Transcript
Intro script—spoken by Mariana Grohowski: In this interview we spoke with Dr. Andrea Lunsford. Dr. Lunsford is Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English Emerita, Claude and Louise Rosenberg Jr. Fellow, and Former Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2000, she was Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University. In this interview we talk about how her childhood in Eastern Tennessee cultivated a love for nature and storytelling that eventually led her to teach and study rhetoric and writing.
Lunsford has written or co-authored nineteen books, conducted workshops on writing and program reviews at scores of Northern American universities, served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and Chair of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Division on Writing, and is a member of the MLA Executive Council. We know you'll enjoy listening to Dr. Lunsford talk about her storied career as much as we did. Enjoy.
Andrea Lunsford (AL) interviewed on October 6, 2017, at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Dayton, Ohio
Interviewed by Megan Adams (MA) and Mariana Grohowski (MG)
AL: My name is Andrea Abernathy Lunsford and I was born in Oklahoma but moved to Tennessee when I was—to eastern Tennessee in the mountain region—when I was very young. My father was having trouble finding work in Oklahoma but my mother's parents were . . . her family all was from these hills of eastern Tennessee, and so we moved and lived with my grandparents for awhile, and then all my uncles and aunts were there, and I had lots and lots of cousins. It was very rural. Everybody had farms. We rode horses. We went up to the mountain—horseback riding in the mountains—and so I grew up in that rural atmosphere until my dad did get a job and then we moved into Knoxville. So—and then moved a lot after that. But those early years of being on the farm with my cousins and especially being with my grandparents, sitting on . . . they had . . . their wrap-around porch of their house in rocking chairs and listening to my grandfather play the fiddle and the banjo and sing songs and my grandmother tell stories. She was a real storyteller. My ancestry is all Scotch Irish. And so that oral tradition of sharing stories—I know now as an adult—is deeply ingrained in that culture. I did not know that as a child; I just thought that's what everybody did. So I'm, that's where I, that's where I'm from, where I grew up. My parents moved around to Maryland for awhile and then to St. Augustine, Florida, where I graduated from high school and attended my state school at the University of Florida for my BA and MA and then I got my first job teaching. I believe my salary was about forty-five hundred dollars. It must’ve been in like 1964 or something like that. So I've gotten to know a little bit more about the Oklahoma part of my background and my father's people as in my adult years. But I didn't, I don't ever really think of that as home. In fact, I haven't really thought about any place as home until very recently. I really despised Florida. It's the weather, the weather, and it's flat and hot and humid and buggy and sandy and I just didn't like anything about it. But I stayed there, of course, because that's just what you did. It was not until I got out of Florida [laughs] that I realized that was definitely not the place for me.
And then I went to graduate school at Ohio State and that was a little better geographically. But then I had the great good fortune of moving to the West Coast to the University of British Columbia for my first job after my PhD and I'd never been west of the Mississippi River and I looked around and thought, “Oh my goodness. This is just the most wonderful place in the world.”
But I taught there, I taught at EVC for ten years but my marriage broke up and that . . . that could have been home for me but then wasn't home, so I moved back to the States and eventually, after teaching at Ohio State for thirteen years, ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I am definitely a West Coast person and I, without knowing what I was doing, I bought a lot at a place called the Sea Ranch, which is on the Northern Coast between Bodega Bay and Mendocino, if you know that area at all. And it's a managed community, fifty-two years old called the Sea Ranch, and I just bought this lot without even knowing a thing about it. And the motto of the place is “living lightly on the land” and it's got a very specific ethos and all about conservation and appreciating the place where you are with all of its flora and fauna and that's home. So here I am at seventy-five years old and I have found a home. So that's where I came from and where I have ended up.
MA: And then, so our second question would be how—And I, so you mentioned many communities where you've been so you can answer this however you want—but how have you . . . how is either . . . or maybe there's one community that sticks out as particularly shaping who you are and what you do. Or maybe it's each of those communities that shaped a little bit of who you are and the stories, you know, you choose to tell and the work you do.
AL: Well, I mentioned my grandmother and her stories. She hardly ever was out of eastern Tennessee. She was very proud of having graduated from the eighth grade at the Friends School— at a Quaker school—in Friendsville, Tennessee. She wrote a poem for every one of her grandchildren but she was not . . . she was a self-educated woman but very wise. I didn't know any of that until much later in my life. But her love of language and her love of wordplay and her storytelling deeply, deeply affected me and in my, maybe in my early 30s I got to spend quite a bit of time with her, interviewing her and asking her questions, and she knew how to make medicines she learned from Indians, how to make medicines out of the bark of trees and things like that. She was just full of the most wonderful information, and she was very, very, very funny. Gosh, I could go on about her forever. And then my mother was very much like her in the sense that she also was a storyteller. My mother was the only one of all the children in that very large family that got to go to college.
