Kathi Yancey’s work has impacted each of us, over time, in different ways and formats and media, and in different contexts. Each of us has also dedicated scholarly and pedagogical work to and around delivery and to rethinking, revising, and remixing delivery for our contemporary, digital world. We were invited to write a chapter focused on D for delivery and on Kathi’s contributions to our thinking in rhetoric and writing studies about delivery, a task we were keen to take on.
Two days after receiving the initial invitation from Stephen, Matt, and Rory, Dànielle reached out to them and to Doug and Naomi:
I would just like to report that I had a dream last night that Naomi, Doug, and I were writing postcards to one another about Kathi's work and then we created digital versions of the postcards as part of this amazing project about delivery across analogue and digital spaces inspired by the arc of Kathi's work.
I am not kidding.
#nerddreams
Stephen, Matt, and Rory shared with us the 30-minute interview with Kathi focused on delivery. We met to discuss how we might approach the topic and to honor Kathi’s contributions given the expansiveness of both her body of scholarship and the myriad ideas, challenges, and questions that emerged in the interview. As we each watched the interview and read the transcripts and reflected on our experiences with Kathi and with Kathi’s work, we found ourselves gravitating toward postcards. The dream proved prescient!
In "Evocative Objects: Reflections on Teaching, Learning, and Living in Between," authored with Doug Hesse and Nancy Sommers, Kathi wonders about how Americans “composed in the twentieth century," especially in ways that aren't recognized or haven't been curated, protected, collected, and preserved. In this discussion, she includes an image of a blank postcard (see Figure 1) as representative of these sorts of uncurated, not typically protected, not owned, sometimes collected but not often preserved in collections of everyday writing.
Figure 1: Postcard from Hesse, Sommers, and Yancey (2012, p. 348).
Each of us was captivated by this type of writing and by this particular means of production and, important to this chapter, the means of delivery of this type of writing. We decided to honor Kathi’s attention to postcards by writing each other two postcards and reflecting on our experience of the medium and of viewing Kathi's interview. We talked about recording and photographing ourselves writing, and reflecting on the process of interacting with the postcards and with each other via postcards. We talked about anticipating and reading each others’ postcards, from our separate distances. We talked about reading each others’ postcards to and with each other after we received them and as we met via Zoom to work on this chapter.
In this webtext, we share our postcards, via narration, via analysis, via video, and via writing. Like these modes of delivery themselves—crossing as they do between digital and analog, classroom and campaign trail, scrawled sentences and video conversations—our narrative loops in time and space, crosses and re-crosses moments in our dialogue, Kathi's interview, our own written reflections, to layer our shared experiences. We focus first on themes that emerged as we wrote and shared our first postcards—themes of embodiment, of the analog and the digital, and of the genre and genre-ic work of postcards, then on themes that more specifically emerged in Kathi’s interview on the topic of delivery: on everyday texts and actions; on writing and democracy; on violence, grief, and community composing and mobilization. We conclude by sharing an additional found postcard and by reflecting across our postcards and our postcard writing. We also reflect, as best we can and as much as possible in one short chapter, on the exceptional contributions Kathi has offered us in her scholarship, especially her work on delivery.
Dànielle (00:00):
Do we want to start with talking a bit about when we first encountered Kathy's work?
Doug (00:05):
Although I don't have a good answer for that. I mean, it's just always been in the background. And her work though, I think I probably encountered first in the context of portfolios because for a while there I was very interested in electronic portfolios. There's a lot of work that she and some of the collaborators did on electronic portfolios at the time that were very, very influential on the ways I was thinking about portfolios and hoping to go in that route, even though ultimately I didn't end up really pursuing e-portfolios all that much.
Dànielle (00:34):
I kind of feel the same in that any luminary, her work has always already been there.
Dànielle (00:43):
A structure, a scaffold and anchoring for so much of what we do and talk about. But yeah, I think it was her e-portfolio work when that's when I was really like, oh, there's this Kathy Yancey and she's doing this fascinating work. But I think to me, this wasn't the first time that I had met her, seen her, but seeing her deliver her 4Cs address. I think it was 2002, 2003, published in season 2004 maybe. And she did this beautiful DJing, mixing, performing, demonstrating, telling the story of public libraries and talking about these moments of writing that so expansively drew across so much of the work she had done to date. That was my, whoa, Kathy Yancey.
Naomi (01:33):
Yeah, I mean, I made a shift from comparative literature to writing studies in 2004. And so it was really kind of at that point, I pretty quickly started working on reflection. And so I think I came to her reflection work first, but then I really was focused on her work and found it deeply generative in 2009 when with Anne Gear, we were revising our, at that time, sort of transitional writing program at Sweetland and we introduced a portfolio element. And so her work became really important to thinking about that. And then we also applied to be part of, let's see if I can get this name right. It's the International Coalition for E-Portfolio Research that she was running. And we were part of Cohort six that was 2010 to 2012. And so yeah, really working with her and others around e-portfolio work, Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge.
Doug (02:53):
I wanted to jump in and just remember, since we're talking about how memories come to us not immediately. So we immediately go to the e-portfolio, the reflection. But then I was remembering, actually, I think the first time I hit Seeing Yancy and her work was as Micah Vilstemig, which was the made-up name that she and Michael Spooner came up with to be a collaborative single mind and then posted the postings on a genre of email in 96, I think. Wow.
Doug (03:25):
And I was like, wow, I really love the way this dialogic thing is happening. And it was new then in the pages of our print journals because they were still all print journals. I was like, this is really very, very interesting. And also evoking the genre of the email, how things are changing really ties into our thinking about delivery, I think in really strong ways from very, very early on in my experience, because that would've been reading into this field only a year or two in for me. And that came out and was like, wow, that is really, really powerful. And then in 98, there's another piece that the two of them wrote about being collaborators in 3C, which I think also really, really interesting. So the collaboration, the digital, the delivery, the back and forth, the dialogic, that to me really stuck out. And then later we also get the vernacular stuff, which I thought was a really nice move in her work of getting us to start thinking about, let's look at these everyday texts that everyday people write.
