EPISODE ONE: INTRO

20min 27sec

Joe: We four are going to talk about this idea of everyday writing. We have all worked with everyday writing and some capacity with Yancey over the past ten years, so Yancey and the editors of this collection brought us together to talk about everyday writing. And we could really talk about anything we want, but it seems as though we are probably going to talk about where this has come over the last ten years—what hasn't been published. The great thing about a podcast format that we have here is that we could talk off the cuff about things that we've talked about that never probably made it to publication. We can talk more candidly about that kind of thing and where we think this is going—everyday writing as a concept and what the value of it is. So that's really where this podcast is probably heading.

Jacob: In the spirit of candor, please stop saying ten years.

Joe: Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah. It's like you keep saying ten years and I'm like, no, no way. And then it becomes real that it's been ten years.

Erin: Not quite, it was Fall.

Jacob: Stop it.

Joe: It was Fall, we still six months.

Jacob: It was got two years ago, tops.

Joe: This might be a good time to maybe introduce ourselves, briefly.

Jacob: Jacob Craig, College of Charleston. So, she was my dissertation director. I read “Made Not Only in Words” probably my first semester as a master's student (Yancey, 2004). She just sort of described me on the page. I was doing a bunch of writing because I had all these reasons that didn't have anything to do with school or grades. And just her point about leveraging what's happening culturally in school kind of felt like a powerful argument to make, especially in 2005 [*2004] when everything was very naïve.

Erin: Erin Workman, DePaul University Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse and Director of First Year Writing. I first encountered Kathi's work in the practicum that I took my first year as an M.A. student, and it was a chapter from her book, [*Reflection in the Writing Classroom], “On Reflection.” (Yancey, 1998). So I got more interested in reflection and then transfer research and decided that Kathi was the person I wanted to work with, and I was lucky enough to have that happen.

Jeff: I'm Jeff Naftzinger; I'm an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing at Sacred Heart University. I worked with Kathi—she was my master's thesis director and my dissertation director. My introduction to Kathi was reading some of her stuff in undergrad in the Florida State Editing, Writing and Media major. I came into Florida State as a master's student. I had worked with Kris Fleckenstein and Michael Neal as an undergrad. And so coming to the master's program, I was like, I'm going to work with them on some kind of thing there. But I think as soon as I took a class with Kathi and, you know, encountered her boxes of junk and things like that, I was like, this is kind of more aligned with the things I'm interested in. And then we kind of fell in together, and she ushered me through and assisted me as I moved on and did my work on the mundane.

Joe: And I'm Joe Cirio. I'm Assistant Professor of Writing and First-Year Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, soon to be Associate Professor coming this Fall. I'm also our WAC Director and also soon to be the First Year Writing Director in the Fall. I encountered Yancey’s work in a digital rhetoric class I took with Moe Folk at Kutztown my junior or senior year, and we read “Made Not Only in Words” (2004). What's to me interesting about that is the way in which Moe Folk approached the class was that digital rhetoric was ubiquitous. He talked about it really, as everyday writing. He didn't have to use the language of everyday writing, because, that's not really the kind way we talk about this stuff in the field. But he was into it, and this is probably 2010—2011. So the whole class was millennials—people who grew up making stuff. Back in the day when you said “Break into Myspace” and you used to code your Myspace or your Live Journal. People were—obviously digital nativism is not real—But, we in this class, we knew, that we could like do stuff online. We were able to like do produce writing in really compelling ways. So a lot of the conversations that we had were about, look at the cool stuff that you guys are already doing that your education really hasn't caught up to really theorize yet. So we had read Yancey’s “Made Not Only in Words” (2004) which really talked about that, and so I was really into that idea—the idea where she said we have not caught up to the kind of complex, interesting writing and genres that our students are already doing that we haven't even paid attention to yet. That was my introduction to Yancy initially, and it kind of goes to like she has clearly been thinking about this kind of thing for a while, right? I think she landed on the phrase everyday writing sometime, once we arrived at Florida State. But this is clearly something that she had been interested in: this kind of writing that people do that is self-sponsored, that is for their own purposes. So that was my introduction to Yancey. And then I came to Florida State in 2012 and worked with Yancey through my master’s and PhD.

Joe: Jeff, Erin and I—And Jacob, you weren't in this class. I think you were still around campus. Yancey did an everyday writing class, I believe this is Fall of 2014. She taught a class on everyday writing, and we're all graduate students at Florida State. All the faculty members get to do their one special class every like five years. And Yancey’s, in 2014, was everyday writing. It was such a weird class in the sense that it wasn't even really a field of study. It was just a thing that Yancey wanted to do. And lasting memory for myself about this class was the day she kind of came to the class with like a box or a big old bag of just random stuff, and she tells the story, and she talked about it in her interview.

KY: There was a kind of eureka moment that was one, and the second one was visiting a, um, used bookstore in Old Town Alexandria with some of my sisters, and I was looking for used postcards, and we wandered around and looked a little bit. And my sisters, I mean, I've told this story before. My sisters understand that I'm something of a researcher. They have no interest. I mean, I'm like four words in, and they’re like [*hissing snarl]. And so not happening—this they liked. This resonated with them because it resonates with everybody one way or another. So I'm asking the nice person at the desk, it's called the book bank, I think—if it's still around. And I'm asking the nice person at the desk if they have any used postcards, and I'm willing to buy them, depending on, you know, whatever the cost is. And she pulls out this box that has postcards, cards, letters, photos, and she says, here, have it. You know, like, I'm, I'm the trash person I've come to— And I said, can I pay you for this? Oh no, no, no, no, take it away. And I thought, you know, there's a project here. This is really interesting. And we haven't studied it really to speak of.

Joe: As she brings it to class, and she just kind of divvies it up. And she just says, all right, here's a bunch of—it was just a whole bunch of stuff: notes, postcards. People wrote receipts—tickets, like a whole bunch of random ephemera, and she just gave it to us. I think we were in little groups, and she just said, “All right, tell me what you think about this. What can we learn about writing from these things?” And to me, the reason why that's such a lasting memory is because that's just the thing that's just so interesting. Like, here's a pile of things. Here's a pile of writing a bunch of stuff that people forgot. They literally forgot it in books. And I want you to tell me what this pile of junk tells us about writing. And to me, I think that is a great way to kind of think about everyday writing as something: it's just stuff. It's things. It's all around us. And if we just take a moment to look at it and ask, what does this even mean? What does this writing even do? I think that is at the core of why I think a lot of us are interested in everyday writing because it opens up just possibilities.

