Matt: My zoom-in question to you both: If you could replace one letter in the 26 letters that we gave Yancey to talk about, what concept would you replace it with? And what would you say about that concept?

Rory: Circulation would have been one. It's one of the key expressions to formulate her new curriculum for the 21st century in her 2004 C's address, the circulation of composition. But it was also a key term for her in her teaching. How was a given text or a piece of content circulating in all of these different sorts of ways?

McElroy: A possible direction that the project could have gone in. It's less focused on the field and more focused on Kathi. One of the terms was "F for family." It would have been interesting to have a topic that was especially focused on, you know, biographical questions, Kathi's life outside of her career, the sort of uh work and and home life balance, I guess we could say.

Rory: the work life balance.

McElroy: Another topic that we talked about, G for Gaston or Gaston, I don't know how you pronounce his name. Kathi's dissertation director. We were able to get at some of those things in other topics. I also share that as sort of um a kind of insight into our process.

Matt: It would either be M for major or D for discipline to explore the undergraduate writing major. something that Kathi I mean devoted public attention to like in her chair's address at Florida State designing the editing writing and media major it's only one version of disciplinarity but Kathi's was more oriented to curriculum I would have been interested in particular to hear I mean about those experiences but then how she feels like they um appear or don't appear in the present

McElroy: we originally had why for youth

Davis: the youth what are use of two these days.

Rory: Yantheisms was a much better choice. In the long run, which is interesting too because I think we were reluctant to suggest that one because it did feel perhaps a little too how much of this is personal to her versus how much of this is able to sort of speak to the larger discipline of which she's contributed so much.

Rory: What about our project do you wish you would have done differently?

McElroy: There are plenty of moments where there's some technical thing that I wish I could have done differently. But I I think it's those are also things that we've learned. You know, this is not our first interview project. Obviously, we've done lots of interviews uh together.

Rory: Yeah. This is like our what fourth different iteration of a sort of interview setup.

McElroy: Our interviews in the past have um often featured multiple speakers one after the other uh in sort of a montage form trying to layer those voices. But this was different, right? This is uh this is an extended session with one interviewee. Engaging in that kind of work is is quite different and you know I think taught us quite a lot.

Rory: You get better the more you do it, but there's still always more that you can get better at.

Davis: For me, what I would change that thing would be the timeline. The time between interviews and now uh has definitely zoomed by. Part of this is the product of collaborating where we're we're distant from each other. I mean Z is for Zoom as in this interface. The software played like no small part in how we managed geographic distance.

Rory: Every time we would meet on Zoom, I've you know excited to get back and eager to get back to doing this stuff. Gosh, I for I forget about how much I like this work.

McElroy: As you look back over the past, you know, two and a half, three years, if you had to pick one favorite moment, uh what would it be?

Davis: I've got mine. We have a picture. The picture is us in the convertible, the only car they had at the Atlanta airport. Drove this convertible all the way from Atlanta to Tallahassee. Then we had like absolute gorgeous weather. Kathi found it very funny and took a picture of us in the driveway. That picture reminds me of the moment when we drove up though. Um we drove up to her house and Kathi came out to like greet us and was like as excited as we were about the project. Uh and then I remember thinking like, "Oh, this was such a good idea."

Rory: The interviews themselves were so great. It's the moments where we weren't doing interviews and it was often moments where we were eating, you know, snacking. We went to Cool Beans for a dinner. Yeah. You know, and it was those were really fun moments because it was like, okay, we we weren't doing work, but like we were .

McElroy: I don't know if we talked about anything else the whole time we were there.

Rory: unwind or decompress a little bit and and really reflect what a privilege it is to sort of do this work with smart people whom you respect and have like nostalgic food.

