks new ground and sows an abundance of seeds for a transformative pedagogy with the power to heal fractured souls in broken times. This book is not only for those in power--teachers, clinicians, politicians—but especially for those who have little or none—a book for NOW that unites theory and practice in a kind of prayer for our times."—SUSAN HUDSON "Teachers of wri