She went to a very small college—Maryville College out in Maryville, Tennessee—and got a degree in French and then taught in a one-room school. So my connection to teaching and to . . . and to the love of language and to the love of story goes back to my, my mother and my grandmother. So, that's one of the great influences in my life.
MA: Can you think—and this is putting you on the spot. So of course, you don’t have to answer—but can you think of a specific time or instance where they told you a story or any any specific memory you have that really impacted you that kind of stands out with either of them?
AL: Well my grandmother told me a story that—I'll tell you about two stories that she told me. She told me about how often the children—she had seven children—how often they were ill, how often they were sick, and there were no doctors except for a doctor who rode around on a horse and would come sometimes. My mother got—when she was quite small—got very, very sick and wouldn't eat anything. The only thing that my grandmother could get her to eat were ginger cookies and I wish I knew . . . And they were, of course, homemade. There was not anything that wasn't homemade. So . . . but I wish I had thought to ask my grandmother, “What was in them? How did you make them?” But my mother would eat the ginger cookies and finally the doctor rode through their neighborhood and got to see my mother and my grandmother, and my grandmother said, “What should I do?” and the doctor said, “Well, Miss Rosa, if she'll eat ginger cookies, let her eat ginger cookies. Maybe she'll die but maybe she won't.” And it was that very matter-of-fact, more on my grandmother's part, that this is life in a rural, farm-based community. Maybe you die and maybe you don't. And luckily for me my mother did not die. She kept eating the ginger cookies and got . . . But my grandmother also loved to talk about how much she'd seen in her lifetime. She was ninety-six when she died; she remembers seeing an automobile, the first automobile she and her brother ever saw. There was not a road. It was just, it was just out in the field, and they couldn't think of the word for it; it was so new that they could not imagine what it was. And she also loved to tell about school and the elocution lessons that they, every Friday, they had to recite in school. And she loved to tell about this one boy who recited the same thing [laughs] every Friday for like years [laughs] and the teacher apparently never recognized that fact. So yeah, all of those wonderful, wonderful old stories.
MA: It's just so interesting to hear these origin stories. And, you know, kind of like building off that, too—thank you for sharing those, as well-- but how did you find the field of rhetoric and composition? It seems like, as you tell these stories and you talk about your grandmother and your mother's influence, as it seems almost natural. But you know, we're interested in figuring that out.
AL: Well I, as a child, I loved reading. In fact, I was one of those children that I think . . . there's a book called Lost in a Book, and it's about children who really do lose themselves in reading and the danger, especially to young girls, and I was one of those girls. I, if I . . . the minute I could read I didn't want to do anything but read. I would go out to my grandmother’s—had a big weeping willow tree—and I'd go under the weeping willow tree where I had this little play place, and I would just read and read and read and read. I don't remember very much at all of my childhood. I couldn't tell you. I mean, I remember my sister being born, things like that. I was just focused on a book. So when I got in school I paid a lot of attention to reading and, of course, writing. So when I went . . .got to go to college and I did . . . I didn't go easily. I had to convince my father that I should be able to go to college, but I got a very small scholarship and that convinced him that I could go. I didn't even think about anything other than English. That's something that would be reading and writing, which I loved. And then after I finished my master's degree I was interested in a PhD. I asked them questions but my all-white-male professors said, “You don't want to get a PhD.” You know? “You need to go home and have babies,” and so do the things that women are supposed to do. So I got a job teaching. I could imagine myself . . . I could have imagined nursing, teaching, or some kind of clerical work. So this is in the early 60s and in Florida. And I just didn't have a vision any bigger than that. And so I chose teaching. And all these years later I'm so glad I did. I'm sure I would have liked other things. But being with young people has meant everything to me. So I'm glad I made that choice. It was a good one for me. And then I, I was teaching in a high school and then I was teaching at night at a community college and then I eventually got hired full-time at the community college and I was assigned, over a summer, by my dean to write some pamphlets to use in the curriculum about writing. And so I knew when I finished my MA I had a pretty good idea of how to teach reading but I didn’t have a single idea of how to teach writing. I had never taken a writing course. I'd exempted whatever it was that was required; I've never taken a writing course, and I had a terrible time writing my master's thesis because I didn't know how to do