Transcript
Intro Script—Spoken by Megan
In this interview we spoke with Dr. Jackie Rhodes. Dr. Rhodes is a professor of writing, rhetoric, and American cultures at Michigan State University. Her work focuses on intersections of rhetoric, materiality, and technology. Her book, On Multimodality, coauthored with Jonathan Alexander, won the 2015 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and the 2014 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Techne, a book-length e-project coauthored with Jonathan Alexander, won the 2016 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. We spoke with Dr. Rhodes about her many career experiences, including being a graphic typesetter, wedding singer, and a ventriloquist, to name a few. We also enjoyed hearing about how she enjoys her passion and builds relationships in the field. We hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did.
Jackie Rhodes (JR) interviewed Oct 6, 2017 at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Dayton, OH
Interviewed by Megan Adams (MA) and Mariana Grohowski (MG)
JR: I’m from Montana originally, from Western Montana, in a small town called Florence. Population maybe now a thousand people? And I haven’t lived there for thirty years. So, I thought, well, I’m sure it shaped things, but I’ve lived in so many different places since then, and each of those have shaped me in different ways, and when you hit fifty-ish [laughs] . . . when you hit fifty and you look back over your career, it’s like, “Oh yeah, that place did that; that place did that; that place did that.” I would say probably what shaped me specifically from Montana and growing up there is my mother, who was not able to go to college. And so, my grandmother, her mother, couldn’t go to high school. So my grandmother had an eighth grade education, and she pushed her daughter, my mother, to finish high school, and when I got my PhD, I looked at her “Mom, can I stop going to college now? [laughs]
The other thing that shaped me from both my parents is that they were both avid readers, and so my mother always had a book attached to the end of her arm, and I just learned to learn to read widely and voraciously, so I have a lot of competing interests, though they’re not really competing interests. It’s more, I have a lot of trivia, and I have a lot of interests in everything from opera to country music to great canonical literature to bad genre fiction to reading encyclopedias to just sort of skimming around on the internet. So, I read a lot, and I think it all sort of combines so that there is a lot of synergy between what’s going on in my brain. Like, how do you make a connection between this and this, it’s like, “Oh, yeah! That was really cool. What if we put these two things in interaction, and what comes up?” So I think that shaped me, the reading and the going to school.
Montanans are direct. And concise. That probably influenced me in terms of—I tend to write short. It’s like, “We need a 25-page manuscript . . . ” Well, here’s 22. “We need a 300-page book.” Okay, here’s 119. So I tend to be very direct and very concise. And Montanans tend to be, especially Montanan women, tend to be very independent. So I was an early feminist there. When I went to the University of Montana, which is where I got my BA, I immediately was at the Women’s Resource Center, and I came out my first year of college into a community of lesbian feminists who were all about twelve years older than me, ten, twelve years older than me. And they just piled me up with like, “Read these books. Listen to this music. Go to this march. Do all this stuff.” So I got sort of introduced to lesbian feminism fairly early, and it’s just been part of who I am, so I guess that’s the Montana connection.
After that I was in Idaho, I was in Washington state, I was in Kentucky for a little while, then I went and did my doctoral work at Southern Mississippi, and then I was in California for sixteen years. So, I sort of bounced around the country and each of those places has been formative. Yeah, that’s the Montana connection. . . [laughs]
MA: And kind of . . . I’m going to put these two together . . . but so tell us about—I know you mentioned your childhood, but I’m assuming you did not want to be, I don’t know, maybe in rhetoric and composition when you were a little kid?
JR: What’s rhetoric and composition? [laughs]
MA: Yeah, so [laughs] is there anything that you wanted to be when you grew up?
JR: Oh yeah, I wanted to be a magician and a ventriloquist. [laughs]
MA: [laughs] I love it.
MG: Umm, what? [laughs]
JR: And then I wanted to be a concert pianist. I think I had this attachment to a job that would entail wearing a tuxedo. Umm . . .
MG: Very good. [laughs]
JR: I have no idea why. So, I still have my ventriloquist dummy from that my parents got me when I was seven. Charlie McCarthy with a tuxedo. And I’m only now creeped out by it. It’s very strange to have a ventriloquist dummy in your house. But at the time, Charlie was my best buddy. And then I went through a phase where I was going to be a surgeon until I discovered that doing things like cutting up chicken really made me queasy. I was like, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t be a surgeon.” And then I went to school. Let me back up a second—I was a wedding singer for a while. I took voice lessons for a while. I took piano lessons from the time I was five until the time I was seventeen. So, there was the concert pianist connection and then I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll be a singer.” But then, because I’m from the working poor, and so there’s this idea that you should do something that is recognizably professional. Like, you’re going to college so you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. So, when I went off to college it was like, “No, you’re not going to be a singer.” So, I decided to be a lawyer. So, I started out pre-law, political science, and I lasted two quarters, and then I changed my major about six times as an undergrad until I ended up in English.
Then when I got out of my BA I was going to be a writer, a fiction writer. And had little success with that. I had more success actually writing poetry for a while, but I got into a special session at the University of Idaho in their MFA program. They were having Marilyn Robinson coming to do a two-week intensive, and I got into that, and then I just sort of fell in love with the campus in Moscow, Idaho, and I had friends there so I went to a master’s program there in their creative writing program.
So I got a teaching assistantship, and this is one of those teaching assistantships where you get two weeks of training, and they throw you in the classroom with a syllabus, which I think is far more common still than it should be. So, I was tossed into a classroom with a syllabus, not knowing much of what I was doing while I was a creative writing emphasis. And we had sort of a praxis course, a practicum that we did at the same time as our first semester of teaching, and then we didn’t take the theory course until the second semester of our teaching. And I took the theory course with Evelyn Ashton-Jones, who had done a lot of work on gender and collaboration, and she is probably the best teacher I’ve ever seen. She was amazing. And so I had a conversion experience. You’ll hear people talk about conversion experiences in rhet/comp. I fell in love with the theory. I thought, “Well, this is interesting” because you get to think great thoughts and then enact them in the world—like, you get to philosophize, but then there is an actual, practical, this-might-change-the-world-for-the-better component to it, and I loved it. And this is in the days where we were still reading Jim Berlin’s Rhetoric and Ideology in the Classroom; that was sort of my gateway drug. So I switched then to rhet/comp and presented at my first CCCC when I was a master’s student on the use of dialogue in scholarly journals. It was a Bakhtinian exploration. So I was very into Bakhtin at that point and then . . .
