Run-up to Theories of Written Communication 📆

/ Derek Mueller
A black and white photograph of a row of old desks topped with typewriters in a desert.
Photo [I’m retitling “Bloom Spaces”] by Matt Artz on Unsplash

A full month has blinked by in this run-up to the start of classes on August 26. That’s the day of our first meeting in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. Recent weeks at the end of Rosemary Road included welcoming four new pullets, building a new coop and run, welcoming a rooster, hosting A’s friend from Minnesota, hosting Is. and then driving her to Michigan for her birthday, completing the final external promotion review letter of the season, and keeping aging grandpa’s pace with the rest of it all. This week I picked back up with class preparations, and I am making headway on the online hub for the class and the documents that will live there: syllabus, schedule, project descriptions, and bibliography. Here, for example, is the elaborated course description I settled on well enough to plug it into the landing page and syllabus:

Our seminar-styled study of theories of written communication this semester will begin with 1) considerations of what theory (θεωρέω, theóreó, 🔭) is and what it does, 2) how/why to engage with the theorizing sojourns and sightings of others, and 3) how this “bloom space” called theory has made us feel, especially as it hands a bouquet of possibilities to writing and rhetoric. Together we will read articles and chapters, book intros, and dissertation intros grouped with selected theoretical antecedents, thereby listening carefully for how theory circulates. Themes among these small sets include -isms and -graphies, root metaphors, academic writing and its alternatives, intellectual genealogies, expertise, rationalism, literacy development, and how we write. Readings will include selections by Gloria Anzaldúa, Mikhail Bakhtin, Deborah Brandt, Michel de Certeau, Manuel DeLanda, Yrjö Engeström, Harvey Graff, Joy Harjo, Cynthia Haynes, Julia Molinari, Beverly Moss, Stephen Pepper, Louise Phelps, Michael Polanyi, Malea Powell, Paul Prior & Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, Jacqueline Royster, Kathleen Stewart, Eve Tuck & C. Ree, and more. Class activities will include weekly writing, discussion, a substantive project (Theory Deck/Microanthology), a presentation, and a course reflection.

For five or six semesters I have focused weekly writing on delimited increments called Nineties, which are ninety word flash responses later tuned stylistically because a ninety must have ninety words (allowing ±5) or a multiple of ninety. Like with The Hundreds, the incrementalism tends to elicit intensities, touched nerves, goose bumps, books thrown across the room, PDFs dragged to Trash, the felt weight of worlding now. So, 185 words is okay, as is 87 words. But 200 words is a bust. Although it may seem at first wrapped too snugly in a quantitative obsessiveness, it abides the principle of liberation by constraint, providing one less thing to think about, encouraging stylistic precision, and implicitly inventing an economy of intentional scope (favoring neither reductionism or expansionism by default). I continue to think there is value in a short planning pitch around Week Four or Five, and a share-out pitch nearer to the end of the semester, but then again, the schedule is busting at the seams and the readings and step-back readings will have to be cut back if there are two pitches. The larger project is also taking shape, though I have not written a prompt yet. I foresee it living up to the title Theory Deck/Microanthology, and assembling through defined sections: cover, frontmatter/intro, three articles, chapters, or excerpts, each with two theoretical antecedents (so six nine pieces total), and a glossary of 6-8 elaborated keywords. Each section will have a suggested deadline, and then the eleven seminar participants will alert me to what sort of feedback they would like to receive: conference, audio comments, written comments.

I am still sorting out the order of readings and project pieces, and I am fairly sure I will have to scale back a bit (to say nothing of whether I have the willpower to stand at the scanner for hours getting this into accessible shape). I have already begun to understand that the book and dissertation intros will have to scale down from four of each to “choose one” from a set of four options, but even this might turn out to feeling denser than we’d like. Cake sponge needs air bubbles. And some class meetings will give us 30-40 minutes at the end for returning to the in-progress projects and for pace-keeping check-ins. Allowing for that possibility, here are the readings I am, for now, feeling good enough about and taking steps to assemble. Weekly placeholders are lightly and noncommittally noted, and second tier bullets are the corresponding step-backs:

  • Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013) (Week2)
  • Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) (excerpt) (Week3)
    Julia Molinari, What Makes Writing Academic (2022) (excerpt) (Week3)
  • Jacqueline Royster, “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” AltDis (Week4)
    • Deborah Brandt, Literacy as Involvement (1990), excerpt
    • Beverly Moss, “Creating a Community: Literacy Events in African-American Churches,” Literacy Across Communities (1994)
  • Malea Powell, “Listening to Ghosts: An Alternative to (Non)Argument,” AltDis (Week5)
    • Michel de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) (excerpt)
    • Joy Harjo, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” (1994)
  • Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) (Week6)
    • Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (excerpt)
    • Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (2007) (excerpt)
  • Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) (Week7)
    • Gerald Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001)
    • Manuel DeLanda, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998)
  • Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) (Week8)
    • Mikhail Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) (excerpt)
    • Yrjö Engeström. From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (2008)
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” Counterpoints, 1999, Vol. 90, How We Work (1999), pp. 241-261 (Week10)
  • Louise Phelps, “Rhythm and Pattern in a Composing Life.” Ed. Thomas Waldrep. Writers on Writing, Vol. 1. New York: Random House. 1985. 241-57. (Week10)
  • Book intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week11)
  • J. Logan Smilges’ Queer Silence (U Minnesota P, 2022)
    • Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. (excerpt)
    • Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, eds. Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (excerpt)
  • Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency (U Chicago P, 2023)
    • Fukushima, Annie Isabel. Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. (excerpt)
    • Vivian, Bradford. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (May 27, 2014): 204–19.
  • Jennifer LeMesurier, Inscrutable Eating (Ohio State UP, 2023)
    • Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. (excerpt)
    • Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 109–25.
  • Eric Detweiler, Responsible Pedagogy (Penn State UP, 2022)
    • Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent (Winter 1959): 45-56.
    • Ellison, Ralph. “Leadership from the Periphery.” In Who Speaks for the Negro? by Robert Penn Warren, 268–354. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
  • Dissertation intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week12)
  • Walwema, Josephine. Tactile Interfaces: Epistemic Techne in Information Design (2011, Clemson)
    • Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” The Idea of Design. Ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Print.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Print. (excerpt)
  • Sackey, Donnie. The Curious Case of the Asian Carp: Spatial Performances and the Making of an Invasive Species (2013, MSU)
    • Mol, Annemarie. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in J. Law and J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (74-89). Malden, MA: Blackwell and the Sociological Review.
    • Callon, Michael, and Law, John. (1982). On interests and their transformation: Enrollement and counter-enrolment. Social Studies of Science, 12(4), 615- 625.
  • Faris, Michael. Rhetoric, Social Media, and Privacy (2012, Penn State)
    • Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375. Print.
    • Wysocki, Anne, and Johndan Johnson Eilola. “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 349-368. Print.
  • Carr, Allison. Negative Space: Toward an Epistemology of Failure (2014, Cincinnati)
    • Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.
    • Stewart, Kathleen. (2010) ‘Worlding Refrains’ in M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 339-53.
Eleven books are piled on a desk. Titles correspond with readings in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication at Virginia Tech, Fall 2024.
Heap for scanning selections.