it. And I didn't get any direction either from my professor—I wrote a master’s thesis on Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which I keep in order to humble myself, if I ever need humbling. [laughs] So I got . . . I decided that I would have to write . . . what, I was going to get maybe $300 or something extra as a stipend? So I wrote. I did a lot of research about— the only kind of research I knew how to do, looking in textbooks and in magazines—and so I wrote a little pamphlet called “How to Write an Expository Essay,” “How to Write a Narrative Essay,” “How to Write an Argumentative Essay,” and then I made up a category of my own called “How to Write the Combination Essay” [laughs], which of course there are no essays that are no combination essays but I didn’t know that then. And they use these, and then I made videos where I talked about how to do these wonderful genres that I had discovered over the summer. So I wrote all this stuff up, and they used these for years at that community college and that very fall, after I'd done this exercise in the summer, I got a free book from Oxford University Press called Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P.J. Corbett. And I read that book and I thought, “Oh my goodness.” And I spent my summer about how to write the expository essay—and here's this man who knows where all this stuff comes from. So I decided . . . then I got mad at those people who told me I couldn't go to graduate school so I applied to grad—I just applied to one school, to Ohio State where Professor Corbett was teaching. You couldn't go on the web, you couldn't find anything about. I just . . . but . . . and I didn't get accepted. I got put on the waitlist, but eventually they got far enough down on the waitlist for me to go, and I got a T.A.-ship and I turned up in Columbus, Ohio, and Dr. Corbett was not teaching any classes. He was teaching one class called “The Bible is Literature,” which I didn't want to take. So, I signed up for other courses, and I signed up for an American literature course by . . . with a professor named Dan Barnes who in talking to me learned about my interests and so, “I'm going to take you down and to meet Professor Corbett,” and so that's how I got to meet him. And Ed was, at that time, editing the CCC Journal, and so it was just on the spot he asked me if I would like to be his assistant. And so for my five years at Ohio State, as a graduate student, I was Ed Corbett's assistant. And on the publication of that journal, which is how I learned the field of composition. And because he wasn't teaching any courses in rhetoric I did directed reading with him every quarter and I would read—I just started in with the Greeks and just read forward, and I would go in with all these questions, and eventually he started teaching a course on style—rhetoric and style—and on the history of rhetoric but not until way into my graduate career. So that—does thate answer, is that—that's how I came to rhetoric and writing. It was just so wonderful. I just thought . . . this world opened up for me and I thought, “This is what I want and need to know about.”
MA: So well the other thing that we and I don't want to put words in your mouth either. But another thing we were interested in—and Mare please pop in at any time-- is mentorship. So would you consider Ed a mentor?
AL: Yes, for sure. There were no . . . there was only one woman on the faculty at Ohio State that I can remember when I was . . . went there as a student. It was all white men. There was no person of color even imagined at that particular point. But, that said, Ed was a wonderful mentor. And you know he, he took many of us under his wing and also did a couple of NEH seminars. Lisa Ede was in one, Sharon Crowley was in one, many, many people were in those that became leaders. And Jim Berlin. The leaders in the field were in Ed’s NEH seminars. So he was a very, very fine mentor. But I often . . . often I had to prompt him, you know, what did . . . and when I went, when I was . . . I was approved or accepted to be on an MLA panel in my final year as a graduate student. I think it was my final year. So it was my first time to give a really big paper and especially at MLA, and I was on the panel, a panel with E.D. Hirsch and you probably don't know . . . ou do know. So I was so intimidated by E.D. Hirsch being that . . . anyway I gave my paper, and before I gave my paper I went and asked Professor Corbett and said, “You know, I'm really, really nervous about this.” And he said, “My dear, if you do not throw up you will have been a great success.” [laughs] So he could do things like that which were not always all that helpful. But that's been my standard ever since. If you can get through your speech without throwing up then you've been a great success; so lower your expectations. And then when I gave that paper, the first question after all the papers were over it was for me, and I just wanted to sink down under the table. And this woman stood up and said, “I just want to know if you have a handout.” [laughs] And I didn't have a handout but I tell you, I hardly ever go anywhere now. Ever since then I turn up with handout, so I didn't want to be asked that question again. [laughs]
MA: [laughs] This also leads into something else that . . . we, I know we talk about this in the field and theorize this, but this idea of impostor syndrome.
