Robert Root

2013:

Bob Root will read from his nonfiction at a public reading on Tuesday, August 6, at the Ashland University MFA Summer Residency. The event takes place in Schar Hall on the Ashland University campus at 7 PM. Joe Mackall and Mark Irwin will also be reading.

Bob presented a workshop with Tom Montgomery-Fate on "Knowing Where You Are, Knowing Where You've Been: Writing In and About Place" at the second River Teeth Nonfiction Conference at Ashland University May 17-19, 2013.

Bob taught an online course for the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis titled "Knowing Where You Are: Writing Nature, Writing Place." The course ran February 4 through March 31, 2013. Bob's guest essay, "Having a Sense of Place," appeared on the Writer's Block blog at writersblock.loft.org in January.

Bob published Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves in both print and e-book editions. The book collects the best of the "Thinking Out Loud" radio scripts he broadcast from 1980 to 1987 on public radio in Michigan.

"The Long and Winding Road: A Memoirist's Journey" is the title of a guest essay Bob wrote for Michael Steinberg's blog at www.mjsteinberg.net/​blog.htm. It describes the process of writing Bob's memoir, Happenstance.

Happenstance, Bob Root's memoir, will be published in Fall 2013 by the University of Iowa Press as part of the Sightline Series in Literary Nonfiction.

Bob Root (Robert L. Root Jr.) believes he has been a writer since he was around eight years old, when he came home with a friend from a showing of Superman and the Mole Men, pried open the lock on his mother’s typewriter, and created a series of very short adventures about Tiger Boy. Since then, his life and career have centered on his writing, his study of the way other writers compose, and his teaching of writers and writing teachers. His bachelor’s degree from State University College, Geneseo, New York, was in English education and theater and his graduate degrees from the University of Iowa were in English literature, but he also did post-graduate work in composition and rhetoric before beginning twenty-eight years of teaching at Central Michigan University. There he taught courses in composition and rhetoric, nonfiction, editing, English education, literature, and media. He retired from full time teaching in 2004 to devote more time to writing creative nonfiction and to writing about it.

A frequent presenter on creative nonfiction and composition at national, international, and regional conferences, his scholarship and teaching led to many articles and books. They include: a book for writers, Wordsmithery, which went through two editions; a book for teachers of writing (co-edited with Michael Steinberg), Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching; and an anthology of creative nonfiction (also co-edited with Michael Steinberg) The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/​on Creative Nonfiction, now in its sixth edition. His essay “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment,” originally published in The Fourth Genre, has been used often in creative writing courses across the country. He has also published three books examining how nonfiction writers do what they do, Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing, E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist, and The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading & Writing Creative Nonfiction.

His creative nonfiction includes essays of place published in literary journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Colorado Review, Rivendell, Ecotone, The Concord Saunterer, and divide; “Knowing Where You’ve Been,” in Ascent, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2004; "Postscript to a Postscript to 'The Ring of Time'" in The Pinch was a Notable Essay in 2010 as well as a Pushcart Nominee, and "Time and Tide" in Ascent was a Notable Essay in 2011. As an essayist he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Isle Royale National Park; his anthology co-edited with Jill Burkland, The Island Within Us: Isle Royale Artists-in-Residence 1991-1998, won the 2001 Excellence in Media Award from the National Parks Service. He edited and contributed to Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place, an anthology of essays and writers’ commentaries on their composing published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. His first full-length work of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale, was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2004 by the Library of Michigan. His second book-length work of creative nonfiction, Following Isabella , chronicles his attempt to learn how to live in Colorado by tracing the trail of nineteenth-century travel writer Isabella Bird around the Front Range. He has also published collection of his essays, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place, a collection of his essays for radio,Limited Sight Distance: Essay for Airwaves, and an edition of columns by his grandmother, Betsy Root, titled How to Develop Your Personality. His most recent book is a family memoir, Happenstance.

From 1999 through 2013 Bob Root was a contributing editor for Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, one of the first literary journals devoted exclusively to literary nonfiction. He continues to talk about creative nonfiction at creative writing and English education conferences and has been a visiting writer and speaker in writing programs at colleges and universities around the country. His future writing projects tentatively--very tentatively--include Walking Home Ground, a book of place set in Wisconsin andThe Arc of the Escarpment, about the Niagara Escarpment.

Bob is presently a faculty member in creative nonfiction in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ashland University in Ohio and a nonfiction teacher at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin.