Champlain College Publishing Initiative ReadyTo Go Online with First Two Titles This Fall

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Tim Brookes

• Champlain College campus photo. (photo by Stephen Mease)

BURLINGTON, VT (08/26/2009)(readMedia)-- Champlain College students in two classes in the Professional Writing program will do something completely new when classes begin Monday, Aug. 31. They'll go online to buy course books that were written and published, in large part, by people they may see around campus.

The two course books in question are The Best Student Creative Non-Fiction, which will be a required text in the Creative Non-Fiction course, and the Short, Sweet Guide to Dialogue, which will be the focus of a three-week segment of the Introduction to the Writing Profession course.

The creative non-fiction anthology consists of outstanding work culled mainly from courses taught in previous years at Champlain College and other institutions. (The contributors will each receive an equal share of the author royalties.) The dialogue guide was co-authored by Professional Writing senior Natalia Yaacob and the program's director, Tim Brookes. Both books were designed by Champlain Graphic Design major Kyle Simpkins. The program's website is www.champlaincollegepublishing.com

The books are the prototypes for a publishing initiative that will include students, working under professional supervision, in every aspect of the process: writing, editing, copy-editing, layout, design, illustration, publicity and promotion, marketing, web design and accounting. But it's not only the process that is revolutionary: the books, too, are radical in design and approach.

On Demand Publishing

"We're using print-on-demand technology that means we can afford very small print runs," explained Brookes, who is editor-in-chief of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative. "This means we can produce books for very specific classes, because unlike the big textbook publishers we don't need to sell tens of thousands of copies to survive. We can also take risks they can't afford-in fact, it's our job to take risks.

One example of the revolutionary approaches CCPI is trying, Brookes explained, is publishing books in which students essentially teach other students, as in the anthology series of outstanding student writing, of which Best Student Creative Non-Fiction is the first example.

"Most anthologies are both dull and intimidating," Brookes said. "They're full of big-name dead people."

Famous professional writers, Brookes continued, seem out of reach, almost unreal to students, who therefore make all kinds of fantasy assumptions about writing-namely, that famous writers can write effortlessly while others can never write at all, that some people are just deep while others will never be anything but shallow, that there is an unbridgeable gap between the published and the unpublished, and so on.

"Students who are taught to worship great literature think 'I could never do this'," Brookes said. "Students reading this book think 'with a bit of work and a good idea, I could do this,' which is exactly what we want them to think."

To help strengthen this connection, each story in the anthology is prefaced by an introduction by the student who wrote, explaining how the ideas came about, how they were shaped, what feedback the writer received and what revisions were made. "It's not a textbook," Brookes said. "It's a conversation across a table."

Print-on-demand technology also means the book can be changed or updated quickly and easily. When a new faculty member, Eliot Sloan, was hired to teach the Creative Non-Fiction course she decided to add two memoirs written by former students of hers from an institution in California. "In fact, we can customize the book to suit the teaching needs and approaches of every instructor who wants to use it," Brookes said.

Publishing Changing Demands

The second new book, the Short Sweet Guide to Dialogue, is revolutionary in a different way. "Most writing textbooks give two unfortunate messages to students," Brookes explained. "One, that this is remedial work you should have learned in fifth grade, and two that you're going to be suffering through this all semester."

Instead, the Short, Sweet Guide series will focus on a specific writing skill that specific students need. Instead of covering a whole semester's work, it will drive a short two- or three-week segment of a course that may not be a writing course at all, but in which students nevertheless need to develop certain specific writing skills.

"A great example is business writing," Brookes said. "There certainly are business writing courses and textbooks, but they tend to be for first-year students and they don't address more sophisticated skills the students need in junior and senior classes, such as the ability to study three different business practices, analyze them and come up with a recommendation.

"At the moment, nobody is actually teaching those writing skills. The instructor may not feel qualified to teach writing, and there's a sense that by then the students should just have picked up those skills by themselves. But that's not happening.

"The Short, Sweet Guides will be designed to go after a very specific set of writing skills that students in a range of disciplines need. They'll be small, cheap, and they'll address kinds of writing that student recognize they need to learn."

The Short, Sweet Guide to Dialogue addresses a specific skill-writing powerful, credible dialogue-that is central to fiction, journalism, creative non-fiction, playwriting and many other forms, but is rarely taught as a skill in itself. Brookes plans to use it in his first-year course so students will take that skill into the more advanced classes they'll take in the following years.

And once again, most of the examples in the book were captured by students.

"Print-on-demand publishing opens your eyes to a hundred things you always wanted to do in the classroom but couldn't because you could never find the right book," Brookes said. "Now it's our job to go out, find those missing classroom experiences, and make the right books for them."

Champlain College, founded in 1878, is a private baccalaureate institution in Burlington, Vermont. It was named the Top "Up-and-Coming School" in the north and ranked in the top tier of Best Baccalaureate Colleges in the North by U.S. News & World Report in the 2010 edition of "America's Best Colleges. To learn more about Champlain College, visit www.champlain.edu.

Photos available of TIm Brookes and Champlain College campus.