AL: Oh, yeah, I certainly had it and deserved to have it I think. [laughs] I did know when I went into my graduate study because I was older; I was about five or six years older than most of the people in my cohort because I'd been teaching. Um, I wouldn’t say that I felt confident but I felt—because I didn't feel like that—but I felt I was I was at ease because it was so much easier than teaching high school and community college at the same time, you know, twelve hours a day, and I thought, you know, “They just want me to take three classes and write something? I can do that.” I found that I couldn't do it as well as I wanted to, and I had to work really hard to get better. But I was at more at ease than my younger colleagues and friends—Lisa Ede being one of them—that were much more tied up in knots about what we were doing there, and it was just . . . it was just a function of being older and knowing more about who I was. And I've often thought that it . . . that stopping out is not a bad idea. Between high school and college or between college and graduate school. But it's . . . I would never discourage somebody from doing that.
MA: Do you have any advice for new graduate students in the field who . . . who may be feeling that right now?
AL: May be feeling the imposter syndrome?
MA: Yes.
AL: Yes. First, know that everybody else is feeling it too. Even the guys, I think. I have had enough male graduate students now in my career to know that they also go through this to some degree. So know that it's, it's, it is a documented phenomenon. And so you shouldn't feel odd about it but I urge my—especially my women students—to con—to face up to it consciously and to resist it because you're not an imposter. You got, you got where you are by being who you are and what you do, and you're there to improve and get better. It's not . . . it's ridiculous to think that you would arrive in graduate school fully formed. That's not what it's for. So I try to just put that aside as much as possible. But my other advice to graduate students is to let yourself go at the beginning, almost with the flow of classes and ideas. Keeping track of what really intrigues you, what really seizes your imagination, and don't go in with an idea that “This is what I'm going; this is what I must do.” Leave yourself open. And the third thing—and I don't think this is as prevalent as it used to be, I hope—but don't let your advisors choose for you. And my—especially my experience at Stanford—many of the professors want graduate students who will do their work, who are just working right in their narrow little vein and that is so destructive for graduate students, I think. And so, so . . . stultifying in terms of intellectual growth. So if it means you have to pick another advisor or get other committee members, do it. But don't be put into that kind of a box by a pretend mentor or an advisor who just wants you to do want you to see the world exactly as they see it.
MA: Building off of that question, do you have any advice about maybe, like, intimidation or . . . because I imagine if you're in that position of fear you would have to maybe challenge someone in a higher, higher position than you are with more power or authority. Even though they may be exploiting this work?
AL: Well the first thing is to choose your advisors very, very carefully and after consultation with your fellow . . . with other students so that you, you—it's not hard to find out reputations. And you want one—insofar as possible—to have access to mentors you can trust to have your best interests at heart and not theirs. And maybe you have to really look. And that person is probably gonna be a woman. Not always. Now I remember interviewing Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work I admire so much, and asking her about who had really helped her as a mentor. And Jim Sled, a white guy that was . . . that from Texas, is the one who said, “Go for it; do what you want to do; follow your own bliss. You want to write this way, you write this way.” And he's the one who encouraged her . . . So you can't . . . I would never say “never.” But I think we're most likely to find an open . . . a supportive mentor . . . I'd look to women first.
MG: I’d like to ask you about peer-to-peer mentoring and kind of also in the vein of collaboration, and clearly you and Lisa Ede have been, I guess most visible to me, in your collaboration, and I assume is some form of peer-to-peer mentoring but that’s my assumption. I was just wondering if you could talk more about, you know, how important that relationship was, how much peer-to-peer mentoring is helpful for grad students, sure, but also for individuals like us who are early in their careers, pre-tenure?
AL: Yeah. Well I think what you're referring to as peer-to-peer mentoring I thought of [it] as friendship, and I think it is a form of friendship. So I've collaborated with a lot of people and most—but most of them friends—and Cheryl Glenn I’ve collaborated with, I’m collaborating with her on something right now. Cheryl was my first graduate student at Ohio State. I think she's nine years younger than I am. So she's quite a bit younger than I am but . . . and I was her . . . I was the teacher; she was a student. But we are . . . we became very good, very good friends.