Dànielle (04:29):
A beautiful connection point too, because I mean, one of the things that she's asked in the interview that's part of this book and that led to us collaborating on this chapter is, what aspects of delivery do you think are currently under-researched or under-theorized or simply warrant more attention? And she pauses briefly and says how everyday people use delivery to accomplish their ends. And the exciting part about it is that it seems like no matter how we focus and look, there's that constant expansiveness of the writing public and this broad community of people delivering all sorts of materials and all sorts of media in all sorts of ways across all sorts of places and spaces.
As the video above illustrates, each of us has found our way to and with Kathi’s work in different contexts and with different purposes, needs, and questions. In this brief review of Kathi’s work, we home in on her contributions to our discipline’s—and our own—contemporary thinking about delivery.
Yancey’s attention has long been focused on the expansiveness of writing and composing and on the many, many things we create, write, and circulate. At her Chair’s Address at the 2004 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Yancey stood at the podium, a laptop to her right, to her left, and directly in front of her. She orchestrated photos, quotes, captions, and more between the laptops and across the two display screens as she delivered her address. In the December 2004 issue of College Composition and Communication, Yancey likewise made the most of the modalities at hand. The print article featured images, text call-outs and sidebars. She proclaimed “never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside” and described literacy as being “in the midst of a tectonic change,” many of those changes happening beyond our classrooms and many of them emerging across digital spaces (p. 298). Yancey’s scholarship has created through-lines in rhetoric and writing studies, posed questions that remain as relevant today as they were when she first raised them, and engaged composition across all the spaces and places where composing happens.
We would argue that “Made Not Only in Words” contains some of Yancey’s most compelling, most provocative claims and questions about delivery. She asked
Suppose I said that basically writing is interfacing? What does that add to our definition of writing? What about the circulation of writing, and the relationship of writing to the various modes of delivery? (p. 299)
Early on in the piece, she also says “we have a moment.” The moment in which she delivered this address and then wrote this piece was in the early 2000s. And what a moment this was! The World Wide Web was on a rebound and in the midst of a massive transition and evolution after the collapse of the initial imagined web economy of the late 1990s. We were in the midst of a file-sharing revolution and on the very cusp of social media. YouTube didn’t yet exist; the first tweet hadn’t yet been sent. Email had been anchored as a communication norm and truly a revolutionary one for those of us who did our work via postal mail and fax years previous. As Yancey articulated, this moment was one where writing proliferated in and with and across emerging technologies and digital places and spaces. Our concepts of audience evolved with digital writing platforms and our understandings of networked spaces of delivery. Yancey compared the writing publics of a rapidly changing 19th century Britain and the writing publics of a rapidly changing 21st century United States, pointing out the reading and writing happening outside of school contexts and focusing on the technologically mediated writing communities in each context.
In the “third quartet” of the essay, Yancey posed a set of pedagogical claims about circulation that invoke delivery. Specifically, she argued that the field of composition hadn't effectively addressed delivery, and that instructors might do so by asking writing students to “consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be and then create and share those different communication pieces in those different media, to different audiences” (p. 311). We would argue, more than 20 years since the publication of this incredibly important piece, that many of us are still working to extend invitations to students in our writing classes to robustly consider media and delivery.
In "Evocative Objects: Reflections on Teaching, Learning, and Living in Between" (Hesse, Sommers, & Yancey, 2012), Yancey focused on another, more specific, moment: The April 18, 1906 earthquake in California. Her discussion homed in on invention and the inventive practices of presenting earthquake-related data. She read images and data renderings as relational, as surfacing relationships: "geologically, the plates and continents; compositionally, the page, the screen, the interface, the network" (p. 343). She looked AT and THROUGH the images, exploring who produced the images and who owns the images. Later in the essay, she turned to another focus, wondering about "how other Americans composed in the twentieth century," especially in ways that aren't recognized or haven't been curated, protected, collected, and preserved. In this discussion, she includes but does not directly discuss a postcard (see Figure 1 in the introduction to this chapter).
It’s impossible for us to read this piece and not see it as an essay about delivery and the inseparability of invention and delivery, even though the word "delivery" does not appear once in the essay.
While delivery is often at the foreground in Yancey’s work, postcards are often on the writerly table, peeking out from between books on the shelf, or sitting adjacent to and in illumination of key themes across her work. For instance, in her 2015, "Cultures, Contexts, Images, and Texts: Materials for a New Age of Meaning-Making"—the print version of her 2013 address at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association—Yancey described circulation "at the heart of our new digital postcard archive... this archive currently hosts thousands of postcards: one can view them in any number of ways and can learn about each one" (p. 9) in ways resonant with history, archiving, and public memory (see McElroy, 2017).
Yancey described collecting postcards in her introduction to a special issue of South Atlantic Review on "Everyday Writing" and articulated our deep connections to everyday writing. She shared that her sisters (typically uninterested in her scholarly work) were very interested in her postcard collecting and
wanted to know what texts people were writing... about how composers learned to write new genres—like postcards in the late nineteenth century and blogs in the late twentieth—when there was no school instruction. (p. 1)
In her essay in the special issue, Yancey elaborates this theme, describing a special topics course she taught on everyday writing, with postcards as a genre explored alongside letters, notebooks, signs, zines, and other seemingly mundane forms of writing.
In the introduction to Delivering College Composition, Yancey explored what it means when we link college and composition and delivery. Here she expansively situated delivery (in this context as a powerful metaphorical tool) to include the layout and design of the physical classrooms in which we teach writing/deliver writing instruction and the bodies/people who deliver such teaching.
This expansive focus, to us, is illustrative of a thread across Kathi’s work, a thread that pulls across the analog and the digital in rich, provocative, compelling ways (see also, Yancey, 2016). We hope to have paid homage to this thread of Kathi’s work with our approach to this chapter, and the ways in which we wrote physical postcards and digitally shaped the claims we’re making here.
In writing our first postcards, mailing our first postcards to one another, receiving and spending time with each others’ postcards, we found three compelling delivery-related threads emerge, all of which resonate with Yancey’s work on delivery: the embodied dimensions of composing; the ways in which we think, write, work, and encounter across the analog and the digital; and the genre conventions of postcards and how those conventions shaped (or disrupted) our work with the postcards.
View TranscriptEveryday writing is a material practice, one inflected by the technology of a time and by its economics as well. (Yancey, 2020b, p. 168; concluding comments to special issue of “Everyday Writing”).