I glance it and see a heap of a list, with pairings or trios matched with ten of the fourteen weekly meetings. I’ve opted for no readings ahead of meeting one, the 26th. And I want to hold as a clearing Week Nine for project starts and for a round of dialogue focused on one well-begun component. Readings fall away at the end of the semester, too, allowing space in the two meetings after the late November break for short form presentations about the projects and for reflecting on what theories of written communication amounted to. My hope as I continue planning is that by the end and all throughout, ENGL6524 will feel like something we’ve been in, recalling that line I can’t stop thinking about from Kathleen Stewart’s “Worlding Refrains,” “Anything can feel like something you’re in, fully or partially, comfortably or aspirationally, for good or not for long” (340).

Theoroses 🍎

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments
Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash

In what will be the fourth new grad class prep for me in two years, in seven more Mondays, I will begin teaching ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. 6524 is one of four required core courses in VT’s rhetoric and writing PhD program. The course description, which I would carbon date back to the program’s launch in 2007, reads, “Studies in theories applied to written communication. May be repeated twice for credit for a total of 9 hours when the topic varies.” Two sentences. The first sounds quite a bit like tautology, or maybe even doublespeak because the repetition isn’t varied enough: theories of written communication is a class that promises studies in theories applied to written communication. Notable here is that this graduate program also features an MA-level (5xxx-numbered) class called “Composition Theory,” and by implied design, I guess this means that theories of written communication and composition theory are demarcated well enough that these are two classes but not one and the same. The second sentence from the course description suggests that the class could be repeated not once, but twice, for a total of nine graduate credits. Trouble is, the class is only offered once every other year, or one time in each two-year cycle of coursework. So it hardly seems possible to repeat it even once, much less twice.

As I’m prone to doing with most classes I teach, I have been mulling over possibilities for several weeks albeit in a low-key, backburner sort of way. I notified the bookstore on Tuesday that I will not be ordering any books for the class. Instead we will sift then trace theoretical antecedents from shorter units of scholarship: 1) published articles, 2) book introductions, and 3) dissertation introductions (or first chapters). In practice, several weeks (~9) of the semester will entail reading the article or chapter along with the theoretical referent and, as such, learning to alternate similar to the way theater-goers might, between actors and props, and a cyclorama, or backdrop. Finding and following theory’s antecedent traces should, if things go well, reward us with a repertoire for theory-finding and, in turn, for theorizing. The approach is similar to the one taken in Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past, a textbook that I happen to be familiar with not only because I taught with it a few times but also because a professor and mentor in my MA program at UMKC, Stephen Dilks, was the book’s co-author and co-editor. Cultural Conversations laid out a two-step archeology: a historical-archival text, a contemporary uptake, and then contextualizing pieces that drew connections and filled in gaps. Our upcoming fall semester is fifteen weeks long, but some of the weeks will focus on short-form presentations, or pitches, conferences, workshopping one another’s work, and so on. The class will include weekly writing and a larger project designed in the spirit of anthologics, or assembling and introducing an album of theoretical favorites, influential and inspirational beacons for scholarly offerings students one day hope to create, whether with their own dissertations, with articles or chapters, with teaching materials, with all of it, and so on etcetera.

I want to begin the class with some consideration, together, of our experiences with theory, especially if there are any adverse reactions to theory. I am thinking here both of fear and loathing. Under what conditions, if any, has theory been scary? Are there theories that you loathe? That elicit worry? Why? Like distasteful foods, how many times would you suggest trying a theory before disqualifying it, ruling it out, casting it aside, or dismissing it altogether? This opening segment, then, points to the title of this entry. With theoroses, or something like theory’s neuroses, we might begin to parse why and to what extent theory designated as such may be offputting, difficult, time-consuming, perhaps even abruptive, steep, hazardous-seeming, or even upsetting, dare say violent. Part of this line of inquiry is meant to open up a greater awareness of our dispositions toward (or against) theory and what has formed that disposition. And part of this line of inquiry is meant to reset theory with a light-admitting aperture of possibility. If there is a third part to this line of inquiry, it rests in a few questions I don’t know the answers to yet: Must theories be named to be useful? Must theory be communicable to be useful? Can scholarship proceed with unnamed theories, and might there be any advantages in (or rationale for) shedding antecedents? Can scholarship in rhetoric and writing be theoryless?

Paired with the theoroses check-in, I want us to read Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” The glossary is a list of keywords, and these keywords are followed by vignettes, images, and microhistories/microanalyses. The set is referential, naming other texts, but it is also personal, heeding gravity in the co-authors’ standpoints, which intersect in their collaboration but also outwardly to their respective and sometimes overlapping ways of being, knowing, and acting. So I am imagining this as an imitable text; each project (theory microanthology) will include a custom glossary of haunting and an introduction to the contents, including some engagement with the question-led threads above: fear? loathing? named? unnamed? possibilities opened? foreclosed?

Some of what I’m sorting out includes, Where to start with theory? And, How well-formed a grounding case, or object of analysis, will serve us well in coming to terms with any theory? There is of course the French critical deck with cards featuring major figures from the 1960s and 1970s. There is, alternatively, a cluster of more contemporary theorists who have given language to deleterious and destructive -isms, late Capitalism, the Anthropocene, climate collapse, globalization, and colonization and its aftermath. And, too, there are earlier models, like Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence , which looks into root metaphors for formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, notably nodding toward but then leaving out animism and mysticism. In yet another deck, we could have theories that direct us to consider phenomena differently still, such as with CRT, standpoint theory, intersectionality, and misogynoir, though this might also include Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966). Whichever thread I begin to work with, it pulls the others, and eventually what surfaces returns to the other part of the course title, written communication.