Jeff: I definitely agree about the last part about like that's why everyday writing appealed to me. It's funny because until you brought it up, I totally forgot about that activity in the class. I've always been interested in everyday writing. I just didn't know that there was a term for it until, Yancey—In my mind, Kathi just invented this term and was like, I'm going to do a class on it because I have all this stuff, you know, in my office that I want to show people. Even in undergrad, that was kind of my way into rhetoric. And then I kind of fell into composition through the connection of rhetoric and composition. But all of my projects are based on the most mundane, ephemeral, kind of minute things that I could find that I wouldn't have terminologically knew they were considered everyday writing. But as soon as I had this class, it was like, oh, yeah, this is what I'm actually interested in. And so everything in that class, from that moment, has kind of shifted the way that I have studied and researched. And also just been like, what I want to know isn't just a niche thing that just I want to know. It's something that would be useful for other people to know.

Erin: That is also how I remember experiencing the class, where it was like we have maybe one meeting and we're talking a little bit about it. And all of a sudden, there are all of these different pieces of everyday writing that I'm realizing have been important to me, but I haven't had a way of thinking about it. And I agree that shifted the way that I approach transfer research, for instance.

Jeff: I think one of the lasting memories for me of that class to harp on this for one more minute is just that we had a bunch of days where she would have us bring in whatever we were interested in, like for whatever project we were working on—and just the random assortment of things. Like Joe, I think at one point you found your own box of bookshop castoffs. I remember one person in the class—she wasn't in our department. I think she maybe was auditing the class or something, but she brought in her grandmother's recipe—like it was a menu from her grandmother's restaurant or something like that. I think I was doing something with Russian tattoos, like prison tattoos. So just all of these random things that we were able to find a through line with, where I feel like it was so different from most other classes we had taken in the program where it was like if we were working on a project, we were all working on some kind of similar thing like, oh, this is a classroom practice. It might be a different class. It might be a different practice, but it's always got this thread where the threads in everyday writing were so disparate, but it was still really interesting to see those kind of connections.

Joe: Well, I was going to say that what I think was interesting about the class was and now it's been—It's 2014. I think this is ten years ago, literally. And I remember some of the reading lists, some of the stuff that we read. It was pretty sprawling in terms of the fields that we really reading from, you know. Some things from American cultural studies like scrapbooking (Katriel ∓ Farrell, 1991) or stuff about sociolinguistics (Lillis, 2013)—things that are not necessarily in-field. We did read some in-field stuff, but Yancey had really scoured to find things, basically out of field, to find the stuff. And that to me is interesting because you couldn't even turn inward for the most part, within the field of rhetoric and composition, to find a plethora of things that really theorize around weird stuff—stuff that you have in your attic, stuff you have in your bedroom. And if writing is a thing that we care about, why couldn't we look in—I mean, there was some stuff like Jody Shipka (2012, 2016), for instance, is a good example of someone who was already theorizing with weird stuff like Dorothy and Fred. She went to a yard sale and just picked up a box of random crap and did so many cool things with it. That's an example of someone in-field who's doing cool stuff. I think it's fun and kind of fascinating how we read a whole bunch of stuff from anthropology (Barton & Papen, 2010). But in addition to that, it was just people—to Jeff's point—people just brought in things and said—You just go back to your memory. For me, I think about like when I was at Kutztown, and we used to go into our—In Kutztown, there's like a big old, old main building. And it was old like had to be from like 1850, and the desks had to be from like the 50s or something like that, the 1950s. Who knows? And you just go in, and there was just like a piece of wood. And people had been writing graffiti on this, had to be for decades. So there'd be writing on there from like students for, you know, years. And I would just add to it. And I just always found that so fascinating, you know, this kind of writing that people did collectively, they came in, they wrote on this stuff. People have this stuff, and they're everywhere. It's ubiquitous that this writing is just like—and people are fascinated by it. It has a whimsy to it that people are really fascinated by. And so that's what we were theorizing. Both people brought in weird stuff or talked about the weird things in their lives and just theorize from it. Or we had to read so far flung from the field—not that far. But we read widely beyond the field to try to figure out what this new thing of everyday writing was, which 10 years ago in 2014 was a new thing.

Jacob: I'm teaching our Intro to Writing Studies class last semester. We look at threshold concepts for the first part, and then we do a feature article project and a layout project after that. Like the first three weeks in, there was one student in particular who seemed disconnected, bored, uninterested. And then somehow we ended up on that story that Yancey tells about the box in the bookstore. So I said, hey, there's a bookstore around the corner. You should go ask to see if they have one of these boxes. And then the next class she came in ready to talk about the stuff in that box using our terms in the way I would expect a grad student to—just appropriately naming how purpose, audience, sociality, all these things played into like this box. And it was just like a cool—For people who are inclined to that kind of thing, I think it's—You don't get access to that kind of thing without everyday writing. Otherwise, everyday writing was a better way to say not-school and not-work, so I like that. And it described a bunch of stuff that seemed like I already cared about, and I remember at the time on [*Florida State’s] campus, that [*everyday writing] class was happening, and then they were working on that [*postcard] archive (Neal et al., 2013). A lot of people were just talking about things like tattoos—I have a bunch of tattoos, and all of a sudden people are talking about it like in my work building—not my tattoos but just tattoos in a lot of detail: like this is kind of wild, kind of interesting, postcards.

Jeff: Stephen McElroy and Katie Bridgeman had started the postcard archive maybe like a semester or two before that, and that was kind of getting off the ground (Neal et al., 2013). And so I think there was—the postcard [*archive] kind of coincidentally like, a kind of intersection of—We had the postcard archive, which I think is a pretty good example of everyday writing, and then it—Not just an example of everyday writing, but it was an archive. So and then I think Tarez Graban had come in that year, around that time. So she brought in some archival interest. And so there was the everyday writing, the archive interest—All of that stuff kind of compounded all together at the same time. To keep going back to the class, I think one thing that I also really liked about the class that made it more fun and exciting and interesting is that it felt—And this goes to Joe’s point about how far-reaching our readings felt, the class felt exploratory. Everyday writing was kind of our god term or whatever, but we didn’t have a set definition. The class really was working through—Because none of our readings had the term everyday writing. It was like The Sociolinguistics of Writing (Lillis, 2013). Or we might talk about ordinary writing (Barton & Papen, 2010) or mundane writing (Rivers & Weber, 2011) or, you know, we had all these other terms. But then it was kind of up to us individually and as a class to determine what we felt like everyday writing was, and I think for me, that felt kind of—It felt more fun. It felt more, you know, I'm not working in visual rhetoric, which is already an established thing or assessment, already an established thing. It was like, where can we push forward in this area based on our own interests and kind of set, set our own agenda, which felt interesting and fun at the time.