Doug (00:01):
I made a real shift between postcard one and postcard two. And then in postcard one, I wrote the same message to both of you. And then what happened was Danielle's postcard arrived, her postcard two arrived before I was able to send anything out. And I realized that I had ended up being in a more dialogic, like I'm responding to what Danielle said in Danielle's message, and then I put a slightly different message for Naomi because I wasn't responding to directly to a text from her. And it's interesting to me that the longer we do the process, the more we're doing this, the more it seems to feel like a conversation and less like an exercise, which I think is interesting if you think about people who would use a postcard to say something like, "Don't come by tomorrow." They're clearly seeing it as more of a conversational element rather than I'm marking this one moment.
Doug (00:59):
I'm doing something that's in more of a timeline or a sequence. So I noticed that about it, but in both cases, I felt like it was very difficult for me to come up with, what am I going to say that's worth saying? And also in this small space, as we noted before, the constraint is like, "Oh, but I've got to say..." And then what I ended up doing is I ended up typing it out on my computer.
Naomi (01:26):
I was just going to ask if you drafted before committing to handwriting.
Naomi (01:30):
Yeah. Yeah, I did. And then I edited a little bit. And then I actually edited while I was writing it on the card as I realized, oh, it needs to be a little shorter even a bit. And so I'm doing on the fly editing in the printed handwriting version, but I also did, I wanted to gather my thoughts because you can only commit your writing to this space once. You can't edit. I mean, you can scratch out and stuff, but then you're losing valuable real estate when you do that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it was a real challenge. It was a very interesting writing experience, trying to map out what is the process and how am I going to do it to be most effective given the constraints that I have.
Doug (02:18):
Yeah. Yeah. I had the same process that in both cases, I wrote it out first and then changed it somewhat in transposing. Actually, in the first card I sent, I found I had a little more room than I thought, so I added one more line, but I did send the same message to each of you both times. So I was less, I think, dialoguing more in my head than directly on the card.
Doug (02:46):
Because we're talking to each other too on these meetings. And so it's like the card is an extension of a conversation we're already having.
As the video above illustrates, we of course brought each of our bodies to the act of writing the postcards.
Doug noted that he had to actually write out the text digitally to edit and revise before committing to indelible ink on paper. He was thankful for having cultivated very small lettering in his handwriting style (see Figure 2), as that worked well to squeeze information into the small scope of the composing space on each card. After writing two cards, his hands were starting to cramp up a bit, highlighting the embodied nature of this kind of writing, which is more recognizable and explicit than typing or texting.
Figure 2: The back of Doug’s first postcard.
The moment of delivery, too, is more obviously embodied—sending our postcards required moving the cards to a post box or post office, where they were physically transported. From Doug in Virginia, to Naomi and Dànielle, situated an hour apart from each other in Michigan. Doug experienced a delay in finding proper postage and in finding time to go to the post office and (particularly in the case of the second postcard) brave the long lines of holiday mailers at the post office. Unlike sending an email, the physicality of the postcard means that its use can also aid the circulation of other, less-desirable communicative messages, like the flu.
Naomi wrote this prompt to get herself started on the first postcard (see Figure 3):
Prompt for Postcard 1: Reflecting on what we’re doing. What am I doing? Creating connection, reflecting on postcards as a means of delivery of everyday writing, reflecting on everyday writing as an aspect of political speech in a democracy.
I’m realizing that the two Michigan mitten postcards I bought for this first round are quite small with not very much room for writing. I’m not sure that’s good…
On the backs of the postcards: “This space for writing messages,” “This space for address only.” Interesting imperatives, a kind of bureaucratic text, procedural rhetoric, classification. Faux old-fashioned or vintage look (or maybe a reproduction of an actual old card design). From City Bird in Detroit (citybirddetroit.com), on Canfield (though purchased at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor).
Figure 3: The front and back of Naomi’s first postcard.
Dànielle did not draft her postcard text via computer, but after writing the cards to Doug and Naomi reflected in a Google doc:
I honestly can’t remember the last time I was so hesitant to write. The act of committing ink to page—or, rather, to the thick slightly glossy paper of the postcard—threw me. I also can’t remember the last time I handwrote anything. For anyone.
I email. I text. I post. These compositions almost always have immediacy.
Please get cream cheese at the store.
Please submit your syllabi to our department archive using the form link below by 5pm on Friday, September 29.
This Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) serves to document the expectations that will guide your work in the department in the coming academic semester.
Class plans for today: 1. Review the class agenda; 2. Discuss questions people may have about the first project; 3. Do the first reading activity.
I wrote the first two sentences on the first postcard and my hand immediately began to ache. My wrists have acclimated to the keyboard. My fingers know how to seek out keys without me needing to look down. I can type 120 words a minute with minimal errors. By the third sentence, I had to stop writing and shake my hand loose.
I don’t even write grocery lists.
***
When we met to read our second postcards to one another, we spent time with the postcards—holding these analog objects up to our webcams, describing what we saw on each.
View TranscriptNaomi (00:00):
I'll talk for a minute about the postcards. I found the first ones I sent, I was looking for postcards that were just local, so about Ann Arbor. And I had come across at one point a little book of postcards that was all Ann Arbor that I had actually bought for my kid because my kid wanted to send some postcards. Where it was a perforated book where you could tear out.
Naomi (00:27):
Yeah. Yeah. And so that was also interesting that my kid was wanting to communicate with someone. So it was like, how can I do this? I was like, oh, well, we used to do these things called, we wrote cards and we sent them to each other. And so they did that. But I couldn't then find that same packet again when I went to look, but I did find some images from actually a Detroit company that are of the mitten in Michigan. And that was funny because they were also made to look pretty old-fashioned. I mean, maybe the images themselves were actually old. One of them is the state and has the different counties and different colors. And then the other is more about the resources in Michigan. And you see deer and cherries and water and bears and things like that. And so it's more of a tourist come to Michigan type thing.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
When I went to write the second postcards, I remembered that at the U of M Museum of Art on campus, they have had ... Well, one of their permanent exhibitions that has new pieces coming in and out of it is called We Write You About Africa. And one of the artists who has pieces in that exhibition also created postcards. These are images. So this is Giza Egypt. And then this is Akra Ghana and this is Ades Ababa, Ethiopia. And this one is Kampala Uganda. Against the wall, it's like a table basically, and it's wood, and there are these wood partitions. And in each partition is a stack of postcards of the different images. So people coming through the museum then can just choose the ones they want. And so they're also mementos of this visit and they're on display, but not on display like this, but as something as a souvenir to take.
