September 30, 2022 • 61 mins
We are joined by Dr. Martha Brenckle, a full professor and the interim-first year writing director here at UCF. Dr Brenckle teaches FYW and Rhetorical Theory. Our conversation touches on course construction, in particular her class “Queer Rhetorics and Queering Writing”, theory, working with students, the writing process, and representation in the classroom. You can see a full listing of her substantial publications and accolades in her profile on the departmental website:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place includes for curious novices, blossoming scholars and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today we are joined by Dr.
Martha Brenckle, full professor and the interim first-year writing director here at UCF.
(00:53):
Dr.
Brinkle teaches first year writing and rhetorical theory.
Her scholarship has been published in multiple disciplinary journals including the Journal of Basic Writing, CCC, the WPA Journal and Pedagogy and Culture.
She writes and publishes poetry and fiction, winning the Central Florida United Arts Award for Poetry in 2000 and Orlando Poet Laureate finalist in 2021.
(01:20):
Street Angels, her first published novel, was nominated for a Lambda Award and a Triangle Award.
She has also co authored an award winning screenplay turned film titled Untold.
Her poetry manuscript, Hard Letters and Folded Wings, was published in October 2019.
You can see a full listing of her substantial publications and accolades in her profile on the department website.
(01:45):
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Oh, you're very welcome.
That's a lot of accolades and publications.
Yeah, but I worked hard to get them, of course, so I want more.
I'm very greedy that way.
Normally.
Well, there's a trap in academia.
I feel like to produce something is such an amount of time and energy, but it also becomes this lifestyle almost where you're constantly like, what am I working on? What is the next thing? And not even necessarily due to external pressures.
(02:22):
I think a lot of it is those are internal pressures we put on ourselves.
It just becomes like a part of our lifestyle.
So I can see where there's always that what are we doing next? Mentality.
Yes.
Most of us are here because we put a lot of pressure on ourselves.
And even early school, even in elementary school, how to have an A? Had to know the answer.
(02:43):
First one to raise your hand.
I mean, we've got a whole university full of people like that.
I tell people, I think the first moment of feeling out of my element in grad school, when you're an undergrad, you're typically one of the few brightest in the class.
You're an overachiever.
That's how you get to where you are.
And then you get to grad school where everyone was the brightest in their class and you suddenly are in a whole new arena of these people that were all always the best and brightest.
(03:10):
And it takes a moment to adjust to being in that different dynamic.
It really does.
Yeah.
I can remember an undergrad when I was getting my PhD at Lehigh University who came into me crying one day and she said, I was valedictorian of my class.
I was this, I was that, and everyone here is just like me.
I couldn't stop laughing.
(03:32):
I said, yeah, that's what it's like when you go to college.
But it's a good thing.
Yeah, it is.
Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences here at UCF? I know that this is not the first institution you've been a participant of, so basically, how long have you been here? This is my 24th year.
Wow.
(03:52):
So you've seen some changes.
Big changes.
When I came here, we had 24,000 students, and that felt huge to me because I came from a college that had like 5200.
So it was quite a change.
I kept thinking, this is a little city.
And I remember having to learn how to schedule meetings, so I gave myself time to walk to another building.
(04:20):
I mean, it was that crazy.
Yeah.
So I know that, as we already established, UCF was not your first academic institution.
How has your time at UCF specifically shaped you as a professional? The environment, the climate here? I've learned to be a whole lot tougher, if that makes sense.
(04:44):
I've learned how to work smart.
I mean, I'm still working hard, but you can't accomplish all the things you're expected to accomplish at UCF and not work smart.
I like these students a lot.
Does that make sense? I mean, I think they're wonderful.
(05:06):
I especially like the first year students.
They are so eager and ready to go and ready to learn, and they don't have that little editor in their heads that tells them, oh, don't say that, it might be stupid.
Right? And so they say things and sometimes they say the most profound things and I'll go, wow, I never looked at that that way.
(05:28):
So, yeah, the students are wonderful.
They really are.
It's been a long haul coming here and being openly gay.
I think I was probably the only openly gay lesbian on campus because I used to constantly get, can I interview you for my class? And I finally said to one teacher, am I the only lesbian? You know, I can't be.
(06:01):
And plus, you don't like to speak for everybody in your group.
You can't, but you can't because everyone's experiences are different.
So that was tough.
And until we had sexual orientation into the antidiscrimination clause, I was always walking on the edge.
I was told by many people in administration, you can't tell your students you're gay.
(06:26):
Wow.
Please don't.
You can't tell your students you're gay.
Of course.
I did anyway.
And I'm glad I did because I would get these little notes like, thank you for being so matter of fact about your life.
I feel better about being gay now.
And if I can do that for one student, it's all worth it.
Absolutely.
(06:48):
While there's the flip side of that pressure of being the representative right, is that you are then representation, which matters to a lot of people, and I can't agree with you more about our incoming freshman.
I'm always renewed in the fall semester because they were coming from being the top in their class, and so they feel a sense of both, what am I doing? This is college.
(07:15):
But I also was always really good at being a student, and they don't have that inner editor that you were talking about.
They're not jaded yet.
They're like they're still excited to be here.
And I do love those moments where I had never considered a reading in that way, or they bring something new to a class discussion.
(07:36):
And I like to be that champion for that generation amongst friends and colleagues, because I feel like the tale of time is always on these kids today.
Right.
I mean, I was in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, which is set in the there's a whole thing about these Kids Today and Ed Sullivan Show, and it's never ending.
(07:57):
So I do love that we have that chance, and as writing instructors, we have a glimpse into their lives.
It's very different than many other professors, but I had to echo that, that I love this time of year with our freshman coming in.
But if we can pivot a little bit because you're teaching a new course this semester, can we talk about that a little bit? Sure, we can.
It is queer rhetoric and queering writing.
(08:18):
Yes.
So it's not just new to the department, but you also built this class, correct? Yes, I actually asked to teach this class 24 years ago, and I was told no probably five times.
Wow.
It never got out of the department.
One time it got to the college committee and then I just kind of gave up, so I thought, what the heck? I'll ask again.
(08:43):
We had a nice ten year break from it, and our chair said, yes, I want you to teach that.
And it's actually been a lot of fun so far.
And everybody's worried that nobody would take the course.
I mean, I have 30 students in the course.
Wow.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to turn anybody down.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
I had the pleasure of looking over your syllabus, which, you know, it's always so fun to read a syllabus.
(09:09):
But I love in the course definition, you start out with a definition of writing.
You say writing is both a practice and a process of critical thinking and communicating to others.
And I think it's so important that as writing instructors, writing professionals, writing academics, we do give students a concrete understanding of what are we calling writing? Because it's not just sitting at a keyboard.
(09:36):
Right.
There's so much else happening that we need to consider when we're studying writing.
So I really enjoyed that you set up that expectation.
So with that definition in mind, how are you applying the ideas of looking at queer rhetorics and querying writing with that definition in mind.
It's writing to disrupt the status quo.
(09:58):
It's writing maybe not in the usual linear fashion.
It's experimenting.
It's sort of a way of looking at the world and then saying, well, what if it was like this instead? So there is a lot of sort of what I call critical imagination involved.
(10:20):
And you also have to question how language works.
Like is there only boy and girl? What else is there? Does every word have to have its opposite? And that's actually how we were.
At least that's how I was educated.
And I can remember taking IQ tests and they'd go night and you were supposed to go day.
(10:42):
And it's questioning all those things.
It's breaking everything up into little or littler parts.
Is the course now what you imagined it would have been when you first thought of it 24 years ago? No, it's really not.
When I thought of it 24 years ago, I had a lot more theory in there.
(11:02):
You also have to remember at that point, queer rhetoric really was in its very beginnings, and it wasn't quite named yet.
And so putting it together was very experimental in a lot of ways.
Now we have a whole field called queer rhetoric, and I get asked to read tenure applications from other universities for people that are in that area.
(11:28):
I just did one two weeks ago, and so it's gotten very firmly established.
But back then it wasn't.
And it's really hard to find the right balance of theory and practice when it's brand new.
(11:50):
And there's usually, at the beginning, just so much theory and not enough work on practice.
So I feel like right now it's actually better than it would have been.
I noticed one of the assignments that you have students do is defining queer rhetoric or defining it made me wonder.
(12:17):
How do you think about students in the practice part of it like encouraging them to maybe go for those experiments that you were talking about and playing with language.
It seems to me I think sometimes students tend to be a little hesitant sometimes of things that they think might be risky in that way when it's in the context of a class.
(12:42):
And so I was just curious, reading some of those things, like, how do you think about those when you're asking students to approach these topics? And what I think is so great about it is that they'll sort of leave with that experience of having defined it for themselves or taking the theory in combination and coming up with the definition and participating in it.
(13:10):
I know this is the first time you're doing the class, but how's that going? Or what's your sense of that from students? I think it's going pretty well and we're dealing with the current climate that we live in now and what that means.
And we'll eventually I have someone from Quality, Florida who's going to come and talk to the class, which will probably only be just me on Zoom, but then I'll put it up.
(13:39):
We have to deal with all the new bills that Florida has put together and really look at them.
What do they say? What don't they say? And then my next thing is, okay, what do you want them to say? And that, to me, is the big leap.
It's not just taking things apart and being looking at them critically.
(13:59):
It's also, if this is what we have and I don't like it, where should we go? I used to ask it as what kind of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world like this? Or do you want something different? And trying to get them to see that language has so much power and how you label people and what opportunities are open to them makes a huge difference.
(14:27):
Yeah, I started thinking while Nick was asking that question the potential for experimentation and form in a class like this where you can take things and flip them from what's the typical expectation? And I hadn't even considered the larger world view of what might be theory and practice outside of the classroom.
(14:49):
How might they play into our understanding of the world around us? So we sang the praises of our freshmen a moment ago, and now this is a 4000 or 3000 level class.
4000 level classes are graduating seniors.
In theory, do you see any difference between the 4000 level more exposed to the world students than our incoming freshmen who still kind of have rose colored lenses on about the college experience when encountering these kinds of ideas? They're much more thoughtful, I will say.
(15:28):
Their discussion posts are amazing.
They're very good at pulling things from their own lives or something they've seen or something from popular culture into their post, which is what I want them to do.
So that makes me very, very happy.
And then we'll just see how it goes.
(15:54):
this week we're talking about young adult literature and the importance of it.
