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I started reading “Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing” on an unusually warm day in April, peacefully sitting outside on my blanket under a tree. Now covered in tree sap, the book sticks to my desk, requiring a firm but gentle nudge to remove it. The sap also obscures the back of the book from view, offering only a partial summary to the curious. Inspired by all of this, in this review I allow myself to be guided by sap and partial readings. My aim is to make you sufficiently curious enough to pick up a copy and enjoy Teaching Queer as I have.

We begin by situating this work and ourselves in graduate writing. Although our experiences as burgeoning researchers are not a focus of this article, we are nonetheless present in the background, not unlike a palimpsest. We trace one aspect of this palimpsest—the use of playful and creative methods to generate ideas for this paper—before then suggesting three key concepts we consider foundational to discussions about play and graduate writing development. These are play, playspace, and mindsets. Building on these concepts, we offer some concluding remarks about the ambivalence some learners may have—which we refer to as play ambivalence—and propose that this ambivalence is partly related to the three concepts underscored in this article. We suggest that future research in play and graduate writing development could better consider this play ambivalence.

We begin by introducing the special section of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie on play, visual strategies and innovative approaches to graduate student writing development. Most exciting for us to see as editors of this special section is how many authors from various locales are drawing on creative methods, signalling to us that in some ways this is a burgeoning area. We have papers from Germany, the U.K., Thailand, and at least three provinces in Canada. We have some poetry, examples of collages, photos of cats, shapes, and Lego™. We include the abstracts for each of the papers.

In an era of increasing pressure to publish and complete doctoral degrees as quickly as possible, all while managing heavy administrative workloads, it likely comes as no surprise that do-it-yourself (DIY) doctoral supervision tools are becoming increasingly prolific (Kamler & Thomson, 2008). Perhaps these materials are a response to a growing friction between time needed and time available for doctoral supervision, as well as between the crucial place writing occupies in a doctoral researcher’s life and the often tacit nature of apprenticing to become an academic. As both a doctoral student and a writing coach that works with other doctoral students, I am keenly interested in resources that can support me in both roles. Recently I picked up two texts to aid me with navigating my first attempts at publishing an article and with facilitating a doctoral writing workshop: Thomson and Kamler (2016), Detox your writing, and Paltridge and Starfield’s (2016), Getting published in academic journals. Both texts are geared toward a doctoral audience, though master’s level students and supervisors may equally appreciate the texts for their practical strategies. The texts are complementary as well. Where Thomson and Kamler focus mostly on the journey toward producing a dissertation, Paltridge and Starfield pick up from there to discuss how and why to consider publishing articles from the dissertation.