![\"<p>Lynn](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/English-prof_memoir_lg.jpg\" "\\"Lynn")
<\/a>As a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English and the University\u2019s first Aetna Chair of Writing, Lynn Z. Bloom has been a pioneer in the field of composition studies for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s no surprise that Bloom\u2019s first autobiographical work \u2013 The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays \u2013 Coming of Age as a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker<\/em>, (University of South Carolina Press, 2008) \u2013 celebrates her iconoclastic style.<\/p>\n Bloom\u2019s memoir is a compilation of 15 colorful essays \u2013 some 18 years in the making \u2013 that describe her trials as a chronic nonconformist and female scholar; her Christian parents\u2019 vehement opposition to her marrying a man of Jewish descent; and her life as a teacher, wife, mother, and grandmother.<\/p>\n Her warm personal tales are laced with humorous, insightful, and often inspirational accounts of the risks and rewards she encountered as an artist living and writing on the edge.<\/p>\n Whether writing about picking blueberries in New England; coping with FBI wiretaps while authoring the first biography of famed pediatrician and peace activist Dr. Benjamin Spock; or her experience as an adjunct professor working with a desk next to a cat litter box, Bloom doesn\u2019t miss an opportunity to enlighten, instruct, and entertain.<\/p>\n A master essayist known for her lively and provocative writing style, Bloom believes the traditional structures surrounding academic expression \u2013 her seven deadly virtues \u2013 stifle personal creativity and subvert the mission of education.<\/p>\n She pleads with her students and readers to avoid the traps inherent in the \u201cdeadly virtues\u201d of duty, rationality, conformity, efficiency, order, economy, and punctuality so often affiliated with academic prose.<\/p>\n \u201cI am not out to supplant virtue with vice, though that is always tempting,\u201d Bloom writes in the book\u2019s introduction, \u201cbut to propose, in essay after essay, an alternative set of lively virtues to replace the deadly.<\/p>\n \u201cDuty and helpfulness have their place, though I have busted up more than one romance and quit more than one job over issues of servility, sexism, and second-class citizenship,\u201d Bloom continues in the book\u2019s opening lines. \u201cI would augment these with anger<\/em> and defiance<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Her other \u201calternate\u201d virtues are honesty, risk-taking, independence of mind and spirit, originality, rigor, energy, and having fun.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that I would like people to take away from the book is to feel that they can take risks,\u201d Bloom says. \u201cIn my mind, I am always taking risks. I don\u2019t think you ever grow intellectually if you don\u2019t take risks. \u2026 If I had done what my professors had told me to do, I wouldn\u2019t have had a very good time. I might have gotten a job, but it wouldn\u2019t have been original and I wouldn\u2019t have been happy.\u201d<\/p>\n Taking risks does not mean being irresponsible, however, Bloom says. She is both serious and disciplined about her work.<\/p>\n One of her specialties is creative nonfiction \u2013 an art that requires great skill in developing the traditional narrative writing styles of plot, dialogue, character development, and tension within the confines of hard and true fact, she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned to write from Dr. Seuss, which means writing ought to be fun,\u201d Bloom says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I learned from Dr. (William) Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, which means writing ought to be clear.<\/p>\n \u201cI also learned from Dr. Spock,\u201d she adds. \u201cHis point was that if you don\u2019t write clearly, someone could die. If you don\u2019t write clearly, your idea could die; you could cause some horrendous misunderstanding.\u201d<\/p>\n Once challenged for her innovative essay style, Bloom says she is now being called upon to write personal essays for academic journals looking to diversify.<\/p>\n \u201cI find that heartening, because it validates a lot of what I\u2019ve been trying to do with routine academic submissions for the past 20 years,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The author of 28 books and more than 150 articles, Bloom is preparing to release four more publications in the coming year. One of them, The Essay Canon, is about the evolutionary history of the essay, its rise and fall and recent resurrection as a distinguished literary art form. She has been working on it for 14 years. She is also working on a book about the rhetoric of food writing.<\/p>\n Lynn Bloom is married to Martin Bloom, professor emeritus of social work. They have two sons, Bard and Laird, and three grandchildren.<\/p>\n Bloom\u2019s other works include: Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical<\/em>, Composition Studies as a Creative Art<\/em>, and Writers without Borders<\/em>. Her essay \u201c(Im) Patient\u201d was named a Notable American Essay of 2005 in Best American Essays<\/em> (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English and the University\u2019s first Aetna Chair of Writing, Lynn Z. Bloom has been a pioneer in the field of composition studies for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[44],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 20:04:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36603,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions\/36603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}