And then next week we're doing Foucault's History of Sexuality.
Just the introduction in the first two chapters because it's too much to do the whole thing.
You could do a semester just on those.
I know.
Yeah, I know.
And what I have them doing in the discussion post is their first post.
(16:21):
Is there a journalist interviewing Foucault? And I can put a picture up and everything.
What kind of questions would you ask him about what you just read? What things did you find confusing? And so they have to have three questions.
And then the next post is to choose someone else's post and be Foucault and answer the question.
(16:47):
I think it's actually going to be fun.
Yeah.
And what I like is I can do a lot of things like that as a way into very difficult theory and give them an opportunity to play with it where it's really low stakes.
Yeah.
So I always default to a new historist approach to looking at texts.
(17:13):
I feel like you can't look at a text without considering the context of what it's constructed.
So do you feel that our students today still can have the same access to the ideas that Foucault or do you think Foucault would understand what the questions are given our context today? I know it's a lot of supposition, but do you feel like the theories stand alone and that they're timeless? No, not at all.
(17:38):
But I do think there are a few things that end up in the canon because they were the first to do that.
And Foucault is really interesting to me because philosophers don't think he's a philosopher, and historians won't recognize him as an historian, and yet he does both.
But still you'll get told that he's not really a philosopher, he's not really an historian, and so it gives them a chance to think, well, I'm not really this either, so let me play.
(18:08):
And to me, a lot of it is all about playing and trying something new and seeing what you come up with.
But I hate to say that any author is timeless because it's not something I've grasped onto.
But I do think that there are some pieces that, even though they're older, are really worth reading.
(18:29):
And that's one of them.
Yeah.
And it sounds like a great activity.
Exercise in what I find with students sometimes is there I don't know if it's reverence for respect for, like, text, where they don't want to play with them, or they see them as, like, one way information that they're there to absorb as content and not sort of ask questions of or interrogate or use themselves to sort of elevate them in that conversation.
(19:06):
In eleven or two, I try to get students to do that a little bit because I know that's something that when they get to the 4000 level class, like, professors are going to be asking them to engage.
And so I think anytime you can have fun ways of engaging students with text so that not only the content of the text, but they start to view text in a slightly different way, one that they are sort of allowed to engage in, I think that can really kind of change their positioning of themselves in their own writing.
(19:38):
One of the things I always tell first year students, first semester, as I say, there's no meaning in this text until you read it.
It doesn't walk around with meaning.
It's just words on paper.
When you open it up and read it, that's when the meaning starts to happen.
So I try to sort of let them see what their responsibility is as a reader.
(20:02):
Well, actually, all of them tell me they can't watch television normally anymore because they're starting to question everything they see.
Well, that's good.
Welcome to the good life.
Yes.
Yeah.
When pleasure reading has notes in the margins, like, you know, you're part of the inner sanctum.
(20:25):
I love that too.
In terms of I don't know if agency is quite the right word.
But even accessibility for students to interrogate those canonical ideas.
I think one of the hardest shifts.
Because it was for me.
And I see it with students.
Is putting yourself into the conversation with texts that are so long regarded as being the end all.
(20:49):
Be all.
You have the canon of even.
Like.
Our rhetorical theorists.
And so to take that stake down where they can interrogate it in a way that still respects the ideas, but also can ask those questions and give them away into the text, instead of just, I need to absorb this.
This is the end all, be all.
(21:10):
Once I can regurgitate these ideas, then I'm an academic theorist.
So I think that is important to allow them that step into the process of putting yourself into those academic conversations.
And the conversations aren't just academic.
They're about our culture.
They're about the society we live in right now.
(21:35):
Yeah, I think maybe even more like rhetorical conversations as opposed to academic conversations.
The questioning and what is happening here, the examination.
I actually read this interesting article yesterday, and one of the sentences in it was that the university is built on rhetoric.
We all practice it.
(21:56):
And I thought, all right, because that's what I study.
That's pretty good.
I'm sure people in the chemistry department wouldn't believe me.
But, I mean, when you think about it, it really is we have all these discourse communities that also have to talk to each other.
We have an administration that needs to know how to talk to us, which is often a disaster, but we try.
(22:18):
And so that idea that your world is only there because you speak of the world, when you speak, you pull it into existence.
In a sense, it's almost Lacanian, isn't it? Well, it is Lacanian.
Yeah.
It's also freer.
Yeah.
I'm having to quickly try to remember the names of my theorist.
(22:39):
I say so long ago.
So in this queer rhetoric inquiring writing.
When we have this definition of writing in the syllabus and this expectation.
And we're asking them to challenge these worldviews both about the world around them and what they are bringing to the world in themselves.
Are there any approaches to the writing process that you're hoping they're considering specifically that you're trying to direct them to.
(23:02):
Or is it just open for interpretation.
Like the practice part? I actually make them when you're online, so double space the PDF, take a color and write in between.
Do interlinear notes, almost like you're translating it.
And that's a way of getting into the text.
(23:28):
The same way that I used to write in pencil in the margins and all of that.
But when they put it in color, it kind of makes a difference because then that becomes their color and it becomes them.
And so they start becoming a character almost in the piece that they're reading, the character of interpreter.
So that's one of the things that I have them start with, especially with something really difficult, interpreter and interrogator.
(23:53):
Yeah, right.
But my thought is, if you're not going to read something difficult, what's the point? Because why would I teach them something they already know? Yeah.
Why would I spend time on it? You already know that.
Yeah.
Let's move on.
Are there any other acts of writing, even if they're in academic instructions, that you are hoping or outside in the world that you're hoping they're looking at in terms of querying of writing? Well, we look a lot at memes actually have making memes.
(24:21):
We look at infographics.
That's one of their assignments.
We have a blog going in the class.
Another sort of way to write their final project they can do, if they want to, a Ted Talk.
They don't have to and they can tape themselves and what else should I give them? I tried to make them really creative so they'd have more fun with it.
(24:49):
Actually, if they're thinking of teaching, they can do a class week's worth of curriculum.
What would you teach, what would you have the students do, et cetera, if this was your topic.
And I think those kinds of things are more application to me that's the now that you know this, what do you know or what are you going to do with it? I can remember a student here showing me some screen saver he had made and I found it horrifying, but it was a bunch of cockroaches that just like covered the screen finally.
(25:24):
And he goes, Isn't that cool? And I went, what does it do? And he said, well, that's it, it's just a screen saver.
I went, how much time did you spend on this? Because to me, and I guess it is entertaining for people and that can be an application, but I was just like, oh my God.
(25:47):
I can remember my youngest brother, when he was like four, his clock radio, he decided it was broken, brings it downstairs, gives to the guy.
I was standing at the time and wanted him to fix it.
So he took it apart and put it back together and he said, Here you go.
And Nick said, but that's all it does, as if in his head he start doing so much more.
(26:13):
Yeah, I love that inclusion of memes.
I use a lot of social media in 1111, actually, all my courses I incorporate something to do because I think it's a literacy that is overlooked a lot, very much, but that our students are bringing to the table with a real strong skill set.
Is there any other particular assignment or reading that you're excited to be delving into with them.
(26:35):
Well, we're actually going to read my friend Jonathan, one of his memoirs.
He's written a series of three and it's really interesting.
It's called creep.
A sort of apology.
And he does sort of talk about his life and growing up as a gay man and those things.
But in between are all these issues of rhetorical theory that he follows along.
(26:58):
It's probably one of the most interesting memoirs I've ever read because it's not just straight narrative, it plays around all the time and it's not long.
So I'm hoping that they enjoy it.
I'm looking forward to at least talking about it.
Yeah.
Are you going to invite him in? Yes.
I was saying I'll probably have him on over Zoom because it's an online class and then whoever can be there can be there and we'll talk about the book and I'm hoping that some students will be there and ask him questions so he's not stuck with me the whole time.
(27:35):
We've known each other a long time, so it will get too silly if it's just there'll be plenty to talk about.
Yeah.
I have a question about projects that you have your students doing.
It's always fun to see what they come up with when you give them a lot of free reign to pick their modalities, creating things in digital spaces and things like that.
(28:00):
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you see your role with a project like that, with that freedom.
I mean, you mentioned the example of the screen saver, which I think is really a funny one because I think the challenge there is to guide without giving too many sort of instructions about exactly what to do to allow that sort of freedom and exploration.
(28:27):
But then you also have to be kind of like a coach or a guide through that for their time, for their resources, and for them kind of applying the things that they use in the course and the things that they read.
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you see that role for yourself with all that kind of experience that you've had over all the courses you've taught.
(28:50):
I usually think of myself as a facilitator.
I don't own the knowledge.
And I also think that knowledge gets made and remade and revised and remade all the time.
And so their voices and what they think of something is certainly as important as mine is.
So I try not to be a teacher.
(29:11):
That's sort of the arbitrator of what is valuable to know and what is not valuable to know.
I've even taught composition where knowledge was the topic.
And we actually talked about how do people come to these conclusions, how do people decide what is valuable knowledge? Who decided that you should learn these foundational skills and why? Who made this world so that this is education.
(29:39):
And then we spent the whole rest of the semester with their papers and everything else, questioning education and questioning the way that they're taught.
And it really got good, I got a lot of good ideas out of them, what they would like.
I think it's something that the more years that I teach, that's one of the things that I think keeps it so fresh, for me at least, that it's allowing students to explore in that way or question things.
(30:07):
They're always going to be changing.
They're always going to be the classes that come in.
And so by being just that sort of like facilitator, I think of it as almost like a host for people to practice some of their ideas and observations a lot of times and say, find out what they think about things, find out when they question something, what claims do they come to make? Some claims of your own, you know, in this class.
(30:34):
And I think for me, that keeps it really fresh because it isn't just one way information or content that they're cramming for.
A lot of times before class starts, students might be there.
The other day it was a chemistry test where they're all scoring before class, like trying to remember all the things that they know.
(30:54):
And I just walked in being like, man, this class is so different than that class that they're in.
There's no way to sort of cram for the types of classes that we do or whatever because it's almost like an experience.
Yes.
And it's practice.
It's practice more than knowledge based or content based.
(31:18):
And I realized there's the big drive in rhetoric and composition to prove that we have content and that it is somehow knowledge based.
And I don't care if students know what Kairos is.
I just care if they recognize it when it happens and if they can recognize those moments in their own lives.
