X-posted from the socials, a note about a job change:
Figure 1. Updated myscot wheel1Otto the Orange is at the twelve o’clock position in the first myscot wheel mock-up I created (and posted to Flickr), which implicitly clocks the genre to 2004, the move from Kansas City to Syracuse and matriculating in CCR. I am seeing EWM entries about myscot wheels made in 2006 and 2009., or the institutions whose halls I have travelled.
This morning I updated the many-years-forged and still turning myscot wheel, whose every stop along the way has been powerfully rewarding2By “rewarding” I mean rich with realizations, commiserations, and learning. Louise Phelps emphasized to me, as I was nearing graduation from Syracuse, that every faculty position, no matter how high-gauged or low-gauged the system, could serve as a poignant teacher if we simply choose to look at it that way. and whose zenith position now reflects my most recent—and hopefully last ever—job change. Today is as apt as any to share the news with you all, since it is my first day as faculty at the University of Michigan. I will be on research leave/duty off campus through June 30 and begin a term as Director of the Sweetland Center for Writing in July. Goes without saying and also WITH saying that I am profoundly grateful to everyone who made this possible—you and you and you, friends and colleagues and students, encouragers, urgers of patience during patches of uncertainty in the long run-up, confidential external reviewers, and more. I hesitated to social-mediate the news but nonetheless wanted friends and family whom I haven’t told yet to know; plus, Is., who is in her first year in Ann Arbor (after transferring to U-M), thriving and loving it, nudged me over the holidays to share it, homecoming that it is, and here goes, an old taking the advice of a young, as they sometimes should. 💛💙〽️ #myscotwheel #jobchange #update #goblue
Notes
1
Otto the Orange is at the twelve o’clock position in the first myscot wheel mock-up I created (and posted to Flickr), which implicitly clocks the genre to 2004, the move from Kansas City to Syracuse and matriculating in CCR. I am seeing EWM entries about myscot wheels made in 2006 and 2009.
2
By “rewarding” I mean rich with realizations, commiserations, and learning. Louise Phelps emphasized to me, as I was nearing graduation from Syracuse, that every faculty position, no matter how high-gauged or low-gauged the system, could serve as a poignant teacher if we simply choose to look at it that way.
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.
“Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.”
Figure 1. “Fetadala.” The hound arranged in hues and textures of her own making.
The Teeming World of Funes
“I now arrive at the most difficult point in my story. This story (it is well the reader know it by now) has no other plot than that dialogue which took place half a century ago. I shall not try to reproduce the words, which are now irrecoverable. I prefer to summarize with veracity the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know I am sacrificing the efficacy of my narrative; my readers should imagine for themselves the hesitant periods which overwhelmed me that night” (151).
—Jorge Luis Borges. (1942, 1999). Funes the Memorious. Collected Fictions (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Books. #remembering #forgetting #mnemonism
Nudged from a Write! conversation earlier in the week, I re-read Borges’ “Funes the Memorius” and have been thinking about the accursed blessing of remembering more, remembering less, and the pleasurable inevitability of forgetting (thanks to CGB‘s mention of the 1942 short story).
Mists of Academic Majors
Figure 2. A Tagcrowd word cloud rendering of the majors listed for the forty-four students enrolled in two (online-asynchronous) sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media coming up this fall.
5ives
Midsummer To-dos
External review letter No. 1
Syllabus for ENGL3844
Electrician to lend me a bzzt with swapping out remaining switches and outlets in front shed
Virginia DMV registration renewal
Finish painting shed
A Map May Be Concealing
“Such maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.”
“Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk–lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say o.k. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?” (42).
—Maira Kalman. (2009). The Principles of Uncertainty. Penguin Books. #walkingmood #proud #lugging #walking #steps #trip
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the seventh in this series from Week 28 of 2025, or the Week of July 7). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Downspout, PVC drain line near-neighborliness, or where, with a plastic joint and a piece of rebar to shield it from the garden house, mending is overdue. #wonderhollow #rollcall
“The integration of LLMs into learning environments presents a complex duality: while they enhance accessibility and personalization of education, they may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions [3]. Prior research points out that there is a strong negative correlation between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with younger users exhibiting higher dependence on AI tools and consequently lower cognitive performance scores [3]” (10).
—Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Haptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Zian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (MIT, MassArt, Wellesley1Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?). (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872 #cognition #debt #writing #LLMs #AI #frenzy #atrophy #performance #humanbrains #consequences
A prepublication version of the Kosmyna et al. article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” circulated a couple of weeks ago. At >200 pages, whew, it is long and ornately specialized at points. I’ve read enough of it to conclude a) it will, on the sunny side of review, be a landmark study, an important account leading to further research on the cognitive consequences of LLM over-reliance (notably, a developmental vortex fueled by enthusiastic, uncritical adoptions and battering-ram marketing efforts by boom or bust AI startups), b) the approach to writing essays at the center of the study is woefully reductive (i.e., timed for 20 minutes, AP-test-styled prompting without much context or purpose), c) the ability to quote one’s own essay shortly after writing it is a bizarre and not altogether persuasive indicator of cognitive performance, yet this was the greatest differentiator among the three participating groups (brain-only, search engine, and LLM), and d) there remains a vast gulf between cognitive neurosciences, rhetorical invention/eureka/epiphany studies2We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging., and reading and writing research as it is valued in the humanities, much less in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies.
Visual Portmanteau: Monarch Butterfly + Mandala
Figure 1. “Monarchdala.”
Mature, blooming milkweed at the back of the holler is aflutter, buzzing with pollinators, including a small kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. And lately I had been exploring in Procreate various brush and palette customizations, watching a few tutorials, learning how to make stamps. What followed were experimental, exploratory pieces, like this one, which uses drawing guides for mirrored quadrants, then bending and combining selected elements, adding color from a custom butterfly photograph palette, and inlayering a gradient backdrop for a fade of center-to-periphery brightness.
The Standard Way into the Sheepfold
“What is the good of research ? What is worth doing ? Shall we be allowed to do it ? Who will do it ? In answering the first question, I hold that by the scholarship which is the product of research the standing of our work in the academic world will be improved. It will make us orthodox. Research is the standard way into the sheepfold” (17).
~
“Now, is there any reason, in this age when every other branch of human knowledge is being ruthlessly pulled to pieces and tested why our branch should be passed over?” (18).
—James Winans (Cornell U). (1915). The need for research. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335631509360453. #branches #research #orthodoxy #sheepfold #speech #communication #disciplinarity
From the Mail Bag 📭
Sadly, there was no mail from readers this week.
G-l-o-r-i-a
Figure 2. Summer 2025’s first morning glory bloom.
5ives
CCCC Covers and a Poll
Five years, five program covers from past Conferences on College Composition and Communication. Why these? Albeit somewhat peripheral to my current research project, they’re quirky with their idiomatic, time-spanning expressions of then and now: the phrase “composition and communication” repeated 53 times from 1960; warpy, nested Cs from 1962; an optical illusion from 1974; seven missiles soaring from left to right in 1977; and an earth-sized pencil from 1983.
19601962197419771983
Walking as Artistic Practice Syllabus
“This workshop is designed as a brief survey of some of the origins, theories, processes, and manifestations of walking as art. We will read, watch, and discuss perspectives on walking-based projects. Using this information as a springboard, we will complete walking exercises, and execute our own original walking projects.”
I have been meandering in wide arcs toward a plan for this fall’s pair of online-asynchronous sections of ENGL3844: Writing and Digital Media. The course description mentions digital writing within “the context of business, organizational, and political practices.” It also mentions production, devices, data visualizations, videos, web design, “and more.” Sample syllabi I have been able to track down tend to outline three major projects, usually something related to podcasting or sound editing, something related to data analysis and visualization, and something related to video. The official, CUSP-approved outcomes are keyed toward ethics (“ethical design strategies”) with three bullets emphasizing visual, video, and web. I haven’t taught this particular class before at Virginia Tech. The online-asynchronous format adds complications to the kinds of engagement and interaction one can reasonably expect, of course. But I have been thinking more about short-form exercises paired with an anthologics-styled (perhaps ABCDEary format) assortment. Self-introductory account of digital mecology/technologies of self; microthemes prompted with alternatingly terrestrial (food, walking, fieldwork) and digital (photo, sound, hypertext, map, 4D/time, etc.). Inflections of Ashley Holmes’ device-mediated environs (writing on location), inflections of Ellen Mueller’s walking courses reframed as writing on foot, Geoffrey Sirc’s seriality, throwback maps of the imagination (e.g., what goes on in that building I walk past every day?), and more. “And more” as the inventive indeterminacy better fitted with digital writing than anything else I am finding or can think of as of yet, seven weeks or so from the start of classes.
Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the sixth in this series from Week 27 of 2025, or the Week of June 30). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Buck moth larva, near posts at SW corner of the holler. #stinging #caterpillar #wonderhollow #rollcall
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Notes
1
Why don’t citation systems include institutional affiliations?
2
We don’t really have anything like Eureka Studies or Epiphany Studies; perhaps all of the Humanities should retool in this direction, renaming minors as Epiphany Studies, or, if you are at a tech/stem school, Epiphany Engineering. The curriculum would draw upon writing and rhetoric, philosophy, history, language and literature, and cognitive neuroscience, regarding learning as a so-called “open period,” of the sort that the neuroscientists studying psychedelics describe in reparative/therapeutic terms as a window for synaptic rerigging.
“They stand not on the shoulders of giants, but in the shadow of them. Many of these student writers are haunted by college regulations against plagiarism that they suspect they regularly break, since they ‘know’ that nothing they write is or can be original and that they do not acknowledge every single source” (101).
〜
“To locate plagiarism in an ethical realm is to describe it as a choice behavior; hence those who plagiarize can be punished and numbered among the rejected—consigned to dwell in the shadows of giants—for they have chosen to transgress against fundamental morals” (160).
—Rebecca Moore Howard. (1999). Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Ablex Pub.
Say Hello to My Little Hen
Figure 1. “Say Hello to My Little Hen.”
Or, “Don’t Shoot Shoot Shoot That Thing At Me,” or “So I Says to the Security Guard, ‘For Pete’s Sake, She’s a Therapy Chicken!,'” or “Hall County (Ga.) Fair Best in Retribution for Extreme Overproduction,” or “Loaded with Oyster Shells,” or “Bawk bawk ba-glock,” or “[your best title/caption].” This is a dusty one, a few months old, inspired by noticing someone packing heat in public but wearing the piece casually, more like a shawl or high-riding fanny pack than with the self-seriousness of a safety conscious gun adorner.
Incredible, Edible
Salad season is hard-boiled egg season is now, the time of year when the hens are laying more eggs than we can reasonably consume. So, insofar as batch hard-boiling, here is what I do to hard-boil 18 eggs because the outer shells slough off like boom bam bing nothing.
Prepare the pot. Combine and bring to boil.
A volume of water that will cover the eggs ≥ 1 inch without boiling over.
Teaspoon of salt.
1/2 c. white vinegar
Add the eggs and reduce temperature to medium-high for a lower-rolling boil.
Boil for 13 minutes.
Ferry the eggs to a bowl of ice-cold water. Let rest in the bath of cubes for 15 minutes.
As a last step in prep, peel and eat, dry in-shell and store in the refrigerator, or peel and jar with vinegar or brine.
For a dozen and a half stashed for lunches and salads, I will peel them, jar them in a half gallon mason jar with apple cider vinegar and dill sprigs, beet juice optional.
With a few minor modifications, this is close to the “perfect” process published on AllRecipes.
Prose Expression Courses
“The cultural needs of the nineteen-sixties will probably determine the shape of the prose expression courses in colleges. Many would say that the needs of any time are the best norm for selection of courses to be used in that time. Certainly it would be safe to say that a course in rhetoric, composition, speech, writing, or communication that did not meet the needs of its time could be put forward only at the risk of failure” (126). #presentism #curriculum #newrhetoric #failure
—Daniel Fogarty. (1959). Roots for a New Rhetoric. Teacher’s College, Columbia.
Keiko, The Good Whale 🐳
“In the summer of 1993, the movie Free Willy—about a captive killer whale that’s heroically set free—was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko—or at least try.” –The New York Times
I drive the 500 miles between Ypsilanti and Christiansburg frequently; when I do, I catch up on podcasts, since they aren’t an especially common part of my everyday media. “The Good Whale,” a six episode season from Serial, dropped late in 2024. Altogether, TGW amounts to 3.5 hours of audio, perfect for a summertime roadtrip. I found it all the more moving because Free Willy was Ph.’s favorite movie around 1995-1996. While it is something of a behind the scenes for that movie, TGW floats at that uncomfortable depth of the known-unknown where animals star in popular movies. The series is a carefully produced blend of historical narrative, investigative reporting, and analysis that lays plain the exploitative impulses and brand safe-guarding behind hit movies and featured attractions. If you’re looking for a podcast this summer, give it a listen. You’ll also pick up a few musical surprises, like Yellow Ostrich’s 2010 track, “Whale.”