I would like our step-back antecendent throughlines to follow a narrowed few specific choices. Early maybes are from Alt Dis, such as Royster’s “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” stepped back to Deborah Brandt’s Literacy as Involvements (1990) or Beverly Moss’s Literacy Across Communities (1994), or Malea Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts,” stepped back to de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) or Harjo’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994). Another possibility is Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) stepped back to Polanyi or to Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). Another is Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) stepped back to Worsham, “Writing Against Writing” (1991), Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001), or De Landa, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998). Another is Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) stepped back to Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) or Engeström for a check-in on CHAT. And for the book introduction step-backs, I am thinking in particular of the winner, runners-up, and perhaps a few other nominees for the RSA Book Award this year: Hsu’s Constellating Home (2022), Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (2023), Smilges’ Queer Silence (2022), LeMesurier’s Inscrutable Eating (2023), Detweiler’s Responsible Pedagogy (2022). And this leaves as yet-to-be gathered a small set of dissertations whose introductions and/or first chapters we’ll read similarly.

I’ll pause here, this entry vining long enough and several other to-dos lingering. But I hope to return to this, to say more about the short-form weekly writing, the intervals of pitches and workshopping, the build-ups to the larger project, which I hope will find synchrony with lead-ins to our exams process at VT. I would also like to work back to first principles, to say a bit about what I understand theory to be and do in the context of research, scholarship, teaching, and writing, both within and beyond the academy, and also to revisit the commonplace in rhetoric and composition that theorein requires practice, or application, that theory without practice is baseless, harmful, chaotic-evil, etc.

Beneath the Pines and Beyond 🐓

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments
Figure 1. The Wonder Hollow mixed flock when last I took a photo of them crossing Rosemary Road on Tuesday afternoon, June 25, Fluffy Foot (top), Bitumen (second from top), Cinnabon (lower right), Tiny Honey (lower left), and Lightfoot (bottom center).

Abstractly, hypothetically, and intuitively, we always understood that free-ranging the Wonder Hollow Six came with risks. On the last day of January, when that no account Cooper’s Hawk clamped down on Big Sweetie, the lesson sharply pierced this otherwise peaceful and out-of-the-way hollow on the eastern edge of Montgomery County, Va. We bumbled along, head and heart making way and making sense: of course during the lesser foliated times of year aerial predators have a direct line of sight and the hens become more vulnerable thereby. Additional predator-proofing followed, CDs perpendicular to the sky scattered around the embankments and mounted wobblingly on sticks to throw unusual light patterns as they shift in the breeze, glowy and spectral in the daylight, a pair of poured mold plastic owl statues, one with a head that will spin the full 360 degrees, which is disturbing enough unto itself that any curious hawk would have to think, nah, I’ve seen The Exorcist and I’m moving along. With Big Sweetie’s death, the six were five and the five were chickening along contentedly. They’d been free-ranging most days this spring and summer, once the landscape unfurled again its leafy canopy.

Last Friday, I was home alone as A. was abroad on a trip with her dad. I mowed for 2.5 hours, starting around 11 a.m. as I turned loose the five hens. After mowing I tinkered through the day with ordinary paces: a few things in the kitchen like batching pickled red onions, walking Feta before writing group, writing for a late afternoon hour, and then returning to the yard to make rounds, check on the chickens, begin some of the evening rituals. I took Feta out again, and I remember looking up and seeing what I thought were three of the chickens near the back shed. Ninety-nine days out of 100, this glancing-casual sort of check-in suffices. It’s no chicken footprint biometric tracking, but when I could see three of them, usually the others were close-by, safe, accounted for. Back inside I went ahead with kibbling Z. and F. scoops of their evening foods before I stepped outside again with the meal worms, shaking the orange plastic cup and calling to the chickens to come. Lightfoot and Tiny Honey came running and followed me as I made 2-3 rounds on the terraces, near the pond and creek, up the two-track easement, down again. I also waited for 1-2 minute pauses in each place, listening for their scratching, but the world was quiet. Something felt off. Something was off.

I figured I may as well head inside again and sort out my own dinner situation, which I did–a light, quick-cut salad, carrying it back out again to see whether the stray chickens had showed up. By this time it was 6:30 p.m., quite a bit later than is common for them to stay out foraging or dust bathing. The flock is a clockwork; it doesn’t mess around with temporal patterns, especially when that pattern is the setting sun. I walked another loop while eating and calling to them, then decided to switch clothes, long sleeves and pants, get the machete and hand clippers in case I needed to brush access to anything deep in the underbrush, and venture in. I can’t really say how I picked the location I did. A feeling, a locative hunch. All of the woods around us are comparably dense, but beneath the pines behind the Moon House is a favorite place the chickens frequented. And even if it is extra thick with thorny vining overgrowth, I guessed it was where they’d set up through the midday heat.

Within ten minutes, I found a starburst of Cinnabon’s feathers first on a plane extending pretty much from the top terrace back along the steep slope. By now it was almost 7 p.m., and I was visited by both a heavy, heavy weight and a kind of mania in that I knew something bad had happened–a predator attack–and I knew daylight was growing short on this side of the embankment. I looked hard at the ground and found Cinnabon’s body, half buried under a few leaves and sticks, intact, lifeless. It seems like I felt both despair in that moment and a faint, fading hope; had Fluffy Foot and Bitumen witnessed the melee and escaped, perhaps running up the hill to the abandoned cabin on the neighbors’ land? I carried Cinnabon’s body to the forest’s edge and went back again. This time I saw a scuffle of brighter yellow feathers, undoubtedly Fluffy Foot’s. They were hard to access, in a clearing but on the other side of thick vines and thorny bramble. I canvassed in the other direction, and there I found a scattering of dark feathers. Bitumen’s. I picked up a few of the feathers, as I had done with Cinnabon’s, and pushed them into my pocket, kept looking, inch by inch going over the rutted and rotting forest floor. A few steps downslope, I spotted Bitumen’s feet tucked under a couple of sticks, and when I pulled back the makeshift covering, like Cinnabon, her body was there on the ground, intact but lifeless. The predator had half-assed buried both birds after killing them. I carried Bitumen’s body to the edge of the woods and placed it next to Cinnabon. Went to the house to get the headlamp. Went to the back shed to get the live trap. Went to the house again to get the trail cam. Went to the coop to make sure Lightfoot and Tiny Honey were secure. Went to the front shed to get a leaf bag for wrapping the dead birds’ bodies. I knew I would have to figure out how to keep them on ice until Monday for a proper pyre and farewell once A. returned from her trip.

