Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

My response to Nancy Welch's work in progress is really a series of responses. These pieces, comments, extensions are all purposely kept as loose ends because I hope to act as an opening to all of your responses to her paper.

If there is a theme to what I have to say it is that I found myself returning again and again to the word "use" in Nancy's title: "No Apology: Challenging the Uselessness' of Creative Writing." The question that came to me as I read her paper and reread it is, What is the use of student writing? What makes student writing useful?

Loose End #1
Briefly, let me summarize her work-in-progress. Describing herself as a "writing teacher who encourages students -- in first-year composition courses, introductory fiction workshops, and in graduate composition theory seminars -- to write across generic boundaries and to question ideas about craft in all writing they do" (3), Nancy Welch takes on our impoverished attitudes toward creative writing and it's role in English studies:

I believe a claim can be made for how creative writing can trouble the curriculum, [and] should [do] harm to the neat, simple, and thus very attractive stories that teachers and administrators tell about who needs to write and in what kinds of classes. (3)

Loose End #2
Leaving her to fill in details, I'll mention directly her main tool or lens through which she constructs a different narrative within which we might re-think the distinctions we apply between creative versus critical writing. She takes up a term coined by Bakhtinian literary theorist, Gary Saul Morson. The term is sideshadowing. Sideshadowing is an alternative to the narrative device of foreshadowing. [Here I'm quoting Nancy] Morson has said,

Sideshadowing asks us to look again at the present moment, its surplus details we haven t considered, the other contrasting and competing visions of the future that surplus could bring to view. . . . Instead of writing and reading as if the future is already set, we can consider, "But what if it is not?" Morson suggests that, through sideshadowing time itself becomes a succession not just of points of actuality but also of fields of possibility. (5)

As she ends this draft, Nancy argues that compositionists are implicated in this impoverished notion of creative writing by our conception of fiction writing as "inherently individualistic" (19). Such a view of creative writing "overlooks the social relationships and social ideas that students bring to their writing and want their writing to answer back to" (20).

When reading her paper, I come back to the question, What does it mean for writing to be useful? In Welch's paper, writing is useful when it helps us ask critical questions of our daily practices and the narrative we tell ourselves and others about those practices. This we see in the work students did in their writing for the fiction workshop. Secondly, I think she is arguing that writing is useful when it helps teachers ask critical questions of their teaching practices and the narratives they tell themselves and others about those practices. Thirdly, writing is useful when it helps students interject critical questions regarding the writing and the reading we ask them to do.

Loose End #3
I see connections between this concept of usefulness and the cultural studies/critical pedagogy phrase "really useful knowledge." Marilyn Cooper has written about this term. So have Jim Berlin, Ira Shor, and others. Really useful knowledge refers to knowledge that develop in praxis. Just as Nancy demonstrates in her paper, praxis is a concept that sees the personal and the theoretical as intertwined. Theories are stories, afterall. Ways of seeing the world which we develop by virtue of our experiences in the world.

Richard Miller provides another way of answering the question what does it mean for writing to be useful? In "The Nervous System" he writes that we need to conceive of "writing as a place to see and re-see the components and possible trajectories of one's lived experience and to situate and re-situate that experience within a world of other thoughts and other embodied reactions" (285). I wind myself to Miller and Cooper and Berlin from Nancy's paper because Nancy is remarking on a problem having not only to do with the position and value of creative writing but having to do with the position and value of composition as well. In this way, Welch opens this forum to address how our current sense of the use of student writing (its value) hamstrings the composition field's own position and it's ability to enact social change.

As I reflect on her paper, it seems to me that she points out that we apply to both creative writing and composition curricula a limited view of student writing. Her paper asks me to consider how our current practices support an on-going division between writing that is "personal" or "subjective" and writing that is theory-talk or removed from experience. And illustration may help here. Susan Miller has argued in Textual Carnivals and elsewhere that current process approaches to teaching first-year composition trivialize student writing. Trivializing their personal experiences and their relationship to the world they live in. S. Miller argues that despite the curriculum's apparent emphasis on individuality and developing a personal voice, compositionists' process pedagogies enforce a "leveling of differences" (103) among first-year students. Emphasizing "written language as a self-contained site for meaning'" she suggests, only reinforces exclusionary practices in composition because it masks any real potential for empowering students (100). This is because the meaning students are asked to develop in their writing never reaches beyond themselves or their classroom peers.

Susan Miller, Richard Miller, Jim Berlin, and many others have made and continue to make these arguments. Nancy Welch's paper is making this argument as well by her attempt to fight against such attitudes about student writing. I wonder if this afternoon we might talk about this and about the very fact that we are still making this argument.

Loose End #4
One of the strongest aspects of this paper is Nancy's willingness to share with us both her narrative of the fiction writing workshop and her sideshadowing of how that course might have been otherwise -- how it might have done even more to lead her students to see how and in what ways their writing was interlaced with socially constructed meanings. As she puts it, she asks herself how she might have better helped students

to consider how stories dramatize not only personal obsessions' but social ideas. Here is the possibility for a class that asks students, much more explicitly than my own class did, to consider the social ideas and roles their drafts represent or take issue with. (20)

Loose End #5
In my own teaching and writing about teaching I've incorporated two similar concepts -- concepts I'd compare to Welch's term sideshadowing. This concepts are desocialization and deroutinization.

Desocialization as a practice of critical dialogue in which "students extraordinarily re-experience the ordinary'" (qtd in Berlin, "Rhetoric" 748) is a practice developed by Ira Shor. I find it useful to Relate Shor's notion of desocialization to Anthony Giddens' term deroutinization. As Nancy is suggesting in her work, both Giddens and Shor argue that educators need to learn to re-see daily practices, habits, and beliefs in order to make these connections between personal obsessions and social relationships visible. Shor refers to this process as desocialization and Giddens refers to it as deroutinization. As Giddens defines it, deroutinization "refer[s] to any influence that acts to counter the grip of the taken-for-granted character of day-to-day interaction" (Central 220; see also Constitution). Giddens argues that routine is a crucial aspect of the continuity of social action between individuals because it speaks to the human need for connection to others. By deroutinizing social behavior, we discover avenues for change.

Desocializing or deroutinizing teaching practices would require students and teachers to reinvent their relationships with each other. It demands a participatory classroom in which students and their teachers expel social behavior, language, and common-sense attitudes from their "unexamined nests in consciousness" (Shor, Empowering 133) and make them available for critical study through dialogue.

Through this practice, processes of socialization -- the way we use and study language and the way we act in school and daily life to reproduce or to transform our conditions -- become a central part of classroom discourse. But such an approach is never pursued without some discomfort. Nancy's own story and the story that she shares about her students indicates this as well. So, how do we handle the discomfort of our students as well as our own discomfort as we engage in this kind of pursuit of "what ifs" -- as we ask students to re-see their lives and experiences as embedded in learned behavior and received values?

Loose End #6
In my own writing classes, I have experimented with sideshadowing (without using that term to describe it) by asking students to write what I call disjunctive essays.

Disjunctive essays break the linear narrative scheme and they break students perceptions of how meaning is made in writing in a writing class. Disjunctive essays allow writers to develop what Richard Miller calls "a kind of multi-vocal fluency" (285). In one paper students construct multiple voices and positions from which to see and re-see a particular issue.

If, as a writing program administrator, I insert this kind of assignment into the new standard syllabus we are currently writing, am I troubling the curriculum in ways Welch is suggesting here? And is it a productive kind of trouble?

Loose End #7
What others kinds of trouble should we be stirring up?

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