“Whale,” Yellow Ostrich, 2010.
Make Much of This Distinction
“We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction—which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism” (89).
—Wendell Berry (2010). “The Responsibility of the Poet.” What Are People For?: Essays (Second edition). Counterpoint. #professional #amateur #love #work #professionalism
Black Bear Season
Last weekend’s wanderer, a black bear maybe a year or two old, crossing over Rosemary Road. It’s common in late May through the end of June to see bears. They’re a different kind of trouble for F., however, because she would likely chase the bear if she was out off-leash, and it’d be a steep, slow while before any humans could catch up to call her off if she felt and followed such an impulse.
Figure 2. Look, it’s the bear in the road.
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a new, provisional series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the second in this series from Week 23 of 2025, or the Week of June 2). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
Creekside raised bed cabbage shoot. #wonderhollow #rollcall
“But what are we, then, in this space of all spaces all at once and no temporal flow? Under the sense of literacy we unpacked in the earlier/previous part of this writing, we rely on our ability to construct ourselves at some nexus between past and future, to have faith in the present as the point where past and future meet like (exactly like) a reader progressing through a linear text, uniting what has gone before with what is now and with what will come.
[P]ersonal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present …. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life” (Jameson 27).
—Anne Wysocki & Johndan Johnson-Eilola, “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Hawisher, Gail E., & Cynthia L., Selfe (Eds.). (1999). Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Utah State University Press. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/119. 349-368.
Longue—Illustration Paired with the OnlyPoems POTM for May
Figure 1. “Longue.”
Longue, as in a duration of waiting, a rest, an eventually. An em-dash-like figure relaxes in repose, punctuation appearing to grow tired of always the highs and lows of overuse followed by neglect. The editorial illustration paired with the OnlyPoemsMay 2025 Poem of the Month, “Ars Poetica as the Sexy Little Em Dash,” by Katherine Irajpanah. #ekphrastic #POTM #illustration
Remain a Ghost
“As I said, I was a ghost. The truth is that, even all these years later, I remain a ghost. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me. I’m not morose or retiring. I laugh a lot. In fact, I’m genuinely happier than many people I know. But I can’t help but feel that, on one level, I do not exist.”
A., in the midst of class planning for fall, sent me a link to this project from back when the WWW felt funkier, freer, more alive, interactions less overdetermined by platforms. It’s like a click-around at a bygone thing, a plunge on Boblo Island’s Log Flume. In it, teaching possibilities. Seventy assignments, complete what you will. -DM
“Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designed and managed the web site.
Participants accepted an assignment, completed it by following the simple but specific instructions, sent in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and their work got posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments was intended to guide people towards their own experience.”
—Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, & Yuri Ono, “Learning to Love You More.” http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/. Accessed May 27, 2025. #installation #digital #art #participation #throwback #assignments #teaching
Peculiar Form of Intellectual Currency
“In particular, I am troubled by the limited circulation of student texts in our field—very few of which are requoted or reanalyzed outside of the articles in which they first appear. Student texts thus turn out to be a peculiar form of intellectual currency. We establish our bona fides as compositionists by quoting them, but we seldom revisit student texts quoted by others.”
Figure 2. Computers and Composition Digital Press logo.
Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an imprint of Utah State University Press, has published twenty-six titles since its launch in 2009. The first book, Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, edited by Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Dickie Selfe, reads as especially salient for the 2026 Computers & Writing Conference in Charlotte, NC, considering that sustainability will be the conference’s theme. Sifting for a moment through the TES materials, the mixed modalities, from the 383-page PDF (size noted as 4.8 “meg”) to the embedded videos, call up impressions suggesting both novelty and time-capsulism in its feeling much more than sixteen years removed from today’s digital environments. I have been perusing all of the titles as I think about the still-complicated prospect of producing scholarship that simply cannot abide the constraints of the printed page, while still living up to long-held commonplaces about what constitutes a “book.” One more noticing: there are titles published in every year since 2009, except 2023. #digital #press #publishing #books #reliquary #sustainability
Phenakistiscope Mock-up: Kite Lost to Upsky
For the past few months, in the narrowest of narrow slivers of eveningtime, I have been attempting to create a phenakistiscope workflow in ProCreate. I first heard about phenakistiscopes from CGB a few months ago, and I found I was thinking about them more than I expected I would. Phenakistiscopes are pinwheel animations of old; they spin out stroboscopic movement from one wedge to the next. Insofar as rounding the bend from admiring them to making them, I am still puzzling through some of the finer points: which elements should be fixed (or in the exact same position), if any; what sizes of figures show up more legibly than others; whether text can be fitted into the sequence (so far, not with any result worth celebrating; how many layer-frames amount to something both visually inviting yet with a lean file size; and how to manage the bleed-edge for circular rotations converted to a square canvas. I had envisioned this one below, Kite Lost to Upsky, as a child flying a kite on a beach, only the kite catches a gust and the kite string snaps the kite sailing off irretrievable. So, as you can maybe? see, not quite a disastrous failure, but also not the sort of success you’d send to a friend with a Wow! subject line.
Figure 3. Phenokiteiscope.
About Collectanea
Collectanea is a new, provisional series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the first in this series from Week 22 of 2025, or the Week of May 26). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM
I shouldn’t pick back up here before first acknowledging head bow hands folded and humbly that Earth Wide Moth received the John Lovas Award from Kairos last Friday evening at the 2025 Computers & Writing Conference. I learned about the award early that week, so I drove to Athens, Ga. to accept the award on Earth Wide Moth’s behalf. Striking to realize this event as punctuation, a pause EWM—dash to notice simultaneously how much and how little a two-decade-plus installation of this serial variety holds. The nomination was co-signed by sixteen or so brilliant, generous, and ever-supportive colleagues; some of them even wrote brief rationale, testimony to the value of what happens here from time to time. I’m grateful for the twenty-one years of write-living, a variation on life-living (Manning), the sorts of activation and articulation loops that, come what meandering-may, dances as moth to flame and flame to moth.
Figure 1. Athena statue, Athens, Ga., stony and still before the Classics Center at the University of Georgia.
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While in Georgia, I attended a few sessions, the opening reception, the Kairos-Digital Rhetoric Collaborative karaoke event, a meeting, Saturday’s keynote by Jen Sano-Franchini, titled “What’s Critical about Critical Interface Analysis? A Recommitment to Humanistic Inquiry In the March to Hyper-Automation,” and the social gathering at Creature Comforts. I drove home on Sunday, on the road by 8 a.m. ET, 370 miles, four states, giant peach water towers and turbulent speed differentials from one lane to the other along I-85, and as I drove I kept thinking about conferences and bandwidths, about desires for disciplinary community and mutual attention. It’s not such a surprise that Computers & Writing was saturated with polemics, gestures, and questions revolving heavily around generative AI. What are we, 2.5 years on since the November 2022 release of Chat GPT?
Many have turned sharply to AI; love AI or hate AI, the polemic casts triumphalists and refusalists in sometimes-heated exchanges, though much of the time we are nevertheless grasping for context and honing definitions that eventually return us to earth.
Returning to Earth Wide Moth, I happened across an entry from a decade ago, “Overlooking,” the entire entry consisting of a quotation from Oliver Sacks’ book, A Leg to Stand On (1994). Here it is:
I thought of a dream related by Leibniz, in which he found himself at a great height overlooking the world–with provinces, towns, lakes, fields, villages, hamlets, all spread beneath him. If he wished to see a single person–a peasant tilling, an old woman washing clothes–he had only to direct and concentrate his gaze: “I needed no telescope except my attention.”
It helps to remember that dreams, though they are not the same as windows, shake up monadic tendencies. There was a time, too bad it has elapsed, when the digital opened up a comparable sense of possibility. Byung-Chul Han writes in Hyperculture about how the hypertextual world roils with “possibilit[ies] of choice” (43), its windowing refrains inviting inhabitants–hypercultural tourists–to experience the vastness of boundless opening. Yet, as Han continues, screens akin to windows, the possibilities of choice run their course, and the “Being-before-a-window” resembles “the old windowless monads” (45).