I went into the woods again with hopes of locating Fluffy Foot. She was the biggest of the flock, head hen, and so it made it hard to imagine that any aerial predator could have made off with her body. I puzzled through all of the scenarios with possible ground predators. No stray house cat could have pulled this off. Domestic dogs, maybe. Fox, maybe. Raccoon, maybe. I’d never fathomed that any predator would have been able to kill three birds while they were free-ranging 20-30 feet behind the house. I continued to slash at bramble and brush a path, step by step checking for feathers or other traces. It grew darker, and I had to accept that I would not find Fluffy that night.

Not that I ever really slept all that soundly, but I was awake again by 5:45 a.m., and after watering the garden and flower beds, I went for the trail cam and live trap. A raccoon had taken the bait. It was the only critter on the trail cam that night, evidently having returned for the bodies of Cinnabon and Bitumen. I went into the woods again just before 9 a.m., and this time I was led to Fluffy’s remains by the audible buzz of insects. She’d been beheaded, a not uncommon signature in raccoon assaults on chickens, but much of her body was recoverable, and as I’d done with her flock sisters, I carried her body to the edge of the woods, taking care to fold it into a bag later, to place it on ice, and to ensure as much dignity as I could in an otherwise stark and brutal and heartbreaking incident.

By Monday, A. was home, and we went to the woods to revisit the locations, to collect every last feather, and to notice together the locations, the unfolding of the assault. There is little point in reconstituting the scene, in reading it too closely, except that it felt necessary and important to develop an informed guess about what had happened. We concluded that the three hens had been ambushed at a place where they might have been dust bathing, that Fluffy was the first to be killed, that the other two scrambled down the hill toward the house, and that Cinnabon was killed next. Bitumen made it the farthest, nearest to the house, but she possibly went for cover and cornered herself beneath a couple of 2-3 inch sticks where the raccoon was able to break her neck and sink at least one incisor into the space between her wings. Open fires are legal in Montgomery County after 4 p.m. I cleaned out the old ashes from the burn put, built a small pyre, laid the three hens on a middle tier atop wadded, dried tiger grass, and felt fully and sadly the warmth from the flames. Until the flames dimmed.

Anything else I could add would trail off with infinitely regressive qualifications and hedges and second-guessing. Backyard chickens are for some mere livestock, I suppose, realer than the grotesquely farmed masses so many indifferently gob upon from the grocery store and restaurants, but not quite fully alive and present as everyday named friends, domestic kin, or pets, whose gifts include reciprocal care, gratitude. We were well aware that predator narratives abound because predatory incidents are an unfortunately common part of raising backyard chickens, particularly in an American landscape where predators are driven into smaller habitats by casual development. We’d made a choice (albeit a choice frequently reconsidered!) for these birds to be as free as we could reasonably achieve, together anticipating and thwarting threats while providing a more-than-caged life. And so I write and post this not to moralize, not to cast for condolences, not to shed or minimize my responsibility, but simply to remember, to witness, and to continue translating an awful experience into local practical wisdom, into keener stewardship.

Fields Steeper 🧗‍♀️

/ Derek Mueller
Photo by Tyler Gooding on Unsplash

There were fields steeper than barn roofs ending in sheer cliffs, where a fall would be death. (Andean farmers do occasionally fall out of their fields.) And we continued to see herders with flocks of sheep and llamas. (23)

Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1979)

By now I have several checkmarks ✔️ and phis ɸ in the margins of Berry’s The Gift of Good Land, idiosyncratic but patterned marks distinguishing themselves over the years as the homing punctuation that give me a chance of returning and rereading. A checkmark or a phi is like a waving hand, a beckoning forefinger, and a glittering agate fieldstone combined. While reading the other morning, I was struck by these lines nodding to the sharp, impassable edges sometimes demarcating the small potato fields Berry observed and described during his visit to the northern Andes. Unto itself, it produces quite an image–to tumble, cruel gymnastikoi!, from one’s potato field. Considering my continuing strickenness with the doubling of “field” for parcel of land (field1) and semistable plane cohering shared academic inquiry (field2), the scenario of falling out got me thinking about the comparable tumble from the second type of field, the field more or less synonymous with a status quo academic discipline. Are there comparable fallings out, where someone decided, in effect, I’ve had enough of this small potatoes field!? Recent stories about leaving academia altogether cartwheel to mind, as do older examples of dismounting quietly (e.g., North, Vivion). I suppose that choosing an alt-ac path or choosing to switch fields from rhetoric-composition to English education (or whatever) is not quite the same as nose-diving over the cliff at an earthen field’s edge. And so maybe it is enough to pause with the definitional character of a field as a parcel with edges. And to think about how those edges are not necessarily on level with what is adjacent to them. Sometimes the adjacent field levels up, and sometimes down.

I’m in the third summer of living on these wonderful but rugged and moderately non-level (by Andes standards) six acres at the end of Rosemary Road. In two and a half years, I’ve only fallen twice. The first spill was two years ago, June 2022, when after transplanting a sugar maple and three or four tansies, I thought I would water them extra generously by carrying five gallon buckets of water to where I had set them in the ground. All of these new plants were plugged in along the bank running from the easement westward toward the upper shed. I’d climbed the steep slope easily enough and was five or six feet above grade, but when I started to pour the plant a long drink from the bucket, I slipped and fell on my right side, shoulder and collarbone especially screaming what the fuck is the matter with you. I was fine, but startled to be fine. The fall was teeth-clackingly jarring, all the more forceful for gravity’s hard pull not only on me but on me with a water-filled bucket in hand. The second fall was last winter break, so December 2023. Icy precipitation had glassed over the holler. When I went out in the morning to bring the chickens their food and water, I made the classic mistake of gaining my sure but shortlived footing on the grass, only to step onto the sidewalk slab near the door to the front shed where as though to a 1970s cartoon soundtrack I slipped and planted myself squarely on my back. This time, too, I was astonished not to be injured beyond having the wind knocked out of me. Doubly astonishing was that the chickens’ water didn’t spill. To imagine falling from one’s potato field is to rewind the tape on all the spills that have taken me down before, it turns out.

