I was involved with the student literary magazine Inscape for over twenty years, and was frequently asked what the name meant, since people couldn't find it in their dictionaries.  I have a very clear and simple definition of my own, which I would usually offer, though it is not quite what Gerard Manley Hopkins, who may have coined the word, had in mind, or what you are likely to find in those dictionaries that do happen to have a definition, or what our own editors over the years have taken it to mean.  It comes, rather, out of my own experience, which I reaffirm every time I see that word on the cover of one of those magazines.  It means the opposite of "escape."  To "escape" you get out, to "inscape" you go in.
        For years, after Washburn dropped the curriculum I had spent ten years in graduate school learning how to teach, leaving little more than wall-to-wall freshman composition, I told Dr. Stein, the chairman of the English department, that I was working on my escape plan.  And my great discovery in the summer of 1981, when I attended a NEH seminar on Japanese literature at the University of California at Berkeley was that I had escaped--that I was living there, not here, in Japanese literature, not in freshman composition.  But I hadn't escaped; I had inscaped.  I was reading that literature in my office at Washburn.  I had gone in to find the values that were no longer there outside.  I couldn't have found a job teaching the great books anywhere in the country (given the state of the market and my age, couldn't have found a job at all) anywhere else.  I couldn't have escaped.
        And another aspect of my inscape was the work with Headwaters, the group of creative writers Bob Woodley had formed, and Inscape, the magazine they had begun to edit in his memory, and, finally, the Bob Woodley Memorial Press, which allowed me to give some expression to sublimated energies thwarted in any expression they had once had.  My own writing was another.  I have published about half of the sonnets I have published anywhere in Inscape over the years, so I told those who asked that that was the reason for the existence of Inscape, to give some sense of expression to that inner impulse--but told them not to expect too much, that I could count on my two hands the times anyone had remarked that they have read one of those sonnets (and then almost always it is someone who had something published in the same issue), so publishing there does not mean that you are likely to suddenly explode on the literary scene.  The magazine was, for me, a visual projection of the experience of inscape.  None of these activities get much external support in this environment, so the satisfaction still had to be internal, which it always has been for me.
        The word "inscape" is unusual, but I think the activity is very common.  It's what you have to do if you are imprisoned, or trapped some place you can't escape from--you have to inscape, if you are going to preserve your sanity.  I think that inmates in many kinds of institutions, not just the birdman of Alcatraz, or war prisoners held in Vietnam, but a lot of people who are measuring out their lives with coffee spoons--or something comparable to freshman themes--go in to get away.  In my experience, that's the best use of both reading and writing.  And I encourage it.  Read a Japanese novel, then write a sonnet.  Write something for Inscape, even if it doesn't get published there--for the good of your own soul, to "inscape" from whatever you feel it is important to get away from.