So I was a rhet/comp person, and then I left academia for three years and worked as a typesetter and a graphic designer. I actually put myself through my undergrad as a typesetter and a graphic designer, so I have about ten years’ work in graphic studios and newspapers and stuff like that, which ties now to my interests in multimodality. So I took three years off, and then I was still debating about whether or not I was going to be a lawyer again. So I took the LSATs and the GREs and I thought, “Ah, my test scores will tell me which way to go,” and they didn’t because they were basically the same. So I had to make a decision, and my friend Connie Munson, who I wrote Risking Queer with, was visiting me because her car broke down in Montana, so we were holed up in the snow and she said, “What was your thesis about?” And as I started talking about it, I could feel myself getting very interested in the field again and I thought, “Okay, well I should go into rhet/comp.”
So I contacted Evelyn to get a letter of recommendation, and she said, “While you’re doing it, why don’t you throw in an application here?” because she was at the University of Southern Mississippi at the time, and so I did, just thinking, “Well, this is nice because she’s writing me a letter.” But that school out of all the ones I applied to was the only one that offered me and my girlfriend funding, and I think that’s how—I’ve talked to a lot of people. A lot of people’s’ graduate choices boil down to that. It’s like, “Well, I’d really like to go here, but I’d rather not go without my family, my lover [laughs]. . . so, I’m going to go to Southern Mississippi.”
So I went to Southern Mississippi, and it was a very—they don’t have rhet/comp people there anymore; it’s a very small program. But through Evelyn, I met a lot of people, and that was sort of the big payoff was just the networking that happen.,So I fell in with the South Florida crowd and met various sundry people who I’d only read works by, and it was good. It was a good program for me. So then as I was kicking around looking for a dissertation topic; I was over at Evelyn’s house and she had . . . I was making a joke about this yesterday in my presentation. She had a feminist archive because many feminist archives are boxes in attics full of stuff. [laughs] And she had a whole bunch of pamphlets and newspapers and old, not comics and not graphic novels, but you know, funny things, and I was making a joke then about, “Wow, feminists used to have a sense of humor! Isn’t that amazing!” This was in the seventies, and, you know, “What ever happened to that idea that feminists had this really biting sense of humor? I wonder?” So I started reading all this old stuff and then came up with my dissertation topic, which was radical feminist print culture in the seventies, so it was this circuitous route. . . . I had been living lesbian feminism, and I didn’t realize that I would come back around to it as a research topic. It just seemed like, “This is who I am,” but my research will be Bakhtin or Burke or Foucault or Deleuze or something like that. That will be my mark, and I found my interest in print culture brought me back to feminism, so . . .
MA: That’s so interesting to hear you say that . . . to say, I thought I had, I guess, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but, like, I thought I had to do this thing—
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: —to be a part of the field but then like you had that, you had that eureka moment where you were like, “Okay, no, I can do this work. That is who I am”—
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: —and obviously the social justice work was a big piece of it—
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: —for you as well, but I guess, could you just describe a little more about how that coalesced for you or like what that meant for you?
JR: Oh yeah, yeah . . . my book—my first book came from my dissertation, and this will get back to your question. The point of that, that sets it up, is that a lot of work that was going on in feminist composition at the time seemed to leave out the sixties and seventies. It would jump from the twenties to the eighties. [laughs] I think there would be these brief mentions like, “Oh yeah, there were consciousness-raising groups—oops—Carol Gilligan.” So, everybody was enamored with Carol Gilligan and Mary Field Belenky at the time. This was the late eighties/early nineties. And the point of the setup of my boo—and this was great for dissertation time—“I found a gap in the scholarship!” Well, the gap in the scholarship was if feminist activism and work did not fit a fairly narrow definition of what feminist writing was, it wasn’t looked at. So—[sound of air conditioning turning on]—here comes the air conditioning again. [laughs]
MA: Thank you.
JR: So, there was this notion that through Carol Gilligan and Mary Field Belenky and other sorts of work that women were essentially—it was a very essentialist sort of thing. Not all of it was. Not all of it was. Some of it was complicated, like the Jarratt and Worsham book that came out in ’98, for example, but there was a lot of emphasis on women’s ways of thinking, women’s ways of writing, women’s ways of doing x, y, and z. And there seemed to be painting . . . they seemed to be painting women into this sort of gentle, nurturing, non-confrontational space. I mean, there were debates, I don’t know if they are still going on, debates about whether, you know, the thesis-driven argumentative essay was essentially a male form and that we were disadvantaging women by emphasizing it in the classroom, so those sorts of debates. And I’m looking back from my early-eighties, coming- out feminist community, and I’m thinking of the Furies and Cell 16 and all these radical feminist groups who are very much in your face and confrontational and angry and could argue thesis-driven like nobody else. They were just in—like I said—in your face. And so, I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting that we haven’t studied all these in-your-face women” because they were writing, they were writing manifestos, they were writing pamphlets, they were writing all this sort of ephemeral stuff that just disappeared, and so it was sort of this . . . The other, the third part of it, because there’s my history as a graphic designer and typesetter, so my interest in print culture, my feminist history, and then the third part of it is my second foreign language in my doctoral program was actually library science, and I took lots of histories of books and histories of publishing classes. And so, I had this big print-culture interest, both personally and professionally and academically. It all sort of came together: I will look at radical feminist print culture. And then I tied it to those sorts of ephemeral texts that were happening online.
So, it all kind of came back to that point for me for my first book in Southern Mississippi. Then I branched out into queer theory and multimodality and now with my new project, I feel like I’m sort of going back to the stuff that I started with.
MA: Could you talk about your new project?
JR: My new project, I love. It excites me, and I’ve been in the field for a long time, so it’s wonderful to feel excited about your project. [laughs]
MG: I bet.