Longer ago, farther away, I was on what I may be misremembering as my first or second campus visit in January of my final year at Syracuse, walking along Putnam Street near the dumpster between Parking Structure 6 and Wayne State’s Maccabees Building, where the English Department is located, and unsuspecting but with slippy shoes, I caught a frozen-over puddle and whoop-whoop-whoop did an improvised Charleston move that included, miraculously, spilling my coffee into the air and, steadied by hands of winged angels, regained my balance in time to catch the floating river of scalding hot coffee back in the cup again. This goes down not as a slip and fall but as a damned close. I remember the rest of the day well because this slip sparked sharpened focus: the committee interview, the conversation with the grad director at the time, the job talk and especially the questions that followed, and then the lunch immediately after the job talk, which all of the attendees enjoyed eating as they watched Obama’s inaugural inauguration. It would have felt a bit more like opening act to the day’s headliner, except that I’d regained my balance and caught the coffee earlier that day. I don’t mean to imply that my job talk was on level with Obama’s inauguration; I only mean that at a private and personal scale, even though the after-talk questions were barbed and even though I didn’t end up getting a job offer, I was in the slip recovering and coffee catching sense having a great day.

And then there are a couple of falls on basketball courts. Courts are not fields, except when you consider Janice Lauer’s reframing of field as a kind of “epistemic court,” jurisprudentially negotiated through give and take, consensus building, etc. (granting of course that these days certain so-called high courts are not what they once were, that ‘supreme’ judgments of late have been skewing asshatted toward a politics bent on dissolving the republic). On basketball courts, I’ve fallen more times than I can count, yet two in particular are memorable because they are the only two times I have broken bones in my life. In 1990, a Highland Conference home game against the Leroy-Pine River Bucks, I intercepted an upcourt pass and lost balance, falling backward and using my left hand to break the fall and, as a consequence, fracturing my left wrist. Hurt, redness, swelling, but because it happened in the first half, and because I was the tallest player, and because Pine River had dominant bigs that year, I was encouraged to tough it out, play through the pain, be a man, and so on. I played on, suckily finishing the game even though I could hardly catch or rebound or squeeze with both hands the basketball. Many years later, older and presumably wiser, when on October 1, 2014, I similarly disrupted a long upcourt pass but landed with the tiniest of toe rolls followed by an audible pop, I hopped off the court and told my teammates I’d just broken my foot. They didn’t believe me! And sure enough, I heel-walked to the Honda Element, drove myself to the ER, and confirmed it: fractured fifth metatarsal on the right foot. Though they are not falls from fields, they are falls on courts that required eventual exits, interruptions, healing, transitions, and subsequent wayfinding.

Is the line connecting this back to the Peruvian potato fields unfollowably jaggy? Like potato fields, academic fields–as ritual, locative, material, social, and epistemic concentrations–share edges and bear out adjacencies that can be navigated, sometimes with ease and sometimes with crash or clamor. To grant fields topography opens them to a more careful review of leveling and traversals, or how cross-field movement has worked and might work differently. We can and perhaps should, every so often, run the thought experiment that asks how this field leveling has changed, how individual and collective standpoints have reshuffled. What can grow here? Who remains to carry the water, to pull weeds, to edit journals, to shepherd promotion cases? What elevations do we ascribe to the subfields in English Studies today? What elevations do we ascribe to the constitutive nominative jabberwocky ever reshuffling for rhetoric and composition/writing studies? What elevation differential are folks who tumble in or tumble out negotiating as they play chutes and ladders, this field to the next, or the next back to this? I am, for now, more interested in refreshing the old and possibly adequated (or dead) question an aid for checking up on first principles among the terms, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, as these, too, have now become split and spliced almost as much as apple varieties and chicken breeds, to include technical writing, professional writing, scientific communication, business communication, and dozens more. Within the small potato field, it is as if each footfall has its own special, unique elevation, as if the field’s name(s) offer a stamp of dissensus so stubbornly fractal erosion, as gravity, has the final word and mountains, too, draw flat.

Underlying Conditions

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. Two-track easement rising to the upper plot south of Wonder Hollow.

The two-track easement I mentioned a couple of posts back angles on a more or less straight line from NNE to SSW, bending ever so slightly where the grade steepens from driveway to an off-road pitch of what I’d guess is at least 25 degrees. I asked the former owner how long the two-track carved a line up the easement, and he said it had been there as long as he could remember, which I’d guess goes back to maybe the 1950s when he was growing up in the then-newly-constructed bungalow (which dates to 1948). The easement links the end of Rosemary Road and the 10 acre plot just above the holler. The legal description includes the exact coordinates for the two-track, noting its 20-foot width, noting it persists only for as long as that upper plot is owned by the same family. And then there is a code in Virginia, 55.1-305. Enjoyment of Easement, which conserves the ways the easement can be used. No converting it to a raceway; not sure it could be paved or significantly upgraded. The code begins, “Unless otherwise provided for in the terms of an easement, the owner of a dominant estate [neighbors] shall not use an easement in a way that is not reasonably consistent with the uses contemplated by the grant of the easement, and the owner of the servient estate [us] shall not engage in an activity or cause to be present any objects either upon the burdened land or immediately adjacent to such land that unreasonably interferes with the enjoyment of the easement by the owner of the dominant estate.”

When it rains, the easement two-track gathers and delivers torrents like a dried up river bed subjected to a heavy downpour. At the bottom of the two-track is our front shed, and until last fall when we had an excavator operator dig below the shed’s foundation wall and then go over it with a sealcoat, laying drain tile, and backfilling with gravel, it didn’t take much rain to send puddling across the shed’s slab, soaking everything that touched the floor. The excavation work successfully redirected the intense runoffs, and now the shed floor stays dry, though the two-track still switches from dry to gushing every time it rains. Erosion spills snaking routes onto the driveway below and exposes a rocky subsurface all along the two-track. Can’t imagine driving a basic passenger vehicle up it all that often. You’d feel tossed-about, and you’d worry about the brakes. I haven’t tried it before, but my guess is it’d feel unsafe. It does fine with small tractor or rugged vehicles like four-wheelers , not that we have anything like that. With each subsequent rain, the ground gives to the water course silty bits of itself, clay particulate, organic material, dust. I couldn’t guess how many times the easement has had to be repaired since the 1950s, nor how many times it has washed out, nor how many small rinses it takes to render it impassable, nor how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop.