I'm not going to give them a quiz on Stasis theory or something, but I want them to understand why the abortion argument can't go anywhere.
(31:47):
And that's why they need to know Stacey theory, so they can look at it and maybe come up with a much better argument.
Yeah, I always use the analogy that I'm more like a sherpa.
Like I say, I'm a cheerleader and a guide to my students, but I really feel more like a sherpa because I feel like I'm the person that packs all the stuff.
I've come up with the readings, I've come up with the assignments, with the journey in mind that we're going to go on together and we're going to start together and there's going to be some parts that are easy and some parts that are challenging, but I'm there with them every step of the way and I'll give them everything I have to help them.
(32:19):
But really it's the journey they're going on after they leave our classrooms.
We only have them for 16 weeks, maybe two semesters, or three if we're lucky.
But, yeah.
I feel like more than cheerleader or guide.
We're the ones who know what to pack and what to bring and how to try to best prepare them for the road ahead.
Yeah.
We can give them things to look at and think about and things to read, think about.
(32:43):
I just don't want the journey to be like, sherpas have already been there.
That's what always cracks me up.
I made it to the top, and the person who climbed up gets all the accolades and all of that.
But honestly, the shepherds do that ten times a month.
I mean, this is, like, what they do for a living, and so those are the kind of things I don't want to get overlooked.
(33:11):
Why did the sherpa pack what the sherpa packed? I would tell students, Why do you think I picked this article? What do you think? I thought you would learn.
Yeah.
And I love to say to them when they ask a question, and I love to say, I don't know.
Let's look it up.
Yes.
I have no idea.
Yes, I become the notorious I get eye rolls because everything that they give me is an answer.
(33:34):
I respond with, Why do you think that? Why do you consider it that way? Tell us more.
And they love it, and they hate it.
It's useful, but in the moment, it's like, again, can I just give you an answer and be done? No, this isn't the chemistry quiz.
It's not that simple.
No.
And I always say, hey, this is the one class where I actually care what you think.
(33:58):
I've had them draw, like, the outline of our brain and then write in there all the things that they're thinking about.
Oh, wow.
And I'll go, which one looks like a good idea for writing? And I have them circle it with colored pens.
I'm really big into colored pens and origami paper and things like that.
Yeah, it's a tactile thing.
The time I felt probably the worst, because my honors composition class, they've been working so hard, and I thought, just for fun, let's make origami cranes today, and then we can take them apart and write on the paper.
(34:32):
They were so freaked out.
What if mine doesn't come out good? What if I fold the paper wrong? I mean, it wasn't fun.
They had no fun.
I felt horrible.
That's why they're honor students.
I never did it again.
Yeah, but you guys still have fun.
No, I agree.
And I think that's a really valuable lesson for honor students, that it's okay if it doesn't come out all right every time.
(34:55):
Exactly.
I find Origami to be a stressful person.
I love it.
I like making things.
Me too.
Because I don't know, maybe it's the detailed directions that I think look, someone wrote, like, all these detailed directions.
You should be able to do this.
And it's like I'm constantly worried about where I'm going wrong.
But maybe that's well, maybe that's just a meeting.
(35:17):
There's your next course.
The rhetoric of instructions.
Yes, actually, that is a whole it is a whole thing.
And it's really interesting.
Ikea has been so successful because it's all pictures and because you can take a screw and put it on here.
Okay.
That fits the picture.
That's screw.
K yes.
My son recently was gifted.
(35:39):
I learned later that I should have looked up the value of this thing.
My aunt found a complete Lego set in her attic.
That was her son's, and it was 30 years old.
She sent it to my son.
We open it up, we build it.
And then I googled it.
It was worth like $500 in mint condition.
I should have looked at it first.
But it was interesting to see, even in Lego's instructions, because that's also just pictograms how they have evolved over the years to be more effective.
(36:03):
You wouldn't think that the drawing of putting this Lego here could change that much.
But even in 25 to 30 years, it was a very different set of instructions.
And I was so frustrated that they didn't look like the Lego instructions I was used to it's usability testing.
They have a course in that in the English Department and Tech communications.
Yeah, that makes sense.
(36:24):
I think we need to bring rhetoric of instructions into our department.
Yeah.
Just because I don't know, we used to make jokes.
There's the person that follows the instructions step by step, and then there's the person that looks at it and goes and throws it over their shoulder and puts it together somehow.
Yeah.
And usually the person who follows the instructions comes along behind them afterwards and redo it the right way without anyone knowing.
(36:48):
I noticed that you have also assisted in multiple thesis that have been published and amongst also your publications in general.
I'm seeing a little bit of an overlap between the consideration of identity and writing, especially in your personal publications.
I could point to some of them.
But you had cruising composition, text negotiating, sexual difference and first year writing readers from the Journal of Conference on College Composition and Communication.
(37:18):
You had Cartography and adoption, identity and difference beyond the politics of the comfort zone.
From the Review of Education pedagogical cultural Studies by Butch and Bardyke, pedagogical performances of class, gender and sexuality and the Journal of the conference on College composition and community Medication.
(37:38):
And then for some of your thesis, you had things dealing with gamification in educational environments and technopanic and posthuman potential.
And so I'm wondering how the overlap works for you in terms of consideration of identity and writing and digital rhetoric.
(38:00):
Well, I think we have to get past and I think we have, to a large extent, the idea that technology makes everyone the same.
So when you're in some sort of digital space.
Everyone has the same amount of power.
And of course we found that's not true.
Everyone doesn't have access to technology.
(38:21):
It's the first problem.
And so usually those are the kinds of thesis that I agree to work on, are ones where there is some sense of forming identity using technology or inequity because of how technology is set up and how we began using it.
(38:43):
Okay.
How do you consider digital rhetoric in relation to writing? I don't know.
It's hard for me to see it as a separate thing because I don't write on paper anymore.
So for me, it's just something I grew with as a writer because it was more outlets to publish, more ways to do things.
(39:10):
It's certainly a lot easier to write with word processing than it is to write by hand and then type it, which was my young life.
And that's really hard.
I saw an ad the other day for what's, in essence, a word processor.
It's a keyboard with a tiny screen so that you can look and it was like distraction free writing.
(39:31):
Here's this product you can buy so that you can write effectively and not be distracted by email or the Internet.
And I thought, wow, we have really come full circle that someone was like, let's invent a keyboard with just a screen and we'll be more productive with it.
And it was just such a weird moment because before I had a computer, I was gifted a word processor from my dad.
(39:53):
He thought it was like this really big moment that I was getting this tool to help me be successful as a student.
And I thought, oh, wow, have I been around writing that long that now what's old is new again and that word processing is going to be like the new thing for writers and distractors in free environments.
It was really unnerving that that is considered the new thing.
(40:15):
I still bang too hard on the keyboard because I learned how to type on something where you had to do that because, of course, typewriter ribbons were expensive and so you had to get as much out of it as you could.
And often that meant bang on the tea.
Yeah.
(40:36):
I was talking to a student the other day about their note taking, and now they were using a tablet, but they were writing on the tablet, not typing, but they could do like easily change colors.
So it was like a multi colored set of notes, and then it was her notes, and then she would annotate her own notes in a different color.
(41:05):
But it was just I mean, it was really cool looking, but it was interesting to me how there was preference to using a tool like a pen or stylist on a screen as opposed to like, typing things.
We've talked about this before, too.
Students using those different modes and technologies, like even things like voice to text or to write or produce work.
(41:35):
And it's interesting to see how that kind of affects the content and affects the writing process.
I don't know if you've seen similar things with upper level students in terms of the composing tools.
Yeah, and again, though, the thing that I think this rhetoric needs to look at is the relationship between us and the tool is no different than a pad and a pencil.
(42:06):
We're using it in a sense, the same way, different technology, but our relationship with the computer is the same when we were processing or is it the same? And that's what I'd like to see people looking at and thinking about.
Like, are our students really composing differently? Some studies say no, not at all.
(42:31):
I didn't mean to put you on the spot without asking you, because I do think that the umbrella digital rhetoric is so capacious because it does consider so many aspects of both the writing composition process, the way that it's interpreted by the technology, and the means in which it's delivered, the way the reader interacts with that particular delivery.
(42:54):
And we have talked about this before on the podcast.
I've seen an increase in students using talk to text software when they're composing.
And I just had this conversation with my class this week saying, if you use talk to text, it's essential that you proofread a little more stringently than you would if you were just writing, because we speak so much differently than we right when we're composing something.
(43:15):
And some of them agree and some of them look at me like I'm bananas, but that's typical of anything that I say in the classroom.
But I didn't even realize the difference until I had a student.
I was giving them feedback and I kept this one sentence, just I couldn't get over it.
And I said, okay, let me read this to you and tell me what we're trying to say here.
(43:35):
And I read the sentence, she goes, oh yeah, I was doing talk to Tax.
That's why that sounds the way it does.
And it was like this lightning moment of thinking about, oh wow, yes, there are the really big variations in the way that we're composing, given whatever the chosen platform.
And I do love the study of digital rhetoric because it also allows legitimacy to those literacies that we're talking about that students think are just pastime.
(44:00):
But actually they're very nuanced and sophisticated in the way they compose.
And this variety of digital environments, whether it's sitting to talk to text or they're actually composing on a computer, are they writing on an iPad or I can't think of the name of the other one that's like an iPad and how is it being interpreted and disseminated amongst the people.
(44:23):
So I think it's an interesting area of rhetorical study and that's why I was curious to hear your thoughts on it because I know you have worked with students in that arena before.
Talking to text is not problem is that that becomes the step and that's all they do.
And until the software and some of it's better than others, but until it knows your voice inflections accent you're going to get all kinds of stuff.
(44:57):
And we've had a lot of trouble teaching my mother that was sending texts on her phone because suddenly there'll be like a random word in the middle like penis.
And then we all call each other up and start laughing.
But she still hasn't realized that she's got to read it over before she hits send.
That she's got to go back there.
Yeah.
(45:19):
And I think that they still have to understand that it's a writing process.
It's great that they're using that software, but now go back in and that's your draft.
Okay, you talked out your draft.
That's great.
In the olden days I used to have students who had trouble drafting.
(45:40):
I would have them talking to a tape recorder and then write down what they had said.
I mean it was a lot of steps, but then they had a draft that they could work with because they just couldn't seem to get a word on the paper.
All the pressure of that first word, we've all been there.
The screen is just so bright.
