This week Rowman & Littlefield releases Compassionate Critical Thinking: How Mindfulness, Creativity, Empathy and Socratic Questioning Can Transform Teaching by Ira Rabois. In his new book, Ira demonstrates how to use mindfulness with instructional effectiveness to increase student participation and decrease classroom stress, and it turns the act of teaching into a transformational practice. Many books teach mindfulness, but few provide a model for teaching critical thinking and integrating it across the curriculum. Ira Rabois recently retired from the Lehman Alternative Community School, a public secondary school in Ithaca, NY, where he taught English, Philosophy, History, Drama, Karate, and Psychology for 27 years. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan, a M.A.T. from SUNY-Binghamton, served in the Peace Corps, studied Zen and Japanese martial arts for 40 years with Hidy Ochiai, and took classes in meditation and Buddhist psychology at Namgyal Institute for Tibetan Studies, The Omega Institute with David Loy and Robert Thurman, healing meditation with the Consciousness Research and Training Project, and Proprioceptive Writing with Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon. Prior to his retirement, Ira Rabois began writing this book and contacted me in late 2012 for a professional assessment. After a round of revisions to his manuscript we began to work together on a book proposal and building his audience platform. He began to blog weekly and in 2014 was interviewed by Sasha Lilley on Pacifica Radio’s Against the Grain and by Tish Pearlman on WEOS/WSKG Radio’s Out of Bounds Radio. Ira’s book interested…

This summer Samantha Kolb completed an internship with Swenson Book Development LLC. Here she shares some of what she learned in the last 10 weeks. As an English major, I have learned to endure perplexed looks when family and friends ask what my major is. I have also learned to gracefully answer no to the follow-up question; “Oh, are you going to be an English teacher?” As far as teaching English is concerned, it is a noble profession and I applaud all who will take up that torch. My answer is that I  am interested in a career in publishing after college. As a summer intern for Swenson Book Development L.L.C, I have learned four things every English major should know about publishing. Publishing is a Business. It isn’t just about reading manuscripts and turning them into books. There’s a business aspect that doesn’t seem to come to mind when thinking about what to do with an English major. Contracts need to be reviewed, market research to be completed, submission guidelines to follow. While editing manuscripts certainly is part of the process of publishing a book, that is only a small percentage of what is involved with publishing a book. Distribution, profit-loss statements, copyright royalties, and sales are as important to understand as grammar and punctuation.  I learned about Publisher’s Marketplace where I can gain access to job postings and a database of agents, publishers, editors, and lists of book deals. Read. It seems like a simple request, but part…

On Saturday morning at 9 a.m. at the Atlas Coffee Mill, three dozen Fox Cities writers filled a meeting room for a workshop with Will Schwalbe, author of End-of-Your-Life Book Club (Knopf, 2012) and editor at Macmillan. Friday afternoon there were two readings to packed houses as part of the Fox Cities Book Festival. I listened to him at UW Fox Valley where the audience spilled out of the auditorium at 1:30 p.m. He also spoke at the Neenah Public Library at 3:30 p.m. “Reading, writing, and editing are three legs of a stool,” Will Schwalbe said in his introduction Saturday morning. To write a book requires all three. Offering advice to a room full of aspiring writers, Schwalbe said you have to give yourself permission to write a crummy first draft. While he set out to write a 50-70,000 word manuscript, he wrote 150,000 words before he arrived at a final version. “Find or make the time to write,” he said. “This is perhaps the hardest part. Butt in chair.” For those writing memoir, he advised them to be authentic. Schwalbe shared Hemingway’s advice: never stop writing until you know what will come next. He suggested writers shouldn’t overlook the Melville solution: drop in chapters with necessary expository information intermittently. Figuring out what the readers need to know and when they need to know it is the hard work of writing in long form. He suggested sleep sometimes provides the solution to these kind of writing problems. Schwalbe described the…