Editors' Introduction

Often in the autumn issue, we have used this space to reflect upon the possibilities that each new school year brings. We speak of beginnings (since every teacher knows that years begin in September, not January), of the excitement and promise signified by each new group of students. Yet fall is a season perhaps more often associated with the melancholy waning of the year—nature's lovely yet inevitable decline into winter's desolation. Living now as we both do in Michigan, we have come to understand the severity of the snowy months to come, but like the poet Linda Pastan (1998), we often wish we could ignore this narrative of loss:

How many autumns I've . . . tried to pretend the falling temperatures, the emptying trees were not a synopsis: so many losses behind me, so many still ahead. The world is diminished leaf by single leaf, person by person and with excruciating slowness.

This past year, we too have been diminished by the deaths of three of our editorial board members: Kitty Locker, Wayne Booth, and Jim Slevin.

When we began Pedagogy, we were extraordinarily fortunate to have the early and enthusiastic support of many leading scholars, and the three board members we remember here were certainly prominent among that group. We are profoundly thankful that these three colleagues, each with such remarkably productive and noteworthy careers, demonstrated such generosity. Not only did they do the work of editorial board members—accepting manuscripts to review, encouraging colleagues and students to submit articles, promoting the journal—but they also modeled the kind of teacherly ethos that Pedagogy signifies. The fact that their former students are also board members, associate editors, and contributors to the journal should tell us something of their impact as teachers and scholars.

Tributes like these can never really convey sufficiently what we mean or how we feel. Despite working with language in the classroom and in our scholarship every day (or maybe because of that), we all recognize the inadequacy of words and can feel platitudes beginning to make their unwelcome appearance. We say "thank you," but it seldom feels like enough. Perhaps that's because gratitude is best lived. We hope that in this small corner of English studies, we might continue to work to produce a field worthy of Kitty, Wayne, and Jim.