Joe: Something I thought was interesting that you said earlier, Jacob, was like about your student who said, it doesn't seem that interested. You had him go around the corner, collect some stuff, and then they were able to talk really, you know, compellingly about this kind of writing. What's always, I think, when Yancey tells the story of how she found the stuff in DC, and I've heard her tell the story many times, you know, as all of us probably have. But she always talks about how she was not alone when she went into to the bookstore. She was with her sisters, and her sisters don't care about what she studies normally. They don't care about this rhetoric and composition thing. They got their own thoughts about things. I think some of them were lawyers or something like that. But when they when they were kind of involved in talking about this box of random doodads and writing, they were really interested in it. They loved sifting through it and, and I'll say—So I myself went around the Philly area when I visited home with a couple of my friends. We did the same thing, and they don't care about this stuff or they don't care about writing, you know, as an enterprise to theorize. But they did care about this thing. And the reality is which is kind of to me, why probably we're interested in it is that people—It’s hard to get the everyday person to care about composition because as Jeff's research on defining everyday writing, and all of us who teach first year writing know that we ask a student about writing, they think writing is whatever you do in school because that takes up the most labor and effort and most of their attention, and they don't consider all this other stuff writing. But when you do say, you know, what do you think about this meme? Or what do you think about this pile of weird stuff, you know? Does your grandma have a recipe, right? Or I have a lot of students who, like, really like love the talk about the Christmas cards that their family collects over the years. You know, they love talking about it. They can speak really intelligently on it. And I think that is part of the reason why it's such an interesting avenue to explore because people care about it—not just us in the field of rhetoric and composition but people—the people, you know. The public cares about this kind of thing.

EPISODE TWO: DEFINITIONS & DEPARTURES

25min 08sec

Joe: You know, it might be good to start with a definition. We have already kind of danced around this, and this is a complicated conversation about definition and even why it matters. But do we want to try to define it first?

Jacob: So this is from your article, “What texts of everyday writing share in terms of defining features is threefold: they are purposeful; they are self-sponsored; and borrowing from Jenny Rice, they are enactive” (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 12).

Joe: Again, Jeff, this is from your work. In Jeff's chapter in [*Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research: Generating an Actionable Coherence] where he talks with writers about what they think a definition of everyday writing is, you used an old definition from this draft (Naftzinger, 2020). Is that right? I always thought that was a great definition. I don’t know why we departed from that.

Jeff: Yeah, when I wrote that chapter that's in the [*Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research] collection, that was the definition that we had. Going back to the candor point that you made earlier, Joe, I feel like we, [*Joe, Jeff, and Erin], alongside Yancey—We had worked on an article together, and we really labored. We spent a lot of meetings kind of going back and forth about what our definition is and how that would include or exclude certain things. And we were trying to be really deliberate about those inclusions and exclusions. So when I had started this draft for Talinn [*Phillips] and Ryan [*Dippre]'s collection (2020), I'm pretty sure that this was the definition that was in our article. I’m sure I would have copied—or come close to copying and pasting it. I don’t think that counts as plagiarism if this comes up later, but by the time the book was published, the article had gone through quite a few instantiations, so we came up with that shorter one that Jacob had read.

Jacob: What was the difference between your definition and the shorter one?

Jeff: So I'll quote, “In order to specifically highlight mundane writing tasks, I, [Jeff, along with Erin, Joe, and Kathi] have defined everyday writing as, ‘the ubiquitous self-sponsored writing typically operating outside the regulation and oversight of an institution or representative of an institution’” (Naftzinger, 2020 p. 89). So we kind of—And I go on in this chapter to kind of say we like did that explicitly, as I mentioned before, to like include and exclude certain things. And one of the things we wanted to do was exclude things like the sponsored work, like from Brandt (1998), that kind of like extracurricular (Gere, 1994)—like I'm telling you to do this—that happens at school and work. Because our goal at the time, at least especially I think, for Erin, Joe and I, was to orient discussions towards those unsponsored writing tasks that really hadn't—at least in our mind—gotten the attention that we felt like they should. Because a lot of those discussions in our field go back to the classroom or that kind of extracurricular—maybe not in a classroom but classroom-connected —or professional. And so we felt like there's this really big bulk of writing that happens outside of that. So our definition was like specifically attuned to that, and then for the SAR piece we have that shorter [*definition].

Jacob: Purposeful, enactive, self-sponsored (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 12).

Jeff: Yeah, so it still has elements of that [*longer definition], but I feel like the one we ended up with at SAR was maybe partly to feel more encompassing of the articles that came later since it was that kind of framing introduction piece, whereas the one we had had before was kind of a more of a standalone piece that would—we had hoped would be—We had grand dreams it would be the kind of a catalyst that would cause a rupture in the field and be our be our comp-related Martin Luther moment. But it did not go that far.

Jacob: It’s hard because the three terms almost function like a meme. They’re easier to remember, but Jeff’s definition was so exacting and accurate. And I think the part about institutions was really interesting, and I think that’s the most interesting thing to run with.

Jeff: I do want to say, as much as I would love to take credit for it, and I did put it in print. I definitely could not have come up with that on my own. I really, I want to like I think it was—it felt it felt frustrating but ultimately productive at the time to have—We really had a lot of conversations sitting in the rhet-comp common room going like, you know, if we include this, what does that exclude? Well, does this count? Like, what about—Joe, I remember us having a conversation. You might remember it better, but there was something like if there, you know, if two people are working at a job and they pass a sticky note to each other about their work, but it's not a function of a task, does that count as sponsored or unsponsored? And we really went minutely into the details of what would be included or excluded.

Jacob: That reminds me of the underlife scholarship (Mueller, 2009).

Joe: But the two that I remember were, is a quilt everyday writing? That was like three hours of discussion. And another one was if Barack Obama wrote a note while he was president that would then go in the Library of Congress or his presidential library, is that everyday writing? And these were hours of discussion. And I don't want us to talk about whether these two examples are because we've already kind of—and I don't know how useful that was—but it helped us to get to a definition.

Jacob: It's a fantastic segue for the thing that I want to say, when I was writing the South Atlantic piece (Craig, 2020), I didn't really want to come to a definition, so I borrowed, from “Made Not Only in Words” (2004), and I borrowed mostly from Hesse's CCCC address (2005), just to denote that I'm putting this useful name on something that's not school or work. The thing I kept going back and forth with in the draft and then in review and conversation was this attention to money. Like if money enabled the act of everyday writing to happen or if money came as a result of everyday writing, then it didn't count as everyday writing. And Jeff's definition is making me think more sort of about that question. It’s almost to your point about quilts, Barack Obama, and post-it notes, working from specific examples of—I post something online, it goes viral, and now I’m getting YouTube creator fund money. That’s not—but then that’s sort of reality. The inclusion and exclusion thing is interesting, and I could see spending a year or two playing that game.

