Backwards Research

The Backwards Research Guide for Writers:
Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration

This research guide features quotes from Buddhist monks, poets, and neuroscientists. Each chapter provides exercises to nurture curiosity itself and to rekindle the ability to use that curiosity for research.

Each chapter also including informative context about the assumptions we bring to the research task itself.

It’s called “backwards” because it starts with a series of exercises that invite the writer to tune in to themselves. At certain points, students are invited to close their eyes and watch their minds.

And yes, it does work as a composition textbook. It might even be fun and rigorous and off-the-wall at the same time.

This book is for writers looking for brainstorming ideas and teachers working with students who have lost the thread of their own curiosity and need to find it again.

Features fun, informal interviews with creative nonfiction authors

Steve Almond

Jill Christman

Robin Hemley

Joe Mackall

Bill Roorbach

Benjamin Vogt

Can a writing and research textbook have these subjects listed in the index? This one does.

  • anthropology

  • anxiety

  • beginner’s mind

  • confusion

  • contemplative

  • creative writing

  • curiosity

  • emotions

  • empathy

  • enjoyment

  • excavation

  • freaks

  • imagination

  • intuition

  • meditation

  • mindfulness

  • neurons

  • noodling

  • noticing

  • openhearted

  • passions

  • quantum physics

  • questioning

  • randomness

  • reflection

  • relax

  • self-awareness

  • wabi sabi

Details

Published by Equinox Publications, November 30, 2011
ISBN: 9781845534417
Price: Paperback $39.95, Hardcover $115.00
362 pages, 8 Figures
Buy it on Amazon.com or through

Contents

Introduction for Instructors: The Context for Seeking as Research

Section I. Research: An Inside Job
Chapter 1. Write About Anything
Chapter 2. Meet the Author: You
Conversation 1 with Ben Vogt: Wandering Research
Chapter 3. Areas of Expertise: Using What You Already Know
Chapter 4. Living and Loving the Questions

Section II. The Inside Meets the Outside: Paying Attention as Research
Chapter 5. Learning to See
Conversation 2 with Bill Roorbach: Immersion Research
Chapter 6. Responding to Reality
Chapter 7. Uncharted Obsessions
Conversation 3 with Steve Almond: Freakdom
Chapter 8. Beginner’s Mind

Section III. Big Bang: Form and Structured Chaos in Research
Chapter 9. Take Note
Chapter 10. Noodling as a Research Method
Conversation 4 with Joe Mackall: Places, People, and Paper
Chapter 11. Conversations
Conversation 5 with Robin Hemley: Interviewing

Section IV. Open Minds Invite Surprises
Chapter 12. Twists and Turns in the Research Story
Conversation 6 with Jill Christman: The Research Journey
Chapter 13. The Research Road Map
Chapter 14. Finding Your Way
Chapter 15. Writing the Story’s Journey
Chapter 16. Revision: Seeing Again

Appendix A. Experiments in this Book: Short
Appendix B. Experiments in this Book: Long
Appendix C. Experiments in this Book: Take-Home
Appendix D. Recommended Reading
Appendix E. Source Citations Using MLA Style