Naomi (02:34):
Yeah, so it's an odd play.
Dànielle (02:37):
Oh God, just that mutual tactile dimension. You just did that with your hands. They're not here. They're here. This is so compelling and interesting. They would be doing something different if they were here in the museum, but they're here.
Naomi (02:51):
So there are all these different kind of ... The images weren't taken by him, but they're recent. They're all from this century, the 21st century. He then took these images of everyday life in these places in Africa. This one, for instance, is showing a cell phone advertising building with all these different billboards on it and stuff. And he created postcards and he then has quotations on the back of them. Two of them, the ones I sent you, have quotations by Chris Marker from 1964. And the line that he quoted is, "In life, new connections turned up sometimes due to an image." And so he's turning this image into this postcard and then bringing in this theoretical perspective and commentary already in there, this one of Giza, Egypt, which is tour buses parked outside the Great Pyramid. It's another Chris Marker quote. "This film, Lejeune Me, would like to offer itself as a fish tank for the future fishermen casting their nets into the past.
Naomi (04:03):
It is for them to sort out what has left a real impression from what will turn out to have been only froth. "So again, this idea of the image and of his film and the past and the connection to the past that then it's also captured in this tourist
Naomi (04:18):
Image
Dànielle (04:19):
Really startled me because it's the parking lot. It's where the tour buses pull up and stop.
Dànielle (04:27):
It's not that expanse we're so used to seeing of the pyramids with the sun coming over or that epic, look at this place. It's a, yeah, this is where we park and you can see the edge of one of the pyramids in the background.
Naomi (04:43):
Yeah. And I think all of these are, I mean, they are very much everyday people in everyday circumstance. They're not the monumentalizing. I mean, that's what these images are doing. They're just showing this snapshot of the world of life. The image made material in this object meant for circulation, but also containing within its own theory of existence.
Dànielle (00:00):
So I am reading Doug's postcard. On the front is a grainy black and white photograph of what a young person. It looks like a girl. She has both her fingers up with the peace sign. Important, not the sign, but the peace signs. She's smiling and looking at the camera. She's wearing a head scarf and a very vibrantly colored dress. It looks like she's in the corner of a building. There might be another girl standing next to her. It's hard to tell. The back of the postcard, the very top text reads, "Don't attack Iraq. A nonviolent piece is possible," exclamation point. At the bottom, American Friends Service Committee with a phone number, including an area code. And there's a text box that reads a girl in a Basra camp for internally displaced persons. Her camp is home to approximately 5,000 people. Children play amid open sewers and heaps of rotting garbage.
Dànielle (01:04):
The majority of camp residents arrived during the Iran-Iraq war and continue to have no prospects for relocation. So jarring commentary, given the smiling girl holding her fingers up as seemingly a gesture of don't attack Iraq and non-violent pieces possible. There is some joy, beauty here in this place. It is addressed to me at my campus address and it reads, "Dear Danielle, writing a postcard feels less intimate to me, more public. I think it feels more personal though somehow. I also hesitate to write about topics like Parkland, UNC, MSU. I can't imagine how challenging it must be for you to revisit that time. In my note to Naomi, I suggested that maybe postcards are ideal media for slow composition. But what if its publicness acts as a constraint?
Doug (00:00):
The picture on the front is the cell phone advertising in Akragana 2014, and it has this photo from the Netherlands and it lists the printer and it lists the information about where it comes from and how it was produced. And then it has the Chris Marker in 1964 quote, "In life, new connections turned up sometimes due to an image." It's got a lovely stamp of a snow covered barn with a moon rise over it, and it has my home address this time. And it says, "Doug, I'm drawn to Kathy's words about writing as connected to the delivery of democracy in the ways "everyday people" use delivery to accomplish their ends. So youth organizers after Parkland have delivered their activism in so many modes and media and to create community and connection through grief and trauma. How do everyday low tech and low cost forms of political delivery move our democracy forward?
Doug (01:11):
How can they help healing? These are some questions I want to explore with you, Naomi.
Naomi (00:00):
This is a picture of roses on a trellis in a garden at MSU. And the postcard, the back of the postcard is quite blank, which is interesting. It doesn't have say where the picture was taken or what it is or have a date, but it does have a very beautiful stamp that has very colorful polka dots on it. And it's probably something more specific that I'm not figuring out. Addressed to me at U of M. Naomi, Kathy talks about us as rhetoricians, as everyday people choosing the most auspicious delivery. Writing postcards feels small, but it feels potent. I'm writing to you only to you. Kathy speaks of kaleidoscopic delivery. This is delivery through a straw. This is potent too. Kathy speaks of Parkland. I went back to the emails I sent and received after the mass shooting at MSU. I couldn't spend much time there.
Naomi (01:15):
In the two weeks after the shooting, I turned a corner of our building into a relief space. There were blankets and snacks and space to write and take messages and tape messages to the wall for others. I kept these. One reads, and this is in Spanish. Be strong in these moments. Be strong, united. Danielle.
Each of us also physically—and viscerally—experienced the physical limitations of the postcard. It was a jarring move from our typical writing in digital spaces where “space” and “page” are seemingly limitless even if page margins are marked on a screen and meant to remind us of the 8” x 11” landscape in which we typically compose. Much of the physical real estate of the 4” by 6” or so cards were occupied by explanatory text and room reserved for addressing and stamping, and the entire front of each postcard devoted entirely to a photo, image, drawing, map, etc.
When Dànielle began writing her first postcards, she narrated in her reflection:
View TranscriptI realize I haven’t yet really explored the postcard itself other than the photo on the front and the blank, left side space on the back. There’s no title. There’s no explanatory text. There’s no name for the place.
There’s a small PRINTED WITH SOY INK textbox, with a graphic of a red and blue and white flag inside a droplet outline. The green-arrows recycling graphic appears next to it.
msu.edu is centered at the bottom of the postcard, and under it reads PHOTOS BY W. SALVATI. PRODUCED BY ©2019 PHOTOGRAFX WORLDWIDE LLC 1.877.285.5766 * PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. WITH RECYCLED PAPER & SOY INKS
This text is in perhaps 7 point font and ALL CAPS. I have to put on my readers and I still strain to read it. There is no magnify option.
