CFP (edited volume): 13 Exigencies for Teaching the Essay

Teachers of essays and essayism stand at a new threshold in how we understand the value of what we teach: the seismic impact of generative AI on academic writing courses and the programs or departments that offer them call us to rethink profoundly our subject matter, methods, and reasons for teaching any type of writing. For some teachers and programs, this professional rethinking has existential weight. However, AI’s impact is not the only reason to reconsider the need for essay pedagogies. High school teachers are often caught between needing to prepare students for standardized essay exams and helping their developing writers to learn that writing in all modalities remains a powerful “technology for thought,” as Charles Bazerman has suggested. The essay as both a genre and praxis is uniquely accommodating to intellectual and formal experiments that foreground the writer’s presence and process, rather than occluding them. How to center human agency in writing continues to be a central focus for writing program administrators (WPAs) in two and four-year college settings. In 2025, WPAs are expected to ensure that their curricula anticipate students’ writing needs in future careers, which will not typically require them to write essays. And yet, amid all of the challenges to essay-based curricula and teaching, creative nonfiction courses are in high demand by students, and the field of Essay Studies is burgeoning, with its focus on the essay as a literary and cultural practice, a pedagogy, and a genre that bridges the academic and public spheres and varieties of media.(1)

13 Exigencies for Teaching the Essay seeks to assemble a collection of original essays that provide reasons for sustaining or introducing essays and essayism into pedagogy, programs, and professional lives across disciplines. The volume takes its origins from Douglas Hesse’s crucial work on “essayistic literacy” in his many articles, essays, and talks for high school and college teachers of writing. The volume will serve as a de facto tribute to his varied and sustained contributions to literacy studies. This volume will include voices from contributors across educational levels and settings, including community settings. While “defending the essay” is a familiar trope that has existed in some form since the 16th century, this volume seeks essays that problematize the status of essays and essayism for teachers, students, writing programs, and the future of liberal arts and sciences educators in k-12, college, and beyond. 

We invite original essays on both essay pedagogies (i.e. the teaching of essays as a literary form and a writerly practice) and essayistic pedagogies (i.e. pedagogical approaches that enact habits of mind or form that might be associated with essays and essayism, including fostering inquiry, dramatizing thinking and thought, experimenting with forms, and signaling what John Keats called “negative capability”--i.e. the capacity to resist prematurely coming to conclusions.

The editors imagine publics for 13 Exigencies to be both seasoned and new teachers of writing, writing program administrators, and students of essay-writing at all levels. We welcome chapters by teacher-scholars of writing as well as teacher-scholars in fields outside of writing studies, literature, or creative writing to provide as varied an account as possible of how, when, and why the essay and essayism matter for education at the current moment. Authors should avail themselves of the full range of stylistic and structural possibilities that essays afford. Proposed contributions may enact many types of textual experiments (including lyric essays, collages, dialogues, open letters, etc), and may be written by multiple authors. 

Questions that a proposal might take up include but are not limited to the following:

• How can pedagogy itself be essayistic? What are the characteristics of an “essayistic pedagogy”?

• How do essays teach? What are the pedagogical dimensions of essays and essaying?

• How are essay/essayistic pedagogies impacted by large-language models/generative AI as well as institutional policies about their use?

• What are the relationships between pedagogies dedicated to teaching the essay as a genre and those that teach essayism or what Doug Hesse has called, “essayistic literacies”?

• How do essayistic pedagogies function in times of deep uncertainty, division, and precarity in our classrooms and institutions? How are essay pedagogies challenged in times of political instability or crisis?

• What do essay/essayistic pedagogies make visible (about their practitioners, students, institutional contexts)? What or whom do essay pedagogies occlude or compromise?

• What does it mean to write essays within or across disciplines? How do our disciplines shape the writing identities that we enact in our essays?

• How do essay pedagogies challenge and extend what pre-professional preparation entails? How can essay pedagogies thrive in educational environments that are professionally or technically oriented?

• How do essays serve pedagogical functions outside of educational contexts?

Interested authors are asked to submit a 400-500 word abstract, in MLA Style and as a Microsoft Word document, that includes full author contact information along with an explanation of the proposed chapter’s purpose. Authors are encouraged to cite existing scholarship within abstracts that locate their work within the fields of essay studies, writing studies, or creative writing studies, among others. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be asked to submit a 15-20 page manuscript.

(1) See Aquilina (2021); Aquilina, Cowser, and Wallack (2022); Jurečič (2023); Karshan and Murphy (2020); Wall (2018); Wallack (2017); Wampole and Childs (2024); Wittman and Kindley (2022)

Deadlines: 

• Proposal due by June 15, 2025. 
• Preliminary chapter draft due by September 1, 2025. 
• Final draft due January 15, 2026. 

Contact information for Nicole and Heather: exigenciesfortheessay@gmail.com. Replies to hfester@mines.edu or nw2108@columbia.edu are also welcome.

Bios:

• Heather Fester, Ph.D., is a Teaching Associate Professor of the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, where she directs the Nature and Human Values Program and teaches classes in rhetoric, ethics, composition, and creative nonfiction writing. She has a combined background in Rhetoric & Writing and Creative Writing, which offers her a unique perspective on the humanities that she enjoys sharing with her students. Heather has also administered various types of writing programs on the university level over the past 20+ years.
• Nicole B. Wallack, PhD is the Director of Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program and Senior Lecturer-in-Discipline in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her scholarship focuses on the history, pedagogy, and aesthetics of the American essay, and Writing Studies. She is the author of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies (Utah State University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (Edinburgh University Press, 2022/2025) and has written articles and chapters on the essay, knowledge transfer, and writing-based teaching. She was a founder and co-creator of the MLA’s Institutes for Teaching Reading and Writing in Access-Oriented Institutions and has served since 1998 as a Senior Associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.