...that could have only been written in the spirit of reflection.
When we the editors emailed Kathi Yancey1 in Spring 2023 with our proposal to conduct & compile a series of video interviews with her on 26 different topics in writing studies, each tied to a different letter of the alphabet,2 she understandably expressed some hesitation in reply. Sure, she acknowledged, Deleuze A-Z, which we had said was the inspiration for our particular line of flight, provided an intriguing model, but she (gratefully) was no Deleuze, and we three would never (alas) possess the charm of his interviewer and frequent collaborator Claire Parnet. (Okay Kathi didn't say that last part, but she must have been thinking it because it's the cold truth). Given this, she shared her typically understated view that it was an open question whether "a sufficiently large number of people would be interested to warrant" our proceeding.
1Who served as dissertation director for each of us at Florida State University.
2At the bottom-right of each page of this collection is an open-book with the letters “A” and “Z” on it. That button that opens the main navigation bar with links to each letter/topic in the collection.
This latter view had not entirely escaped our consideration, but we remained undeterred--mainly out of our firm belief that, just as our intellectual engagement with Deleuze's written work and beyond was enriched by his interviews three decades (in our case) after they were produced, people in the field of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS), present and future, might likewise benefit from engaging with an extended exploration of the professional career arc of a CCCC's Exemplar3 and of the key concepts and themes that animated her research and teaching throughout. While necessarily biographical in some respects, the interviews would nevertheless be 'about' Kathi only to the extent that her work has overlapped, sympoietically, with the discipline and woud thus offer value to viewers from a wide array of perspectives.4 With this commitement in mind, we took up Kathi's emphatic suggestion, offered in the same reply, that we aim to produce something "more than a retrospective...also employed for other kinds of new, inventive composing, a Lanham-like version of looking at and looking through."
3The CCCC's Exemplar Award is presented "as occasion demands" (annually since 1991) by the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, one of the largest professional organizations in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies to "a person whose years of service as an exemplar for our organization represents the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession."
Kathi received the Exemplar Award in 2018. This collection also features contributions from fellow Exemplar Award recipients Charles Bazerman (2020), Beverly J. Moss (2021), and Anis Bawarshi (2026).
4Scholars interested in the history of the discipline, for instance, will find both a synchronic sense of the RCWS (based on the topics themselves) and a microhistorical, diachronic version of the field’s history (through Kathi’s recounting of her career). On the other hand, scholars who are interested in broad understandings of RCWS–for instance, new graduate students and those teaching seminars for new graduate students–will find a capacious set of topics that cross theoretical, pedagogical, scholarly, and administrative areas.
It was "looking through" this very suggestion that led us to invite a small army of Kathi's colleagues and past collaborators5 to participate in dialogue with the interviews, each author or group of authors assigned to one of the 26 topics. We apprised the authors that, should they accept our invitation, we would send them the segment on their assigned topic, which they could watch and then craft an open-ended response(-ive) text for the collection. Each author/group would decide for themselves how central or ancillary Kathi's responses to the interview questions would be to their respective chapter. In the spirit of Kathi's long-held, capacious framing of writing, one that includes all modes of meaning-making, we encouraged authors to experiment with form, genre, media, and other aspects in whatever way they saw fit. The resulting collection, we hoped, would be greater than the sum of its parts, exploring kaleidoscopically the A-Z topics.
5Some of them frenquent, others more sporadic. Collaboration has been a running theme in Kathi's career, so it's fitting that this project likewise features multifaceted and multilayered collaboration: the interview questions were collaboratively composed, the interview segments were collaboratively recorded, the project is collaboratively edited, and many of the chapters are collaboratively authored.
You can see the list of contributors by clicking here or from any page in the collection via the link at the bottom of the navigation menu.
The immediate response from the authors to the invitations was overwhelmingly positive, settling finally in our minds the question of sufficient audience-interest and prompting us to float the project in a prospectus for a digital collection. The pitch? A documentary in dialogue, a kind of multimedia hypertextual mashup that would have elements of both a festschrift6 and of a keywords project7 but would mainly operate as an invitation to share a glimpse of RCWS as Kathi has seen it and to reflect on how, as members of the discipline, we each stand in relation to and as a part of it. In response and in further affirmation, the press indicated that if things went as well as we hoped, there would surely be interest.