The image on the front of the postcard is of the Children’s Gardens on campus. I know this because I’ve been there many times. It’s clearly mid-to-late summer and the gardens are full. Flowers are blooming. Vines are creeping. Trees are lush with green leaves.
No one is in the garden. The photo is taken at the entrance, looking into the gardens. The garden playhouse is to the right, but the small seating area in front of it is obscured by tall plants. The wood fence in the far back of the gardens blocks the view of the road on the other side of the gardens, and the sprawling large animal vet med clinic across the street.
I know in the garden there are two small ponds. At one of the ponds is a fountain where if you swing a small metal gate as hard and fast as you can, a stone frog will spit water toward you. There are herbs throughout the garden, and usually three or four types of basil. I can never resist pulling leaves and then tearing them to inhale the green smell.
Naomi (00:00):
My colleagues at U of M in the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, we had been working on a project together on reflection and metacognition in college writing, and that led to a book that has the same name. And we invited Kathy to contribute a chapter to that book because, I mean, I thought of her immediately in terms of reflection and her work there, but also just because we had been collaborating around e-portfolios. And so she co-authored a chapter with Lee Graziano, Rory Lee, and Jennifer O'Malley on, it's called Reflection E-Portfolios and WEPO, WEPO, a reflective account of new practices in a new curriculum. And that's a course that they were developing at Florida. I'm scrolling to get to the actual name of it, writing and editing and print and online. And I just remember talking to her about the work students were doing.
Naomi (01:11):
And I'm trying to recreate this, but I feel like her telling me that there was this whole wall in a room where students were putting their work up, and it was these physical portfolios, but they also had digital portfolios. And it was this, anyway, this really interesting multimodal, but also just collage-like text that she had pictures of and she was talking through. And I mean, it almost felt like in a ... I mean, this is not quite the right reference, but well, let's say in an investigation where you're putting the threads between the different things and what connects to what, and it wasn't exactly that, of course, but that for me just really resonates with the everyday literacies and the ephemeral and the kind of materiality. And that just even when she's thinking about electronic portfolios, it's also very much connected to what's happening on a material level and with text in the world that circulate among people physically and the ways that we can see connections in space as well as through hyperlinking and et cetera.
Naomi (02:31):
Anyway, that's a long story about meeting Kathy and working with her on that. But it really, to me, resonates with what we're talking about here. It was also, I mean, she named collaborations around e-portfolios as one of the reasons she invited me to be part of this group with the two of you who she had other connections with.
Dànielle (02:52):
That just struck me too in terms of her scholarship and her work is I think she has almost always toggled or worked across this bandwidth of analog to digital. And I think so many of us, maybe not younger scholars today, although I could be wrong, work in one realm or the other. You work in the archives touching paper and working with books and articles and the print word and sometimes illuminated words, or you work in and across digital spaces with digital texts and born digital things. And that imagining that room with all of the pieces and the connections and that attention to the material and the embodied and the digits, and also the attention to the digital and embodied and the zeros and ones digits, I think is so, so interesting and definitely a thread across her work.
Doug (03:53):
Yeah. I mean, that's also, for me, the postcard project that we are working on comes out of that back and forthness between the digital and the analog, especially in the ways that we have been digitizing the postcards that we have been sending physically. But even I was reminded of this piece that we published in Kairos about a digital archive for multimodal research by Michael Neil, Katherine Bridgeman and Stephen McElroy, all from UF, students of Kathy's basically doing the same kind of work where you're flipping between the physical and the digital and the digital and the physical. And I think that's really encouraging to see more of that. I think especially in terms of delivery, that's critical for us to be thinking about in digital rhetoric, for instance, that it's not one or the other. We don't limit ourselves to this tunnel vision of the network, for instance,
Doug noted that
So much of my vernacular writing these days is online—notes to myself, to-do lists, emails short and otherwise. The postcard experience reminded me quite a bit of writing email—I always write and re-write and then edit even the simplest of emails, pondering: Did I get the tone right for this recipient or these receivers? Did I include a joke, a sarcastic comment that I can't be certain won't fall flat or be unrecognized as such? What's the best signoff? I was thinking in the same ways when writing the postcard, but there was an added pressure of knowing that the text on the card would be, to some extent, very public—any hands it passed through could be readers' hands. So perhaps it's more like a Facebook post, although I put less care into those than I do into email… or into postcard writing even though I know those online posts are in fact much more open to the public. The shortness of the message also reminded me of the back-and-forth of the short missives in Spooner and Yancey's (1996) "Postings on a Genre of Email"—you could get a similar effect with many postcards, but much slower.
And of course that article is itself an analog representation of digital communication (we only had paper copies of College Composition and Communication then, mailed to our home or institutional addresses, or retrieved from the library to be read there or photocopied and carried along with us) and the way we are writing and then digitizing postcards in a webtext is the converse of that example.
***
Students also noted that at least some of these everyday texts seemed anachronistic if not foreign to them: three students, for instance, had never written a postcard and didn’t know how to “write” it (e.g., where to put the recipient’s address or at what angle) (Yancey, 2020b, p. 149, "The Museum of Everyday Writing").
Postcards are a genre. A type of writing. A type of writing whose delivery isn’t digitally mediated (at least not on the surface; postcards are, of course, part of larger digital systems today—of UPC codes and postal scanning and routing). The “digits” mediated by this type of composing are our fingers (drawing from Angela Haas, 2007). The space of this writing certainly isn’t infinite. This writing doesn't happen on or across screens. The spread of this writing isn’t rhizomatic or multichannel. We spent a good deal of time discussing the rhetorical contexts and genre conventions of postcards.
View TranscriptDànielle (00:00):
This is fascinating. I had to go back. I'm so glad I took notes as I was writing my first postcards to YouTube because it's stunning me now that I didn't do this. I didn't draft it on my computer, which is always already my inclination to immediately, because I can type so quickly. My fingers on the computer can keep up with my brain. My fingers when handwriting can't keep up with my brain. I did go to ChatGPT though and asked it to tell me what I should write on a postcard. What was your answer? I documented here. "I feel the postcardness of the card calling to me to perform in certain writerly ways. I wonder what would ChatGPT generate if I asked it to write me a postcard, I turned to my computer and asked ChatGPT. I'm a lazy prompt writer. Write text for a postcard and ChatGPT gives me, " Wish you were here to witness the breathtaking beauty of Paradise Cove!