Jeff: Should we continue on that kind of like departures of the definition question? Because I think, Jacob, you know, kind of going over our notes that we all put up before this, that your, your points about the, the economic factor were interesting to me because at the time when we were coming up with this definition and when I was kind of like firming up the ground that I felt would be or would not be everyday writing, influencer culture and I think like digital means of kind of capturing and monetizing things—They existed, but they were—I think at the time there were big conversations, like the famous people on Twitter or Instagram would get paid to do a spon-con post where that feels very sponsored, like, I mean, it's in the name of sponsored content. Now it's much easier in a way or much more proliferated to have smaller versions of someone making content where they're self-sponsored. You know, it's not it's not sponsored by an institution, but it's their livelihood. And so I wonder in some ways where—I don't I don't know exactly where I would fall on that, um, kind of conversation.

Jacob: Yeah. I think. I mean, to your point about these technologies—these practices, I think scammers and grifters are like really good cases for savvy writers. And I don't—looking at Brandt's (1998) definition of sponsorship before this, I was wondering like, how would a scammer’s affiliate marketing scheme posing as self-help Reddit thread map onto like the dimensions of these definitions? Because it feels like the genres of everyday writing. You know, but there’s this other part that's like not—I guess no one could even anticipate. I wouldn't be able to anticipate.

Jeff: I mean, thinking like thinking in the genre conversation, it's like, you know, brands are all over TikTok with their own account. So, you know, it's like Wendy's has their—I don't know if they actually, I'm an old guy. I'm not on TikTok. But Wendy's has a TikTok account or any brand has their TikTok account. They're obviously cribbing the genres made by quote unquote regular people to make their videos, so it's the same genre, but because of its corporate connection, I would say the brand account isn't everyday writing. But if someone's brand is them being an influencer, I would almost say that is everyday writing in a way because it's a single person. But then I'm also not, I don't know—I’m not going to put my stake in the ground.

Joe: See, my issue is my issue with conversations about definitions. And and we're kind of getting to this, which is like, why would this matter? Why would it matter whether a TikTok from Wendy's or a TikTok from your neighbor is everyday writing—or where that line is? Right? And I think what Yancey did—When we wrote that definitions piece at the start of the article, Yancey primarily did the introduction material where she did the kind of definition work. What she did, what I think made a lot of sense, was she defined everyday writing. I mean, we have that one line, but all the stuff before that, she defines it in relationship to other stuff. And one of the kind of central reasons why we landed on that particular definition was—There’s a lot of things that she talks about how everyday writing is defined in relationship to other things, but one in particular is its relationship to schooling or to institutional writing. And because we might compare everyday writing as a concept to Anne Ruggles Gere (1994), her understanding of it as the extracurricular. That was a big part of this is that when we think about writing as extracurricular, it has a—the central component is the curricular, and this is extra to it. And so we wanted to define everyday writing as like it doesn't necessarily need to have a primary tether to institutional writing. The reason why it's interesting is that it exists on its own. Of course it has like all the stuff is enmeshed with one another, right? And I think Barton and Hamilton, in their Local Literacies (1998) book, talk about how we thought there would be distinction between home writing and school writing and work writing. There is not that distinction; it's all kind of enmeshed together. I agree with that, but we wanted to make a definition that was—It’s something that could be theorized on its own, that this writing doesn't have to be understood through the prism of the curricular. So to call it extracurricular tethers that stuff to teaching of writing and school-based writing. To call it everyday writing is to say that it's its own thing. So to me, it's like that's its value. Its value is really to theorize writing. So to me, that was like the salient point of the definition is that we're just trying to draw a spotlight, whether something falls in it or not may not necessarily be the thing that matters that much. What matters is that we just want to draw attention to this other stuff and begin to ask different kinds of questions.

Jeff: I agree. I think that was. Oh, that was bigger for me than the questions or nuanced discussions of, is this tiny thing, would it fall slightly outside the light or would it fit in? The bigger point for me was what you mentioned of, let's get away from how does this affect the composition classroom or how is it connected to schooling? And go straight to this is the writing that happens out here that I think we all felt was too overlooked or not even looked at. And do you have any departures like from that definition that we've worked on?

Erin: So I don't know that this is quite that, but something that is connected—One of the ways that I sort of got into everyday writing in the class was the notebook that my great grandmother kept, and then I've continued getting pieces from the house, my grandmother's house. And there are years’ worth of financial records chronologically, in a stack. And then in some cases there's some writing on that, and it's like boxes and boxes in the attic. And this is all relevant because it got me thinking about what an economic analysis of those records might look like. Like, is there a way that I can we can think about, like this component of writing through the lifespan? And the shorter answer is the house is going away, and so those things can't be rescued.

Jeff: I think one other thing in my notes as I was thinking about this, especially thinking about those three terms that we settled on for the SAR piece of purposeful, self sponsored, and enactive (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 12). One thing that I kind of missed from that definition, and I think about a lot in my own thinking about everyday writing is a term that we had initially borrowed from Theresa Lillis (2013), who's a sociolinguist, where she talked about ubiquitous. Her term wasn't everyday writing; it was ordinary writing. But she talked about how ordinary writing is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. And one thing I really liked about that is the—It's like ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, like it becomes so overwhelmingly everywhere that we just don't often look at it. And I think, Erin, your great grandmother's journal is a good example of that, especially for her. She maybe wouldn't have considered that artifact important because it was such a ubiquitous and spreading part of her life (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 17). Your family might not have considered it important because it was just a thing that they maybe always noticed, or was one document in the midst of many other artifacts and documents that they put in a box that you uncovered later. And I think that that's really something that we felt was important in trying to highlight this was all of this writing is so ubiquitous, but in all of our conversations—Not all. But in many of our conversations in writing studies, it felt invisible, like we're going to not focus on that. We're going to focus on this thing in the classroom. And even when people did focus on everyday writing-adjacent materials, it was always, almost always with that coda at the end of: here's how you would bring this into the composition classroom, which I think to us in our early conversations was like, why are we shoehorning this into conversations about writing that is totally disconnected from that?

Joe: You know what I think? Something else that's kind of interesting is when Yancey, herself, talks about—In the interview that she did for this collection when she talks about everyday writing, she talks about things like tombstones. And so then that's her—So then that's her research is located in, like, the tombstones that she studied in Emigrant, Montana (Yancey, 2017).

KY: Um, I was on a trip to Montana, specifically to Emigrant, Montana, which is where my mother's mother grew up. And one of my four sisters, in looking at the tombstones, we were walking around, looking at the tombstones. And my great grandparents were buried there, which means I can be buried there. Good news. And it just occurred to me that this was absolutely everyday writing. I mean, it was so, so interesting because you got a very—Tombstones have a genre to their own. It's a short form kind of bio. The visuals on the tombstones, especially as they've changed over time: moving from very religious visuals to ones that are much more vernacular. They could be ballet shoes, tennis rackets, golf clubs.

Joe: Where I remember, uh, she had presented this research at Florida State. It was kind of like a little faculty talk, and she had Q&A and I don't remember who said—I'll remember this later on. She had asked, I don't think tombstones—She didn't ask. I think she literally said, “I don't think tombstones are everyday writing. How do you justify that?”