JR: The Furies were a lesbian separatist group from about ’71-’73 that published a newspaper, so this was going to be my second project after my dissertation. I’m going to look at the Furies. [laughs] So, you don’t know where your professional life is going to go. I’m going to look at the Furies because I thought this is really fascinating that they had a nationally run newspaper that was advocating, basically, overthrowing the patriarchy and taking state power based on lesbian separatism—and they believed it. And their newspaper was very much in your face. So, I was going to write this article about them, and I thought, “That’s good. That will follow up on my dissertation.” And then I got writer’s block for about fifteen years. [laughs]
MG: [laughs]
JR: Because I could not, I mean, I presented at the National Women’s Studies Association on it—I think I presented at CCCC once on it, talking about class and women’s labor, writing labor, because there were arguments in the collective about writing. So, it was just this perfect topic. So, I presented a couple times, but I could not sit down and write the thing—it just always stalled. And so I went on and did other books [laughs] and did other projects and did other stuff. But I always had my notes for the Furies project on my computer. It’s like, “I am going to come back to this.” It’s embarrassing that I haven’t finished it yet, but at the same time, the field continued and continues to ignore this period of feminist activism. It’s only really recently, like in the last few years, that people have really started looking at that period, and I find that such a shame. On the other hand, it’s like, “Great, I can hold on to this because nobody’s publishing on it, so it’s still a research hole.” I mean I got my PhD in ’99, and here we are, you know, almost twenty years later, and it’s still a research hole, and part of me thinks, “Well, maybe it’s not that important,” and it’s like, “But no, I really believe it is.” So, my second project, writer’s block, and then sometime about a year and a half ago—so fairly recently—it was this epiphany. I just woke up one morning, it’s like, “You know, they are still alive; you should talk to them. You should videotape them. You should make a documentary.” So, part of it was just that epiphany, and I think this sort of goes to my interest in multimodality and mix-up and sort of remixing things . . . it was something about just jogging my brain to think of doing it in a different genre that made it possible.
JR: So, I got my IRB clearance, and I did some gentle cyberstalking to find out where these people were, and I was able to find four of them. And I emailed them my project and my questions and what I wanted to do with it, and they all agreed to be interviewed, which was wonderful. I was so thrilled because, again, I came out in ’84 and was reading these people’s newspapers because somebody had old copies, because it was ten years old at the time that I came out. So, I’m reading these old newspapers, and it’s like, “Oh my god, I’m going to talk to Charlotte Bunch. Oh my god, I’m going to talk to Rita Mae Brown.” So, it was all very cool. So, I am still excited about that because I meet people, and I’m totally fangirling. I mean, Charlotte Bunch, it’s like, “Oh my god!” Anyway. So, four agreed to be interviewed, and then they sort of branched out and told other Furies what project was going on, and so I would either get an email from yet another Furie, saying, “I’ve heard about this project, I would like to be interviewed.” Or someone would send me contact information, and I would contact them with my spiel again. So, I’ve gotten to where there were twelve original Furies. One has died, so there are eleven left, and I think nine have agreed to be interviewed, so I’m very excited about this, and I’ve started the interviews. I have completed five now. In New York City, in Washington D.C., another one in Ohio, north of Columbus. I have scheduled ones in Santa Fe and Oakland and Studio City. So, I take massive amounts of equipment with me. You know, multiple cameras, multiple mics, and, you know, my soundboard and stuff like that and always get searched at security because something about taking a soundboard wrapped in wires—they just stop you. [laughs] There’s only been one time that somebody said, “Oh, it’s a soundboard.” But every other time, they are like, “What is this thing wrapped in wires?!” It’s like, “Sorry.”
MA: [laughs]
JR: So, I’ve got those set up. I’m going to complete the interviews by February, and then I’m turning it into a few things. One was the FemRhet presentation this year where I showed twenty-two minutes of the interviews, of just how they got together. The second is a documentary that’s going to be a ninety-minute documentary that I’m hoping to show at queer film festivals because I think it’s an important history for people to have. And then the third part, and this is sort of the geeky part that gets me more excited, is that Michigan State has a radical archive in their special collections library. And they have agreed, excitedly, to house the complete interviews. So, they’ll be available for people to do further research on them, and I think that sort of—making that history available to researchers makes me happy because then I feel like I’ve actually contributed something to the field and to queer history, so.
MA: That’s amazing.
MG: That’s amazing. Do any of these—did they talk about the war? That sounds like—
JR: A lot of them were anti-war activists.
MG: Yeah, I would think so.
JR: You start—you start talking to them, and you find out, “I was in SDS—Students for a Democratic Society. I was registering voters in the South, I was in the Southern Female Rights Union.”
MG: —that time period, I mean—
JR: They were all very active in anti-imperialist and anti-war movements, and then the way that a lot of those movements happened, you know, you go from the anti-war movement to a feminist movement to a lesbian movement—is that first there’s the split from the larger anti-war movement because a lot of it is male-controlled. You know, the guys were the ones getting the interviews and doing the leadership stuff and, you know, it’s the sixties, it’s Mad Men time, and this “Wow. We have women in our organization; they can make us coffee while we fight the war.” And so then you have the feminist movement breaking off from that, saying, “This is not right.” And this is happening sort of at the same time as the formation of NOW.
MG: Mmhmm.
JR: And I think a lot of times when people look at the formation of the feminist—the second wave, which is a problematic term—but that particular period, they think, “Well, there was Betty Friedan and then there was NOW and then there was Gloria Steinem. The end.” It’s like, no, there are multiple entry points for the feminist movements at the time. But so you have the feminists breaking off from the radical left because of the sexism, and then you have the lesbians breaking off from the larger feminist movement because of the heterosexism, and at the same time, you have African-American women’s movements going on, you have the Chicano movement that’s leading towards a different sort of feminism coming out. So all this stuff is happening, but this particular group was mostly split off from the male left. The Furies had people in them who were part of the Chicago Seven, so there are a lot of connections to a lot of different groups at the time.
MG: That’s really exciting.
JR: Yeah.
MA: Yeah, it is.
JR: It makes it so when I sit there, I think, “This is so cool.” You’re sitting in front of history.
MG: Right.
JR: With people who are very much alive and much engaged and still doing social-justice actions, and you think, “This is just cool. This is what research should be.”
MG: That’s what Megan does.
MA: This is interesting for me, and I think for other people. I don’t want to skip over this here, but it’s so—I love that you said, like, “I sat on it for fifteen years, and then I realized that it was multimodal.”
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: That I needed to interview these people, and you think about, like, the power inherent in that format, right? I love that you’re then taking it out to the film festivals and archiving it, which is all beautiful. I think that also, how did you—I mean you kind of glossed over—“I have all this equipment.” How did you learn to use it, how did you . . .
JR: Oh.
MA: For someone who is like, “I want to do that. I think my work could look like that.” Where do you—how did you start?
JR: Well, one of my other career paths—
MA: [laughs] Of course.
MG: [laughs]
JR: This is when I was twelve or thirteen after the surgery—I was like, “I’m not going to be a surgeon, so what will I be?” I was going to be a filmmaker.
MA: Nice.
JR: I was president of my drama club in high school.
MA: Hmm!
JR: But I never wanted to be an actor. I always wanted to be a director and producer. I wanted to make things, and so I still have some of my old home movies, which is hilarious. And then I’m working on a Super 8 back when we actually had film, I’m working on a Super 8 camera, I have a film editor where I can splice things together. I tried a little slow-motion animation and made a monster movie and made a detective movie and made these weird commercials—
MG: [laughs]
JR: —just like playing with cameras and part—so that was part of it, but part of it was my type-setting experience, which I had to learn a lot of different computer systems, and so I learned how to learn technology. I’m not afraid of technology. I never think of myself as a total tech geek—I think I’m a highly literate user. I can approach technologies as, “Okay, I could use the instruction manual or I could just play with it.” So, I tend to play with equipment a lot. So, I had played with enough equipment, so when I got to, I mean, I always had cameras, when I got to Michigan State, I got a really good video—digital video—camera. And then I started researching sound equipment because I knew for film festivals, you can be forgiven a lot of bad video because they’ll just think, “Oh, you’re an auteur, and you’re doing something interesting.”
[air conditioning sound] Here comes the air conditioning again. But the sound is not forgiven. You have to have good sound for those films, and so I did a lot of research and played with a lot of audio equipment and ended up with an audio kit.
The other part of it—I’m sorry I’m jumping back and forth—
MA: No, this is okay.
JR: [laughs] Part of my history in Montana is that I played keyboards in a country-western band.
MA: [laughs]
MG: Who are you? [laughs]
JR: [laughs]
MA: [laughs]
JR: My family is a family of musicians, and my family had a band. And so we all grew up playing music, and then when my older brother turned about twelve or thirteen, he started playing drums with my parents, and then when I turned about thirteen or fourteen, I was playing keyboards in their band. So, we were going out to the bars in Montana and playing country music for people so they could dance. And then I joined a couple of rock ‘n roll cover bands, either playing keyboards or bass guitar. Keyboards much better than bass guitar. I was a very bad bass player. But you get familiar with how to run sound equipment, right, so there’s a lot of just playing with equipment and having professional experience with it, so that I have a mindset of playing—you know, that none of this is particularly scary; you just need to play with it and figure it out. [laughs]
MA: I love that advice. So, I also kind of want to go back to your fifteen years that you—
JR: [laughs]
MA: So, I also want to go back to, like, your fifteen years that you sat on this project—
JR: [laughs] My fifteen-year writing block?
MA: And you obviously have written other things, so, and then part of that is knowing, like, the timing is right, as well, I’m sure, but how did you kind of, so, this is like a twofold question. I love speaking to scholars like you who are so passionate about their work, and so I think that—but I guess we’re not always so passionate about all of our projects, maybe? Maybe, I don’t know, I’m not there yet. So, how did you kind of get through it to, like, keep publishing even though your heart project, right, the heart-and-soul project was something that maybe just the timing wasn’t there or you had to—and I don’t want to impose on your story at all—
JR: No, I think, you know, my other projects I was as passionate about, but it was a different sort of passion. It was sort of like polyamorous research. [laughs] I was in my doctoral program so resistant to queer theory because I so did not want to do because I didn’t want it to be that just because I was queer I had to do queer theory. That, “Oh, automatically you must be interested in this.” It’s like, no. I’m not going to do it for that reason. So I sort of put it off, and I had—I would argue with people about queer theory and how it was a white, male endeavor that depoliticized LGBT movements, that it was anti-lesbian, that it—I mean, all these sorts of things, and I can probably still make those arguments now and then counter-argue, I mean, I contain multitudes. So then Jonathan Alexander put a call for papers out in 2001-2002 for things having to do with queer theory and composition, and my friend Connie, who I was referring to earlier, was a doctoral student at Emory. And I was a brand new, baby professor at Cal State San Bernardino. And Connie and I had known each other since we were undergrads, and it was like, “Hey, here’s this thing. You’re into queer theory; I’m not,” because I’m, you know, resisting it. But she very much wasn’t. I said, “Let’s write something together.” So, it was basically that relationship with Connie that made me write the piece on queer theory, the “Risking Queer” that turned into Jonathan and Michelle Gibson’s special cluster of queer articles in JAC. And so then Jonathan said, “Hey, we should all get together at CCCC,” because I had never met him. “We should all get together at CCCC and have dinner.” So he arranged for all of the authors from this cluster to get together for a big dinner at CCCC, and Jonathan and I met and just clicked instantly. We have the same sense of humor. We have very similar backgrounds in some ways. And so we met for dinner, and then the next day I think I went to a panel, and then I ran into Jonathan, and it was like “Hey, let’s skip the conference and go to the bookstore.” So, we went to a bookstore across the street and drank coffee; then we came back to the conference hotel, and I think we ran around the conference hotel playing all the pianos that were out. [laughs] Being bad kids. We just hit it off; we just clicked so well together. That’s what I mean by polyamorous research. I think a lot of times it’s the relationships with people that get you interested in things. Then that turned toward a long interest in queer theory and multimodality and queer rhetorics and digital rhetorics, and that was a very prolific relationship. Still prolific—we actually have a follow-up project to Techne that we’re working on now. So yeah, I kept myself busy for the fifteen years. I was publishing. [laughs]
MA: It’s so great to hear you say, though, like, so that seems to also be a theme, at least, in the—you’re the fifth interview we’ve done—is this idea that, like, this focus on collaboration and relationships—
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: —in the field. And so I’m wondering if you have any advice for people who, it’s twofold because I remember coming into the field and being very overwhelmed at my first CCCC. How do I find people—
JR: Oh, I was, too.