(46:00):
And what word do you start with? I think the fun of teaching first year writing is acknowledging the struggle of taking what we have conceptually in our minds through our experience and our command of language and trying to communicate it in a way that is effective depending on the audience, depending on the genre constraints because they're taught to demonstrate a very particular skill.
(46:27):
K through twelve when it comes to writing and probably haven't ever had the person on the front of the room say, yeah, this is going to be challenging.
Writing is hard.
Ask anyone who writes.
Writing is hard.
This is not an easy class.
This is not maybe what you thought it was going to be and nobody likes it.
Yeah, even writers don't like it.
It's like this huge secret that until you get you peek behind the curtain, the fact that even writers have horrible dread and lots of feelings of anxiety and it's not all just sitting in front of a window in a mountain cabin like typing away like you think you're Stephen King or something.
(47:01):
Where's the window in the mountain cabin? I don't know.
I keep hoping that's what I think of that's.
My writing place in my mind, like the perfect writing place.
Speaking of which.
I wanted to pivot a little bit to ask you a little bit about your creative writing process and work from the novels to my copy of your book of poetry.
(47:24):
Hard Letters and Folded Wings.
Which I think I may have told you this in passing before.
But Phantom Limb is the one that really stood out to me.
And I really just think that's great.
And thinking about process and places and things like that.
(47:44):
I'm so blown away by poetry a lot because I always want to ask the same question.
And since I have a poet here right in front of me, I'll ask it.
How do you know when you're done with one? Because I think, well, you revive them to death just like you do everything else.
(48:05):
I happen to be very good at the final two lines.
I don't know why, but that's something that I can close out of poem.
Sometimes the stuff in the middle is not so good, but I can definitely close out a poem.
I think it's when I've said all I want to say about the topic.
(48:25):
And you can talk about smaller and smaller topics when you write poetry.
So you can take a large experience and then bring it down to, say, one moment, and once you start writing past that moment, then you've lost the poem.
Does that make sense? Yeah, because I think for most poetry, the economy of poetry means that every word sort of hits right in a way.
(48:56):
And that's what I think is kind of the magic of it.
Like, why those words or that combination of words.
And it won't obviously spark the same image in every reader or even from the author, but to me, that's where I think the tweaking might be endless.
(49:17):
Oh, it's fun, though.
I mean, that's fun.
And it's not just say the words.
It's also the rhythm and the sound of the words and where you put that sound and how sound makes meaning as well.
It's so much fun.
I never considered the sound portion.
Do you read aloud as part of your writing process? Yes.
(49:37):
Do you ever have anyone else read it for you? No.
Okay.
Too shy.
Oh, yeah.
I can understand that.
Poetry is usually and of course, family members always want to know if you're writing about them.
And the one time when I did put my mother it's actually in the chapter in my novel, she read it and then didn't even see herself.
(50:01):
Wow.
And my sisters read it.
We're like, oh, my God, are you going to publish that? She's going to kill you.
Didn't even see herself.
It made sense to me that you have done so much work in constructions of identity and constructions of the digital spaces as a poet, because you're always that's kind of the charm or drafting a screenplay or drafting short works, is that you're so conscious of those constructions in a different way that then you can take that out into more theoretical approaches.
(50:40):
So it seemed like a perfect marriage to me, looking at your resume, that, oh, of course, she's so good at writing about these particular things.
They almost seem to be like a symbiotic relationship.
Almost, I would imagine.
Yeah, in some ways it is.
In some ways they don't always get along, though.
No.
So, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work.
(51:04):
Yeah, I was going to say how do you because I think about our minds of it when we're in the moment of creating and then having so much experience looking at text, reading text, interpreting text, analyzing tax.
Do those minds sometimes get in each other's way during the creation process? Because that seems like it could be like a challenge as well.
(51:32):
It is, because you don't analyze while you're drafting and you draft a poem the same way you draft an article or an essay.
You have to draft it out first, and then the playing happens and that's when you can let go of that.
But it is very hard sometimes, and I do analyze my poems as I'm writing them, but what happens then is by the time I'm done, I'm like, is that what I wanted to say? What was I doing? And since I don't write literary criticism, I think it's a lot easier for me.
(52:08):
I review books of poetry for people, but I don't do that kind of writing and I think that's much more helpful to me.
Like a separation of church and state, almost.
Yeah.
How long have you been writing poetry? Since I was five.
Wow.
Do you still have any of your early work? Oh, yeah, I can still remember my five year old poem.
(52:33):
Do you want to say one for us? You don't have to.
But the snow is falling all around.
It falls on hills and trees.
It's falling on the sidewalk and it even falls on me.
Oh my gosh.
Very derivative of Roger Kipling.
(52:54):
My mom has it, that's why demonstrating a clear gift from an early age.
Absolutely.
And apparently I drove one of my grandmother's crazy and she would not sleep in my room because I would sit in my crib and repeat things like rain or rain deer.
(53:14):
It's raining deer.
And that's over insane.
I don't know why, but I think it's almost like that sounds like word association.
Practice it's rhythmic.
That's interesting.
One of the things that I noticed in glancing through some of the poems in this book and also when I heard you speak at the read some of your poetry at the Doctor Phillips Center recently is I love the way that you talk about deal with bring up kind of the construction of memory, right, that we all do and that we all have.
(53:55):
Can you speak a little bit about why that's so kind of fascinating or fun for you to explore in a lot of your work? To explore my own memories or family memories, yeah.
Well, I think in some of those you include in the poems, but I think that to me, is something that we can all kind of relate to because again, our memories are our stories, but they're definitely all constructed by us.
(54:26):
And so it just seems like a really kind of fascinating topic to play with.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, I have eight siblings, and when we get together and talk about things that happened when we were kids, nobody has the same story because everyone saw their role in what was going on differently.
(54:48):
And that always fascinates me, except for my youngest brother, because a lot of stuff happened before he was born.
And he'll say, oh, I remember.
And we'll go, no, you weren't born yet.
And he gets really mad.
Even now he gets mad and he's 40.
But I don't blame him.
You feel kind of cut out from older kids talking about things.
(55:10):
But yes, memory is really tricky.
It really is.
Because you don't remember things.
Like you did a video of what was going on.
And even with the video, you only got that little square.
There's stuff over here and over here.
I remember I wrote about I don't know if it's in that collection about a photograph where people see this moment of my siblings in a photograph, and I saw standing together and my mother took the picture, but they didn't know that 2 seconds afterwards somebody knocked somebody down or you got mud on your dress or whatever was going on.
(55:47):
And so the picture doesn't tell the story or the process of getting to it, if that makes sense.
And so for me, poetry does tell that story and the process of getting to it.
And there's also a lot of trying to understand other perspectives.
(56:09):
I hated buying shoes when I was a child because we always had to wear brown oxfords because my father wanted our feet to be safe.
And if your feet you have good feet, you can get anywhere.
And so we wore oh, man, I wanted saddle shoes so bad then I wanted low first men.
We're talking up into 6th and 7th grade, if you can imagine this torture.
(56:32):
And it really hit me when I was older why he did that.
So I wrote a poem about it.
He wasn't being mean.
There's a lot of thought and care that went into that.
And it wouldn't have been shown in a photograph.
No.
Yeah.
And who's taking the photograph? Absolutely.
(56:52):
So now that you've had a chance to build and the process of delivering the course you've been really itching to get your hands on for so long, do you have any other ideas or areas that you would like to develop in terms of things that you want to teach or have that opportunity for? No one ever asked me that.
(57:14):
No, seriously.
It's like here, teach this.
Here's your chance to put it out there and make it my own.
Yeah.
I wouldn't mind teaching a class that took the rhetorical triangle through the centuries.
Because now I'm thinking when you talk about digital rhetoric, one of the things I've noticed, because people comment and then people comment about the comments, is that sort of where you have the writer and the reader that they're moving closer and closer together.
(57:49):
So the triangle is not an equilateral triangle anymore the way we usually draw it.
So I think that would be really cool.
Or to make a video like that about.
That would be really neat.
Yeah.
Think about like if Benjamin Franklin was trying to write his autobiography now and putting it on the Internet versus having all that feedback from people, versus being that standalone.
(58:12):
I use him as a reference because to me, he's what you point to in terms of like, at least American autobiography.
He's the start and that idea of speaker versus reader and what that relationship would have been like now and what might that mean to the text or the importance of the text versus when it was drafted.
(58:33):
Yeah, and even how novelists break things up into chapters.
Because if you think in the 19th century, people read a chapter at a time because they could take a chapter out of the library or it was in a magazine, and so everything had to end in a way that would make you want to read the next one and that sort of cliffhanger thing.
(58:57):
But it really happened because of how the texts were produced, not necessarily because the writers wanted to do that, but it was you've got to create readers and you have to have readers that are going to follow you and stay with you.
In so many ways, writers shape their readership and lead them to expect certain things.
(59:21):
Sounds like how streaming shows now that come out once a week.
They have to keep you coming back for the next one.
We are closing in on our time for this episode.
So I was wondering, what is it that you're excited about? What are you working on, maybe in your own writing that you may like to mention or talk about that's sort of on the horizon for you that you're excited about? Well, I've got two sort of collections of poems I'm writing.
(59:51):
Wow.
One is about Marie Curie and kind of turning her into a real person that has dinner and stuff instead of the first wonderful, brilliant woman scientist.
And then it goes into what happens to her discovery.
And the rest of the book is about the radium girls in waterbury in Newark and orange in Ottawa, Illinois.
(01:00:19):
And then the other book I'm trying to write about is because I suffer from anxiety and clinical depression and trying to think about when it started.
And it really did start when I was a child and sort of writing about that journey in poems.
But that's been really hard because sometimes I start doing it and I get depressed.
(01:00:42):
A lot of emotional labor, but I think it would be valuable for people to see, well, again, that's representation, right? Yes.
It's hard to be the one person to put it out there or be that icon, so other people have, but I don't know if anyone's done a poetry collection about it, so that's what I'm trying to do.
(01:01:05):
Right.
Wow.
Fantastic.
Well, we can't wait to hear how that goes.
Well, hopefully it gets done.
However I can sherpa for you.
All right, whatever you need.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Well, thank you for having delight having this conversation with you.
We get to pass in the hallway a lot, but we don't often get to just sit down and talk for an uninterrupted amount of time.
(01:01:29):
So thank you again for joining us.