Lisa and I. Lisa was . . . is about five years younger than I am but was ahead of me in graduate school because I was older. But we, our friendship grew during graduate school, and our decision to collaborate really grew out of our admiration and affection for Ed Corbett. We decided to write an essay for a volume of [inaudible] for Ed and that was our first time at collaborating and we had so much fun doing it and enjoyed it so much, and also we liked the fact that it shocked people so much. Ed couldn't believe it. He said, “You can't do that; it’s not going to work. It's impossible. Impossible.” Then that really got our backs up, and we decided we would continue and we would do it anyway. But good collaboration doesn't have to depend on friendship. But I think friendship helps; but it does have to depend on trust. You have to be able to trust the person. Or, I think that collaboration is pretty much—It will be unsatisfactory, or it will be doomed. So I've a long collaboration and collaborative partnership with John Ruszkiewicz at the University of Texas—we've co-authored some books together and just working on the eighth edition of Everything's an Argument, and he and I were in graduate school together; we graduated on the same day. We were . . . we were friends but he has gotten more and more conservative as he's gotten older, and I've gotten more and more liberal if that is possible. So we don't agree about anything politically, but we agree about pedagogy and we agree about students and our collaboration. And I absolutely can trust him if John says he will have X by Wednesday, he'll have it by Tuesday night, and he knows that he can trust me to do what we say we're going to do. So that's what I think is the “sine qua non.” You cannot do without that level of trust for a successful collaboration.
I wonder how he's just gigantic crowdsourcing kinds of—I've never been involved in more than you know eight or ten people working on something. I'd like to know more about that.
MG: I know you have written textbooks on writing. And I love that you told us about your first textbook
AL: [laughs]
MG: What I assume was your first textbook . . . those pamphlets.
AL: Yes. I'd give anything if I had those today. I would give . . . I don't have them. I don't know what happened to them. I would just give anything to be able to see what in the world I said.
MG: So keeping with that. I know you have your “Bedford Bits” and your suggestions for writing tips, but what are your best writing tips or one best writing tip?
AL: Well, I often tell students, “Writing is hard, and it takes a long time.” So not to be discouraged. The second thing I like to tell students is that “Your decision to write is the biggest one that you'll make and you need to make it consciously. ‘I am going to write X.’ And then you need to do it.” I mean when I was working on my dissertation or papers in graduate school, you know, or articles, you could do . . .I could do research forever and never write anything. And at some point you have to say, I have to say to myself, “This is enough. Enough is enough. Now it's time to write this. Let's start right now.” [laughs]
When I taught at Ohio State Sonja Foss was there, too, for awhile, and she used to get graduate students and put them in her basement. And make them live with her and they couldn't—they were not allowed out of the basement until they had done like a chapter or something. She was very, very strict about that. [laughs] Now I've never done that..
MA: I feel like I needed that at some point, though, at some point.
AL: Yeah! That’s right.
MA: That would have been really helpful . . .
MG: So that’s kind of a dungeon.
AL: Yep, a writing dungeon.
MA: You need to get started, though, right?
AL: Yep, to get started. And that's the biggest—sometimes that's the biggest challenge. And then to understand your own processes of writing. I . . . my preferred way to write is to have a good chunk of time and to write with . . . I have to know the arc of what I'm gonna write. I don't have to know every point because writing is epistemic and ideas will come, but I have to feel the arc of it. And then I like to just be able to do nothing but concentrate on that. But other people are . . . ou write in chunks, paragraphs. Even Lisa is much more that way. So our processes of writing are very different and I don't— one is not better than the other. You just need to know what works for you. She often says that she has to clean the house and make garlic soup before she can start a big writing project. [laughs] And I just think that’s ridiculous. [laughs]
MA: If we interview her, we’re going to ask her about that.
MG: Garlic soup.
AL: I think it's garlic soup; something with a lot of garlic.
MA: I'm also interested, you know, coming back to what Cheryl had said during the plenary talk about being hopeful in a time of, you know, kind of tumultuous political . . .
AL: Yeah, despair.
MA: Yes. How do you maintain—and so this is, like, a self-, personally selfish question. How do you maintain, like, not just the work-life balance, but how do you maintain the hopefulness and energy, or do you have any advice to doing that in climates where you know that's . . . that's rough. Or that that becomes harder to do what you do.
MG: Especially in the work that we do with activism with women and recovery . . .
MA: Right. There's a lot of balance in your life and you remain sick to hold on to that hope or like a little piece of joy.