MA: Yeah.
JR: Yeah.
MA: But the other thing is, so I’m a third-year, tenure-track, but I still also feel that I’ve found my people, but sometimes I feel like I work in a vacuum. Like, I’m just by myself, and I know Mare and I have talked about this, as well. So how did you maintain, first of all, how did you find your people? And that seemed, like, very serendipitous with Jonathan, like, I love that story. I think that happens a lot, too.
JR: Yeah.
MA: But are there any intentional ways you can do that, and then also how do you maintain them? Are there any strategies you have for, like, making sure you are consciously maintaining and productive in those relationships—in collaboration and relationships . . .
JR: Let me think about that. . . . Collaboration is one of those master tropes in rhetoric and composition. And that’s been true for a while. I mean, once we got out of the seventies and eighties and got into the social turn, and people were talking about social constructionism all the time, it’s like, “Ah, collaboration, that’s the way to go.” And so there was this real push for everybody to collaborate. And I resist that a little bit because I don’t think collaboration is necessarily good in and of itself because very often people pick bad collaborators, and they have failed collaborations, and then they don’t want to do it again. Jonathan and I clicked, and so we had a very productive—I shouldn’t say that in the past tense ‘cause we’re still working together. We’ve had a very productive collaboration. Connie and I collaborated, and I think that was because of the past relationship, and she’s now in . . . oh, she is becoming a minister. [laughs] So she is, I’m blanking on where she is now, but she’s becoming a minister, so she’s not in the field anymore, so that sort of collaboration isn’t going to happen. But I talk with my grad students about this because they all think they have to collaborate, and I tend to caution them, not away from collaboration, but to put so much thought into who they can work with. Because I think that it’s better to collaborate with somebody whose interests do not match yours than it is to find somebody who matches your interests that you can’t work with. Because it’s such, I mean, it should be an intense and passionate relationship. You are creating something together.
I mean, making little research babies, and so you have to, you have to think about who you are willing to make that commitment with and realize that the project itself is going to cause drama; it’s going cause hard feelings sometimes; it’s going to involve emotion. And if it’s being done right, it’s going to involve emotion and affect and all of these hard things that happen with relationships, and it can’t ever be just a professional collaboration. It’s going to be a personal collaboration, too, I think, that’s—the best collaborations take that into account. And I think it’s such an idiosyncratic, like, who can you—it doesn’t even have to be somebody you get along with. It’s just somebody you’re willing to commit to.
I’ve done other collaborations either on grant writing or teaching collaborations and stuff like that, and sometimes they don’t work well at all, and I think it’s because we weren’t willing to make that sort of commitment to each other personally. But I think the best, most productive collaborations are the ones where it takes into account emotion and attachment and the idea of creating something together—to keep it going, to keep it going. So, my advice is don’t do it like online dating. It’s like, “Oh, we have a lot in common; we should collaborate.” Yeah, that might be a disaster. I think you really just have to work with people and see how it’s coming together, and then maybe float the idea of maybe collaborating, and then you work on it together, and sometimes it’s just a one-shot deal and other times it goes on for years.
MA: That’s such wonderful advice. Thank you. So, the other question I had would be, so you mentioned earlier when we weren’t recording, you’re now at an R1—
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: You have time to do this work, this documentary work, which we know, digital scholarship takes a lot, a large amount of commitment and time.
JR: Mmhmm.
MA: How did you manage to publish when you weren’t at an R1? Because you had mentioned that earlier. Are there any, like, strategies—
JR: —tips for that? [laughs]
MA: Yeah. How did you do that?
JR: It was difficult. Part of it’s just I love writing, and I love creating things, and that was what I got into the field to do. And teaching. It’s the service that eats up everything. I was at Cal State San Bernardino, which is on the quarter system still and teaching three classes a quarter. And they are switching to semesters in 2020, and it’s going to go to a 4/4. And because that was what they saw as the equivalent of the 3/3/3. So, it was a teaching-intensive place. You could get tenure purely on your teaching or your research or your service, although we always advised people, “For god’s sake, do not try to get tenure on your service.” Because service is the goldfish that will fill the bowl that you give it. [laughs] If you create space for it, it will just expand. I loved my teaching. A lot of my scholarship is not directly related to my teaching except in the sense of as I read more and more queer theory or feminist theory, it informs how I teach and how I have conversations with people, even though I don’t do classroom-based research. That is one way that you can do it. If you can base your research in your classroom at a teaching university, then you can sort of double-dip, but it’s just so hard, especially when you are a writing instructor. So, it is difficult to have three writing courses and do it responsibly and do the assessment responsibly and meet with your students responsibly and at the same time carve out time to do research. So, time management has never been one of my strong suits. I had to teach myself how to keep a calendar and how to keep lists and—lists and calendars and sort of creating this external structure for myself because my mind was so full of fifty-bajillion things that I didn’t have an internal structure for it. So, I had to sort of create this artificial external structure to keep myself prioritized. So, yeah, I was thinking—I don’t know if that’s a class thing or a working-poor thing. Like, I would be interested in looking at people who come from different backgrounds and whether they rely on external or internal structures to keep their job in a particular way. I think there is probably some connection there. Somebody should do research on it.
