Welcome
Bale is a collaborative, living annotated bibliography and a collective gathering of resources in narrative and storywork. This project is open-access, and we encourage a wide range of users from students to scholars to folks simply interested in these topics. Please use the search options on your right or the Read and Respond link in the main menu to see what our community is developing.
You are invited to join as a contributor, respondent, or category facilitator. Through these roles, you can create annotations, add to discourse around them, and help organize them into useful groups and networks. These efforts will result in an expansive map of narrative and storywork resources. In support of WAC’s mission to provide barrier-free access to scholarly work, Bale strives to “encourage greater representation across cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints” and “foster transparency and openness throughout the publishing cycle” by facilitating broad participation in the organizing and knowledge-building of the project (see the WAC Clearinghouse Statement on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice).
Bale draws from the innovative digital work showcased by digital spaces and publications such as the Clearinghouse's CompPile database. As it continues to grow, Bale endeavors to map potentially thousands of resources relevant to the use of story, storytelling, and narrative in the breadth of academic work. See our About pages to learn more.
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Featured Category
Resources and scholarship by Indigenous authors written for sharing broadly with writers, teachers, and researchers interested in learning more and perhaps applying these methods in their own activities. Sources found here can be used by people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but always must be considered deeply, with respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability.
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Most Recently Updated Category
This category includes texts interested and invested in rhetorical and narrative practices, methodologies, and theories that live in relation to cultures, communities, and spaces constructed as and/or identified with Appalachia.
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Featured Facilitator
April Conway
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After growing up in Tucson, I eventually landed in the Midwest where I earned a PhD in English with a Rhetoric and Writing specialization. I now teach graduate and undergraduate students through the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan.
An Invitation to Contribute and Share
We welcome you to read our brief outline of roles, to learn more about how to begin contributing to Bale, and to share our invitation and calls for participation with anyone you think may be interested.
- Facilitators will work alongside the Bale editorial team to develop the overarching structure of the collection. Facilitators will monitor the collection, propose categories and sub-categories, and use their positionality and focus to shape a broad and deep representation of storytelling and storytellers.
- Contributors are invited to create entries based on the storytelling sources they treasure, sharing summaries of their chosen text along with reflective details that ground their annotation in their positionality, how they arrived at these texts, who they are as they explore these texts, and the ways these sources have circulated and moved.
- Community Respondents are invited to regularly monitor the collection and provide additions of positionality, arrival to, and personal relationships with these texts through our comments tool. We particularly hope that this category allows for contributions from marginalized or underrepresented members of the field (or outside of the field) whose capacity to contribute to works such as these is often restricted based on power structures at institutions. Community Respondents ensure this collection remains ever-changing, expanding, and growing by providing a space for all voices at any capacity to be heard.
The project is grounded in anti-racist practices and extends the breadth of writing studies scholarship in innovative ways. Learn more about how to contribute to Bale, and read our calls for participation.
Gratitude and Acknowledgments
Bale originated as a community-centric project and, true to that intent, its design and development have been a collaborative effort. The editorial team wants to particularly thank the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition for offering the pod program that brought us together in September 2021. Mudiwa Pettus was instrumental in facilitating that program, and particularly in the depths of the pandemic, it served as a wonderful source of community. At the WAC Clearinghouse, Mike Palmquist has been an exceptional guide in making this project a reality. Thank you, Mike, for your expert coding skills, for your generous willingness to make our vision a reality, and for your overall support and enthusiasm.
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