AL: Well, I will say that for some years, after my marriage disintegrated, I didn't have a work-life balance. I had to work. I had a work life and and thank God because that's what really saved me. I don't know what in the world would have happened to me if I hadn't had my students, my scholarship, and a few very, very, very good friends. And my sisters. So . . . and I have no children. I couldn't have children, and didn't really particularly want children as something that I thought would fulfill my life. But I love children, so I've been very fortunate that there have always been kids in my life. I've got more nephews and nieces and grand-nieces and godchildren and great-God-children, whatever you call the children of godchildren. [laughs] I've got a lot of them! And they have brought so much happiness and joy to me. So. But for five, six, seven years I just didn't do anything but work. And, and I am very grateful. I think for women who are on their own and who have to look to themselves for everything—the ability to have not a job but a profession. I just feel so incredibly grateful and fortunate that I had that. Now, as I move through my career and had a chance to look around and say, “What are some other things I want to do?” I was able to do some things administratively that gave me great satisfaction, and building the writing center at Stanford was the most fun thing I've ever done. It was just . . . and it just turned out so well, and I'm so thrilled with . . . We have a new director now and it is now the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. And we're bringing in media and multimedia and that . . . that was wonderful. nd starting writing centers in high schools. I even started a writing center in an elementary school—a California public elementary school called Happy Valley Elementary. We built a writing center there. And so that, those kinds of outreach programs. We have a program at Stanford called Project Write that brings kids from the primarily Hispanic Islander and African-American communities to the writing center every Saturday morning and during winter quarter to write and draw and tell stories. And so many of them are now in college. But that's . . . those kinds of things that you get to do once you . . . once you have tenure and once you're—somebody’s not banging your head on the wall to publish yet another article or another book. Not that I didn't enjoy that, too. It's been wonderful. But those sort of more out-in-the-community types of things really, really sustained me and nurtured me.
And then it’s the connection with young people, you know, at . . . at my most depressed and desolate, I never missed a class, and I was in class, and sometimes I wouldn't know what had happened in class. In fact, I taught a whole summer seminar at Penn State . . . that I'd be—if you put a gun to my head, it would be hard-pressed—I know it was on the history of memory. It was on memoria.
And I've run into Linda Ferreira-Buckley was in that seminar as a graduate student, and years and years later she said, “Oh, remember we did this” or “We did that.” [laughs] That's right. We did that. But I was just . . . I was there and kind of not there at the same time—we've all been through things like that. So. But just the thing that I miss in retirement is teaching. It's the best, the very best.
I remember. I've often referred to this Maxine Greens saying that—she's an educational philosopher, you know, Maxine. he just died last year, I think. But she, in a speech once I heard her give, she said, “You know when you go into your class, into a new class, and you look out at the students there, you must always remember that there is at least one who is infinitely your superior in both heart and mind, at least one.” And in my experience, that's absolutely true. So I remember every time I go into a new class I think about that. Who are these people? Because we talked in the session today about difference is always not, is not always visible. Diversity is not visible, and we can we look at people and we think—“Oh, happy-go-lucky. Top of the world.” And you just saw the surface, scratched the surface, and there's all sorts of things going on. So that's been my experience over all these years, and that's what makes every new class just wonderful.
MA: Building off of that, what, do you have any pieces of advice for students who may feel like—and I think this is natural, too, to, like, . . . that you don't trust your voice or that you don't . . . you're new to this sort of large field. You know, I think of, like, my first experience at CCCCs, and you just you feel like you're kind of lost in that wave a little bit. Do you have any particular advice—for women especially, but this can go on to all the new scholars as they enter the field—in terms of how they can be successful and how they can be confident enough to speak through that silence?
AL: I would say start small. Start in your classes, in your graduate-school classes, listening very carefully and making sure that every comment you make connects with something that someone else has said, so that you start building a conversation in the classroom, where your own ideas are merging and melding or contrasting with those of others. You'll get more and more confident. I've had so many students, especially women students, who were . . . who weren't confident at all speaking in class. So I think that's a way to begin—in graduate school. And then I think you go to your first conference and you practice. Richard Enos at Texas Christian practices with every graduate student who's going to go to CCCCs. And sometimes there are eight or ten of them; he practices with every single one. And I think that's remarkable. And Cheryl does a lot, and when I was . . . when I was still teaching full-time, I did that, as well. So get somebody to listen to you and to try and critique you. I used to tape myself with a little tape recorder and then, to my horror, listen and try to improve that way. But it's really easy, very easy now to videotape yourself so that you begin to have the image of yourself as a public person, as a public speaker, and you will grow into that, you really will. And every voice is important. Every story is important. Everyone counts. All voices should be heard. But I, but I think starting small—get a little comfortable with one thing and then try something else and then try something else, try something else . . . It's the way it is the way I did it, at any rate.
