As many of you know, my wife Cristina and I started a publishing company, One Subject Press, this past year.
Today, we introduce our first new book, and the first new book of our “Teacher/Writer” series, Scott F. Parker’s Teaching without Teaching.
As you’ve seen on this Substack, I have often sought to center the voices of teachers as we navigate the choppy waters of this current moment, especially as it pertains to our educational system. It’s hard to think of a wiser or more profound guide in this respect than Scott F. Parker.
As I am partial to a good read-aloud, I’m going to read from the book’s title manifesto in my video intro, but I’ll give you a sampling from the opening here, too, first published in the wonderful magazine, Whale Road Review:
1. Writing is not a collection of skills. It is not the tricks of the trade. It is not a mastery of craft. It might involve these things, but it is not them.
2. Writing is a way of life, a way of being.
3. As with most ways of being, one may be initiated into the writing life. Which is to say it may be learned. Which is to say it may be taught.
4. How is it learned? Curiosity, appreciation, admiration, practice, effort, love, dedication. So many words come rushing to mind, all of them orbiting wonder. Only later does instruction come also to mind.
5. How is it taught? By making one’s own learning public, by maintaining one’s wonder.
I could read and re-read these sentences all day, and not come to the end of my admiration for them. New insights flash forward each time I see them. Today, I marvel at Scott’s answer to the question of how writing is taught: “By making one’s own learning public, by maintaining one’s wonder.” There is at once an acknowledgment of the essentially spiritual nature of good writing (how else but with our souls can we “maintain wonder”) and also a clear-eyed view that teaching writing requires vulnerability, even a kind of nakedness, a regular and ongoing admission of error and fallibility that inheres to “making one’s own learning public.”
In a world where more and more people (including teachers) are willing to farm out the messy process of thinking to machines, Parker’s work reminds us all to come back to those essential values inherent in the art and craft of writing: “curiosity, appreciation, admiration, practice, effort, love, dedication.”
And don’t just take my word for it! (After all, as the book’s publisher, I am more than a bit biased.) None other than
, author of The Writer’s Practice, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay, and most recently and brilliantly, More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI, had this to say about Scott’s book:“Teaching means not just asking if students are learning, but what they're learning, how they’re learning, and when they’re learning. Teaching without Teaching provides us a model for reflective teaching practice that shows there is no endpoint to exploring these questions."
No endpoint. That’s the beautiful blessing and curse of writing, and teaching writing, isn’t it? The thing is never really done. And yes, we are always (always) looking for more books—the wiser the better—to aid us as we continue to make sense in words of this strange and marvelous world we find ourselves sharing with each other.
So, in conclusion, as the kids might say in school: buy a copy of Scott’s book. Or five. Or ten. One Subject Press has it right here.
And that’s not all.
In addition to Teaching without Teaching, One Subject Press has a six more excellent titles coming out in the coming months (including one by yours truly). Here’s a brief list, with what I hope are some tantalizing previews and synopses:
Who’s Afraid of the Still, Small Voice? by Cassandra Nelson
Another powerful entry in the Teacher/Writer series, Who’s Afraid of the Still, Small Voice? considers the ways literature acts as a wisdom-teacher for its readers, on both individual and communal levels. In a series of four essays that span nearly a decade of the author’s life, Nelson shows the immense capacities that poems, stories, novels, and plays have to speak to our lives as human beings. If you’re not familiar with Cassandra Nelson’s work, I highly recommend her excellent Theology of Fiction published by Wiseblood Books.
A Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord by Joseph A. Brown, SJ
This second edition of the inspired seven-day retreat captures the voice and witness of these two inspiring saints in our time, Father Bede Abram and Sister Thea Bowman. Poet, theologian, historian and wisdom teacher Joseph Brown is at his imaginative best all throughout the book, and the second edition of the retreat includes reflections by two Black Catholics belonging to a generation formed and inspired by Sister Thea’s and Father Bede’s witness—a Foreword by Dr. Cynthia Bailey Manns, one of four lay Americans who participated in the Global Synod, and an Afterword by Father Maurice Nutt, who is vice postulator of Sister Thea’s cause for sainthood. To get a sense for Father Brown’s inimitable, powerful voice, check out his Sankofa Muse blog.
Scapegoats by April Vázquez
This short story collection plumbs the depths of a variety of essential human experiences—among them marriage, death, war, and migration—but always in a way that sheds light, that makes us re-examine these realities that face us so often we sometimes forget to really see them. Vázquez is a vital voice to be accompanied and sometimes confronted by, and from her voice in this collection spring a multiplicity of other memorable voices and narrators, many of them on the margins of polite company and society. It’s a collection to disturb, unsettle. An axe, as Kafka had it, “for the frozen sea inside us.”
Seven Last Words by Alice Camille
One Subject Press purchased no less than NINE Alice Camille titles from ACTA Publications to help get the company off the ground—which gives you an idea of the esteem I hold Alice in. This book is a second edition of one of Alice’s first books, a beautiful and powerful meditation on the seven last words of Christ from the cross. “One holy person is worth all the sermons on holiness we might ever hear,” Camille states at one point in this short but powerful book. Yes. And she continues, “If you have the courage to be that person, the Kingdom comes wherever you are.” Amen. Check out some of Alice’s other terrific One Subject Press titles here.
Good Teaching: A Provocation by Zach Czaia
Mine will be the third of the “Teacher/Writers” series books, taking its title from the poem published in the May, 2024 edition of NCTE’s English journal. I’ve been working with a terrific local writer and editor,
From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace by Father Pat Hannon, CSC
As I mentioned in our initial company announcement, Father Pat Hannon was the first author to sign on as a One Subject Press writer for the ’25-’26 season. And I am so thrilled to be publishing this work, which considers the ancient wisdom practice of pilgrimage from multiple angles—community, language, and prayer, among many others—in order to invite readers into the pilgrimages they might begin or into deeper awareness of the pilgrimages they are already on. And if you’re anxious to get a sense of Hannon’s writerly voice before the new book comes out this fall, check out his wonderful meditation on the Our Father, Such Dizzy Natural Happiness, also available at One Subject Press.
A note of grief and request for support:
-I had meant to share this e-blast last week but a shooting and fatality outside the high school where I work (Cristo Rey Jesuit High School- Twin Cities) and another at Annunciation Catholic School a few miles south of us left me and so many I love reeling and bereft. Please do consider supporting Annunciation as they move forward after this tragedy by donating to the Annunciation Hope and Healing Fund here.
Other Notes & Thank Yous:
-Shout out to the amazing Tanja Prokop, who designed the beautiful cover for Scott’s book. See more of her work here. And to Andrea Reider who handled the layout and design elegantly and with patience for this first-timer. (More on Andrea’s work here.)
-Shout out too, to those wonderful authors who endorsed Scott’s book: the aforementioned John Warner, but also essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams, former St. John’s president Nora Demleitner, and historian and journalist,
.-And I can’t forget to name and celebrate those wonderful journals and magazines in which Scott’s work was first published. Without you, this book would not be possible. So thank you
at Whale Road Review, David Wescott at Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Sarah Bray, formerly of Inside Higher Ed.