Thanks for your time, and thanks, everyone, for listening.
Well, thanks for having me.
Greetings and welcome to DWR discussions on writing and rhetoric, a space for informal conversations around research and practice in the field.
At the university level, a place includes for curious novices, blossoming scholars and seasoned academics to consider and share their inquiries, experiences and passions surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professors Meeghan Faulconer and Nikolas Gardiakos, with the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today we are joined by Dr.
Martha Brenckle, full professor and the interim first-year writing director here at UCF.
(00:53):
Dr.
Brinkle teaches first year writing and rhetorical theory.
Her scholarship has been published in multiple disciplinary journals including the Journal of Basic Writing, CCC, the WPA Journal and Pedagogy and Culture.
She writes and publishes poetry and fiction, winning the Central Florida United Arts Award for Poetry in 2000 and Orlando Poet Laureate finalist in 2021.
(01:20):
Street Angels, her first published novel, was nominated for a Lambda Award and a Triangle Award.
She has also co authored an award winning screenplay turned film titled Untold.
Her poetry manuscript, Hard Letters and Folded Wings, was published in October 2019.
You can see a full listing of her substantial publications and accolades in her profile on the department website.
(01:45):
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Oh, you're very welcome.
That's a lot of accolades and publications.
Yeah, but I worked hard to get them, of course, so I want more.
I'm very greedy that way.
Normally.
Well, there's a trap in academia.
I feel like to produce something is such an amount of time and energy, but it also becomes this lifestyle almost where you're constantly like, what am I working on? What is the next thing? And not even necessarily due to external pressures.
(02:22):
I think a lot of it is those are internal pressures we put on ourselves.
It just becomes like a part of our lifestyle.
So I can see where there's always that what are we doing next? Mentality.
Yes.
Most of us are here because we put a lot of pressure on ourselves.
And even early school, even in elementary school, how to have an A? Had to know the answer.
(02:43):
First one to raise your hand.
I mean, we've got a whole university full of people like that.
I tell people, I think the first moment of feeling out of my element in grad school, when you're an undergrad, you're typically one of the few brightest in the class.
You're an overachiever.
That's how you get to where you are.
And then you get to grad school where everyone was the brightest in their class and you suddenly are in a whole new arena of these people that were all always the best and brightest.
(03:10):
And it takes a moment to adjust to being in that different dynamic.
It really does.
Yeah.
I can remember an undergrad when I was getting my PhD at Lehigh University who came into me crying one day and she said, I was valedictorian of my class.
I was this, I was that, and everyone here is just like me.
I couldn't stop laughing.
(03:32):
I said, yeah, that's what it's like when you go to college.
But it's a good thing.
Yeah, it is.
Can you tell us a little bit about your experiences here at UCF? I know that this is not the first institution you've been a participant of, so basically, how long have you been here? This is my 24th year.
Wow.
(03:52):
So you've seen some changes.
Big changes.
When I came here, we had 24,000 students, and that felt huge to me because I came from a college that had like 5200.
So it was quite a change.
I kept thinking, this is a little city.
And I remember having to learn how to schedule meetings, so I gave myself time to walk to another building.
(04:20):
I mean, it was that crazy.
Yeah.
So I know that, as we already established, UCF was not your first academic institution.
How has your time at UCF specifically shaped you as a professional? The environment, the climate here? I've learned to be a whole lot tougher, if that makes sense.
(04:44):
I've learned how to work smart.
I mean, I'm still working hard, but you can't accomplish all the things you're expected to accomplish at UCF and not work smart.
I like these students a lot.
Does that make sense? I mean, I think they're wonderful.
(05:06):
I especially like the first year students.
They are so eager and ready to go and ready to learn, and they don't have that little editor in their heads that tells them, oh, don't say that, it might be stupid.
Right? And so they say things and sometimes they say the most profound things and I'll go, wow, I never looked at that that way.
(05:28):
So, yeah, the students are wonderful.
They really are.
It's been a long haul coming here and being openly gay.
I think I was probably the only openly gay lesbian on campus because I used to constantly get, can I interview you for my class? And I finally said to one teacher, am I the only lesbian? You know, I can't be.
(06:01):
And plus, you don't like to speak for everybody in your group.
You can't, but you can't because everyone's experiences are different.
So that was tough.
And until we had sexual orientation into the antidiscrimination clause, I was always walking on the edge.
I was told by many people in administration, you can't tell your students you're gay.
(06:26):
Wow.
Please don't.
You can't tell your students you're gay.
Of course.
I did anyway.
And I'm glad I did because I would get these little notes like, thank you for being so matter of fact about your life.
I feel better about being gay now.
And if I can do that for one student, it's all worth it.
Absolutely.
(06:48):
While there's the flip side of that pressure of being the representative right, is that you are then representation, which matters to a lot of people, and I can't agree with you more about our incoming freshman.
I'm always renewed in the fall semester because they were coming from being the top in their class, and so they feel a sense of both, what am I doing? This is college.
(07:15):
But I also was always really good at being a student, and they don't have that inner editor that you were talking about.
They're not jaded yet.
They're like they're still excited to be here.
And I do love those moments where I had never considered a reading in that way, or they bring something new to a class discussion.
(07:36):
And I like to be that champion for that generation amongst friends and colleagues, because I feel like the tale of time is always on these kids today.
Right.
I mean, I was in a high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, which is set in the there's a whole thing about these Kids Today and Ed Sullivan Show, and it's never ending.
(07:57):
So I do love that we have that chance, and as writing instructors, we have a glimpse into their lives.
It's very different than many other professors, but I had to echo that, that I love this time of year with our freshman coming in.
But if we can pivot a little bit because you're teaching a new course this semester, can we talk about that a little bit? Sure, we can.
It is queer rhetoric and queering writing.
(08:18):
Yes.
So it's not just new to the department, but you also built this class, correct? Yes, I actually asked to teach this class 24 years ago, and I was told no probably five times.
Wow.
It never got out of the department.
One time it got to the college committee and then I just kind of gave up, so I thought, what the heck? I'll ask again.
(08:43):
We had a nice ten year break from it, and our chair said, yes, I want you to teach that.
And it's actually been a lot of fun so far.
And everybody's worried that nobody would take the course.
I mean, I have 30 students in the course.
Wow.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to turn anybody down.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
I had the pleasure of looking over your syllabus, which, you know, it's always so fun to read a syllabus.
(09:09):
But I love in the course definition, you start out with a definition of writing.
You say writing is both a practice and a process of critical thinking and communicating to others.
And I think it's so important that as writing instructors, writing professionals, writing academics, we do give students a concrete understanding of what are we calling writing? Because it's not just sitting at a keyboard.
(09:36):
Right.
There's so much else happening that we need to consider when we're studying writing.
So I really enjoyed that you set up that expectation.
So with that definition in mind, how are you applying the ideas of looking at queer rhetorics and querying writing with that definition in mind.
It's writing to disrupt the status quo.
(09:58):
It's writing maybe not in the usual linear fashion.
It's experimenting.
It's sort of a way of looking at the world and then saying, well, what if it was like this instead? So there is a lot of sort of what I call critical imagination involved.
(10:20):
And you also have to question how language works.
Like is there only boy and girl? What else is there? Does every word have to have its opposite? And that's actually how we were.
At least that's how I was educated.
And I can remember taking IQ tests and they'd go night and you were supposed to go day.
(10:42):
And it's questioning all those things.
It's breaking everything up into little or littler parts.
Is the course now what you imagined it would have been when you first thought of it 24 years ago? No, it's really not.
When I thought of it 24 years ago, I had a lot more theory in there.
(11:02):
You also have to remember at that point, queer rhetoric really was in its very beginnings, and it wasn't quite named yet.
And so putting it together was very experimental in a lot of ways.
Now we have a whole field called queer rhetoric, and I get asked to read tenure applications from other universities for people that are in that area.
(11:28):
I just did one two weeks ago, and so it's gotten very firmly established.
But back then it wasn't.
And it's really hard to find the right balance of theory and practice when it's brand new.
(11:50):
And there's usually, at the beginning, just so much theory and not enough work on practice.
So I feel like right now it's actually better than it would have been.
I noticed one of the assignments that you have students do is defining queer rhetoric or defining it made me wonder.
(12:17):
How do you think about students in the practice part of it like encouraging them to maybe go for those experiments that you were talking about and playing with language.
It seems to me I think sometimes students tend to be a little hesitant sometimes of things that they think might be risky in that way when it's in the context of a class.
(12:42):
And so I was just curious, reading some of those things, like, how do you think about those when you're asking students to approach these topics? And what I think is so great about it is that they'll sort of leave with that experience of having defined it for themselves or taking the theory in combination and coming up with the definition and participating in it.
(13:10):
I know this is the first time you're doing the class, but how's that going? Or what's your sense of that from students? I think it's going pretty well and we're dealing with the current climate that we live in now and what that means.
And we'll eventually I have someone from Quality, Florida who's going to come and talk to the class, which will probably only be just me on Zoom, but then I'll put it up.
(13:39):
We have to deal with all the new bills that Florida has put together and really look at them.
What do they say? What don't they say? And then my next thing is, okay, what do you want them to say? And that, to me, is the big leap.
It's not just taking things apart and being looking at them critically.
(13:59):
It's also, if this is what we have and I don't like it, where should we go? I used to ask it as what kind of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world like this? Or do you want something different? And trying to get them to see that language has so much power and how you label people and what opportunities are open to them makes a huge difference.
(14:27):
Yeah, I started thinking while Nick was asking that question the potential for experimentation and form in a class like this where you can take things and flip them from what's the typical expectation? And I hadn't even considered the larger world view of what might be theory and practice outside of the classroom.
(14:49):
How might they play into our understanding of the world around us? So we sang the praises of our freshmen a moment ago, and now this is a 4000 or 3000 level class.
4000 level classes are graduating seniors.
In theory, do you see any difference between the 4000 level more exposed to the world students than our incoming freshmen who still kind of have rose colored lenses on about the college experience when encountering these kinds of ideas? They're much more thoughtful, I will say.
(15:28):
Their discussion posts are amazing.
They're very good at pulling things from their own lives or something they've seen or something from popular culture into their post, which is what I want them to do.
So that makes me very, very happy.
And then we'll just see how it goes.
(15:54):
this week we're talking about young adult literature and the importance of it.
And then next week we're doing Foucault's History of Sexuality.