Just as the two-track divides Turkey Slope, erosion and deposition, the weather, and vegetative growth cycles participate in shaping the field, sometimes bringing to the surface reminders and remnants, those underlying conditions that through time form a crust that lasts for a while, enduring but changing, transforming while seeming to stand still. “Underlying conditions” come up briefly in Lorrie Moore’s 2023 novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. There is much, much more to layer on about the book, but for now, let’s just say it is a living-dead travelog, with its protagonists, Finn, who is alive, and Lily, who is dead but talking and otherwise behaving as-though alive, making their way across the midwestern United States and, as they go, negotiating their old relationship, decaying flesh, and the real risks felt to occasionally blinker into the surreal plot. At one of the lodging stops along the way (a bed and breakfast, sort of), the novel hints at chronotopic laminations, “the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held and managed” (180). Moore’s novel characterizes the boarding house this way: “Memories from another time and other people in the form of humidity saturated the place. Any given time always had other times beneath it” (161). Could be the slow reveal of the rock bed underlying the two-track, could be the crumbling granite everywhere underfoot in these Blue Ridge mountains, could be that feeling of aging, at home, at work, everywhere you go. But that line has traction; it catches and holds: Any given time always had other times beneath it.

Any given time always had other times ahead, too. Witnessing this capacity, or recognizing these times beneath and times afore, is something close to temporal bandwidth, ΔT (in conceptual light more than a formulaic one). I don’t know what will become of the two-track. Can’t predict whether its run-offs will become more fitful until water and gravity prevail. Maybe it becomes a pristine road, as humans love to create roads and then to travel on them (notwithstanding that this occludes much of what is beyond the sensory margins of the road and its immediate surrounds!). To grant this path ephemerality itself as an underlying condition is, I suppose, similar to acknowledging the impermanence of everything. Gone-noting intersects with temporal bandwidth, and maybe even underwrites it.

I also don’t know what will become of the academic field where I have lingered for half of my life. It is changing, in some respects trending kinder and more humane, in some ways trending farther spun-out and dissolute. But trends, too, have a way of doubling back, so we have to keep checking, asking whether we are still becoming kinder and more humane, asking whether we are even listening to and reading one another any more. Yesterday, summer solstice, I saw online a social media post from a senior, now-retiring scholar in the field who was trying to rehome something like 500 books from a long and prosperous career. His conclusion, “no one wants them.”

For a couple of entries now, I’ve been hinting at Wendell Berry’s poem, “IX,” as a low-key motivator for these few meandering thoughts on fields. The poem is reprinted in full, with permission, at The Writer’s Almanac. I’ll share a small excerpt, but you can click over and read the rest, if you want to.

IX.

I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.

Excerpt from Wendell Berry, “IX”


Particle, Wave, Field

/ Derek Mueller

I’ve returned to Virginia after nine days in Michigan for Is.’s high school graduation ceremony and party, and so I am settling in a tad road weary, searching for how to pick up where I left off last Tuesday: particle, wave, field; Wendell Berry’s poem, “IX;” and underlying conditions.

In graduate school, the long shadow of Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970) seemed to me to be in its twilight, its influence relaxing as social-epistemic approaches to teaching/leaning rhetoric and writing took greater hold. Given that Young, Becker, and Pike advocated for their tagmemic approach as inventive and heuristic, a careful and generative work with tagmemes as the smallest discernible “units in context” for composing, it isn’t quite right to say that they belonged to a different pedagogical model altogether. Rather, tagmemics were prone to use as a structuralist analytic, which, in turn, bordered on strict logical operations. Another way to frame this would be to pose different emphases for the phrase “units in context,” noting that, for some, the “units” carried far greater importance for many years, while context gradually ascended, boosted by the internet, globalization, pop culture, and technological accessories to multimodality.

I think I remember copies of Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970) lying around the graduate student offices I once shared in Cockefair Hall at UMKC and HB Crouse at Syracuse. At UMKC, so too were there stacks of Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1973), so many in fact that I remember thinking that whatever it contained, it was a book few sought out, held onto, carried home, etc. In addition to the amplifiers of contextualism listed in the previous paragraph, so too was this moment as I experienced it–the late 1990s and early 2000s–punctuated with rhetorical genre studies, post-structuralism, cultural studies, and a blend of close reading, classics imitation, and high-brow critical essayism. As such, copies of Bizzell and Herzberg’s Negotiating Difference (1995) and Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading (3rd Ed., 1993). This is more retrospective than I planned to share in this post, and yet this backdrop returns me to the concern for what else stalled, or went dormant, when tagmemics lapsed. The fade-out of tagmemics might, for example, pair with Paul Butler’s account (2008) of how style dried up or with Susan Peck Macdonald’s article (2007) about the gradual decline of “language” in CCCC programs.

And this links up with a hypothesis, or what is perhaps lying lower than a hypothesis as a mere hunch I’d like to follow: with the fade-out of tagmemics, so too did the field leave behind the small. Or maybe it’s that the small fanned out, spilled in other ways to technical communicators tracking eye movements or keystrokes, archival researchers sifting and whiffing for dust, or narrative crumb-catchers revaluing experiential minutiae in anecdotes and vignettes. The discursive-small, tagmemics, faded, but other smalls held on for a few beats here and there and there, too. Extending from this, the smallest of the small may have slipped beneath notice, the rarer provenance of copy editors or technical stylists, linguist-compositionist hybrids, or old-headed grammarians quietly beholden to parts of speech-lit lanterns for writing by. And with contextualism, which is burdensome and slow when dwelling with the small, middle and larger-scale units spring up. Contextualism (done justice) itself carries with it details abundant to a new order of magnitude, and this is context’s double-edged quality: always too much, and never enough.

Young, Becker, and Pike’s wave, particle, and field constructed “field” as the biggest of the three tiny components responsible for materializing–in expressive motion–the utterance. But it’s not clear to me that this variation on field shares its cornerstones with the field conjured under the label of rhetoric and composition, much less as Wendell Berry observed fields during his 1979 visit to Peru. Though I really should be going back again and studying this more closely, I’ll go ahead with my clouded understanding to say that with wave and particle, field is more like a traversable plane, contingent, stable-for-now and knowable as such, with the potential for circulation. Field, for rhetoric and composition, instead names loosely assembled activities and infrastructure that endure in service of continuing inquiry and interconnection. They’re not quite synonymous, though by pairing them, their explanatory power enjoys a multiplier. Next, I’ll see if I can explore in tandem that poem I keep mentioning from Wendell Berry, “IX,” and the idea of underlying conditions.

Fields, Named and Unnamed 🦃

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. A pair of wild turkeys crossing Turkey Slope toward the easement two-track, May 14, 2022.

A few weeks ago, a friend who guest lodges at the one room Wonder Hollow Moon House from time to time sent midday a text to A. and me mentioning that a lone chicken had found her way to the “the road by the high property.” And this eyes-up, helpful message as if on bended arrow pointed me back to a passage only a few days earlier from Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berry was visiting Peruvian potato fields and attempting to describe in detail all that he saw there.

