The New Work of Composing

 
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NYMA:
Words We Carry

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Welcome to my blog:

Because we are women, because we are academics, because we know so much and so little about using words to create identity and reality, there are many things that we don’t say out loud, and it is so much the worse for us because we remain silent when we should speak.

Words We Carry

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Favorite Quote: “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it wont.” (Audre Lorde, n.d., n.p.)


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Friday, June 10, 2011
small image of Roxanne
Morgan and Roxanne have collaborated on many projects since they worked together at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Roxanne became a graduate student while Morgan was the Writing Director at TWU. Roxanne completed her PhD while Morgan was at Clemson, and during that time, they developed a project on academic mentoring as academic mothering. Although that project remains unpublished, the...

Friday, June 10, 2011
Roxanne and family
Roxanne says, “I believe in blowing off work to spend time with friends and family. I make each choice by asking myself which I would be more proud of on my deathbed: submitting to one more conference or snuggling on the couch with the girls.”

But choosing not to work doesnt mean never choosing work. It is rather choosing balance.

I just went up for tenure and actually had my chair in her formal...


Family in a park
Something important to remember, as suggested by a fellow GenX faculty member:
• “If you want to pole vault over it [the tenure hurdle], you go right ahead, but no one here is going to back up the Brinks truck and start dumping all this cash on you, simply because you’ve decided to work like you have three jobs” (Helms, 2010, p. 10). It is important to remember that no one outside us values the decisions we make the same...

Monday, February 8, 2010
A wombat
Often, one of the reasons that we are afraid to speak is that we don’t know how our words will be taken. We don’t know whether our combinations of words will be effective for those who hear or read them. One of the biggest barriers to communication is the unexpected word. It is too easy to shut down, to break communication, when we encounter the unexpected. We have become so used to easy...