KristinaQuynn.com
Scholarly Writing Facilitation
I am the founding Director of CSU Writes, a scholarly writing facilitation program at Colorado State University that offers support to the university's more than 5,000 faculty, postdoc, and graduate student writers. Started with grant funds fall of 2015, CSU Writes offers workshops, writing retreats, writing & editing groups, drop-in writing sessions, and more. The program grew rapidly and is now integrated permanently into CSU's research support programs funded through the Graduate School and Office of the Vice-President for Research.
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My program development and writing-facilitation research draws on the foundational work of Robert Boice who described "professors as writers" and the more recent work of such academic facilitators as Joli Jensen (author of Write No Matter What--2017) & Helen Sword (Air & Light & Time & Space--2017). They remind us that there are many, many ways to be a successful academic writer.
I study select "experimental" modes of 20th- and 21st-Century literature by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Kristjana Gunnars, and Ali Smith.
I am particularly interested in what happens when a narrative refers to itself or to how it was written or to how it might be read (qualities sometimes called self-reflexivity or meta-fiction). These are a few ways a piece of writing might "perform" literariness. Self-reflexivity might also make the text challenging to read or difficult to interpret. In other words, these books may be not an easy-read because they do not take the very materials of narrative (words, narrative structure) for granted. Their textual self-awareness can also make for delightful, playful, powerful, and even disconcerting reading adventures.
A natural offshoot of my literary studies has been to explore and design complimentary critical modes that enact or perform those literary qualities. Hence, the name "performative criticism."