Jeff: More of a comment than a question.

Joe: Yeah, really. I don't think well, that was really the point. I think you might have asked as a question, but their point was to say, I really don't think tombstones are everyday writing, and I agree. And I don't think it matters. The point is—When I defined everyday writing in my dissertation, I didn't use the definition we used in our article. I said it was ubiquitous, mundane writing, and the phrase that Yancey uses all the time: that mediates life. And so, like the mediating of life—That is the thing that I think Yancey cares most about. When she talks about everyday writing, when she talks about tombstones, or even when she's talking about stuff in your interview, it's the stuff that mediates a person's life. It's the writing you do to like, just live your life, you know? And sometimes that writing is going to be like institutional writing, but sometimes it's not. And that's the stuff that we're kind of interested in. I always loved your grandmother's stuff, Erin, because that's writing that she used to mediate her life: journals that she would write down financial information (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 17). She was using this writing for herself, you know? And what's fascinating to me about that is that—To analyze—Bessie, right?

Erin: Yes.

Joe: To analyze her material, it's the question you ask—And people could ask the question, how does Bessie develop writing over time? That is actually not that interesting of a question. What is a more interesting question is how did this woman use writing as part of a way to mediate her life? And that is a question that we do not ask that much in this field. We do not ask, what is this writing doing? How did this person use writing? What function does this writing have in this person's life? We ask the question, how do you develop writing? How do you improve your writing? How does the writing process work? And those questions are well and good. What everyday writing gets us to is talking about what writing does in our lives. That's what's interesting about it.

Erin: Yeah, I was struck by that piece as well, sort of the way Kathi talks about everyday writing in the interview. And it spurred this realization for me that for much of my life I've very intentionally created spaces where the writing that is connecting me with mostly friends is visible. So one example, you can see this, like, ridiculous Christmas light sort of tree thing back there, and there are little tags hanging on it. And those are gift tags from Jamie, and so every year I'm like saving these things and adding them. I have stuff from at least Joe and Jeff. I'm not sure about you Jacob—like in my office on campus, like postcards and things like that. And I think because family had problematic things for me, being able to just sort of see these pieces of—There are people who, even if they're not with me right now, I am connected with.

Jeff: Yeah, I think that's where I really like that enactive piece of, what is this writing do? Not just that it is or why was it created? Because, you know, it's like we created the things—I’m sending Erin a note of congratulations, and I'm mailing it to her. It's like that's more of the process. But what it does, like you just mentioned Erin, of it shows a connection. It shows—whatever. I think that showed up a lot in Kathi's discussion with her grandkids and stuff like that. It's like she leaves them things to—She kind of like, you know, encourages them through these activities. But the writing that that that is there isn't really about the process. It's about the thing that the writing does at the end. And to go back to— to make it about myself again for a moment, to go back to my research. Like when I worked with everyday writers, I went in with our definition, and I felt so sure that this definition is important about the ubiquitous, non-sponsored things separated from school and work. And then I talked with them, how does a term like everyday writing—How would you define it, and would it matter to you to even have it? And for all of them, that enactive part and back to Joe's point of mediating life, all of their definitions of everyday writing went back to that. Especially for them, it was for communication, or like keeping a connection with other people, or through organizing their life through scheduling things, making journals. So for them, it was all about not the sphere for which it was done but the mediating or inactive thing that it ended up doing for them, which I think has kind of changed my thinking about it a bit more. I think because I—What we mentioned earlier about our interest in everyday writing, I always wanted everyday writing to be the thing that got my attention out of school, because I don't like—Ironically, as a professor, I don't like school, and I don't like writing for school. And I wanted that to be available for other people, but I think for quote unquote real people, real everyday writers, they don't care about that because they're out of school and they have a bad taste of writing because of their experiences in school, often. But then when they think about everyday writing as a concept, it's about—Like they weren't paying attention to it because it was ubiquitous, but after we paid attention to it in our conversations. They were able to say this writing is actually valuable because it does these two things for me, and so I think that mediating part could be a worthwhile inclusion.

EPISODE THREE: Dispelling Rumors

18min 52sec

Jacob: Maybe this is like a dispelling rumors segment. So, this is an impression, and I'll see if this makes sense. And I think Joe's like explanation might help with this. The definition feels like surprisingly atomistic—like a very triangle, limited-circulation, limited person-to-person sorts of writing events instead of an ecological—Or is that fair to say, that it's like an atomistic definition? Or that it favors more atomistic models of writing?

Joe: That’s a good question.

Erin: I was just—and I might be responding to the wrong thing. But as soon as you said that, I thought about the piece we read in the seminar about networking.

Joe: Edbauer (2005b).

Erin: No.

Joe: Are you talking about the web?

Erin: The web, yes!

Jeff: Was that about the nuclear protests?

Erin: Yeah.

Joe: I forget who wrote that.

Erin: I think Joe might have included it in an earlier version of the SAR piece.

Joe: Jolly (2003).

Erin: Yes, that’s the one.

Joe: Margaretta Jolly (2003), I think that was the piece.

Jeff: Jacob, I was thinking about that when I was thinking about Kathi's discussion—like of her examples in the interview. I was thinking about that kind of the discussion of atomization or networked—or that kind of thing—and thinking about Yancey’s examples with her grandkids because that is very much for her it was like: I leave it for my grandkid. They write me a note, and they send it to me. To Joe's point, it's like that is also print-based. She could just get a text from a grandkid and that would be kind of enacting a similar, you know, communication-connection thing, but it would feel different. When we were coming up with this definition in our artifacts that we use this case studies in our SAR piece, mine—Bessie’s was really just for her. Joe's was very networked like to many people. His was Twitter during the Occupy protests, and then mine was a single person writing. It was marginalia so someone writing into a library book with the idea that maybe in a sense of this is just for me but then putting it back into a shelf and then other people—potentially many, potentially very few seeing it. So I don't know that we necessarily had that kind of one-to-one atomistic idea. I think we had more of a wider web or more of a spectrum of it could be a single person. It could be one-to-many. It could be many-to-many.

Joe: Well, I think that's a that's an interesting question because, actually, if we look at the definition we gave in that piece, that is a pretty atomistic—And I don't really know exactly what atomistic means, if it pertains to an atom, you know, like individual: atom as opposed to field.

Jacob: Yeah, they're identifiable, granular parts that I can identify as specific audiences, specific writers, specific texts.

