Tag: genre

A Reversing Course

/ Derek Mueller
Figure 1. At a major trail intersection, Claytor Lake State Park, Saturday, November 29, 2025.

It is peculiar, isn’t it, the way a passing comment can stick, linger, resurface unprovoked again and again. For example, last May at Computers & Writing in Athens, Ga., upon humbly and graciously receiving the Lovas Award for this-here decades-long, meandering, and often self-indulgent blogging effort, in a casual side conversation I said something about redoubling the effort, writing here more frequently, and someone said in so many words Why keep doing such an outdated thing? Why not try something new? I suppose the stickiness of those questions owe to their being good, challenging, existential questions, questions about human aging and range, about the short little blink of time we have here together, much less in this (or any) academic field, career, or professional role. The questions come up, then fade, come up, fade.

Lately I have been preoccupied with emptying my Shanks Hall office. After hauling three pickup loads of books and office wares to Ann Arbor since August, just yesterday I went to campus to collect the last three or four remaining items—a small mirror on the wall, the same second monitor I brought from EMU seven plus years ago, a last box of books. I fetched the cart from the printer closet, rolled it into the elevator, then to the first floor, out the doors to the landing, and item by item, into the back seat with it all. Shanks 315 was a good office space, though I haven’t experienced any particularly noticeable senses of missing it. The remaining to-dos amount to turning in keys, making sure my gong away present reaches the right people, and tending to a handful of transition tasks, like setting up MailJerry to test whether it will move vt.edu emails to the umich.edu account, and checking in with HR here to make sure they have everything they need from me before Day Fin, New Year’s Eve.

Figure 2. Last of the move-out. The last cart load of stuff from Shanks 315 waits for the elevator. After I loaded these things into the pickup, I tried to return the cart to the third floor but the elevator would not open. So I had to carry the cart up the stairs in order to return it to the copier closet.

Meanwhile

Aside from clearing out the office and winding down this ultimate semester in SW Virginia, I’ve been making strides with the book, alternating between writing and drawing in Chapter Four, the chapter that I have planned to house approximately 40 gone notes, each with an illustration. Writing and illustrating together in my experience lends to a lot of hitches. How drafty can the writing be? Must the illustration always follow the text? Last week I had a plan for an illustration that proved impossible to execute. It just was not working. So I adjusted, reimagined it, drew something else. I could puzzle over any one toggle for a day, then a week, get vortexed into caring too much about the feeling that they must make a special, memorable match. But the schedule I have drawn up for completing the full draft of the project doesn’t benefit from this degree of perfectionism.

Gone notes have on days thrown me some genre trouble. I suppose I’ll never quite feel like short form observances are harmonious with academic writing per se. One gone note is ugh…dryly encyclopedic, too short, underresearched, flat, even banal. The next gone note is too personal, marking the end of a project I cared a lot about and invested countless hours in but that few others seemed to pay any mind. Another sparks registers of feeling for what I think the larger field (and especially its newcomers) needs, and another gazes disaffected at the haze of negligent austerities that have defined higher education over the past twenty years or more, where tuition pays for a whole lot of something but not this. This brings me around to wavelets of uncertainty about just how much or how little to pose gone noting as stable-for-now; as an ephemeralist observes impermanence, those observances turn out to be as idiosyncratic as grief. It has been in moments a stumbling dance to crossover from practicing gone noting to defining the practice for others to one day do.

Why keep doing such an outdated thing?

We went to Claytor Lake State Park on Saturday afternoon, a 75-minute hike with Feta from the Dublin boat launch to the lakeshore and back. It was new, a hike I hadn’t been on before but that A. and Feta had done with other friends a time or two before. In late November the lines of sight in the words are longer; we look to white-tailed deer where hunters cannot pick them off, a committee of buzzards congregated at the top of a white pine, and one gray squirrel daring enough to tempt Feta for a chase and a thrill, but for the leash. The two-truths paradox applies. You can do old things and new things; each comports bandwidth and is a shadow of the other. So blog, if it means writing, a warm-up with only the lightest touch of wordsmithing; and do new things, to—take a new job, work on an unwieldy book parts illustrated and parts written, go for a hike, double-back on the routes you’ve been down once, and look again, it is never exactly what it was before.

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.

Vielstimmig, “Petals on a Wet Black Bough”

/ Derek Mueller

Vielstimmig,
Myka. "Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Textuality, Collaboration,
and the New Essay.&quot Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st
Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 89-114.

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