About

Hi, I’m Glenn Willmott, the creator of this Wonder Workshop website, and a Professor at Queen’s University, Canada.  I hope you enjoy something you find on this site, and consider contributing to its collection.  I created this site after writing a book about the nature, importance, and ambivalence of wonder as fabrications in literature and art, Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment.  One of the things I felt I learned while studying wonder is that to cultivate wonder, it must be openly shared as a normal social and educational activity, rather than abandoned to its own devices, as if it were a curiously profound and therapeutic, but not really articulate or social experience.  I believe that really exploring language takes one wandering along a borderline between mystery, beauty, fear, life and death, between self and other; and so too, in a different and perhaps more imposing way, does graphic narrative, whose wild artifices and plastic creatures are so endlessly capable of quiet provocation.  I’m intrigued by the promise and the difficulty of what cultivating wonder in teaching might mean.

Mitchell Crouse brought his digital skills and creativity to making this website happen.  He is a doctoral student in the English program at Queen’s University, Canada.  To read more about his research and other interests – especially music – feel free to visit his website.

Images on this site are courtesy of the Glenn Willmott (for drawings) and WikiCommons and Samuel Zeller on UnSplash (for photos of art and cabinetry respectively).