I understand why there is so much wrapped up in generative AI, its swift onset flaring as it has across every sector, informational and communicative, industrial and material. Academics are thrashing AI for its promises and pitfalls, separating out its big-tech-pushed inevitabilities and coming to terms with its consequences. Monadic routines, or call them turtles, lurk all the way down. Post-C&W 2025, though, I don’t harbor any particularly renewed perspective on AI, digitality, or the panacea of a World Brain, impressively omnipotent. Something about a cheaper (seeming) writing tutorbot who never sleeps. Something about assessment magic and administrators raising course caps because automation frees up your time. Is the hype gaining? Fading by now? Still-glinty gewgaw, I don’t know. But I have returned from the conference uneasy about the hype cycle, for in the event of swivel-necking toward AI, what are we turning away from, abandoning, suspending mid-gesture as unsuspecting mortals covered over by volcanic ash. Almost had that last slurp of ramen, almost gathered that last fleck of pollen, almost fetched today’s eggs from the nesting box, almost sighted something marvelous through the telescope, almost, almost, but for AI’s dooming and dominant gusts.
Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World demonstrates that walking-with is an important methodology for thinking ethically and politically. Yet, Springgay and Truman assure us that ‘walking-with’ is best practiced with a method that betrays any strict adherence to method. While there is no stone left unturned (and if there is, it is because they have chosen to leave it there for the reader to engage with), their thinking is certainly not one that aims for an anchor. On the contrary, it is thought as provocation, as ‘research-creation’ of frictions, engagements (in)tension with the world. What a courageous intent given the spacetime in which they practice this endeavor, when global affect has reached a point of hatred with horrifying implications.–Patricia Ticiento Clough and Bibi Calderaro, Foreword to Walking Methodologies (2018)
Called back to Springgay and Truman’s 2018 Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, dialed to a yes-hopefullysomething taking shape for next fall’s Conference on Community Writing in Detroit, October 23-25. So I meander back in again, leafing in this book released seven years ago, just as I was moving from Michigan to Virginia, a book I later excerpted for the seminars on research design I taught in Spring 2020 and again in 2022. Back then, I thought the book would sew throughlines with method as mess, with embodied wayfinding, with writing on foot, with more-than-words (or more-than-strong-text) rhetorical velocities, and with localized, here we are now, personal geographies. I don’t know how much of any of this carried over into practices or projects, yet, these few years later, it all still feels like a vibrant accrual, a bundle of possibilities I am not finished with, even if I can’t quite pinpoint why.
Yesterday, after a mid-morning dental checkup, some odontal dialogue about how the early September root canal on #19 has not fully quieted, humming as it does through a bite guard tested lately by a grim political horizon and other unsurenesses, personal and professional. I went to the office to polish and print a planning document for this Friday’s food studies meet-up, which I happen to be leading (on foodplaces), and to check off a few other minor to-dos. I remembered to pick up Walking Methodologies, to carry it home for re-reading. And again, as before, it strikes chords. For example, from the Foreword, the doing without anchor, a nod to groundlessness, or the summoning of method to call for its discarding strict, replicable proceduralism. I nod. Yes, this. This makes sense, these dotted footfalls. I am also drawn this time to the verbal methodology, ‘to walk’ supplying splendid, sensorial abundance, lattices of affect and memory, a well of noviceness, or beginner’s mind along the lines of ‘you can never step into the same river twice.’ This reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness essentials series, verbed as it is with eleven How to titles: How to Listen, How to Smile, How to Focus, How to Connect, How to See, How to Fight, How to Relax, How to Love, How to Eat, How to Sit, and How to Walk.1I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on. Springgay and Truman’s WalkingLab and related research, when paired with the context of Hanh’s essentials, blooms consideration of what would it be to sketch and to explore methodologies verbed across this set: Listening Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, or Smiling Methodologies, Fighting Methodologies, Eating Methodologies, and so on. I suppose that’s what this thread loops me back to, a question, as a teacher, that cares for whether someone, in the frame of writing, or in the frame of being, is aware, reflectively, of experiences named by these (and other verbs). It’s nothing grandiose, just a simple provocation, to bundle as a set of teacherly a prioris questions like these (how do you eat, how do you see, how do you fight) and then to know, thereby, patchworks existential and if we are lucky that collage a more-than-humanism worthy of fostering.
Notes
1
I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on.
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 sixnine 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)
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.
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).
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.