Joe: I think actually, you're right that the definition is pretty atomistic when, actually, to Jeff's point and to Erin's point as well, the way we talk about everyday writing in our conversations in developing this draft is off the network [*metaphor]. Now, the Margaretta Jolly (2003) piece is a good example of this—of the letter writing network, of these women in the 1980s protesting nuclear proliferation. They called it the web, but it predates the net. When we think of the web, we think of the internet, but this was a web—that was the metaphor they used—but pre-digital. But also, you have Jenny Edbauer (2005b) in her piece on the different models of discourse in Austin. Related to this as well, we have—One of the pieces that I forgot that I really loved in the SAR collection was—give me a second.

Jacob: Maybe I was surprised by how atomistic it feels was because your examples were much more—The texts had afterlives, and there was circulation, but the definition like didn't reflect that in a weird way to me. And I do see, like Jenny Rice (Edbauer, 2005b) is kind of meant to signal that, but it doesn't--It still feels very granular to me.

Joe: And I think you’re right, and actually, the piece I was talking about is Juli Parrish (2020) where she writes about Bryn Mawr, the collective women's journals.

Jeff: Was that the smoking journal piece? It was the journal in the smoking room where people over the course of many years would write and leave notes for each other.

Joe: Yeah, back smoker diaries. Yeah. That's right. And that's to me—And even the pinwheel thing that Yancey talks about in France that she took pictures of. Most of the everyday writing that we talk about and we care about is a thing that invokes the community in some way. You know, it's a thing that makes you connected. It's a shared text. Often, it's part of a network. Even if it's an individual thing, it's part of a network of stuff: the one person who writes “ZEPPELIN ROCKS!!!” on the side of a billboard (Edbauer, 2005a, p. 134). To think of it as a singular thing that a single author wrote isn't as interesting as thinking about it as part of a network and collection in context with other stuff. So, actually, I agree. I hadn't thought of it like that, where the definition we offer in that intro piece that that one sentence definition is very individualistic. It's purposeful, enactive, self-sponsored (Yancey et al., 2020, p. 12). To talk about something as self-sponsored kind of bakes in an individual writer where I think another definition is possible because I think the benefit of writing is that it is a shared thing. It is a thing that just mediates a life—not just a life but one that is tethered to a bunch of other people. And how is that tethered? Through writing we tether ourselves to others. And Erin said this about her Christmas tree. Writing tethers us to people. That's why we do it, you know? And it's a collective.

Erin: This also may be a bit too personal, but it's also reminding me that I have this big box of letters, notes, cards—like flower cards—that was in the back of my grandma's closet for I don't know how long. I took it with me here, and I opened it and read it for the first time over the summer. It is between my mom and my dad when they first met and going through—They married within five months. The stuff continues. But when I finally opened this box, it was like, who are these people? I do not recognize them. What I'm reading as according with my experience of them. That led me to reconnect with one of my Mom's sisters who I haven't been in touch with for decades. And it has been this really transformative experience of finally being in connection with someone who is like a parent that I think is supposed to be. But why all of these things were collected in a box, why they were saved, and why I took them are all sort of squishy. But they're also “intertexts” (Witte, 1992) used in the way that we were talking about it in the article (Yancey et al., 2020), including letters between my Dad and my future stepmother when they were having an affair and then also, somehow, a letter from her husband to her about this thing. So it's been really wild watching different people's experiences of this thing that happened before I was alive, but I'm learning a ton about myself and my family.

Joe: I love that because as you're talking, Erin, it reminds me. And this is a question I think I might pose, are there everyday writing texts that we, ourselves, have been thinking about, writing about, or theorizing with? One thing for me that's been very recent, and since you're going personal, Erin, I'm going to go personal a little bit too. I had to clean out my grandmother's, me and my—it's my dad's mother. She's a hoarder. She's lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey for a long time. Her apartment—She's like 90 years old or something like that, and so she needs to move to a home. And we have ultimately moved her to a home. So we had to clean out her apartment so we'd get the deposit back and we wouldn't basically destroy it. So it's me, my Mom, and some of my uncles who were kind of cleaning out. Of course we come upon a bunch of documents, and the documents were just—As I'm talking, maybe I shouldn't release all my family secrets, but family secrets were revealed for the first time just by, “Oh, here's a box of documents. Let's take a look.” Here's a little hint for you. Marriage dates of my grandparents were not what my Dad had remembered. You know, things like that. We found out, for instance, we had to find a marriage certificate. We found a note that my grandfather had written—He has since passed. But he had written it to get some sort of grant or something. He was—he wrote a biography for himself, handwritten. And that was supposed to be used for something. And he mentioned stuff that we had no idea. And another kind of special thing was that my grandmother had been scammed by a person in the Philippines, and they were writing love letters to each other. But it was obvious that she was being scammed by some like 20 year-old and really, really devastating things for my father were written in those, which is kind of funny but also—That day, I did not anticipate this. I had a totally, totally different understanding about my entire family, that whole side of that family, totally different. I don't—There’s probably nothing to write about because everyone has these kinds of things: these documents, this writing that mediated people's lives at some point. Well, now most of them are too old to remember their past. But we read them, and we pass them down. And there's stories that we tell. These are the kinds of everyday writing that now I'm thinking about writing about, like how a box of documents can blow up a family or in your case, bring people closer together. But it's just interesting to me, that kind of stuff.

Erin: One of the very striking things for me has been that most of the family materials I have are from my Dad's side, and there's basically nothing aside from this box of letters from my Mom's side. And I had a point there that I had just lost. What was my point?

Joe: Well, I'll add to that while you're thinking of it, because Nathan Johnson (2020) has a book on infrastructures of memory—Because everyday writing is always material. It's always already material. But the materiality of everyday writing, back to the earlier conversation about what kind of media—What, literally, mediates this everyday writing in our lives? Some of the stuff gets lost, and it's a regime of memory (Cirio & Naftzinger, 2024, p. 223). Institutions do this, “Well, we're going to keep these documents and burn these other ones.” But families do that all the time. These documents I found for my grandmother were never meant to see the eyes of humans, ever. She kept them because she had to, but these were not meant to be kept. They were meant to be seen. She had clearly marked these boxes as things that she didn't want—She was pissed the whole time we were cleaning this stuff out, generally, but because we found secrets. So families not only keep these documents but have regimes of what gets to be remembered. You know, these documents represent what is possible.

Erin: Yes, that is sort of what I was thinking which is that class is a big thing because there is—I have learned a bigger class difference between my Mom's family and my Dad's. Ultimately because my mom moved around so much and then lived not-in-a-house for a long time, all of those things have been lost to storage lockers or foreclosed properties. It would be interesting to be able to access that stuff, but it probably lives in a dumpster or a storage locker somewhere in South Carolina.