Just the introduction in the first two chapters because it's too much to do the whole thing.
You could do a semester just on those.
I know.
Yeah, I know.
And what I have them doing in the discussion post is their first post.
(16:21):
Is there a journalist interviewing Foucault? And I can put a picture up and everything.
What kind of questions would you ask him about what you just read? What things did you find confusing? And so they have to have three questions.
And then the next post is to choose someone else's post and be Foucault and answer the question.
(16:47):
I think it's actually going to be fun.
Yeah.
And what I like is I can do a lot of things like that as a way into very difficult theory and give them an opportunity to play with it where it's really low stakes.
Yeah.
So I always default to a new historist approach to looking at texts.
(17:13):
I feel like you can't look at a text without considering the context of what it's constructed.
So do you feel that our students today still can have the same access to the ideas that Foucault or do you think Foucault would understand what the questions are given our context today? I know it's a lot of supposition, but do you feel like the theories stand alone and that they're timeless? No, not at all.
(17:38):
But I do think there are a few things that end up in the canon because they were the first to do that.
And Foucault is really interesting to me because philosophers don't think he's a philosopher, and historians won't recognize him as an historian, and yet he does both.
But still you'll get told that he's not really a philosopher, he's not really an historian, and so it gives them a chance to think, well, I'm not really this either, so let me play.
(18:08):
And to me, a lot of it is all about playing and trying something new and seeing what you come up with.
But I hate to say that any author is timeless because it's not something I've grasped onto.
But I do think that there are some pieces that, even though they're older, are really worth reading.
(18:29):
And that's one of them.
Yeah.
And it sounds like a great activity.
Exercise in what I find with students sometimes is there I don't know if it's reverence for respect for, like, text, where they don't want to play with them, or they see them as, like, one way information that they're there to absorb as content and not sort of ask questions of or interrogate or use themselves to sort of elevate them in that conversation.
(19:06):
In eleven or two, I try to get students to do that a little bit because I know that's something that when they get to the 4000 level class, like, professors are going to be asking them to engage.
And so I think anytime you can have fun ways of engaging students with text so that not only the content of the text, but they start to view text in a slightly different way, one that they are sort of allowed to engage in, I think that can really kind of change their positioning of themselves in their own writing.
(19:38):
One of the things I always tell first year students, first semester, as I say, there's no meaning in this text until you read it.
It doesn't walk around with meaning.
It's just words on paper.
When you open it up and read it, that's when the meaning starts to happen.
So I try to sort of let them see what their responsibility is as a reader.
(20:02):
Well, actually, all of them tell me they can't watch television normally anymore because they're starting to question everything they see.
Well, that's good.
Welcome to the good life.
Yes.
Yeah.
When pleasure reading has notes in the margins, like, you know, you're part of the inner sanctum.
(20:25):
I love that too.
In terms of I don't know if agency is quite the right word.
But even accessibility for students to interrogate those canonical ideas.
I think one of the hardest shifts.
Because it was for me.
And I see it with students.
Is putting yourself into the conversation with texts that are so long regarded as being the end all.
(20:49):
Be all.
You have the canon of even.
Like.
Our rhetorical theorists.
And so to take that stake down where they can interrogate it in a way that still respects the ideas, but also can ask those questions and give them away into the text, instead of just, I need to absorb this.
This is the end all, be all.
(21:10):
Once I can regurgitate these ideas, then I'm an academic theorist.
So I think that is important to allow them that step into the process of putting yourself into those academic conversations.
And the conversations aren't just academic.
They're about our culture.
They're about the society we live in right now.
(21:35):
Yeah, I think maybe even more like rhetorical conversations as opposed to academic conversations.
The questioning and what is happening here, the examination.
I actually read this interesting article yesterday, and one of the sentences in it was that the university is built on rhetoric.
We all practice it.
(21:56):
And I thought, all right, because that's what I study.
That's pretty good.
I'm sure people in the chemistry department wouldn't believe me.
But, I mean, when you think about it, it really is we have all these discourse communities that also have to talk to each other.
We have an administration that needs to know how to talk to us, which is often a disaster, but we try.
(22:18):
And so that idea that your world is only there because you speak of the world, when you speak, you pull it into existence.
In a sense, it's almost Lacanian, isn't it? Well, it is Lacanian.
Yeah.
It's also freer.
Yeah.
I'm having to quickly try to remember the names of my theorist.
(22:39):
I say so long ago.
So in this queer rhetoric inquiring writing.
When we have this definition of writing in the syllabus and this expectation.
And we're asking them to challenge these worldviews both about the world around them and what they are bringing to the world in themselves.
Are there any approaches to the writing process that you're hoping they're considering specifically that you're trying to direct them to.
(23:02):
Or is it just open for interpretation.
Like the practice part? I actually make them when you're online, so double space the PDF, take a color and write in between.
Do interlinear notes, almost like you're translating it.
And that's a way of getting into the text.
(23:28):
The same way that I used to write in pencil in the margins and all of that.
But when they put it in color, it kind of makes a difference because then that becomes their color and it becomes them.
And so they start becoming a character almost in the piece that they're reading, the character of interpreter.
So that's one of the things that I have them start with, especially with something really difficult, interpreter and interrogator.
(23:53):
Yeah, right.
But my thought is, if you're not going to read something difficult, what's the point? Because why would I teach them something they already know? Yeah.
Why would I spend time on it? You already know that.
Yeah.
Let's move on.
Are there any other acts of writing, even if they're in academic instructions, that you are hoping or outside in the world that you're hoping they're looking at in terms of querying of writing? Well, we look a lot at memes actually have making memes.
(24:21):
We look at infographics.
That's one of their assignments.
We have a blog going in the class.
Another sort of way to write their final project they can do, if they want to, a Ted Talk.
They don't have to and they can tape themselves and what else should I give them? I tried to make them really creative so they'd have more fun with it.
(24:49):
Actually, if they're thinking of teaching, they can do a class week's worth of curriculum.
What would you teach, what would you have the students do, et cetera, if this was your topic.
And I think those kinds of things are more application to me that's the now that you know this, what do you know or what are you going to do with it? I can remember a student here showing me some screen saver he had made and I found it horrifying, but it was a bunch of cockroaches that just like covered the screen finally.
(25:24):
And he goes, Isn't that cool? And I went, what does it do? And he said, well, that's it, it's just a screen saver.
I went, how much time did you spend on this? Because to me, and I guess it is entertaining for people and that can be an application, but I was just like, oh my God.
(25:47):
I can remember my youngest brother, when he was like four, his clock radio, he decided it was broken, brings it downstairs, gives to the guy.
I was standing at the time and wanted him to fix it.
So he took it apart and put it back together and he said, Here you go.
And Nick said, but that's all it does, as if in his head he start doing so much more.
(26:13):
Yeah, I love that inclusion of memes.
I use a lot of social media in 1111, actually, all my courses I incorporate something to do because I think it's a literacy that is overlooked a lot, very much, but that our students are bringing to the table with a real strong skill set.
Is there any other particular assignment or reading that you're excited to be delving into with them.
(26:35):
Well, we're actually going to read my friend Jonathan, one of his memoirs.
He's written a series of three and it's really interesting.
It's called creep.
A sort of apology.
And he does sort of talk about his life and growing up as a gay man and those things.
But in between are all these issues of rhetorical theory that he follows along.
(26:58):
It's probably one of the most interesting memoirs I've ever read because it's not just straight narrative, it plays around all the time and it's not long.
So I'm hoping that they enjoy it.
I'm looking forward to at least talking about it.
Yeah.
Are you going to invite him in? Yes.
I was saying I'll probably have him on over Zoom because it's an online class and then whoever can be there can be there and we'll talk about the book and I'm hoping that some students will be there and ask him questions so he's not stuck with me the whole time.
(27:35):
We've known each other a long time, so it will get too silly if it's just there'll be plenty to talk about.
Yeah.
I have a question about projects that you have your students doing.
It's always fun to see what they come up with when you give them a lot of free reign to pick their modalities, creating things in digital spaces and things like that.
(28:00):
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you see your role with a project like that, with that freedom.
I mean, you mentioned the example of the screen saver, which I think is really a funny one because I think the challenge there is to guide without giving too many sort of instructions about exactly what to do to allow that sort of freedom and exploration.
(28:27):
But then you also have to be kind of like a coach or a guide through that for their time, for their resources, and for them kind of applying the things that they use in the course and the things that they read.
So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you see that role for yourself with all that kind of experience that you've had over all the courses you've taught.
(28:50):
I usually think of myself as a facilitator.
I don't own the knowledge.
And I also think that knowledge gets made and remade and revised and remade all the time.
And so their voices and what they think of something is certainly as important as mine is.
So I try not to be a teacher.
(29:11):
That's sort of the arbitrator of what is valuable to know and what is not valuable to know.
I've even taught composition where knowledge was the topic.
And we actually talked about how do people come to these conclusions, how do people decide what is valuable knowledge? Who decided that you should learn these foundational skills and why? Who made this world so that this is education.
(29:39):
And then we spent the whole rest of the semester with their papers and everything else, questioning education and questioning the way that they're taught.
And it really got good, I got a lot of good ideas out of them, what they would like.
I think it's something that the more years that I teach, that's one of the things that I think keeps it so fresh, for me at least, that it's allowing students to explore in that way or question things.
(30:07):
They're always going to be changing.
They're always going to be the classes that come in.
And so by being just that sort of like facilitator, I think of it as almost like a host for people to practice some of their ideas and observations a lot of times and say, find out what they think about things, find out when they question something, what claims do they come to make? Some claims of your own, you know, in this class.
(30:34):
And I think for me, that keeps it really fresh because it isn't just one way information or content that they're cramming for.
A lot of times before class starts, students might be there.
The other day it was a chemistry test where they're all scoring before class, like trying to remember all the things that they know.
(30:54):
And I just walked in being like, man, this class is so different than that class that they're in.
There's no way to sort of cram for the types of classes that we do or whatever because it's almost like an experience.
Yes.
And it's practice.
It's practice more than knowledge based or content based.
(31:18):
And I realized there's the big drive in rhetoric and composition to prove that we have content and that it is somehow knowledge based.
And I don't care if students know what Kairos is.
I just care if they recognize it when it happens and if they can recognize those moments in their own lives.
I'm not going to give them a quiz on Stasis theory or something, but I want them to understand why the abortion argument can't go anywhere.