6A traditional academic genre with a long history in the discipline that has recently found new purchase in RCWS. Festschriften for Sharon Crowley (USUP, 2019) and Charles Bazerman (WAC Clearinghouse, 2023) are recent examples.
7Within the discipline, keywords has a long history as well. For instance, Keywords in Composition Studies, published in 1996, met with enough success to warrant a follow-up volume, in 2015, Keywords in Writing Studies. Between and after those two volumes, keywords publications have been used to frame subfields within the discipline, both to give them coherence and to orient attention to the ideas undergirding them. We hope that four examples suffice here: nearly 20 years ago, Wendy Bishop and David Starkey (2006) developed Keywords for Creative Writing. More recently, editors like Jason Tham with Keywords in Making: A Primer (2024) and previously Keywords in Design Thinking (2022) and Yu and Buehl’s (2023) Keywords in Technical and Professional Communication have expanded the keywords approach in print and digital venues.
So we proceeded, writing and organizing interview questions, making arrangements for travel to Tallahassee, and brainstorming interface designs for the eventual webtext that would house the collection. We frequently met over zoom to finalize logistics and to work toward fulfilling our aspirations that the interview be deep and engaging. We committed both to doing very little editing of the published video segments, for the sake of authenticity, and to withholding the questions from Kathi in advance in order to preserve spontaneity. We prepared. Kathi prepared. The build-up felt a bit like prelims, only in this case the roles were reversed.
When we conducted the interviews in Kathi's living room over the course of two days in late June of that year, everything seemed to go pretty much according to plan. Nerves were relatively high as we set up the equipment and started rolling, but once the interviews were underway, once Kathi saw that we would avoid any personal prying as well as any tendencies toward aggrandizement, and once we saw that Kathi would handle the potentially daunting spotlight with her usual engaging & professional manner, we all settled in for the work (and the fun). We recorded the 26 segments in alphabetical order, starting reasonably early each day, with a long break for lunch and shorter breaks for snacks. We ended up with almost 13 hours of footage.
The biggest logistical hurdles, which in fact were rather minor, were twofold. First, the Tallahassee weather, famous for its extreme midsummer fluctuations, the sunshine giving way to pouring rain and violent thunder in an instant, and dissipating just as quickly, did not disappoint, and on the first day of shooting we had to bring the equipment in from the rental-car under umbrellas. The "A for Assemblage" segment, the first we shot that morning, looks like it was recorded at night, with the window behind Kathi darkened by the storm. Fortunately, by the time we got to "C" the sky was much clearer, our shot all the brighter. The second hurdle was when Kathi's neighbor's diesel generator, which is located just outside and beyond that same window, auto-performed its periodic testing cycle that Kathi says only runs once every few weeks, right in the middle of "G for Genre." Ultimately we think these artifacts of production lend charm to the project.
By the time we wrapped up the second day, we were eager to share the video segments with the responding authors and did so after a few short weeks in post. Then, over the next several months, the response-texts steadily rolled in, each one more interesting, intriguing, and insightful than the last. The authors seemed to have received a memo that we did not write, one that asked for a combination of depth and whimsy that is rare in academic publication--and they each delivered in their own way. While we weren't surprised by the high quality of work from folks whose professional reputations precede them, we were nevertheless blown away by their texts, individually and in the aggregate, not least for how they extend the discussion that takes place in the respective interview segments along new and unpredictable dimensions--just the vital quality that real dialogue requires. And we were (and remain) grateful for their contributions as well as for our own front-seat roles in the project.
Such gratitude was highly motivating as we created the interface in which you now encounter these words. As we went about it, our primary set of goals for design included centering the user experience on both the interview videos and the response-texts, enabling navigability across different devices and displays, and designing for accessibility. We further aimed for consistency of functionality while allowing for variation across the chapters, since the forms employed range from essays to podcasts, videos, and multi-page webtexts. As we near publication, we like to think that we succeeded, and we hope that as reader's you'll agree.
