Coming to Terms: The Collected Works of Jane Blankenship, an edited collection from Jane Blankenship and Janette Kenner Muir, is the story of one academic journey through self-discovery, intellectual development, and mentorship. It is a conversation that illustrates how, in Mary Catherine Bateson’s terms, one composes a life that has meaning and makes a significant difference in other lives as well. Jane Blankenship was an active member of the speech communication discipline, starting with...

Every piece of clothing tells a story. After meeting for years, supporting each other's work, these colleagues decided to try something new—a collaboration. They dug into their closets and discovered that personal essays about clothes—on everything from fringe jackets and fishing vests to bridal tulle and Beatles T-shirts—have the power to evoke memories, not just for themselves, but for everyone that reads them.

Feisty women spanning six centuries ...The twenty-three stories in this collection depict ordinary women—from the 1470s to the 1970s—who meet life’s challenges with fierce determination.An unhappy housewife in 1950s California gathers the courage to escape an abusive marriage. When local men are shipped off to WWI, a young Yorkshire woman joins others to keep a munitions factory at peak operation. As her land and way of life are threatened, a nineteenth century Chi...

Concoctions, treats, brews, and potions from another batch of feisty charactersWhether cooking for solace, scrounging for food, concocting medicine, or brewing poisons, the feisty women in these stories will keep you thirsting for more. Twenty-five tales will transport you far afield in time and place: third century Ireland, medieval Europe, twentieth-century Australia.Read your way from a hippie commune to a WW II internment camp in the Philippines; from a Renaissance pala...

As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is “a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world . . . one of the oldest continuous human traditions.” Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.John Cullen Gruesser’s edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent litera...