McElroy: when we did the Z for Zoom uh interview segment when it was over then we got to say okay we've done this work what's next

Davis: zooming out? okay zooming forward what would you hope for the project for the next three years

Rory: one that it was well-received I I think because there is a sort of larger reflective disciplinary perspective that's being offered--I hope that the value of it you know exceeds three the next project I sort of invest in will in some ways be seen through the lens of this one. What does that mean then for what's next?

McElroy: My hope is that this opens up new opportunities to explore interview as as a form.

Davis: I hope the project forms a network. Folks can get in the project, crawl around in this network of ideas um for a little bit.

Rory: You know, one of the things that really stood out to me about this project, the people we invited to collaborate and participate, how much they then enjoyed making the thing that they made.

Davis: Like I hope the project ends up like an ant farm where like

McElroy: or if I can interrupt or a termite a termite mound if you willstein and B for Bitser.

Davis: Oh, I forgot she did. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's fun to crawl around in a network. Um, this one is made of ideas and people

Rory: with the method of interviews: I used interviews as one of my methods in my dissertation. Matt, you've talked about a lot of the interview work that you've done as part of your research and scholarship on transfer. Stephen, you mentioned an entire course that that you developed around interviews. I'm wondering what keeps us coming back to interviews. Why does the the interview as a genre persist?

McElroy & Davis: The interview class that I teach, the first assignment is for students to interview someone that they know. Suddenly they are granted a kind of authority. That sort of implicit agreement of the interview just by saying we're going to conduct an interview here that you are able to express your curiosity through questions. Not only ask questions but follow up and that those questions will give you responses you couldn't have predicted. So the the surprise element as well in terms of bits are like these are the constraints of an interview. At this particular point in in history, given the ubiquity of the screen, interviews give us a rare opportunity, the affordance of sustained engagement to talk to each other, you know, one-on-one, face to face in casual conversation.

Rory: You're not thinking in such a formal way.

Davis: I find it interesting because it is partial uh in both senses of the term. Uh you get that person's partiality, their their particular worldview, but also interviews are only ever partial.

Rory: There's something very like intriguing about the sort of interplay between orality and writing. You do the prep work in writing of usually writing these questions down and refining those questions and writing the post interview labor of of transcribing so that people can engage with the content of the interview in different formats whether they want to watch it or listen to it or or read it.

McElroy: I really appreciate the value of interviews as opening up opportunities for storytelling, especially when we get into recorded interviews. You have all of that material there, the audio, the video. That's an immense amount of autonomy that an editor has.

Davis: Just being in complete control.

McElroy: Well, yes, I do like the control aspect. Uh,

Rory: but there's an ethics to it. There's, you know, like there's there's a real ethics to it.

McElroy: Yes. Yes. balancing the control with the kernel of truth that lies in the story. That goes to those ethics that Rory's talking about. My zoomout question, if I hadn't realized that we were going to answer our own questions, I probably wouldn't have asked this one. How do you hope the project is taken up

Davis: on the two levels in which we intend it: as a personal kind of reflection and attempt to honor Kathi's career by folks who know Kathi by folks who've worked with Kathi who've read her her body of work or some of it and then as a kind of disciplinary text, and in that regard, somewhat ironically, Kathi is not that important which is to say she's one person thinking about these concepts so are the other contributors and so is whoever is receiving the project just as much the focus of what's going on um disciplinarily or intellectually as anybody everybody else who's involved. I hope it gets taught. I do hope that people take pieces of it as they're able and teach those.

Rory: I think I want it to be received a little bit differently from other edited collections. Some of the impulse on our end to try to do a serial release was to let each contributor really get a moment that their work is sort of spotlighted and featured.

McElroy: Kaleidoscopic. I think about the Marshall McLuhan line that when information brushes against information, the results are startling and effective. My hope is that people do have uh startling and effective interactions with with the piece.

Rory: Everyone is sort of contributing to a larger whole, but that whole is still made up of individual pieces.

Davis: Anyway, that's what editing is for. That's right.

Rory: I think this went well.

Davis: Yeah, it was good. It was enjoyable conversation. liked it.

References