What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies [Paperback]

Katharine Haake (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 285 pages
• Publisher: Natl Council of Teachers (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814156711
• ISBN-13: 978-0814156711
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,656,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katharine Haake's most recent book is The Origin of Stars and Other Stories, from What Books Pres (2009), an imprint of the Glass Table Collective in Los Angeles. Prior books include a novel, That Water, Those Rocks (2003), and a collection of short stories, The Height and Depth of Everything (2001), both from the University of Nevada's Western Literature Series. Her first book of stories, No Reason on Earth (1986) was from Dragon Gate Press. Her short fiction has appeared widely in such magazines as The Iowa Review, Witness, One Story, New Letters, and The Santa Monica Review, and has been featured in the online magazine, Segue, as well as in LA's New Short Fiction Performance Series.

Haake is a recipient of an Individual Artist's Grant from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles, along with distinguished story recognitions from Best American Short Stories and Best of the West, an Editor's Choice Award from Cream City Review, and an Honorable Mention in the Fountain Award for Speculative Fiction.

A regular contributor to scholarship in the theory and pedagogy of creative writing, she is also the author of What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies (NCTE, 2000), with Hans Ostrom and the late Wendy Bishop, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively (Longmans, 2000). She teaches at California State University, Northridge.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Writing Exercises with a Feminist Slant, January 10, 2012

By 

Jeri Walker-Bickett (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies (Paperback)

Katharine Haake's book What Our Speech Disrupts contains a wealth of multi-layered writing exercises that can really help a writer get at the heart of what matters to them as communicators of the written word. Granted, the book is an acquired taste. The subtitle Feminism and Creative Writing Studies should clue the reader in that the writer's approach is influenced by feminist pedagogy. As such, she weaves the narrative of what it is like to be a writer in with the exercises she provides. Narration becomes the tool that the author uses to share knowledge.

All in all it is a beatifully written and challenging book of writing exercises. The exercises take lots of time to complete, so this book is not for those who are not big fans of freewriting. I first encountered the book in a graduate class on the teaching of creative writing, and I have come back to it many times over the years for teaching ideas as well as to hone my writing stills. At times, it will seem like an exercise has gone on forever, but that is when you will discover an entirely new vein of thought if you stick with it.

Haake's introductory statement of what the books is not reveals a lot about her feminist approach to teaching creative writing:

It is not a seamless argument.
It does not speak in a single voice.
Its separate parts, together, are not graceful.
It is not a set of answers.

My writing that resulted from her exercises helped me form a better picture of the type of writer and teacher that I wanted to be. So much writing instruction that students receive in school is so atypical of what really happens in the writing process, so it's easy to see why the meandering nature of this book would rub some people the wrong way. The book is the perfect case in point that the building of knowledge is indeed a messy process that takes a lot of work.

I have since adapted two of the exercises for use with high school creative writing students. In smaller doses, the same principles could be applied to standard Language Arts classes. One is a sharing activity I call a Memoir Box based on Haake's Reflections on the Writing Life: Part One. The other exercise I've adapted is her Sentence Sounds exercise.

All serious writers can benefit from this book. The content is definitely five stars but the formatting of some of the exercises can be hard to read, so in the end I would deem this a 4/5 star book.

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wade through mountains of b s to find kernels of what you already knew, August 6, 2010

By 

Larry Latham (Tulsa, OK United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies (Paperback)

I had to read this in a master's class. At first it was just drudgery, but then I got in tune with the purity of its awfulness and enjoyed it very much, in the same way I might enjoy 'Plan 9 from Outer Space.' This is the kind of nonsense that obstructed my writing for many years, but Haake's convoluted collections of subordinate clauses are a treat if you read them out loud to friends, especially after a few beers. A random example (because I mark them as I go - I will always treasure this book as an example of everything I hate about pretentiousness): "Multiplicity, porosity and paradox are never easy, but until we are willing to cross over boundaries again and again, both at will and by whim, and to pull across them whatever may be useful, keeping at least one foot in every camp, refusing to take sides, but also not letting up at any opportunity, speaking many tongues and risking, always, failure, we are bound to reduce what counts as writing."

I actually agree with the occasional point she makes, but wading through the suffering of the artist, experiencing the bittersweet burden of the truth-teller, struggling with the mundane incidents of her life tossed in at random like pieces of bacon in a pot of beans (but without adding the savor), was ultimately to no real purpose. I learned nothing about writing, nothing about teaching writing. But it was very funny in the saddest sort of way.