The text is structured as a network–one woven together visually and conceptually from connections not only between interviews and each corresponding chapter but also among the chapters themselves. Part of this is formal (through linked content across chapters), and part of it is conceptual (through treatment of similar topics across chapters). One of the effects of this is that even though we started with "A", that doesn't mean you have to, so feel free to start anywhere!
On each chapter's landing page, you will see the contributed chapter title and author(s) at the top. Below that, scrolling down, you will find the chapter’s content, which varies from alphabetic prose to images, videos, audio files, and so on. The video play icon toggles the viewport for the Yancey interview video that corresponds to that letter’s topic. When the Yancey interview viewport is open, you will see an icon at the center-bottom that looks like a printed page. Clicking on that icon will open the transcript for that Yancey interview. To close the viewport, simplay click the video play icon again.
We hope that you will follow your interests (and they hyperlinks) where they lead you. Sometimes you'll end up in other chapters; sometimes, in other places in cyberspace. If you do venture off, come back and enjoy the other chapters. Or, if you prefer, you can always focus your attention separately on the interview videos. Clicking on the collection title at top-left will always bring you right back here.
We are indebted to numerous folks who made this project possible, beginning of course with Kathi, who may have retired from teaching but from whom we are still learning. Likewise, to all the contributing authors, we thank you for your enthusiasm, your expertise, your joy and your patience as the process unfolded. We also want to thank and acknowledge the CCDP editors, Amber Buck, Tim Lockridge, and Crystal VanKooten, as well as the reviewers who provided invaluable feedback and guidance as we prepared the work for publication. Finally, we thank our readers, through whom the work lives on, and the dialogue continues.
Kathleen Yancey is Professor Emerita and Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She focuses her research on composition studies generally; on students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice; on creative non-fiction; on cultural studies of everyday writing; on writing assessment, especially print and electronic portfolios; and on the intersections of culture, literacy, and technologies.
In addition to co-founding the journal Assessing Writing and co-editing it for seven years, she is a past editor of College Composition and Communication, the flagship journal in the field. She has also authored, edited, or co-edited 16 scholarly books and two textbooks as well as over 100 articles and book chapters.
Her most recent edited collections include ePortfolio-as-Curriculum: Models and Practices for Developing Students’ ePortfolio Literacy (2019), Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018), Assembling Composition (2017), and A Rhetoric of Reflection (2016). In 2014, her co-authored Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing was published; it won both the 2015 CCCC Research Impact Award and the 2016 Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award. It has also provided the foundation for two CCCC-sponsored research grants supporting a first-of-its-kind study of the efficacy of Teaching for Transfer curriculum across 8 diverse institutional sites.
She has served as president or chair of several scholarly organizations: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); the NCTE College Section and the College Forum; the Council of Writing Program Administrators; and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). She serves on several boards, including the National Board for Miami University's Howe Center for Writing Excellence and on the Executive Board for the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), and she is serving as a mentor for WASC's Community of Practice for Advancing Learning Outcomes Visibility. She has served on the Steering Committee of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Steering Committee for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE project focused on electronic portfolios.
Yancey is also the recipient of several awards, including the Florida State Graduate Mentor Award, the FSU Graduate Teaching Award (twice), the Donald Murray Prize, the CWPA book award (twice), the CCCC Research Impact Award, the South Atlantic Review Best Essay Award, the Purdue University Distinguished Woman Scholar Award, and the CCCC Exemplar Award, considered by many to be the highest honor in Rhetoric and Composition. In 2019, she received the National Council of Teachers of English Squire Award, “given to an NCTE member who has had a transforming influence and has made a lasting intellectual contribution to the profession.”
Bishop, W., & Starkey, D. (2006). Keywords in creative writing. Utah State University Press. Retrieved from https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/2235-keywords-in-creative-writing
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1988-1989). Gilles Deleuze from A to Z. Semiotext(e).
Tham, J. (Ed.). (2024). Keywords in making: A primer. Parlor Press. Retrieved from https://parlorpress.com/products/keywords-in-making
Tham, J. (Ed.). (2022). Keywords in design thinking. WAC Clearinghouse. University of Colorado Press. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/books/tpc/design/
Yu, H., & Buehl, J. (2023). Keywords in technical and professional communication. WAC Clearinghouse. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/books/tpc/tpc/