In this field, which could not have been larger than two acres, were twenty-two people, including a few children and two babies. In sight, in and around the field, there were also nine dogs, seven pigs, twelve sheep, nineteen horses, and fifteen llamas and alpacas, The name of the field was Tronco, Tree Trunk.

Nothing better reveals the long human history of the Andes and the topographical intimacy of Andean agriculture than this naming of the fields. In his book on the Vilcanota Valley, Daniel W. Gade wrote that “almost every parcel [of land], no matter how small, has a name to identify it. Property is identified by the names of the individual parcels and not by surveyor’s measurements which are in most cases non-existent. Every field…and every enclosure has a name, many of them plant names, reflecting their immediate natural environment” (20).

Once there, lingering in that frame where I leaf and find the page, stare at the words, mull them over, I began to consider again the correspondences between this named field and that named field, the importance of these locative references, ad hoc and informal as they tend to be in my own everyday life. You see, “the road by the high property” didn’t immediately click for me. Where now? I wasn’t sure what it referred to. But once we discussed it, A. and I between us sorted out that it probably meant the middle right of way, halfway up the climbing two track between Turkey Slope and the chanterelle patch. This switch from “the road by the high property” to places we knew in common, owing to our having gained an indexical handle on sharing these field names over time, helped us grasp where, exactly, the hen in question, be it Cinnabon or Tiny Honey, had wandered.

Field naming questions also happen to come up all the time in the academic discipline I consider as much of a home base as one must claim to carve out a career path. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity being in great if blurred fashion for the past twenty years, I continue to accept that identifying my own work with Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, generally, holds both true and reasonably specific, tempting as it has been in some contexts to untether and float the smokier alternatives, “interdisciplinary scholar,” or “transdisciplinary nomad,” or “Sophist.” But Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies, even if you shorten it to RCWS, is kind of a spillway, as naming goes. The slash used to stake its hold between Rhetoric/Composition, but the double-slash is just too much algebra, especially when we pause on the question of hospitality and remember that this discipline’s name is usually paired with a sign that says, “Welcome.”

Over the years, I have encountered folks who reject the conjunction and who call the field only “Rhetoric” or only “Composition.” Are they territorialists or purists? I couldn’t say. Some would have us crumple and toss “Composition” into the dustbin of time, rending it gone, replaced instead by “Writing,” because people know what writing is. Some would have us ditch “Rhetoric,” because it is too caught up with pedicuring the carved marble feet of ancient Greek statesmen and philosophers. No matter how much thoughtful effort goes into pluralizing the tributaries, ethos, pathos, and logos roll on. Were we to entertain for a few more lines–on the controversial if minuscule (I think?) demarcations sequestering technical and professional writing, or scientific and technical communication, or business communication, and so on and so on–we can see the free-wheel spin, and each in our private moments yearn for something more like Tronco, Tree Trunk, for RCWS. On second thought, this name wrangling, even if it diminishes wide-stance footing in English Departments, gives us something to puzzle over, an old riddle about the impossibility of calling a river any name at all, since you can’t stand in the same river twice, thanks to Heraclitus.

I’ve curlicued this entry, commonplace book style, into a good enough for now stopping place. I have more to say about field naming, about Young, Becker, and Pike’s jump to particle physics and wave, particle, field–distinctions requiring a microscope–to make sense of repeating patterns. I’ve been in this field for 25 years, depending on how you want to count those early years when I was an idealistic MA student teaching composition, and so by now I might have expected to be able to say I teach and research in an academic discipline you’ve possibly not heard of, called Never Head Of It. To be continued, as such: wave, particle, whatsit; Berry’s poem “IX,” and a short yarn on underlying conditions (for fields more-so than human health).

According to Conditions 🐿️

/ Derek Mueller

Writing in early summer 2024 has been an exercise in patience, haloed for session after session with a feeling that the timing is not quite right, and so the ever-reliable maxim surfaces again, “Drive according to conditions.” The timing slips because I have been fine-tuning a set of documents with a deadline next week, readying for travel to Michigan for Is.’s graduation, and lingering in that waiting place for feedback on something whose revisions can only take flight thereafter, and also waiting while waiting for go-ahead (or decline) on a chapter I proposed, anticipating a May decision. My point is, rhythms are allowed to wobble; laminar wishes swirl, betrayed by entropy. And so I chip away at other things. Mow the holler before traveling. Install a fabric dust barrier and some squirrel inhibiting hardware cloth in the side shed. Pick the season’s first black raspberries. Spritz the garden with neem oil. Turn the compost. Dab the exposed pressboard edges of a countertop a bonding agent engineered for uncooperative surfaces. Check email, but not too often. (180)

A Five-question Series

/ Derek Mueller

The latest bulletin from The Common Table reached subscribers last Wednesday, May 29, this time announcing an article titled “Food Thinking.” The article’s premises were inviting, in that it works across a few theoretical beacons, Anna Tsing, Horst Rittel, and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, to expand the thesis that food studies is suited to dusting off design thinking, reviving again those dimensions of design thinking that have worn thin or blinked out. You’ll find good stuff there, worthy of reading and worthy of returns, on mindsets, or questioning attitudes; with such practiced, inquisitive dispositions follows something almost ritualistic in noticing taken-for-granted interdependencies, in a feel for the organism, whether the corn plant or the baby bok choy leafing dark green hopeful from the raised beds where we planted them in mid-May. I don’t quite identify with design powerfully enough to prefer that same language (or field of specialization), but I did read in this piece something akin to a foodwise network sense, an atoll whose cartographic attempts I imagine would be delicious and intriguing at once. And this, in turn, relayed me to look around at more of The Common Table, to explore a few of the other recently published pieces beyond “Mother’s Hand Taste,” the piece on Jiwon Woo’s ever-fascinating work about son-mat, which I wrote about a few months ago and also explored in the spring semester with students who were taking Food Writing.

There is much to admire, appreciate, and learn from at The Common Table. I found especially standout the series “On Food and Education,” which follows the pattern of five-question interviews. The five questions invite responses from a host of respondents, and each is featured in elegant, readable posts, organized with the questions as the governing structure. The five questions are

  • How would you explain your perception of food as an educational discipline or tool to someone who might think that means just cookery lessons?
  • What are you doing/have you done to change understanding related to food?
  • Who are you trying to reach and teach and why?
  • Where would you like to take your work in this field; what are your goals?
  • What is the big-picture perspective in terms of the future of food education and where is it coming from?