Part of it is remembering what you love about the job. I think sometimes people get involved in committee work or other sorts of service obligations—service opportunities, they would call them—that you start thinking that, you know, “Deciding this thing about this arcane policy is the most important thing in my life.” It’s like no, remember when you got into the field? You wanted to read and write. You wanted to read, write, and teach and—because the teaching part of it, I thought, “This is the best job in the world. I read and write and then I talk with people about reading and writing—it’s so cool.” It’s one of the reasons why I loved teaching first-year comp. I haven’t taught it for a couple years now but I’m sort of hankering to get back to it because you get first-year students who get excited about learning and reading and writing. And so it’s this really rich environment for everybody concerned. So, I think remembering why you’re doing what you’re doing, and that’s hard to do when you are in the midst of grading twenty-five papers each for three classes [laughs] and serving on committees and trying to maintain a life. So, remembering that external structures, that’s a very brass tacks—I think that keeping track of your calendar, prioritizing things, making lists, stuff like that. Because I found that even during my dissertation—how do you keep going on the dissertation? Make lists. Even if they are these silly lists where it’s like, “I’m going to read three paragraphs today.” [laughs] I’m going to open up my file cabinet today. Something just to keep yourself moving. I think I am blessed with insomnia, that’s part of it—I don’t recommend it. But I tend not to sleep much. I think part of what’s been productive, and this is maybe the most difficult thing, is that I have a life outside of the university. That’s hard. That’s hard. I think that you’re asking for burnout if all you do is work. And so I was very fortunate to meet my wife at a committee meeting of all places, [laughs] and we’ve been together for like sixteen years, and she’s a fellow academic. I think that’s also serendipitous, so we understand each other’s work. It’s like, it may look like I’m just sitting here and reading here, but I’m actually working, so . . . I think a lot of it is having that life where I’m not entirely defined by what I produce, and that creates the space in my brain to re-engage with what I love. So having it come back to love begets love.
MA: I love that! I do, I do.
JR: [laughs] I know I sound all squishy. [laughs]
MA: It’s important to remember, I think, especially for people who are graduate students but also people who are, like, just new professors, where you have that tenure clock in your head—
JR: Right, and that’s—and that’s the clock. That’s the external structure that’s driving everything, and I think that that drive, the tenure clock is so stressful. It’s so amazingly stressful, and it makes you hate what you are doing.
MA: That’s how we both feel.
JR: It’s like, I’m not creating this work because I love doing it. I’m creating it because I need to have x number of articles and a monograph, in order—
MG: So I can have health insurance. [laughs]
JR: Yeah. [laughs]
MA: That’s what we were talking about, and yeah, so—
JR: Yeah, it’s, you know, in some ways, I think that ironically that might have freed me up at a teaching institution because the work I did, I did because I loved doing it. It’s like, I knew I could get tenured on my teaching. My teaching is good, so the work was just gravy, and I loved it.
Yeah. And so now switching to an R1, I have a 2/2 load and doctoral students, who are fascinating to talk to, right? Especially new doctoral students, just like brand new, first-year students, they’re learning new things. It’s a new community, and they’re still fascinated by reading and writing and talking about reading and writing and all the things—learning all the things—so that’s fun. But having a 2/2 load makes it so I have actual structured time to do research. I also have the funding to do the research, so I think that more than time, and this is part of the problem with the institution at large in the United States, is that difference between teaching universities and research universities. That there’s actual funding to go do these things I would not be able—this is probably what solved part of my writer’s block. I would not be able to do the project I’m doing if I was still at a teaching university with the research funding that’s not available there.
MG: I have to ask about you—where were you?
JR: Cal State San Bernardino.
MG: [laughs] Thank you. So, that was your first job out of grad school?
JR: Yeah, yeah.
MG: Why that place? And talk about why you got that job, how you got that job . . .
JR: When I went on the market, I applied to 120 jobs because the market was much—I mean, this is ‘99, the market still for rhet/comp is much better than the literature market. But even the rhet/comp market has slowed down. At that time, most of the ads were for generalists. That’s not the case anymore. So, I applied for 120 jobs and got thirteen or fourteen MLA interviews and had four campus visits and three job offers. So, I actively chose to go to Cal State San Bernardino because the people are so good there. It’s just, part of it was, I was from Montana, and you go to San Bernardino, and the mountains are in the background, and it’s like, “Oh, mountains, I love mountains. I think I’ll go here.” So, the scenery was beautiful because the smog hadn’t rolled in for the summer yet. It was beautiful. But the department was so good. The department was so good. It’s one of those things, if you can find a department where the people are functional, and even if they don’t all love each other, they will work productively on committees together. If you can find that, that is worth its weight in gold. It’s much better to go to a healthy department than go to a place where you might have a better salary but the department doesn’t work. It was a place where even though it was a teaching university, they were all very interested in what I was doing. We were all very interested. It was like, “Oh, you’re working on this?,That’s so cool.” Or ,“Oh, you’re teaching this? This is great.” And we would have these conversations in the hall, and it was just a nice, supportive place. It was functional. That’s probably unusual, but it’s a highly functional department, just a great place to be, and I like the people a lot. And it was easy to make the decision. It’s just the vibe. All of these sort of . . . you can’t really articulate what it was, but you can kind of feel like this is good and it’s real. It’s not just we put on a good face for the interview. You can actually feel that the people were good and see how they interact with each other, and so, yeah, I chose it deliberately.
MG: So, how did this new job fall into your lap or how?
[MG and MA inaudible]
JR: No, it was actually fairly hard to leave because I had such good relationships there. And I had been there since ’99, so about sixteen or seventeen years . . .
MG: That’s a marriage.
JR: It is! No, it is. It is entirely. You form relationships; you develop social capital. Because I worked a lot with the faculty senate and university-level committees, so I knew people across campus and obviously had my friends and my infrastructure there. Part of it was the upcoming switch to semesters and the 4/4 teaching load, because I felt like I was already running at maximum capacity, and I looked down that road, and thought, “I can’t keep doing this if they increase this. I will not be able to do the things I love, and I think my teaching will suffer.” Not because—I have so many friends, really good friends, who are non-tenure track who do amazing teaching. Amazing teaching. And they are teaching a 4/4 already. I think that I would resent it, and that makes your teaching worse. And I feel for them, my friends who are still back at Cal State; they are still deciding whether it is going to a 5/5.
MG: Oh.
JR: For the non-tenure track faculty. It’s a horrible situation. So, I saw that coming down the road, and I also turned 50, and I thought, you know, ”If you’re going to make a jump, if you’re going to do something different, you better do it now because you’re going to be retiring in fifteen years. You need to go someplace where you’re going to have a chance to have a trajectory.” So it was time, it just felt. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis; my mid-life crisis happened a couple years before that, and I bought a Mustang—leased a Mustang because my wife was like, “You can’t buy a Mustang, just lease it. Get it out of your system.” So I bought a Mustang—leased a Mustang.
