The Material Culture of Writing
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-- Cydney Alexis: Cydney Alexis. I am an Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University. My favorite National Park is Grand Teton National Park. I was very excited to see that you work for the Park Service, because I am a big fan of the National Parks. Hannah Rule: And I'm Hannah Rule. I'm an Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric, sometimes called Writing Studies, at the University of South Carolina. And my favorite National Park is … --I'm afraid of the outdoors!. [laughing] Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me today. So, you just wrote a book called The Material Culture of Writing. And I was wondering what led each of you to be curious about the objects that surround and are used in writing practice? Cydney Alexis: Well, we were lucky in that we had a friend professor bring us together, because she knew... She had been working with Hannah closely, and she knew that I was writing about objects. And so, we did a presentation together at a conference, which was great. And quickly the book idea began to evolve, but I'd always been interested in objects. When I was a little kid, I loved Richard Scarry's Best Story Book Ever!. And I would just spend countless hours for years with this book. It has little people and little objects that are labeled. Never knew you could study objects in this way, until I landed at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I was in the English Department studying Composition and Rhetoric, but found that they had a Material Culture program and a Material Culture certificate. And that's when I began to study objects in a scholarly way. The field merges art historians, archeologists, historical archeologists, people from every discipline really. And so, I was so excited to actually be able to study the theory behind this obsession that I had always had. Hannah Rule: Just to go off what Cydney was saying. I think that the origin story of us getting together was possibly eight years ago, and that original conference presentation, from then we were starting the book in a sense. So, it's been a long time coming. But I think for me, I think what brought us together, Cydney is really coming from the material culture studies perspective and has taught me a lot over the course of our collaboration. For me, my work in composition and rhetoric has been focused on composing processes and how people get writing done. Writing itself is a technology of human invention, and it exists only by virtue of things. It literally could not exist if humans didn't take up various objects to make writing also a thing, a material thing that exists and circulates in the world. So, oftentimes in my discipline, people talk about writing in terms of something that happens in the mind or in the imagination, as this ephemeral human act, but I'm really insistent upon and interested in the ways that it's full-bodied and material. So, that's part of, I hope, the work that the book does for people, both inside our discipline and interdisciplinary audiences as well. Catherine Cooper: What was the impetus for putting together these passions into a book and at this particular time? Cydney Alexis: I don't know if Hannah had also been thinking about this book, but I had been obsessing about it already. But when you're thinking about a book and you have no idea how that works, it felt very distant and far away. And when our colleague and friend, Laura Micciche, did bring us together, she said, "You two should know each other. You two should work on this project together." And every time someone encourages you, it just feels a little bit more possible. And of course, Hannah had already been working on a book. I think you were already working on your book when we met. She was able to also show me how it works, which was really nice. Hannah Rule: Yeah. And I think part of our coming together that's been really fruitful, is we've been able to encourage one another that our passions or just casual interests... With that conference that we keep referencing, I was on about writing about keyboards and the stability of keyboards over technological change. And I thought, "Is this a thing? Is it interesting? Does it have stakes?" And I think over our collaboration, we just encourage each other that, yeah, there's something there. There's something interesting. So, I think that's something that we've really benefited from in collaborating is coming from different perspectives and different frameworks, and using them to write about things that we think are cool. And that's been a real pleasure. Catherine Cooper: You mentioned in the book that the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement impacted your thinking while you were putting the book together. Would you be willing to share some of your thoughts on how the material in the book, the choices you made, what chapters you included, how you would approach that possibly differently if you were to do an edited volume or a second edition? Hannah Rule: Cydney and I have thought a lot about this, and I think there's two things that came up while we were in the long process of publishing the book. And one was really aided in part and brought to light through Laura Micciche, who is a mentor of mine and who, again, brought us, Cydney and I, together. And she wrote a foreword for the book where she muses on access. And that's something that we realized was of course part of the book the entire time, but it wasn't at the forefront of some of the stories our contributors were telling. And the other was preservation, which is to say many of our contributors are thinking about contexts, human lives that are historical. And we took for granted, to some extent, the amount of effort and leveraging of power and money that it takes to get someone's stuff to remain. Jefferson's chapter, that Diane Ehrenpreis contributed, she's a Curator of Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors at Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello. And she was writing about Jefferson's writing suite, his furniture. There's fascinating stories to tell there, and she tells it. But it also made us really think about his own legacy, and why it is that we have access to these pristinely preserved objects, and what we don't have about the lives that moved through Monticello. And Diane, along with us, we really thought hard about that chapter and whose stories we could try to tell on the margins of this very well-preserved and curated sense of this historical figure, and try to see him truthfully in an extremely complex and fraught context that it would be unethical to ignore. Cydney Alexis: These are issues that I think Hannah and I have always cared about, but new horrors, what else can you say, emerged throughout the pandemic, that just make the issues crystallize in different ways. And like Hannah said, the various contributors, our Afterward contributor, Kate Smith, and Laura's chapter, it's very interesting to see the touchstones that they pick out. It just raises to the surface the way that someone reads the book. And so, that was very fascinating for us. And then, we could pick up on those issues too. It was something that with us the whole time, and it was very important to us. Catherine Cooper: Is there a second book? Cydney Alexis: Yes, we have a proposal drafted. Catherine Cooper: So, did putting together The Material Culture of Writing spark any ideas of what you want to study next or where you'd like to take your next deep dive? Cydney Alexis: I've been obsessing over a couple of things, other things as well. And one is, I directed the writing center at K-State for a little over five years and came in contact with work in a lot of different fields, the hard sciences, for example. And I would bring in guest speakers from the hard sciences. And they, as you probably know, work on a lot of shorter, newer, fresher research, on short pieces called communications. And it blew my mind that we're still in the 25 pages in terms of consumer research, another field I work in, sixty-page articles in journals. But what people in the sciences are able to do is really prioritize this quick, new, fresh research so that you're not necessarily working for eight years, for 10 years on a project, but you're allowed to take that well-researched quick dive into issues that come up. That and also just reading the research about everyone who got left behind in the pandemic, parents, moms especially, productivity rates and publishing rates just plummeted throughout the pandemic, because people in parent roles were having to caretake during the pandemic, so much harder to get scholarship out, and underrepresented groups who had suffered in the pandemic because of unequal access to healthcare. And so, Hannah and I talked and said, "I'm starting to think a lot about a book that has shorter pieces, where we generate more histories of writing artifacts that are missing in our field and do it more quickly, and allow lots of different voices to contribute." Because you can take a look around your house or in your collection and find an artifact that you want to research, and write a shorter piece instead of that 25 page piece. Hannah Rule: Yeah, I think part of the drive, in addition to a lot of the touch points that Cydney laid out is, I think we're excited to really allow scholars, not just in English Studies or Writing Studies, but those working across disciplines potentially. That's something I've really valued about our collaboration is, it's not easy to do cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary work. Part of the drive too is that I t
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