Dànielle (01:06):
"And I wrote," It's just after 7:00 AM. I'm in my office. It's Friday, September 29th, and the days are rapidly getting shorter. It's barely light out. The juxtaposition between ChatGPT's imagined island escapades on Paradise Cove, and my current setting is amusing.
LINK TO VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: "Danielle writing postcard AI"
Related to the embodied experience of working within the constraints of a small physical writing space, Dànielle reflected feeling “the postcardness of the card calling me to perform in certain writerly ways.” She turned to ChatGPT to generate text for a postcard. A lazy prompt writer, she input the following prompt: Write text for a postcard. ChatGPT produced “Wish you were here to witness the breathtaking beauty of Paradise Cove!”
She noted feeling obligated by this genre and this template to think and write about travel and space. ChatGPT certainly has.
View TranscriptDànielle (00:00):
I wonder if that's a generic convention. I'm looking across the postcard that I found, the initial set, because I was looking for some that represented campus and MSU. There's no date on this photograph. This is our children's gardens, but there is a feel to it. It just feels 80 vibes to me, just the slight washout of the color, the angle, the way it's printed. These don't feel contemporary at me. This is a deliberate manufacturer of nostalgia.
Doug (00:42):
Yeah, absolutely.
Naomi (00:45):
Yeah, the same. That's a nice way to describe that. I think that's what's happening in those Michigan ones as well. Yeah, very much a manufacturer of nostalgia.
Doug (00:53):
I was a little unhappy that the ones I picked for my second postcard don't have a date on them.
Doug (00:59):
I had to purely interpret based on, because I got them from somebody who had them in a collection that she'd held onto for decades. Oh, I got these from somebody who was about to protest the war. We're not yet starting in Iraq in 2003. And so that's how I know when it was from
Doug (01:18):
Because of the circumstance of ... And also it says on it, "Please don't go to a war in Iraq." And then I had to explain that we had one before that. This is the second Iraq war. But yeah, it's very interesting to see that moment in history and why and how these things were constructed because some of them are just like, "Here are places." And some of them are like, "I have a message. I have a thing I want you to be thinking about. " And I feel like Naomi's fits into both of those spaces. Here's a place. But because of the juxtaposition of the quotes and the image, it's got that, as you said, it has its own theory that it comes with. That's fascinating too. To
Dànielle (02:00):
Lift underneath them, there's a censor and expectation of display. The political postcards, I have to assume this isn't inside an envelope. I mean, this circulates in someone's hand in a mailbox. It's visible across however it's transmitted and shipped and sent and put into someone's mailbox. So I'm going to put a message on this that wouldn't be seen if it was closed and saw and sealed inside an envelope and then went off on its way.
Dànielle (02:35):
I have to give y'all kudos for how you selected your postcards because when I first selected mine, I knew I wanted, because we had talked about it, something that represented or captured or anchored Michigan State and East Lansing, but I also chose the biggest ones I could find because I was actually just that sense of space, three by five, that's not enough. I need bigger. I can't remember the last time I felt so constrained facing a composition and a writing moment as I did with this. So I found these big old, I think these are four by six.
Doug (03:20):
I mean, it's a tweet in terms of the number of characters you can fit in this space in a way. And that's also a fun thing to consider for a composition course if you want students to experience the constraints because I've had them try to tweet their ... Now I guess I have to say they X there. No, I'm not. I don't make them do that anymore because we don't use that system anymore. But then I would have them like, okay, your topic, your main topic, your main argument, your main thesis statement, put it out in a tweet so that you can get it down to the absolute crystallization of it.
Doug (03:57):
It seems to me that postcards could serve a similar purpose in providing constraints, but also taking them out of the digital into a space that makes things unfamiliar to them, hopefully.
Dànielle (04:11):
And I don't tweet. I've never been on ... I think I've tweeted twice in my life. So I think it'd be interesting if someone who's much more active in that space and has navigated those constraints as the platform has changed, might have a different take and feel for this expanse like, "Oh, okay, this feels familiar. I can do this.
Dànielle (04:35):
Versus this is unfamiliar and I don't think I can do this.
Doug (04:39):
Yeah, I'm lucky. I have a small handwriting to begin with, so I can- Well,
Dànielle (04:45):
There's that too, right? I mean, in a space where characters are limited, it's monospace essentially. Everyone gets the same number of characters and characters are the same. Where here, I noticed Doug, you wrote below and outside, you brought it into the box that is for the address and using as much of the margin in this space as possible or writing as small as possible or condensing things as much as possible. But that's the tactile material aspects of it is that you have some of that permission and possibility.
Doug (05:29):
Which of the genre conventions can you violate? Because then I've seen some people ride along the edges, right?
Naomi (05:36):
Totally. I feel like I've done that. Yeah, I'm also noticing, Doug, on yours, you started the address above the line that says, "Use this space for writing messages." So meaning below that. And so that's interesting to me too, because that I tend not to do. I mean, it started in the space that's designated, but it might then bleed over to the
Dànielle (06:00):
Other parts. I just noticed too on this one, Naomi, the typeface for postcard is so hand scripted 1920s-esque for very deliberate reason. There's that some ink flourishes around it.
Naomi (06:18):
Yeah, that took up some valuable real estate, I have to say, that flourished. Yeah,
Dànielle (06:22):
It's huge. But again, it's that nostalgia. Oh, and this one too, it's a very different typeface, but the same sort of, this is meant to look like a 1920 script, probably hand lettered rather than mechanically produced.
Naomi (06:43):
Right. And interesting naming its genre. This is a postcard. This is a postcard.
Dànielle (06:47):
THIS IS A POSTCARD.
Naomi (06:48):
Don’t be confused. It's not a letter. It's not some other thing. That's fascinating.
Doug (06:55):
I think it's interesting. There's a real difference because that one you just showed that I sent the first one, I don't know what year those are from. I think maybe the '50s, but definitely the next one I sent was much more contemporary. It doesn't say postcard anywhere on it. It doesn't have that marking in the same way that the older ones do. So it'd be interesting to see, is there a point at which most postcards stop declaring themselves to be postcards because it's kind of obvious?
Dànielle (07:27):
Versus they had to start calling themselves postcards again because otherwise people would be like, what is this thing?
Naomi (07:32):
What do I do with it? Yeah.
