Interrobang: A Writing Podcast‽
In 1962, Martin K. Spektor, a New York-based advertiser and copywriter, coined the term “interrobang.” This novel punctuation mark combines the question and exclamation marks, nestling within the former’s quizzical curve the latter’s emphatic stroke. Spektor’s neologism likewise combines “interro,” for “interrogate,” with “bang,” for the word copyeditors traditionally used to refer to the exclamation mark.
The CWSC’s “Interrobang‽ A Writing Podcast” engages with UBC Vancouver community members who describe their current creative, professional, and academic publications, and talk about their creative process: where, why, and how they write.
Journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee is deeply invested in writing about people and ideas in a way that journeys outward from the self. His most recent book, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, published by HarperCollins (2021), examines the complex relationships that immigrants have with the countries they leave and what compels them to return home. Kamal is a journalist and an author of three books of nonfiction: Intolerable, Brown, and Return. He holds a PhD in English from Nottingham University and is currently a professor and director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
What is the relationship between the public health and the health of democracies? What part do effective communications play in establishing and maintaining their mutual well-being? Heidi Tworek, Ian Beacock, and Eseohe Ojo investigate these questions in their policy report “Democratic Health Communications during COVID-19: A RAPID Response.”
Gregory Mackie’s new book is Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife, published by University of Toronto Press (2019). This charmingly written monograph is an innovative study of Wilde’s afterlives, which is to say, all the ways in which his legend continued to circulate after his trials and death by way of literary forgeries and impersonations.
Evan Thompson is the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press 2015). The book offers a fascinating exploration of consciousness at the limits of both neuroscientific knowledge as gleaned from Western science and phenomenological insight as established through many centuries of meditative practice in Asian traditions.
Video Resources
The Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication produced this series of videos to explore the fundamentals of academic writing and research.
“Managing Time to Write”: A conversation with 4 graduate students from Chemistry, Civil Engineering, English Literature, and Linguistics
“Writing in Situations”: An interview with Dr. Anthony Paré
“The Writing Process”: A conversation with 4 graduate students from Chemistry, Civil Engineering, English Literature, and Linguistics
“The Prewriting Stage”: A conversation with 4 graduate students from Chemistry, Civil Engineering, English Literature, and Linguistics
“The Writing Stage”: A conversation with 4 graduate students from Chemistry, Civil Engineering, English Literature, and Linguistics
“The Revision Stage”: A conversation with 4 graduate students from Chemistry, Civil Engineering, English Literature, and Linguistics
“Writing with Integrity”:
A Conversation between Dr. Susan Porter
and Dr. Beth Haverkamp