The repeating pattern causes me to find the series more inviting as a series; there is so much good stuff here. It got me thinking, too, and again, about the substitutive interplays with food, writing, and visuality, about how this interviewing format, because it is simple and consistent, coheres multiple responses and fashions them into a genre unto itself. Semi-structured, multi-phase interviews have, as I conceive of them, ascended as the interview method that has the best chance of summoning in-depth perspectives, yet these strictly structured, one-phase interviews, like we find in The Common Table‘s series, offer just as much for the researching writer’s repertoire. I suspect that part of what explains my quiet, unchecked bias in favor of semi-structured interviews is that academic publications rarely publish in plain view the uncut and unfiltered responses from interviewees. This is a meandering way of expressing my own realization that the value of the strictly structured interviews has been skewed by wading too deep for too long in academically styled prose. What would a five-question series on writing be? Or visuality? What would the questions be? Who would be the interviewees?

So many pieces in the five-question series prompt new ideas and invite thoughtful responses, such that it is hard to choose one as a paragon, though I suppose “On Food and Education: Marije Vogelzang” rises to the top because I have already bookmarked it for a future section of Food Writing. Her response to the first question strikes connection with our lesson on apple and orange mindfulness, the day when, with Thich Nhat Hanh’s guidance, we linger, slowing down with a piece of fruit to listen for the crunch or to test edges as we pull a Mandarin orange apart, segment by segment. Vogelzang’s lists are rangy and uncanny, playful but not self-consciously so. I love this as a model for the inventional copia generated from something simple, ordinary, everyday. That this piece strikes in so many directions—and all from the repeating five-questions—is why I am holding onto it, tagging it for returns in my teaching, my writing, and my glimpsing thoughts for what would one day be a striking feature in a rhet/comp journal, perhaps.

Feta

/ Derek Mueller
Feta, the Scandinavian Elkhound.

We’d been watching the Montgomery County Animal Control website for a few days, figuring right now to be as good as any time could be for taking the leash on a new pet, a guardian of the chickens who would not succumb to predator instinct nor terrorize the cat, Z. I dragged my feet on an impulse-trip to the shelter on Friday, but on Saturday, sure, why not?, and so we drove across town. We’d seen the profile of a Great Pyrenees who was by breed and age and temperament a promising prospect. The shelter also happened to be hosting an event called Purricane, what I understand to be a kitten season adoption and fundraising extravaganza made even funner-sounding by blending ‘purr’ and ‘hurricane.’ We witnessed it not as so much storm-like but as heavily trafficked with kitty oglers such that were it up to me, I might have gone with Catectacle. Catectacle drew a magnificent crowd.

The foot traffic boded poorly for really meeting a prospective foster dog. The shelter hallways were golldamn, devil, bustling, and most of the dogs mirrored the energy, which was filled with possibility, nerves, anxiety, and barks of all sorts. We met the Great Pyrenees, and then as A. was lingering with her, I walked a round to have a look adjacent, like we did back in the olden days when libraries had books on shelves and we browsed by looking not only for the focal book but also looking around at its near neighbors. As I did, I spotted a dog who quietly and smartly seemed to be telepathizing something like ‘I’m the one.’ A Norwegian Elkhound, she presented as sagely and warm and hearty, like she remembered her great-grandmothers were Scandinavian wolves and that this shelter scene was only temporary. Her self-control under the duress of the raucous shelter ambience suggested a different kind of interiority; I want to be careful here because it’s not as if I am some kind of dog whisperer, but I had a feeling just by pausing with her, looking at each other, that there was more to her than was common. A good feeling, an I-could-get-along-with-this-dog feeling. I was surprised when I went back to A. and said there was another dog here worth of a look that she said she’d already sent a photo of this Elkhound to her mom because it reminded her of her childhood dog, Pepper, who also happened to be a Norwegian Elkhound. A. was thinking that I was hard-set on a Great Pyrenees, but since I wasn’t, the Pyrenees-adjacent, serendipitously glimpsed dog elicited even more interest from us.

Saturday’s click meant Sunday included housewarming and yardwarming efforts: complete the foster-to-adopt form on their website, order and assemble an outdoor pen, and revisit the process that would allow us to have a trial period before committing, as aggression toward Z. or the chickens would be a deal-breaker. The form asked for a list of childhood pets: Cookie, Brandy, Peppy, Sheba, Jake, Kelly, Mushroom, Fang, Pigeon, Max, Tony, Cujo. Not all of these were dogs; Kelly and Mushroom were cats, and Cujo was a guinea pig. But mostly, in those years, dogs were the pet of choice.

We’d been lightly considering for several months a tandem, two dogs, one named Salty and the other Cousin, but fostering two dogs at once was, as the real and pragmatic conditions came into view, just too complicated. With everything else lining up as it did, we were green lighted to pick up the Norwegian Elkhound and bring her home on Monday afternoon. The folks at the shelter had given her the temporary name, Snigglefritz. And we talked some about the decision either to go ahead with calling her Cousin, or, instead, to spend some time with her and for us to come up with other possibilities later. By Monday night, we were thinking either Saga or Feta, both being two syllables with a hard second consonant that would not sound too much with the names of Z. or the chickens. Is. confirmed by text that Feta was a good choice, and so that’s it.

Feta commonly refers to a simple, crumbled, brine-based cheese. Languages being many, in Norwegian, which I don’t know about you but I can plausibly suppose a Norwegian Elkhound more or less comprehends, the word ‘feta’ translates to ‘fat’ in English. Given the troubling ways this pejorative association tracks, we can instead say she is a Scandinavian Elkhound, generally Nordic, possibly Icelandic. But then there is the similar phrase, “fytti faen,” which a lookup tells me is Norwegian for a milder version of “fucking hell,” translated roughly as “golldamn, devil.” Should I be worried about this secondary connotation? No. It’s just enough to not want to shed the Norwegian valences altogether.

We’ll continue for another week in the maybe phase, but after a day it has already become a maybe–probably phase and by tomorrow could be a Feta is where she belongs stage. She’s an astonishingly kind, patient, subdued canine, a creek wolf with Diogenesian quirks who wades in until the water is almost touching her belly, then sits, solving for just-right depth. And golldamn, devil, does she shed. A lot. Guess it’s a seasonal thing, winter coat loosing its blankethold. Creek currents willing, I’ll introduce Feta as friend and flock protector, and, in time, I suspect, as much more.

A Norwegian Elkhound (named Feta) wades in a small creek.
Feta wading in the creek.