Dànielle (07:33):
Yeah.
Naomi (07:34):
Yeah. I really love the directions. I mean, this is on the one you sent too, that this is the space for the messages and this space is for address only. And so it's like governed. How you do this, there's a logic and an order to it and you have to follow the rules or you ought to if you want to get it sent. So I thought that was interesting about the Michigan ones too, that they had that kind of language. Whereas the ones from the museum do not have that kind of language. They have very different language.
Dànielle (08:05):
I'm looking too, Doug, at yours, and it does say something, something crop company Milwaukee, which was, I know this from reading past work on postcards, was I think the biggest printmaking shop for postcards for decades in the United States. But it says Milwaukee. If it was Milwaukee WISC, then we'd know something because I think it was the mid '80s, late '80s when the postal system went to two letter state abbreviations.
Naomi (08:36):
Oh, yeah. This one says American Art Postcard Company Boston Mass.
Dànielle (08:45):
So is that… That actually date? I bet that dates the card.
Naomi (08:51):
Right. Interesting.
Dànielle (08:53):
Yeah. And what's fascinating too is I'm looking at these early 1900s, there's no registered or trademark, there's no copyright, I mean, it predates all of that in our culture.
Everyday writing often evokes images of very personal writing—diaries, calendars, and to-do lists come to mind—but many of the texts of everyday writing contribute to a social ecology, either as context for their circulation or as a function of deliberation. (Yancey, 2020a, p. 5)
Everyday writing plays roles both mundane and consequential. (Yancey, 2020a, p. 2)
Everyday writing happens in the moment, in and across the every day, and can create connections in that present—with family, with friends, in public spaces (the comment feed responding to a local newspaper article, for instance), and across networks. Postcards create networks; postcards act as nodes in networks.
Doug was hard-pressed to see the postcard writing as "everyday writing," as it has been years since he wrote one (certainly not days), but he could identify it as Yancey would describe it: "vernacular" writing, much like a scrapbook, a personal journal, or a family history (see Davis & Yancey, 2014).
Naomi wrote on the postcards: “For me, these postcards embody the networks and connections performed by everyday writing. As such, they participate in the political, the mundane building blocks of democracy. ‘Use this space for writing your message,’ and send it far and wide.”
WATCH: Kathi talking about “Parkland people” and sending texts for campaigns
Naomi described her most recent experience with postcards in similar terms:
My most recent experience with postcards was part of canvassing during the 2020 election, writing postcards on behalf of some organization to inconsistent Democratic voters in Georgia to tell them about why I think voting is important and urging them to vote in the Senate race for Ossoff and Warnock. I wrote out my script in advance, with 3 or 4 different reasons that were important to me, and then I copied that script onto the postcards, using the different reasons on different cards. I wrote pretty small and filled the whole card. (I’ll probably do something similar for this project - write out what I want to say in advance and then copy it onto the card… That way, I won’t waste space by ‘messing up’ and I’ll be able to develop my ideas a bit more.)
***
We don’t quite remember who mentioned it, but in our meandering brainstorm the first week of September, someone mentioned the front page of the UNC Chapel Hill school newspaper on August 30, 2023, the day after an active shooter left one professor dead. The day after the shooting, the campus newspaper filled their front page with texts sent during the 3 hour and 10 minute campus lockdown.
Figure 4: Front page of the UNC Daily Tar Heel, Wednesday, August 30, 2023.
In the interview on delivery with the editors of this collection, Yancey is asked “what aspects of delivery do you think are currently under researched and under theorized or simply warrant more attention?” Yancey’s response is “how everyday people use delivery to accomplish their ends. So one example would be Parkland. The Parkland people.” She said that they “used every means of delivery you can think of…” They marched. They circulated a tag across social media. They initiated and championed legislation. They led campaigns to fund raise, and raised more than $7.5 million for victims. They wrote a book.
Parkland. UNC. The cover of the UNC campus newspaper. In that brainstorming meeting, each of us opened it on our browsers and sat in Zoom, silently reading and absorbing the front page. We talked about delivery in this context—a context of fear. A context of the unknown. A context of ephemeral, quick snippets typically lost or forgotten on individual screens but here captured, designed, and displayed in a wall of texts. We talked about how powerful and potent this transmediation, remediation was and the ways in which delivery shifted as these snippets moved from individual screens to a collage, from quick-sent scrolling moments to this fixed display.
View Transcript
Dànielle (00:01):
I was thinking back when we were prepping for today about, I think we must have had our first meeting right after, right around the shooting at UNC Chapel Hill in late August. The campus was locked down for over three hours.
Dànielle (00:17):
And the day after the shooting, the campus newspaper published on the front page texts that were sent during that time. And it's such a visceral, difficult read, but I think we were thinking about delivery and the context in which those texts were sent and received and what it meant to take them away from that private space of one phone to another, one person to another, maybe a group chat and publish it on the front page of the school newspaper. And I think we also talked too about all of the texts were in all caps. Some were in black ink and others were in red ink. And I think if I'm remembering correctly, they got smaller down the page, which was I think a really visually compelling. And that immediately made us think as we were reflecting on the interview with Kathy about how she talked about Parkland, she was asked, "What aspects of delivery do you think are currently under research and under theorized or simply warrant more attention?" And her response was how everyday people use delivery to accomplish their end.
Dànielle (01:34):
So one example would be Parkland, the Parkland people. And she talks about them using every means of delivery they can think of. They marched, they circulated a tag across social media, they initiated and champion legislation. They led campaigns to fundraise and raise more than $7.5 million for victims. They wrote a book, all the ways in which people ... And I think what's interesting here is I don't remember her honing in on this, but the ways in which they collaborated together. This wasn't just everyday people using delivery to accomplish their ends. It was people working together across a variety of different demographics and dynamics and spaces and media.
Doug (02:18):
I think part of what makes it difficult in some ways, at least for me for writing the second one is that I am removed from these kinds of traumatic experiences and the postcard itself feels a little bit removed from the experience. And because it's not fast, it is a slow mode of communicating and delivery, then it actually adds that more additional layer of time. So as an opposite to the text that we were seeing from the UNC Chapel Hill shooting, which were immediate, that had this kind of immediacy and an immediate impact. And I was thinking about what happened or what would happen in cases where you're in the midst of such a traumatic, strong experience, but your means of communicating in writing are limited to something like a postcard or a card or a letter in the past. How do you process something like that?