MA: That's wonderful advice. Thank you so much. And I just have one last question. Unless you have anything else, Mare. But we’ve been asking, also: is there any particular aspect of the field or anything going on, any new research or new conversations, that are particularly appealing to you that you think about or are excited about right now?
AL: Well I'm, I'm very concerned about the status of language and the hierarchies of language use. I'm very interested in all the work on translingualism that is going on. I'm trying to learn as much as I possibly can. Very interested to see where we are going to go as a profession in terms of really living up to the promise of students, right? To their own language. Which I see eventuating in the whole translangualism movement. So that I'm trying to track very seriously. We, in our panel today, several people mentioned intersectionality, which is a new phrase but—like translingualism—for an old subject. People have been writing about the intersections of gender, race, and class for a long time before that word came to surface. So I'm interested in that work but I'm particularly interested to see how it connects back to all the work that scholars like Beverly Moss, who's written brilliantly about gender, [how] the intersections of gender and race are connected. [I] particularly like what's going on in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly; I think Susan Jarrett is doing a magnificent job of editing that journal. I just wait for every issue. Really look forward to it. Peitho, I think has come just leaps and bounds to the fore as a wonderful, wonderful resource for all of us. Right now, in my own work, I'm focused on two things: one is hoping to complete the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing, which we've been working on for ten years. And the other one—and we're getting, I think, we're finally getting close. Susan and I just finished the general introduction this fall. So I'm working on that.
The other thing that I'm spending time—my time—on is I've been working on a talk called “The Problem of Talking with Others,” playing on Linda Martín Alcoffs “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” So the problem of talking with others, which also came up in the panel today with the person asking about the alt-right women's movement and how do we engage each other when we are all so far removed from one another. So I'm spending a lot of time reading about attempts to reach across vast differences to establish some kind of common ground and find a way to listen to one another respectfully without giving up our own principles. I don't know what I would do if I had an opportunity to talk to Donald Trump. I don't know if it's possible to talk with him. It may be that you just have to listen. I mean I'm not sure but. So take somebody a little less off the charts and that . . . I have something about, something like Betsy DeVos. You know, I've got a lot in common with her in terms of caring. She says she cares, and I think she does care about young people and about education.
Could I find a way to talk to her, talk with her—not talk to her, but talk with her—that . . . where we might carve out some area that we could agree on and try to move from there. I don't know, I would love to be able to try something like that but that's . . . so, pedagogically that's taking up a lot of my time right now. And I think we—all of us—have to be concentrating on what to do in our day-to-day classrooms with young people who need to go out and be able to talk with others that they don't agree with at all.
Interviewer: I’ve seen it. Everybody has become so polarized, and it seems like there’s this inability to speak with—or we’re not trained how to do that. And I think it’s difficult when you try to do it yourself.
MG: I'm teaching a class called “Dialogue.”
AL: Wow.
MG: So we’re . . . you're . . . similar things where we're trying to research that exact topic of how do we come across the table, sit across the table and talk through our differences so I agree that it’s a very timely topic.
MA: Yeah, everybody . . . you see it. I mean over . . . I know I've seen it. Everybody has become so polarized, and it seems like there’s this inability to speak with—or we’re not trained how to do that. And I think it’s difficult when you try to do it yourself. Think about. So yeah . . .
AL: I will say one other thing that I've been learning about. I've seen some videos made by young people in Vermont. I'm losing the name of the group—they are middle-school and high-school students and they are focused like lasers on pronouns and on gender-neutral pronouns and on how the use of pronouns affects them in their daily lives. And these videos are . . . I've seen two of them—they're just fascinating—and they are passionate in their desire to get rid of “he” and she” completely. And so that's a very—and I loved learning, I loved listening to those young people. And in my books I'm trying to provide alternatives and ways to not be caught in that dichotomy. The male/female dichotomy. So, when you look ahead and maybe twenty—maybe even ten years from now—there will be . . . I mean, “zir”? A lot of people are using “zir” and ”their” . . . the plural.
AP: I think the AP just okayed that.
AL: I think so too.
MA: The use of “their.” Mmhmm.
AL: Mmmhmm.