(31:47):
And that's why they need to know Stacey theory, so they can look at it and maybe come up with a much better argument.
Yeah, I always use the analogy that I'm more like a sherpa.
Like I say, I'm a cheerleader and a guide to my students, but I really feel more like a sherpa because I feel like I'm the person that packs all the stuff.
I've come up with the readings, I've come up with the assignments, with the journey in mind that we're going to go on together and we're going to start together and there's going to be some parts that are easy and some parts that are challenging, but I'm there with them every step of the way and I'll give them everything I have to help them.
(32:19):
But really it's the journey they're going on after they leave our classrooms.
We only have them for 16 weeks, maybe two semesters, or three if we're lucky.
But, yeah.
I feel like more than cheerleader or guide.
We're the ones who know what to pack and what to bring and how to try to best prepare them for the road ahead.
Yeah.
We can give them things to look at and think about and things to read, think about.
(32:43):
I just don't want the journey to be like, sherpas have already been there.
That's what always cracks me up.
I made it to the top, and the person who climbed up gets all the accolades and all of that.
But honestly, the shepherds do that ten times a month.
I mean, this is, like, what they do for a living, and so those are the kind of things I don't want to get overlooked.
(33:11):
Why did the sherpa pack what the sherpa packed? I would tell students, Why do you think I picked this article? What do you think? I thought you would learn.
Yeah.
And I love to say to them when they ask a question, and I love to say, I don't know.
Let's look it up.
Yes.
I have no idea.
Yes, I become the notorious I get eye rolls because everything that they give me is an answer.
(33:34):
I respond with, Why do you think that? Why do you consider it that way? Tell us more.
And they love it, and they hate it.
It's useful, but in the moment, it's like, again, can I just give you an answer and be done? No, this isn't the chemistry quiz.
It's not that simple.
No.
And I always say, hey, this is the one class where I actually care what you think.
(33:58):
I've had them draw, like, the outline of our brain and then write in there all the things that they're thinking about.
Oh, wow.
And I'll go, which one looks like a good idea for writing? And I have them circle it with colored pens.
I'm really big into colored pens and origami paper and things like that.
Yeah, it's a tactile thing.
The time I felt probably the worst, because my honors composition class, they've been working so hard, and I thought, just for fun, let's make origami cranes today, and then we can take them apart and write on the paper.
(34:32):
They were so freaked out.
What if mine doesn't come out good? What if I fold the paper wrong? I mean, it wasn't fun.
They had no fun.
I felt horrible.
That's why they're honor students.
I never did it again.
Yeah, but you guys still have fun.
No, I agree.
And I think that's a really valuable lesson for honor students, that it's okay if it doesn't come out all right every time.
(34:55):
Exactly.
I find Origami to be a stressful person.
I love it.
I like making things.
Me too.
Because I don't know, maybe it's the detailed directions that I think look, someone wrote, like, all these detailed directions.
You should be able to do this.
And it's like I'm constantly worried about where I'm going wrong.
But maybe that's well, maybe that's just a meeting.
(35:17):
There's your next course.
The rhetoric of instructions.
Yes, actually, that is a whole it is a whole thing.
And it's really interesting.
Ikea has been so successful because it's all pictures and because you can take a screw and put it on here.
Okay.
That fits the picture.
That's screw.
K yes.
My son recently was gifted.
(35:39):
I learned later that I should have looked up the value of this thing.
My aunt found a complete Lego set in her attic.
That was her son's, and it was 30 years old.
She sent it to my son.
We open it up, we build it.
And then I googled it.
It was worth like $500 in mint condition.
I should have looked at it first.
But it was interesting to see, even in Lego's instructions, because that's also just pictograms how they have evolved over the years to be more effective.
(36:03):
You wouldn't think that the drawing of putting this Lego here could change that much.
But even in 25 to 30 years, it was a very different set of instructions.
And I was so frustrated that they didn't look like the Lego instructions I was used to it's usability testing.
They have a course in that in the English Department and Tech communications.
Yeah, that makes sense.
(36:24):
I think we need to bring rhetoric of instructions into our department.
Yeah.
Just because I don't know, we used to make jokes.
There's the person that follows the instructions step by step, and then there's the person that looks at it and goes and throws it over their shoulder and puts it together somehow.
Yeah.
And usually the person who follows the instructions comes along behind them afterwards and redo it the right way without anyone knowing.
(36:48):
I noticed that you have also assisted in multiple thesis that have been published and amongst also your publications in general.
I'm seeing a little bit of an overlap between the consideration of identity and writing, especially in your personal publications.
I could point to some of them.
But you had cruising composition, text negotiating, sexual difference and first year writing readers from the Journal of Conference on College Composition and Communication.
(37:18):
You had Cartography and adoption, identity and difference beyond the politics of the comfort zone.
From the Review of Education pedagogical cultural Studies by Butch and Bardyke, pedagogical performances of class, gender and sexuality and the Journal of the conference on College composition and community Medication.
(37:38):
And then for some of your thesis, you had things dealing with gamification in educational environments and technopanic and posthuman potential.
And so I'm wondering how the overlap works for you in terms of consideration of identity and writing and digital rhetoric.
(38:00):
Well, I think we have to get past and I think we have, to a large extent, the idea that technology makes everyone the same.
So when you're in some sort of digital space.
Everyone has the same amount of power.
And of course we found that's not true.
Everyone doesn't have access to technology.
(38:21):
It's the first problem.
And so usually those are the kinds of thesis that I agree to work on, are ones where there is some sense of forming identity using technology or inequity because of how technology is set up and how we began using it.
(38:43):
Okay.
How do you consider digital rhetoric in relation to writing? I don't know.
It's hard for me to see it as a separate thing because I don't write on paper anymore.
So for me, it's just something I grew with as a writer because it was more outlets to publish, more ways to do things.
(39:10):
It's certainly a lot easier to write with word processing than it is to write by hand and then type it, which was my young life.
And that's really hard.
I saw an ad the other day for what's, in essence, a word processor.
It's a keyboard with a tiny screen so that you can look and it was like distraction free writing.
(39:31):
Here's this product you can buy so that you can write effectively and not be distracted by email or the Internet.
And I thought, wow, we have really come full circle that someone was like, let's invent a keyboard with just a screen and we'll be more productive with it.
And it was just such a weird moment because before I had a computer, I was gifted a word processor from my dad.
(39:53):
He thought it was like this really big moment that I was getting this tool to help me be successful as a student.
And I thought, oh, wow, have I been around writing that long that now what's old is new again and that word processing is going to be like the new thing for writers and distractors in free environments.
It was really unnerving that that is considered the new thing.
(40:15):
I still bang too hard on the keyboard because I learned how to type on something where you had to do that because, of course, typewriter ribbons were expensive and so you had to get as much out of it as you could.
And often that meant bang on the tea.
Yeah.
(40:36):
I was talking to a student the other day about their note taking, and now they were using a tablet, but they were writing on the tablet, not typing, but they could do like easily change colors.
So it was like a multi colored set of notes, and then it was her notes, and then she would annotate her own notes in a different color.
(41:05):
But it was just I mean, it was really cool looking, but it was interesting to me how there was preference to using a tool like a pen or stylist on a screen as opposed to like, typing things.
We've talked about this before, too.
Students using those different modes and technologies, like even things like voice to text or to write or produce work.
(41:35):
And it's interesting to see how that kind of affects the content and affects the writing process.
I don't know if you've seen similar things with upper level students in terms of the composing tools.
Yeah, and again, though, the thing that I think this rhetoric needs to look at is the relationship between us and the tool is no different than a pad and a pencil.
(42:06):
We're using it in a sense, the same way, different technology, but our relationship with the computer is the same when we were processing or is it the same? And that's what I'd like to see people looking at and thinking about.
Like, are our students really composing differently? Some studies say no, not at all.
(42:31):
I didn't mean to put you on the spot without asking you, because I do think that the umbrella digital rhetoric is so capacious because it does consider so many aspects of both the writing composition process, the way that it's interpreted by the technology, and the means in which it's delivered, the way the reader interacts with that particular delivery.
(42:54):
And we have talked about this before on the podcast.
I've seen an increase in students using talk to text software when they're composing.
And I just had this conversation with my class this week saying, if you use talk to text, it's essential that you proofread a little more stringently than you would if you were just writing, because we speak so much differently than we right when we're composing something.
(43:15):
And some of them agree and some of them look at me like I'm bananas, but that's typical of anything that I say in the classroom.
But I didn't even realize the difference until I had a student.
I was giving them feedback and I kept this one sentence, just I couldn't get over it.
And I said, okay, let me read this to you and tell me what we're trying to say here.
(43:35):
And I read the sentence, she goes, oh yeah, I was doing talk to Tax.
That's why that sounds the way it does.
And it was like this lightning moment of thinking about, oh wow, yes, there are the really big variations in the way that we're composing, given whatever the chosen platform.
And I do love the study of digital rhetoric because it also allows legitimacy to those literacies that we're talking about that students think are just pastime.
(44:00):
But actually they're very nuanced and sophisticated in the way they compose.
And this variety of digital environments, whether it's sitting to talk to text or they're actually composing on a computer, are they writing on an iPad or I can't think of the name of the other one that's like an iPad and how is it being interpreted and disseminated amongst the people.
(44:23):
So I think it's an interesting area of rhetorical study and that's why I was curious to hear your thoughts on it because I know you have worked with students in that arena before.
Talking to text is not problem is that that becomes the step and that's all they do.
And until the software and some of it's better than others, but until it knows your voice inflections accent you're going to get all kinds of stuff.
(44:57):
And we've had a lot of trouble teaching my mother that was sending texts on her phone because suddenly there'll be like a random word in the middle like penis.
And then we all call each other up and start laughing.
But she still hasn't realized that she's got to read it over before she hits send.
That she's got to go back there.
Yeah.
(45:19):
And I think that they still have to understand that it's a writing process.
It's great that they're using that software, but now go back in and that's your draft.
Okay, you talked out your draft.
That's great.
In the olden days I used to have students who had trouble drafting.
(45:40):
I would have them talking to a tape recorder and then write down what they had said.
I mean it was a lot of steps, but then they had a draft that they could work with because they just couldn't seem to get a word on the paper.
All the pressure of that first word, we've all been there.
The screen is just so bright.