Doug (03:19):
Is it good because it gives you a space of remove, a little bit of space away from the actual event because there's no immediacy or because it takes so much time, does it actually layer on and amplify the traumatic components of it?
Dànielle (03:45):
I didn't go back into the archive of emails from the night of the shooting at MSU, but I remember the first email I sent was out to our department list saying, "As you know, we are in an active shooter situation. Please be safe. Please monitor the MSU police and public safety alerts. The admin teams will be back in touch." And that was just it. But I sat that night on the police scanner and in Teams messaging trying to find all our faculty who teach at night on campus.
Doug (04:22):
I think this is also kind of emblematic of the immediacy of delivery of the systems that we have from email forward and texting, and that we can immediately respond, and many times we should not, but we don't spend enough time maybe working through the should or should not component. When we're teaching, we teach what is the proper genre, what is the best way of the salutation? How do we address people? But maybe we don't spend quite enough time saying, "How do you decide when to send the message?" And I think that our postcard experience reinforces this whenness of the message is an important part of how we think about it, how we think about delivery in these spaces.
Dànielle (05:10):
Yes, that's it. If we're going to take the canon of delivery seriously, we have to take Kairos and time and the whenness. That's interesting because so much of my admin life is built around who needs to see this first, who needs to check it? Does it need to go to legal counsel? Does it need to go to HR? What is the time I have to sit with this before I can respond? But I don't remember ever talking explicitly about that in the classroom with students, about that whenness. We talk about so many other aspects of delivery, both traditional and contemporary analog and digital, but that whenness I think is such a critical component of contemporary communication and delivery.
Doug (06:01):
Kind of always has been, but it seems that as delivery speeds up, the modes speed up, harder to pinpoint where that should happen.
***
In “Notebooks, Annotations, and Tweets: Defining Everyday Writing through a Common Lens,” Yancey and her co-authors mention the example of a child drawing in chalk on the sidewalk, and this reminded Naomi of the On the Media (2023) episode she recently heard, part 3 of the series they’re calling “We Don’t Talk About Leonard,” which focuses on the Republican operative Leonard Leo. In this episode, protesters outside his house in Maine chalk the sidewalk with messages protesting his actions in helping to stack state and regional courts and the decisions that have come down from Republican majority courts as a result. One protester describes Leo later walking down the street and adding the names of the protesters in chalk next to their messages—presumably as a way of doxxing and trolling them? This protester encountered him writing her name while she was out for her morning jog and expressed her sense of weirdness that a multi-millionaire like himself would be out doing that. Leo then described that he later washed away the names he wrote because he thought his actions were undignified (or something to that effect). This is weird and consequential everyday writing. It is part and parcel of our democratic forms of interaction, dialogue, protest, fighting. It is low-tech and low-cost. It is available to “regular” townspeople and elite residents alike. It leaves a public record, but it is also ephemeral, able to be removed, washed away.
As we worked on this chapter, we discussed seeking out specific types of postcards, ideally postcards marking a moment in time, a place in space, a happening (not necessarily a happenstance). When we started thinking about finding an existing postcard (rather than writing one) to use as a touchstone for our thoughts on the genre conventions and uses of postcards as vernacular texts, Doug recalled two related major Internet phenomena: Reddit's r/foundpaper, where users post images of messages found with as much context as they can glean, and Frank Warren's postsecret.com, where anonymous senders mail postcards with secrets on them, some of which are selected for weekly exhibits on the website. We also spoke about the ephemerality of digital messages versus those on postcards (which, being physical, may last longer, but can also easily be lost or misplaced). This sense of ephemerality hit home for Doug when he found a link to Martin Parr's collection of “Boring Postcards,” but the site no longer exists. Parr began collecting and publishing curations of “boring postcards” in Britain in the 1960s. He published a U.S. collection in 2004. Figure 4 is just one of the many “boring” postcards that appears in the book. We are unsure whether the site was part of his U.S.-based collecting and curating in the early 2000s or the site existed before he turned to the U.S.—another fascinating moment across the analog and the digital.
Figure 5: Picturesque Indiana from Boring Postcards (Parr, 2004).
The place where Danielle had most often seen postcards were antique shops. There are several massive antique “malls” in the Lansing area, one north of town, just off I-69. The “Lansing Mega Mall” occupies an enormous one-story building, and has been split into dozens of aisles with hundreds of individual stalls. Most of the stallkeepers invest extensive time and energy into arranging their stalls and the antiques for sale in them. Danielle found her third postcard example in a whimsically designed stall that featured salvaged farmhouse furniture and goods—antique egg-collecting baskets, an ancient ice chest, a range of old kitchen items, most rusty metal or heavily nicked and worn wood. There was a glass-topped small display case in the front of the stall and on top of the case was a stack of postcards. The postcards were presented in three-hole punched, office-paper sized plastic sheets, with four postcards displayed in each sheet. The stallkeeper had clearly selected and arranged the postcards thematically. The sleeve Danielle chose had four Thanksgiving-themed postcards displayed in it.
The postcard that gave Danielle pause was one that featured four colorful turkeys on the front, painted in watercolor with “Thanksgiving Greeting” in red, hand-lettered script text. The poststamp reads BUFFALO NOV 23 1-PM 1910 N.Y., with a STATION A stamp next to it. The text, cursive and lettered in pencil, reads “How is the talking machine. Don’t eat too much pumpkin pie. Lillian” The addressee is “Mr. Chas. Miller; Derby, N.Y.” This postcard is jarring and delightful as a particularly exciting moment in time—a person handwriting and physically mailing a card to inquire about the recipient’s telephone (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: Front and back of found postcard.
Certainly it captures a moment of technological transition. Of the migration and evolution of the everyday from written card to real-time telephony. From handwriting to voice speaking. From material object delivered by machine and hand to ephemeral sound traveling across wires and tubes.
We want to end here—but not end here, of course, as Yancey’s work will continue to circulate, to deliver, to be delivered—with a snippet of what emerged in our conversation as we worked on this chapter: Doug said, "my goal and to some extent my assumption is that we use our tools of rhetoric to do good in the world, right? To promote good methods. To circulate to the right audience, the right time, the right message…” and Danielle asked, “isn't that one of the responsibilities of rhetoric that we have to carry?"
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