MA: [laughs]
JR: And then I turned fifty and thought, “This might be time to make a change.” It coincided—this will be a good connection—it coincided with FemRhet at Arizona State.
MG: Really?
JR: And I was talking with Malea Powell, who said, “Hey, we have this job; you should apply for it.” You know, and it wasn’t like, “I am seeking you out; you must apply.” It was just sort of like we were BS-ing about something because Malea and I had known each other for a number of years. “Oh, yeah, you should totally apply for it.” So, I did. And I got the job and negotiated a spousal hire. Because if Aurora hadn’t gotten the spousal hire, I wouldn’t have gone.
MG: Sure.
JR: I mean, because again, you have to remain attached to what you’re attached to, and that relationship is so important. So, negotiated a spousal hire, and we both came to Michigan.
MG: How’s it going?
JR: Oh, it’s great. I love Michigan State. You have a lot of very productive people. You have, and again, it’s a functional department.
MG: Good.
JR: And that was, again, part of the vibe. I could feel when I was there for the campus visit, “Well, this is cool,” and I knew a lot of the people. Like, I knew Bump Halbritter and Julie Lindquist, and I knew Stuart Blythe a little bit and knew Malea and Dànielle DeVoss, and they’re all there, doing their very productive things. So it’s a different sort of vibe where people still are very interested in what you’re up to because it’s like, “That’s so cool! I’m doing this other thing; isn’t that cool?” And there’s a lot of support for doing the research, and there’s more time for it. Because like I said, I’m on a 2/2 now. So, there is the community that engages with the research and expects it, but there’s also the time to do it, and like I said, and there’s also the funding.
So, that part of the job is great. I’m also working with the Dean’s office now. I just got appointed to be the Director of the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Initiative, so I’m the consortium director, so it’s some long, you know, “Consortium of Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research” that we’ve crunched down to something called CEDAR. So, I’m the CEDAR leader.
MG: CEDAR leader! [laughs]
JR: And that’s actually been really good for me because it’s tying in with some of my research and activist interests because it’s not just about diversity in terms of Benetton-ad diversity where we have three people of color and two white people and three women and two men and, you know, [laughs] that sort of just bean-counting diversity. What does it actually mean to change structures to address inequities? So, we’re working on that there, so I’m doing some admin stuff, which gets me course releases.
MA: Nice.
JR: So I have more time. But having the time, I think that it’s like when you had asked about “how do you stay productive?” It’s like, I need external structures, but I need time. Time is the luxury.
MG: Yeah, it is. I think the only thing we haven’t asked about—because I think you’ve answered every other question . . .
JR: You have all those mentoring questions.
MG: Yeah, that’s what I’d love to hear about.
JR: Oh, mentoring!
MG: How would you be mentored? Or—there’s seven questions, basically. [laughs] What is your relationship like with your mentor? How important is mentoring to you? Do you mentor others?
JR: My mentoring has been sort of haphazard. I mean, the mentoring of me. I think my mentoring of other people isn’t as haphazard as what happened. My director, my dissertation director, we had a fairly strong mentoring relationship. She was my thesis director and my dissertation director, so we had that relationship for a while, and then she got burned out because her department was not a good department. It was one of those literature’s-at composition’s-throat sort of places. So, she got burned out; she suffered just horrible burn-out. She left the field. In fact, she left the field the same year I defended my dissertation. Just gone. And I think because she so didn’t want to be reminded of that, we haven’t spoken in a dozen years. Yeah, we just don’t speak, so I don’t have that mentoring relationship, which I find really sad because I know some people are like, “Oh, I’m meeting my dissertation director. This is great; we’re going to do this.” I’m like, yeah, I don’t have that. I have an absent mentor. And so in some ways, it’s a very queer sort of thing because a lot of people, as you know, they come out, and they lose their family. And then you create the queer family, the queer kin from among your friends. And I think I’ve had a similar sort of mentoring thing where, you know, I came out, I defended my dissertation, I’m now a grown-up professor, and then I lost my family. And so I’ve sort of cobbled together different sort of mentoring relationships. I mean, Cindy Selfe, who is just a wonderful human being—[laughs]
MA: —yeah.
JR: —always happy to see me at conferences and we email back and forth and now she’s enjoying her retirement but she was very—she was always interested in what I was up to. And so I had asked her for specific sorts of advice, and then Techne went through CCDP with Jonathan, and that was cool because Cindy had always been after us. “You’ve got to write something for us; you’ve got to write something for us.” And so it was this push to publish in particular ways. Other people—I’m thinking like Susan Jarratt, when I was still a doctoral student, had seen a presentation I had done . . . oh no, no . . . it was actually I had published a piece that was a review essay looking at Reclaiming Rhetorica. And talking about historiography and the problem of just adding people to a canon. So she contacting me after having read that piece and asked me to write something for Peitho [pie-tho], Peitho [pay-tho], I always mispronounce it. Peitho, Peitho all the unwritten, it’s like, “I don’t know; let me hear somebody else pronounce it.” Um, anyway, so she called me, and it was out of the blue, and so you have these fangirl moments of like, “Oh my god! It’s Susan Jarratt. She’s on the phone, and she wants me to do something!” So, and Susan and I are friends now. We’ve known each other forever, and she’s now at UC Irvine, so when I was at Cal State San Bernardino, she was working with Jonathan, so we got to know each other better, and she would offer interesting, like, editing advice. So you sort of cobble together—Cindy’s getting me to publish in a particular way; Susan is doing editing and just sort of interesting intellectual stuff. Probably my main mentor for a long time was Susan Miller, who just died a couple years ago, and that was really hard because she was somebody—I’m going to sound like such a dork on this that I totally fangirled about—because I think that Susan Miller was the most brilliant writer in rhet/comp. I mean, Rescuing the Subject, Textual Carnivals, and her other work was just brilliant. Trust in Texts is brilliant. And so I met her through my connection with Evelyn, my first mentor, because Evelyn’s director Gary Olson was at South Florida, and he knew Susan Miller. And so all of these sort of relationships led to Susan Miller asking me at a CCCC, “Well, what are you presenting on?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m tying together Vico and Wollstonecraft.” It’s one of my other interests, but it’s gone. [laughs] And we were riding in an elevator. It was one of those moments where it’s like, “Oh my god! Susan Miller is on the elevator with me, asking about my presentation!” I said something, and then she was just totally silent. And I thought, “Oops.”
