Styles of Writing/Styles of Thinking Roundtable

Styles of Writing/Styles of Thinking Roundtable

At the first event in the IHR's publishing series, consider how thought translates to the written word in a roundtable on writing style.

How do different styles of writing facilitate different modes of thinking? How can changes in writing style affect scholarship and disciplinary discourses?

Creative writer Matt Bell, cultural critic and game designer Ian Bogost and environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz will discuss the relationship between writing and thinking and how to write for a range of audiences.

Zoom details for this event will be emailed to you by 8 a.m. Arizona time the morning of the event. If you register after this time, details will be included in the "Additional Information" section of your confirmation email. Please check your junk or spam folder for an email from Eventbrite. For any issues or concerns with receiving the Zoom link, contact Lauren Whitby at lawhitby@asu.edu.

Speaker Bios

Matt Bell's next novel, "Appleseed," is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He is also the author of the novels "Scrapper" and "In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods," as well as the short story collection "A Tree or a Person or a Wall," a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

His novel "In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods" was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, among other honors. Both "In the House" and "Scrapper" were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books, and "A Tree or a Person or a Wall" was nominated for the 2017 Story Prize.

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds appointments in the School of Architecture and the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

He is author or co-author of ten books: "Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism"; "Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames"; "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System"; "Newsgames: Journalism at Play"; "How To Do Things with Videogames"; "Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing"; "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10"; "The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living With Apple"; "How To Talk About Videogames"; and "Play Anything." Bogost is also the co-editor of the Platform Studies book series at MIT Press, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury.

Margret Grebowicz's current interests grew out of her books "The National Park to Come" and "Whale Song," where she examines environmental imagination, desire and the attrition of social life. Her goal is to develop a framework for understanding the simultaneity and co-creation of environmental and social loss. Biopolitical capitalism, she argues, needs desire, which in turn becomes something to sustain. In her work, wilderness—understood as places, practices and modes of animal life—becomes the theater for this ongoing dynamic.

Margret has several related projects in progress in this area. First, she believes we need new conceptual resources in order to even begin to think cetacean being, and both posthumanism and human rights discourse fail in this regard. That cetacean life remains so firmly in late modernity’s “blind spot” at the same time as it continues to be fetishized is a clue that there’s work to be done here. Secondly, she is exploring the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as a new space for both wilderness recreation and megafaunal restoration, in order to understand the role of desire in rewilding initiatives. And finally, her most developed project at the moment concerns mountaineering in late capitalism. Margret’s forthcoming book is “Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. The End of the World,” and she has written about climbing in the minnesota review, The Philosophical Salon and The Atlantic.

Writing and Publishing Series

This event is part of the IHR's Spring 2021 series on academic writing and publishing. Through this series, we hope to provide scholars with the insights they need to successfully publish books and journal articles as well as develop an engaging writing style for academic content.

Events in this series include:

Lauren Whitby
Institute for Humanities Research
lawhitby@asu.edu
-
Online