Jessica Edwards

Meg McGuire

Rachel Sanchez

Speaking Up, Speaking Out addresses the lived experiences of those working in the non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) trenches through storytelling and reflection. By connecting NTTF voices from various aspects of writing studies, the collection offers fresh perspectives and meaningful contributions, imagining the possibilities for contingent faculty to be valued and honored in educational systems that often do the opposite. Challenging traditional ways of seeing NTTF, the work contains multiple entry points to NTT life: those with and without “terminal degrees,” those with PhDs, and those who have held or currently hold tenured positions. Each chapter suggests tangible ways that writing departments and supporters can be more thoughtful about their policies and practices as they work to create more equitable spaces for NTTF. Speaking Up, Speaking Out considers the rhetorical power of labeling and asserts why contingent faculty, for far too long, have been compared to and against TT faculty and often encouraged to reach the same or similar productivity with scholarship, teaching, and service that TT faculty produce. The myopic ideas about what is valued and whose position is deemed more important impacts contingent faculty in ways that, as contributors in this collection share, effect and affect faculty productivity, emotional health, and overall community involvement. Contributors: Norah Ashe-McNalley, Sarah Austin, Rachel Azima, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Peter Brooks, Denise Comer, Jessica Cory, Liz Gumm, Brendan Hawkins, Heather Jordan, Nathalie Joseph, Julie Karaus, Christopher Lee, John McHone, Angie McKinnon Carter, Dauvan Mulally, Seth Myers, Liliana M. Naydan, Linda Shelton, Erica Stone, Elizabeth Vincelette, Lacey Wootton

Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Writing Studies

Speaking Up, Speaking Out

One day a teenage boy gets on his bike and rides forty miles up California’s Pacific Coast Highway to avoid causing an earthquake he fears will endanger his mother and sister. But the quake he is experiencing is not coming from beneath the earth; it’s the onset of bipolar illness. Blinded by Hope describes what it’s like to have an unusually bright, creative child—and then to have that child suddenly be hit with an illness that defies description and cure. Over the years, McGuire attributes her son’s lost jobs, broken relationships, legal troubles, and periodic hospitalizations to the manic phase of his illness, denying the severity of his growing drug use—but ultimately, she has to face her own addiction to rescuing him, and to forge a path for herself toward acceptance, resilience, and love. A wakeup call about the epidemic of mental illness, substance abuse, and mass incarceration in our society, Blinded by Hope shines a light on the shadow of family dynamics that shame, ignorance, and stigma rarely let the public see, and asks the question: How does a mother cope when love is not enough?

Meg McGuire

Books

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