MG: “I said the wrong thing.”
JR: Yeah! And then right as we got to her floor she stopped and said, “That’s really interesting.” I thought, “Oh my god!”
MA: [laughs]
JR: So then I didn’t stalk her exactly, but I would take the opportunity to, like, strike up a conversation because—and then we started emailing back and forth to each other, and then we started talking on the phone together. She helped me so much with things like writing a cover letter for a senior position, which is a different process than writing it for an assistant position. She helped me revise my CV. She helped me—she anthologized part of my first book in the Norton.
MG: Awesome.
JR: So there were just these relationships where, for mentoring, that were, like I said, more or less a queer relationship. Like, you seek people out for different sorts of mentoring, and I think, you know, it’s sort of like when you get married. You can’t have one person who does it all for you. I think you need to have a community of mentors who do different sorts of things, and sometimes the best mentoring is just I have somebody I can talk to at the conference. So that you don’t feel lost at CCCC because you see familiar people. It’s like “Oh, hi!” [laughs] “I’m a person. I’m a somebody.” But my own mentoring, like I said, has been fairly haphazard, and the break with Evelyn was fairly, I would say, traumatic just because we had been so intensely doing the thesis and doing the dissertation and doing the doctoral work, and there wasn’t any particular animosity at the end—it was just, she just sort of disappeared. Yeah.
So, my own mentoring, yeah, I mentor students. One of my students the other day said, “I think of you as like an excavator. Like, you excavate people’s potential.” And I said, “Oh, I think of myself as sort of a talent scout, like, I find people, and I’m like “Oh that is so cool. You should do more of it.” So I like finding in people—and it’s not like I’m going out and I’m like, “I’m going to go find talent.” It’s, you find the people, and you find what their special interest is, and you get excited about it because it’s like, “That is so cool.” And it doesn’t have to be something I’m an expert in. It’s just finding that somebody has a hook where they’ve discovered something that so motivates them that they really want to follow through on it, and then working with them to, you know, like I said, not necessarily because I have that research interest but because I’m interested in their process. So that’s the sort of mentoring. I’m looking for the process. I’m looking for that spark, and that’s what I want to engage with. I directed something like thirty-six theses at my last institution, and I’m directing a couple dissertations now, but a lot of the mentoring was not thesis work or dissertation work—it was just in class, trying to get people to find that and then just sort of nurture it along. A lot of my thesis work I had no research interest in, it was just, you know, I wanted to, I don’t know, scoot things along. [laughs]
MA: We hear that a lot, too, actually. [laughs]
MG: Oh yeah, just move it, move it along.
MA: [laughs]
MG: No, I hear encouragement.
MA: Mmhmm.
MG: I’ve heard your reputation precedes you that you’ve encouraged people. And that’s what I hear you saying, too. You find the thing in that person, and, I mean, that’s all we need is, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” Like validated it. That’s so lovely.
MA: Mmhmm.
JR: Mmhmm.
MG: Someone said it was okay. Keep going, you know?
JR: Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Sometimes you need—I think that you always need that. It’s the imposter syndrome.
MG: Perfect. We have a question—
JR: Yeah. I think you never stop needing that sort of, not approval, but sort of acknowledgment that, “Yeah, that’s an okay idea.”
MA: Mmhmm.
JR: And because, you know, when you’re writing your dissertation, and I think that goes into every bit of writing, by the time—I tell my students this—by the time you get done with your dissertation, you have to go through a period where you just hate it. [laughs]
MG: Yeah, been there.
JR: There’s just this moment where you’re like, “Oh god, please stop.” But you also go through, or at least I went through the moment with my thesis and my dissertation where you think, “Surely everybody already knows this.”
MA: Mmhmm.
JR: Because you’re so familiar with the research, and it’s become common sense to you, and you forget that it’s not that to other people, and so you need to have those moments where you can sort of look outward, and you can say, “Well, this is what I am working on,” and somebody says, “I hadn’t thought of that.” That is cool, and I think maybe that’s not exactly imposter syndrome—that’s more just human connection. As far as imposter syndrome, it never goes away. It never goes away. I have heard, or read, a couple of, like, pop articles that talk about imposter syndrome as a particularly gendered phenomenon. I’m not sure in my own experience if that’s been true because a lot of my grad students, regardless of gender, are going through it. I don’t know if it’s necessarily part of humanities scholarship? That might be it, too, because so much relies on that single author, the person engaged, and so much relies on personhood. I think that’s part of it, too, I’m not sure if our colleagues in the sciences suffer from the same sort of imposter syndrome as humanities scholarship does, but yeah, I still go through it. It’s like, “Eventually, they’re going to figure out I’m a fraud.” I mean, “It’s a good gig right now.” [laughs] “I’ll just keep publishing these books, but eventually, they’re going to figure out that I’m just totally full of shit, or, you know, whatever [laughs] and then it will all go away, and I’ll become a magician and a ventriloquist again.”
MG: Just like you wanted!
JR: Yeah, just like I originally wanted when I was six or seven years old, but I have students who really struggle with it. They’re convinced that, you know, “I don’t belong in grad school.” And other people are like, “I don’t deserve the job that I have,” or “I don’t deserve the promotion I got,” or this book, “Somebody’s going to figure out the fatal flaw in the argument in a review and then my reputation will be destroyed.” That sort of constant, lurking over your back—“You’re not quite good enough”—that you’re not legit can really be stifling. And so part of it is sort of getting back to why I do what I do. You always have to remind yourself that you do it because you love reading and writing. You do it because you love reading and writing, and it doesn’t really matter if other people don’t like what you do because your purpose for doing it is because you love reading and writing, and you feel like you can make a contribution to the world. And it might not be enough of a contribution, but it’s something that you’re actually participating in, so.
MA: That’s lovely. Thank you.
JR: [laughs]