Joe: And I think that's also why queer activists care so much about the archive as a concept; I know people in our field study that (Alexander & Rhodes, 2012). Because it is so easy for families and communities to try their best to erase anything that resembles a queer person in their community, so the queer archive of—Here are documents that represent this love that people had for each other in a queer culture. It's so important because everyday writing kind of helps us—These represent people's lives. If these are documents that mediate people's lives, the unfortunate reality is that some of these documents will be intentionally destroyed or cut off because of who they are or because of a variety of other things. So that's why I think—Thinking about the archive of how do we save these everyday documents? The idea of an archive where you purposefully seek out these kinds of everyday texts that are not notable, that are not from people who are Barack Obama or of public interest, that are just people. And this is why I mentioned before, but Shipka’s (2012, 2016) work on Dorothy and Fred—Who are Dorothy and Fred? They're just people. And she, based on the diaries of Dorothy, relives a road trip from Baltimore to St. Louis and learns something about herself, Dorothy, and Fred. Now there's ambiguity between that, but just that you could have a connection with strangers. You can what she calls “collaborate with the dead” (Shipka, 2012). And that—I think could be the work of the field. If we care about writing and writing mediates people's lives, we should be doing more work, not just studying this stuff but making sure this stuff doesn’t get destroyed like Indiana Jones. Instead of caring about a museum piece, we should care about your neighbor’s attic of letters. Someone should be keeping those things.

Jeff: One of my favorite things about everyday writing and kind of the potential of the archive--that museum of everyday writing (Yancey, 2020)—is its ability to capture ephemerality in a non-ephemeral sense. I love things that are that are not “monumental” in the sense that they get a lot of attention (Rivers & Weber, 2011, p. 200). But I'm really interested in things like Dorothy and Fred (Shipka, 2012), or Erin, your talking about your parents and kind of uncovering that or Joe, you talking about this box of stuff. Things that would have previously been just missed or misunderstood or something like that. I recently came across a Twitter thing. Someone uncovered a box of tapes that someone had made as a soundtrack for parties at Fire Island in the 70s. So it's like these DJ sets for these parties that really were truly ephemeral. They were a night of partying, and that was maybe the last part that people—the last thing that people remember. But now we have this archive of tapes of something that was soundtracking the night that otherwise would have been lost, so I think the potential of everyday writing to help us see that, to uncover that mediation of how many—Unless we talked to people there, we wouldn't necessarily know this. But how much activity did the soundtrack mediate in that moment? Like what kind of networked encounters came from that in terms of interactions or lives changed or altered? And I think without looking at everyday writing, without looking at these ubiquitous things, we would miss that. Nothing--aside from a grade—So little seems to be mediated by the writing that happens in the classroom. It's just, are you thinking about this concept? Are you getting the degree that you want? Where this other writing has much more important ramifications, but is often forgotten in a storage locker or thrown out: barred from people seeing it. You know, my family—My mom's side of the family, we have most of our everyday writing is snapshot photographs with stuff written on the back of like the year. But my mom is the youngest sibling of ten years. Like she's ten years younger than her brother and sister, and my grandparents are all—They were pretty old when they passed away, but it's been 20 years since then, now. Something like that, but there's a lot of these pictures that they have that they don't necessarily remember who these people are. Or like my mom will say, I think this is this person, but we'd have to talk to my sister—like my aunt—to figure out who it actually is. I think it's related to this, but then because my aunt and my uncle are getting a bit older, they're like, I don't remember that. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. And so there's this kind of lost, you know, memory, which I think is interesting.

EPISODE FOUR: Future of Everyday Writing

13min 58sec

Joe: I want to ask about the future of everyday writing. We kind of—we've talked a little bit about this already, but where is this going? What value does this have? Is there a future to this?

Erin: Writing through the lifespan feels like a productive place for continuing these discussions (Bazerman et al., 2018; Dippre, 2019; Dippre & Phillips, 2020, 2024), and something that I've been working on is like more autoethnographic explorations (Workman, 2024). I'm collaborating with a couple colleagues here [*at DePaul] who were using a Latin/Latina/Chicana like lens for thinking radical life writing work. I think that what has felt like was missing for me from discussions we have of everyday writing is like explicit and intentional engagement with positionality and thinking about whose voices are in this conversation, whose aren't. Bringing more people into the conversation can only help us develop like a richer understanding of writing and everyday writing.

Jeff: I also think the Writing through the Lifespan Collaborative (Dippre & Phillips, 2020, 2024) and the texts that are coming out from there definitely are—I think outside of my—My work uses the term. I'm not sure how many other people in their [*edited collections] use the term everyday writing. And there is a lot [*of research] where they're focused more on workplace or schooling (Dippre & Phillips, 2020, 2024). But I think a lot of the attention is about life-wide and life-spanning stuff, and I think that's where a lot of our interest collides and why I'm excited about the work they're doing. And I agree, Erin, I think that idea of positionality and how that plays into the mediation that happens—the mediation that has to happen—how it shapes what we do and how we write is important. Going back to that previous discussion we had, I think that everyday writing—hopefully as a lens—offers a way to lock down some of those expressions of positionality that might otherwise have been silenced or overlooked, and so I think that there's a lot of really interesting potential there. And I hope that that that is kind of the future of where things where things go.

Jacob: To your point about print, actually, a lot of the digital texts that seem to matter any given week—just because of the medium—And the medium is meant to be more keyed to more timely publication than preservation, a lot of the important pieces of everyday writing sort of rot. And there are things like the Internet Archive, but that usually doesn't crawl what I would call like everyday writing. Or social networks are closed off, and that doesn't get archived anyway unless it's X [*formerly Twitter], although Elon [*Musk] might have shut that off. So I think there are questions about how much how much tech—how much more tech savvy do I need to be to study everyday writing in a less atomistic, more environmental—Like I spent one summer learning how to use the Twitter API to do different kinds of searches for topic and geolocation and user network, and it was wild. But then he, [*Elon Musk], turned that off to researchers. But it was super hard to learn, and I don't think everyone could. So print feels like a rich place to theorize things, but for me, I guess to Jeff's point, to what degree do I retrofit sponsorship to fit these new environments? Or do I reach for something new, like a new term? I think those are the things I’m thinking with.

