The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays

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.