Bad Grades, Making Bank, and Hating Piano: The Divergent Trajectories of Two Creative Writers’ Semiotic Becomings

This article challenges lore-based conceptions of creative writers’ becomings by showing how creative writers establish their literate and disciplinary identities not only through modes of learning characterized by curricular-based advancement in their field, but also through complex social and material negotiations with communities, institutions, and engagements outside of the disciplinary domain of creative writing. Drawing primarily from case study interview data, this article argues for a theoretical and empirical approach to studying creative writers’ “semiotic becomings” in order to further inform creative writing studies research, creative writing pedagogy, and the disciplinary benefits of validating creative writers’ extra-literate and extra-disciplinary experiences

Bridging a Divide or Dividing a Bridge?: Style, Disciplinarity, and Creative Writing Studies

Considering the role style may play in helping those of us in Creative Writing Studies think through questions of disciplinarity entails considering the ways so-called disciplinary divides implicate writers, material practices of writing, and writing-centric fields of study. Despite scholarship seeking to find consonance between the two (see, e.g., Mayers 2005; Hesse 2010; Koehler 2017; Horner 2018), one such disciplinary divide is still often thought to remain between Creative Writing and Writing Studies. A discourse around style, however, can help us bridge this divide by helping us understand that, in a sense, there is no divide to bridge. Such a discourse can facilitate deliberation on, first, how and in what ways these disciplines have taken up particular, shared conceptions of style as a form of writing knowledge and, second, how this shared conception may trouble the existence of this divide. To wit: as either a Writing Studies or Writing Studies-adjacent field, Creative Writing may find that aforementioned consonance when understood through a techne of writing that treats style as a production of difference, as as well as a product of labor (see Pender 2011). Acknowledging that theories of production across many writing disciplines share this common take-off point can help us see that these disciplines are not as epistemologically incompatible as some would argue. By going this route we may quickly see instead that questions of disciplinary difference are often questions about individuals or groups of individuals and their statuses as professionals ensconced within institutions and iterations of program types (see Thaiss & Zawacki 2006): the ways they/we create and recognize knowledge, how they/we guard knowledge, and how they/we use knowledge to perpetuate their statuses as disciplinary autonomous professionals (see Olinger, forthcoming). Put another way, this divide is better informed by what we say about these disciplines’ stances toward stylistic knowledge than about any specific methodological approaches to the production of writing in or for those disciplines

Character arcs: mapping creative writers\u27 trajectories into the composition classroom.

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical approach to the study of professional creative writers and teachers. Specifically, it examines how these writers developed their knowledge of creative writing and writing pedagogy and how that knowledge informs their work as instructors of composition. Despite the common practice across writing programs of hiring formally-trained creative writers (M.A., M.F.A, Ph.D.) to teach first-year composition and related courses, little scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition or writing studies more broadly specifically focuses on the disciplinary and professional development of these writer-teachers. Through case studies of graduate students, contingent faculty, lecturers, and professors, this dissertation shows that these writers become professionals not only through acts of literate and disciplinary uptake primarily characterized by curricular-based advancement in a field, but also through complex negotiations with communities, institutions, values, and practices outside the domains of colleges and universities. In writing studies and the field of creative writing, the act of writing creatively tends to be viewed, respectively, as either undertheorized or without need of scholarly theorizing. Attendant to this view is one that, by extension, holds that creative writers’ practices and habits of mind are likewise either undertheorized or without need of being theorized. In contrast, sociocultural approaches to studying writing practices address the need for research into this demographic of instructor by identifying the complex relationships that exist across their writing practices, institutions of disciplinary sponsorship, and semiotic action. This dissertation argues that these relationships may account for, provide perspectives on, or offer insights into both these instructors’ practices in the composition classroom and their professional situatedness in the programs for which they work

Overview of vasopressin receptor antagonists in heart failure resulting in hospitalization.

Patients with worsening heart failure (HF) requiring hospitalization commonly have a history of progressive fluid retention, decreased renal function, and hyponatremia. For these patients, diuretics have traditionally been the mainstay of treatment, but they are associated with electrolyte abnormalities and impaired renal function. Previous studies have shown that levels of the endogenous arginine vasopressin (AVP) hormone are elevated in patients with HF and may be the contributing factor to fluid retention and hyponatremia, and probably progression of HF. Vasopressin antagonists represent a unique class of therapeutic agents because of their potential role in both the short- and long-term treatment of patients hospitalized with worsening HF. As "aquaretics," AVP antagonists offer the possibility of added efficacy in relieving congestion and improving symptoms with minimal adverse effects in combination with standard medical therapy. Some AVP receptor antagonists have shown promising results in animal studies and small-scale clinical trials. The purpose of this review was to update the current status of studies with the available AVP antagonists

An early sex difference in the relation between mental rotation and object preference

Accumulating evidence suggests that males outperform females on mental rotation tasks as early as infancy. Sex differences in object preference have also been shown to emerge early in development and precede sex-typed play in childhood. Although research with adults and older children is suggestive of a relationship between play preferences and visuospatial abilities, including mental rotation, little is known about the developmental origins of this relationship. The present study compared mental rotation ability and object preference in 6- to 13-month-old infants. We used a novel paradigm to examine individual differences in infants’ mental rotation abilities as well as their differential preference for one of two sex-typed objects. A sex difference was found on both tasks, with boys showing an advantage in performance on the mental rotation task and exhibiting greater visual attention to the male-typed object (i.e., a toy truck) than to the female-typed object (i.e., a doll) in comparison to girls. Moreover, we found a relation between mental rotation and object preference that varied by sex. Greater visual interest in the male-typed object was related to greater mental rotation performance in boys, but not in girls. Possible explanations related to perceptual biases, prenatal androgen exposure, and experiential influences for this sex difference are discussed