Joe: If you would allow me to offer, I think I’m going to be dramatic here. Here I'm going to be dramatic because who cares—I'm going to throw caution to the wind a bit. But if you look at the 26 chapters that the editors are choosing, I, frankly was like, why every day writing? You know, why should we care about this term? Because here's the honest to God reality, you know, to be candid is that Jeff, Erin, myself, and Yancey, we had written that intro to SAR. The reason why it's an SAR is because CCC rejected it and then College English rejected it, and these are after revise and resubmit [*decisions]. We revised it, and then they rejected it anyway. So, finally, Yancey was gifted the SAR, South Atlantic Review, [*special issue] to do whatever she wanted. SAR is not a journal that people in rhetoric and composition follow that much. You know, it is a journal in its own right. I agree with that, but they do not primarily publish in rhetoric and composition. It's something that people don't really pay attention to. Now, I love the SAR special issue that we have. There's some great pieces in there, but I'm not sure how many people are paying attention to it unless they specifically seek it out. We care about it because Florida State people are up and down in that special issue, so—And I will say of Yancey’s work that she's published, notably on tombstones (Yancey, 2017) and on handwriting (Yancey, 2012), she does not actually use the word everyday writing—Or even when she does transfer research per se. Now, Erin, you might know more about the more recent stuff than I would, but you know, if thinking about students prior writing experiences, she talks about in terms of prior writing experiences, it doesn't talk about it as everyday writing that I have seen. So the question is, why would she elect to have everyday writing as a term? It really hasn't necessarily been picked up by the field, and we have this special issue. Why should we care? And I think we should care, actually, and this is where I'm going to be dramatic. The dramatic thing that I'm going to say is that I think it's—The conversations about everyday writing are about disciplinarity. It's always—It's essentially about disciplinarity. And, Yancey, very, very minimally cites Sid Dobrin (2011), but I think that the reason why we had the everyday writing class in fall of 2014—The reason we have that class is because we read Postcomposition (Dobrin, 2011) as one of our first books. When I came [*to Florida State] in 2012, this is one of the first books we read as part of our reading group, Sid Dobrin’s Postcomposition (2011), where he says specifically that we have not really talked about writing. We have talked about how to teach writing and the administration of writing, and at the center of our field has been students. And so he says we should shift our attention to writing. He wrote that book in like what, like 2011 or something like that? I often think about in--I think it was [*published in] 2020, the CCCC CFP for 2020 [*2021], where their kind of catch phrase was, “WE. ARE. ALL. WRITING. TEACHERS.” (Hassel & Lindquist, 2020). And they kind of split out each word: WE. ARE. ALL. WRITING. TEACHERS. [*AND YET.]. They spelt out each of them and asked questions around those terms. When they got to writing, the first question they asked was not what is writing? Or not what is the function of writing our lives? The first question they asked in that kind of category of writing was, how do we teach writing, [*What are we teaching when we say we teach writing]? This is a problem. This—like we have cared too much about teaching and the administration of teaching. I had a conversation with a history professor. I just walked into the hallways, and we were talking about lines, hiring lines. And I was like, yeah, you know, we're not going to get—We need the lines. We have so many adjuncts teaching our first-year comp classes. We lost a couple of people in writing. We need lines. We're not going to get it, just no funds for it. And she's like, oh—And she was very excited. She was like, “We got we got a new line in history. We needed someone to teach”—I think it was the history of the Caribbean or something like that. And she's like, we have these classes that we need students to take, the History of the Caribbean or South of the Equator-type of classes in History. And she's like, we don't have anyone who can teach those, so they gave us a line because we justified it because it's part of our curriculum. We don't have anyone to teach it, and so we hired someone. I was like, “You can do that?” The provost will give you a line just to teach Caribbean history? Because in writing we don't have we don't say--I mean, I will say at schools like Stockton, regional programs, we don't have a major [*actually, concentration and minor] in writing like Jacob’s school does, and I think the [*writing] major is part of this. But we don't have a major, we just have first-year comp, and we have WAC. And if I were to say we need someone in technical writing, you know, we don't have—we don't offer these classes. We need someone who has more familiarity with technical writing or or writing, or we need someone who has more knowledge of digital circulation, we would be laughed at. They're like, “We don't hire people like that in writing. If you need the—If you have the numbers for it, if we are giving more freshman students or placing into first year writing, then maybe we'll give you lines because our field is a service field. We don't like to talk about it that way. But when you get down, like at Florida State, it was a beautiful place where you got to talk about the wonderful things about writing. We were, you know, we had faculty who cared about writing, and, we were all kind of reading about writing as a content. When you go and get hired at your, you know, schools like Stockton, and I love Stockton. It's a teaching institution. They don't care about writing as a theory. You can't have a conversation with anyone else. Like if I have a conversation with someone in history, we talk about history as a content. You think I can have the same conversation with faculty members thinking about writing as a content? No, because we have not, primarily, in the field focused on what is this writing? How does it work? I think the shift to everyday writing is trying to get us to the theory that Sid Dobkin has kind of written about, you know, because it's not sustainable. I think when 2020, the pandemic hit, instead—Like when we had we had to rethink a lot of things. But what we did and in 2020, a lot of—And I saw this on Twitter, and I think you see this a lot when people writing about COVID and writing, people dug their heels and said we need writing more than ever because it administrates writing, not how we think about how people survived through writing with each other. So it's interesting to me that when the 2020 pandemic hit, people in our field, I think, gravitated much more to the question of how do we continue to administrate writing at universities in a pandemic? Rather than, how do we—how did this thing called writing sustain every single person's life around this globe? That is interesting to me. That is fascinating.

Jacob: I think that is 100% right. It’s a weird disciplinary question because as you all have noted, your definition of everyday writing is so interdisciplinary—surprisingly so. But it also tries to make a disciplinary claim, and there are already these existing writing disciplines that people may not acknowledge. It’s hard to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit, especially, as we’ve talked about, how the lines between technical writing, for instance, and everyday writing seem kind of fuzzy. Which is actually—in the little zine that I wrote about (Craig, 2020), that was one of the points. He, [*Michael], used bureaucratic forms as models and templates for his content even though it was clearly a piece of everyday writing.

Jeff: I'm glad that you mentioned that, Joe. I think that that is an interesting and kind of a hope that I have for the future is that everyday writing functions as a way to not necessarily—I don't know if we will ever fully be extricated from the service of comp but as a way to, kind of, cleave it out a little bit. And I think that, you know, the classes that I have with students that seem to get the most engagement are the classes where we talk about everyday writing, because as we've mentioned before, it's the writing that they're often engaging in. Jacob, you mentioned it's like the bleeding edge. It's the stuff that they're familiar with. It's where they can make those in-roads, and it's where I think they have the least amount of baggage in terms of, you know, bad experiences and bad feedback. I think it's also the most real. It's the one that they'll actually engage with in the future, you know, in the present outside of class. So I really want that to be where we go. And I think that everyday writing as a concept offers a lot of potential to kind of address that in ways that haven't been made clear. And I think that reading, you know—Thinking about those readings that we did from sociolinguistics (Lillis, 2013), anthropology (Barton & Papen, 2010), all of those that deal with writing and communication about a lot of the same ideas that we have as a field of like writing mediates life, writing enables connections. Writing does all of these things. We always have to include at the end, here's how this applies to the classroom. We're reading those pieces. They're talking about the exact same things or, you know, similar things. Um, there's never a, “Okay, here's how you include this in your classroom.” It's always this is important as an intellectual endeavor just because it's important. And I think that's to the detriment of our field, that all of our journals, all of our textbooks, all the ways that we're expected to, you know--Even in our departments, the way that we're expected to theorize things is: how will this help me teach writing to freshmen?