The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays: Coming of Age as a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker - Hardcover

This volume contains eye-opening essays from a pioneering voice in creative nonfiction and composition studies.Inspirational educator and writer Bloom brings to fore the trials and triumphs she has experienced in coming of age as a scholar, teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, and most especially a writer. A pioneer in composition studies and a chronic nonconformist, Bloom is a lifelong advocate of opportunity, authenticity, and expression. Taking a stance in favor of bold creativity in living, teaching, and the act of writing that ties both together, she warns against the snares and sneers of the seven deadly virtues - duty, rationality, conformity, efficiency, order, economy, and punctuality - that so often subvert the mission of education and the potential of expressive communication.Ranging from the comic to the confessional, Bloom's memoir interweaves the pleasures and problems of a forbidden marriage and complex family, the joys of cooking and travel, the struggles to become a professor in an era that rejected women faculty, and the risks of heeding the siren call of creative nonfiction. These fifteen essays probe the assumptions and values - ethical, intellectual, social, aesthetic, and inevitably political - of what Bloom has found to be the most complicated, challenging, satisfying aspects of her loves and labors.

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She is an author or editor of numerous books, including Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical, Composition Studies as a Creative Art, and The Essay Connection. Her essay ""(Im)Patient,"" which appears in this collection, was named a Notable Essay of 2005 in Best American Essays.