How Stories Teach Us : Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship

In How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship, Amy E. Robillard and D. Shane Combs leave behind the debate between the personal and the academic in composition studies in order to witness what happens when composition scholars allow both the personal and the academic to act upon them in the stories they tell. The editors and contributors, in blending their scholarship, celebrate the influence of life writing on their work and allow the contexts of their lives and the urgency of their stories to blend together for a range of approaches to scholarship and essay writing. This blended scholarship features scholars and teachers dealing with loss, grief, illness, trauma, depression, abuse, gender identity, and the ravages of time. How Stories Teach Us is both a challenge and an invitation to composition scholars to pursue a fuller and more robust approach to their scholarship and life stories. It is also an invitation to teachers of composition to open up the potentials of blended scholarship to the students they teach.

Amy E. Robillard earned her PhD at Syracuse University and is Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Illinois State University. She is the author of We Find Ourselves in Other People’s Stories, and her personal essays have appeared on The Rumpus and Full Grown People.

D. Shane Combs is Assistant Professor of English Composition and Professional Writing at Central Methodist University. His graduate work at Illinois State University centered on life writing in composition. His writing has appeared in Composition Forum, Composition Studies, Writing on the Edge, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.