Stratofanatic's Emporium

It's official. ... last night I hit "send" on Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology , and it's now in the hands of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. I'm highly excited about the anthology overall, and while I no illusions about how much any academic sells, I do think the topic fascinating and the scholarship (if I say so myself) pretty far-reaching. 49 different poets 152 poems 53,000 total words of editorial content, which includes 20,000-word introduction 11,000 words of headnotes 5,000 words in Appendix C 17,000 of footnotes. All contracts signed, except for one minor hiccup and one person for whom I couldn't find any contact information. All permission-to-reprint fees paid for out of my own pocket. And I managed all this in "only" eight months. The last three months have been particular brutal since, as Director of Undergraduate Studies, I've been putting in 10-12 hours days for seven days a week, ev...

The secret of academic writing is, of course, TONS and TONS of melodramatic pathos! Two quotes from my (now completed!) introduction for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: "Much too much Society verse, I fear, has suffered an even unkinder fate than this—surviving, if it survives at all, only in damp basements, dusty attics, and long forgotten old desk drawers."  "Still, generally speaking, most unpublished poetry finds only one fate. It disappears quietly into the night: unknown, unloved, unrecognized." As I put the finishing touches on this sucker, too, I've been reflecting on what makes a final-stage proofreading successful. One thing I think about is reading speed : as an academic, you read papers much faster than you do when composing (or revising) them, and I've found that this changes the actual phrasing a writer should use -- for instance, I tend to remove lots of qualifying phrases since, during a speed-read, I realize that the ...

So, having just received my copy of Tolkien Studies , I dropped everything (as one does) and immediately starting reading "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2018", the year-end literature review of all things published on Tolkien during that calendar year. These literature reviews were a godsend to me as a graduate student, and they're absolutely vital for anyone hoping to keep up with the field. Well, my essay on Verlyn Flieger's two YA novels published in A Wilderness of Dragons  (ed. John Rateliff) as a Festschrift  for Flieger, ended up getting some very nice coverage. Like, one-of-the-nicest-things-anyone's-ever-said-about-my-research coverage, which meant more both because it was so unexpected and because I assumed that this book chapter in particular would likely never be widely read. The review's worth quoting in full: Dennis Wilson Wise drills deeper into Flieger's use of fantasy fiction to comment on her Tolkien scholarship in the most exten...

YES!!! So, my two contributor's copies from the most recent issue of Tolkien Studies  have just arrived .... my article is " Depth, Globalization, and the Domestic Hero: The Postmodern Transformation of Tolkien’s Bard in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Films ," and I think it'll be a highly useful application of neo-Straussian and Marxist theory to Tolkien Studies as a field. Here's a quick recap of the argument. Afterward, though, I'll spend this entry discussing the absolutely tortured publication path my brave little article had to follow. ARGUMENT : Does anyone remember the scene from The Battle of The Five Armies when Alfrid Lickspittle asks Bard, “The Master’s mantle was there for the taking, but you threw it all away. And for what?” Bard doesn't answer, but Jackson, who's not really known for his subtlety, quickly pans the camera to Bard's children, thereby implying that family (duh!)  is important. Anyway, that's Jackson in a nutshell. He takes...

 Randomly browsing through C. S. Lewis's letter, and, in a letter to Warnie dated 22 Nov. 1931, he writes: To read  histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves--well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things that great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then .... Although the emphasis on "great men" might now count as among the "silly things," this sentiment, by and large, is still how I tend to read novels, and which I see little enough in contemporary literary criticism ...

So, after holding my article hostage -- hostage , I tell you -- for four years, the editor of The Baum Bugle , Sarah Crotzer, has finally published it into her most recent issue: “Delving into Nome Man’s Land: Two Traditions in Baum and Tolkien.” Baum Bugle , Autumn 2021, pp. 13–22. Interesting story behind this one. Sarah suggested the original idea to me back when we were in grad school together, maaaaybe right after she became Bugle editor, I don't remember. Anyway, I sat on the idea for a while. Then, in December 2017, tuckered out from my long article on gender violence in Stephen R. Donaldson, and wanting to write something short and spiffy for the CV, I turned to L. Frank Baum. Since I knew this break had been coming up, I'd been reading a whole bunch of Oz books in preparation. So, once the fall semester ended, I plunged into a 5-week writing spree where I wrote two short articles back-to-back -- the first an essay on magic words in fantasy (but especially Baum, of cour...

So, I recently had (for another context) to articulate my basic philosophy of being a book reviews editor, so thought I'd shared that here.  Basically, my view of what a good book review entails appears in Fafnir's book review guidelines . Long story short, this is what I expect: The reviewer should assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses. . . .  If a book has more strengths than weaknesses, or vice versa, please let that be reflected in your structure. We consider it a standard convention of the review genre, however, that even highly laudatory reviews contain some critique, even if a minor one; likewise, even highly negative reviews should contain some elements of praise. In terms of unwritten policies, I return all submissions -- with comments -- to the reviewers within 24 hours. Besides expediting the total publication process, this is a form of practicing compassion for contingent labor and the busy workloads of all our reviewers. About 80% of our reviews re...