(46:00):
And what word do you start with? I think the fun of teaching first year writing is acknowledging the struggle of taking what we have conceptually in our minds through our experience and our command of language and trying to communicate it in a way that is effective depending on the audience, depending on the genre constraints because they're taught to demonstrate a very particular skill.
(46:27):
K through twelve when it comes to writing and probably haven't ever had the person on the front of the room say, yeah, this is going to be challenging.
Writing is hard.
Ask anyone who writes.
Writing is hard.
This is not an easy class.
This is not maybe what you thought it was going to be and nobody likes it.
Yeah, even writers don't like it.
It's like this huge secret that until you get you peek behind the curtain, the fact that even writers have horrible dread and lots of feelings of anxiety and it's not all just sitting in front of a window in a mountain cabin like typing away like you think you're Stephen King or something.
(47:01):
Where's the window in the mountain cabin? I don't know.
I keep hoping that's what I think of that's.
My writing place in my mind, like the perfect writing place.
Speaking of which.
I wanted to pivot a little bit to ask you a little bit about your creative writing process and work from the novels to my copy of your book of poetry.
(47:24):
Hard Letters and Folded Wings.
Which I think I may have told you this in passing before.
But Phantom Limb is the one that really stood out to me.
And I really just think that's great.
And thinking about process and places and things like that.
(47:44):
I'm so blown away by poetry a lot because I always want to ask the same question.
And since I have a poet here right in front of me, I'll ask it.
How do you know when you're done with one? Because I think, well, you revive them to death just like you do everything else.
(48:05):
I happen to be very good at the final two lines.
I don't know why, but that's something that I can close out of poem.
Sometimes the stuff in the middle is not so good, but I can definitely close out a poem.
I think it's when I've said all I want to say about the topic.
(48:25):
And you can talk about smaller and smaller topics when you write poetry.
So you can take a large experience and then bring it down to, say, one moment, and once you start writing past that moment, then you've lost the poem.
Does that make sense? Yeah, because I think for most poetry, the economy of poetry means that every word sort of hits right in a way.
(48:56):
And that's what I think is kind of the magic of it.
Like, why those words or that combination of words.
And it won't obviously spark the same image in every reader or even from the author, but to me, that's where I think the tweaking might be endless.
(49:17):
Oh, it's fun, though.
I mean, that's fun.
And it's not just say the words.
It's also the rhythm and the sound of the words and where you put that sound and how sound makes meaning as well.
It's so much fun.
I never considered the sound portion.
Do you read aloud as part of your writing process? Yes.
(49:37):
Do you ever have anyone else read it for you? No.
Okay.
Too shy.
Oh, yeah.
I can understand that.
Poetry is usually and of course, family members always want to know if you're writing about them.
And the one time when I did put my mother it's actually in the chapter in my novel, she read it and then didn't even see herself.
(50:01):
Wow.
And my sisters read it.
We're like, oh, my God, are you going to publish that? She's going to kill you.
Didn't even see herself.
It made sense to me that you have done so much work in constructions of identity and constructions of the digital spaces as a poet, because you're always that's kind of the charm or drafting a screenplay or drafting short works, is that you're so conscious of those constructions in a different way that then you can take that out into more theoretical approaches.
(50:40):
So it seemed like a perfect marriage to me, looking at your resume, that, oh, of course, she's so good at writing about these particular things.
They almost seem to be like a symbiotic relationship.
Almost, I would imagine.
Yeah, in some ways it is.
In some ways they don't always get along, though.
No.
So, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work.
(51:04):
Yeah, I was going to say how do you because I think about our minds of it when we're in the moment of creating and then having so much experience looking at text, reading text, interpreting text, analyzing tax.
Do those minds sometimes get in each other's way during the creation process? Because that seems like it could be like a challenge as well.
(51:32):
It is, because you don't analyze while you're drafting and you draft a poem the same way you draft an article or an essay.
You have to draft it out first, and then the playing happens and that's when you can let go of that.
But it is very hard sometimes, and I do analyze my poems as I'm writing them, but what happens then is by the time I'm done, I'm like, is that what I wanted to say? What was I doing? And since I don't write literary criticism, I think it's a lot easier for me.
(52:08):
I review books of poetry for people, but I don't do that kind of writing and I think that's much more helpful to me.
Like a separation of church and state, almost.
Yeah.
How long have you been writing poetry? Since I was five.
Wow.
Do you still have any of your early work? Oh, yeah, I can still remember my five year old poem.
(52:33):
Do you want to say one for us? You don't have to.
But the snow is falling all around.
It falls on hills and trees.
It's falling on the sidewalk and it even falls on me.
Oh my gosh.
Very derivative of Roger Kipling.
(52:54):
My mom has it, that's why demonstrating a clear gift from an early age.
Absolutely.
And apparently I drove one of my grandmother's crazy and she would not sleep in my room because I would sit in my crib and repeat things like rain or rain deer.
(53:14):
It's raining deer.
And that's over insane.
I don't know why, but I think it's almost like that sounds like word association.
Practice it's rhythmic.
That's interesting.
One of the things that I noticed in glancing through some of the poems in this book and also when I heard you speak at the read some of your poetry at the Doctor Phillips Center recently is I love the way that you talk about deal with bring up kind of the construction of memory, right, that we all do and that we all have.
(53:55):
Can you speak a little bit about why that's so kind of fascinating or fun for you to explore in a lot of your work? To explore my own memories or family memories, yeah.
Well, I think in some of those you include in the poems, but I think that to me, is something that we can all kind of relate to because again, our memories are our stories, but they're definitely all constructed by us.
(54:26):
And so it just seems like a really kind of fascinating topic to play with.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you, I have eight siblings, and when we get together and talk about things that happened when we were kids, nobody has the same story because everyone saw their role in what was going on differently.
(54:48):
And that always fascinates me, except for my youngest brother, because a lot of stuff happened before he was born.
And he'll say, oh, I remember.
And we'll go, no, you weren't born yet.
And he gets really mad.
Even now he gets mad and he's 40.
But I don't blame him.
You feel kind of cut out from older kids talking about things.
(55:10):
But yes, memory is really tricky.
It really is.
Because you don't remember things.
Like you did a video of what was going on.
And even with the video, you only got that little square.
There's stuff over here and over here.
I remember I wrote about I don't know if it's in that collection about a photograph where people see this moment of my siblings in a photograph, and I saw standing together and my mother took the picture, but they didn't know that 2 seconds afterwards somebody knocked somebody down or you got mud on your dress or whatever was going on.
(55:47):
And so the picture doesn't tell the story or the process of getting to it, if that makes sense.
And so for me, poetry does tell that story and the process of getting to it.
And there's also a lot of trying to understand other perspectives.
(56:09):
I hated buying shoes when I was a child because we always had to wear brown oxfords because my father wanted our feet to be safe.
And if your feet you have good feet, you can get anywhere.
And so we wore oh, man, I wanted saddle shoes so bad then I wanted low first men.
We're talking up into 6th and 7th grade, if you can imagine this torture.
(56:32):
And it really hit me when I was older why he did that.
So I wrote a poem about it.
He wasn't being mean.
There's a lot of thought and care that went into that.
And it wouldn't have been shown in a photograph.
No.
Yeah.
And who's taking the photograph? Absolutely.
(56:52):
So now that you've had a chance to build and the process of delivering the course you've been really itching to get your hands on for so long, do you have any other ideas or areas that you would like to develop in terms of things that you want to teach or have that opportunity for? No one ever asked me that.
(57:14):
No, seriously.
It's like here, teach this.
Here's your chance to put it out there and make it my own.
Yeah.
I wouldn't mind teaching a class that took the rhetorical triangle through the centuries.
Because now I'm thinking when you talk about digital rhetoric, one of the things I've noticed, because people comment and then people comment about the comments, is that sort of where you have the writer and the reader that they're moving closer and closer together.
(57:49):
So the triangle is not an equilateral triangle anymore the way we usually draw it.
So I think that would be really cool.
Or to make a video like that about.
That would be really neat.
Yeah.
Think about like if Benjamin Franklin was trying to write his autobiography now and putting it on the Internet versus having all that feedback from people, versus being that standalone.
(58:12):
I use him as a reference because to me, he's what you point to in terms of like, at least American autobiography.
He's the start and that idea of speaker versus reader and what that relationship would have been like now and what might that mean to the text or the importance of the text versus when it was drafted.
(58:33):
Yeah, and even how novelists break things up into chapters.
Because if you think in the 19th century, people read a chapter at a time because they could take a chapter out of the library or it was in a magazine, and so everything had to end in a way that would make you want to read the next one and that sort of cliffhanger thing.
(58:57):
But it really happened because of how the texts were produced, not necessarily because the writers wanted to do that, but it was you've got to create readers and you have to have readers that are going to follow you and stay with you.
In so many ways, writers shape their readership and lead them to expect certain things.
(59:21):
Sounds like how streaming shows now that come out once a week.
They have to keep you coming back for the next one.
We are closing in on our time for this episode.
So I was wondering, what is it that you're excited about? What are you working on, maybe in your own writing that you may like to mention or talk about that's sort of on the horizon for you that you're excited about? Well, I've got two sort of collections of poems I'm writing.
(59:51):
Wow.
One is about Marie Curie and kind of turning her into a real person that has dinner and stuff instead of the first wonderful, brilliant woman scientist.
And then it goes into what happens to her discovery.
And the rest of the book is about the radium girls in waterbury in Newark and orange in Ottawa, Illinois.
(01:00:19):
And then the other book I'm trying to write about is because I suffer from anxiety and clinical depression and trying to think about when it started.
And it really did start when I was a child and sort of writing about that journey in poems.
But that's been really hard because sometimes I start doing it and I get depressed.
(01:00:42):
A lot of emotional labor, but I think it would be valuable for people to see, well, again, that's representation, right? Yes.
It's hard to be the one person to put it out there or be that icon, so other people have, but I don't know if anyone's done a poetry collection about it, so that's what I'm trying to do.
(01:01:05):
Right.
Wow.
Fantastic.
Well, we can't wait to hear how that goes.
Well, hopefully it gets done.
However I can sherpa for you.
All right, whatever you need.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Well, thank you for having delight having this conversation with you.
We get to pass in the hallway a lot, but we don't often get to just sit down and talk for an uninterrupted amount of time.
(01:01:29):
So thank you again for joining us.
Thanks for your time, and thanks, everyone, for listening.
Well, thanks for having me.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com