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2008Rudd

The Call to Conference: Juggling, Struggling, and Choosing our Realities at the Four C’s in New Orleans
By Mysti Rudd
mysti.rudd@lamarpa.edu

Four years ago, I was a conference virgin. The very first Four C’s session I attended in San Antonio included presentations by two compositionists whom I greatly respect and one whom I had never met. Ironically, though it was the first Four C’s conference I was able to go to (it was within driving distance of my home campus), the presenters at this particular session threatened that it might be the last one they would attend. Their reasons were sound from an ecological point of view—the fuel we burn, the ozone we poke holes into, the colossal waste inherent in running a hotel big enough to accommodate a conference registration of five thousand or so. After listening to their presentations, I felt a little like I had arrived at the free breakfast buffet at the Best Western fifteen minutes before the end, when only dried remnants of scrambled eggs remained encrusted in the corners of a stainless steel bin. Was incurring the expense of attending this conference a mistake? And if so, what did this mean about my decision to embark on a new career at the age of thirty-eight? Was my desire to attend every session of this conference, to distill the message of every presenter, to detect trends and zoom in on urgencies, focusing the microscope of my perception in such a way that I would be able to perceive the heart and soul and borders and war-zones of my newly chosen profession as sincere and honorable as these intentions might initially seem? Or were my motivations more self-serving than that—was I tracing the amoeba-like edges of this profession in order to find room inside its single cell for a research of my own, also known as a dissertation topic? If nothing else that first Four C’s session I witnessed in San Antonio made me question my future as a student, as a conference-goer, and as a compositionist.

Being the born-again infidel that I am, I will always admire the chutzpah required to submit a proposal to a conference that questions the very necessity of said conference. But I did not heed the advice of that first presentation, and instead chose to fly to San Francisco, then Chicago, and next, New York, following the Four C’s from sea to sea. “Sure,” I told myself, “they can afford not to attend the biggest conference in our profession because they have already made it in this field. But as a lowly graduate student, I can’t imagine turning down a chance to present at this prestigious venue.”

Certainly the Four C’s is not the only academic conference I attend. I have regularly attended regional MLA conferences, Pop Culture Conferences, Associations of Creative Writing Teachers, the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE), the College English Association (CEA), and even presented at the Watson Rhetoric in Louisville a time or two. Lest it seem like I am bragging, let it be noted that a friend of mine has said that I probably need to attend some sort of twelve-step program like “Conference-goers Anonymous.” And if I look at the reasons why I conference an average of four to six times per year, they are not as résumé-driven as they might first appear, since spending my energy writing, revising, and sending out for publication might make for a more balanced curriculum vita than the puffed-up one I currently sleep with between my knees. So why, I ask myself today as I drive three hundred miles on a humid Tuesday in April, with the compressor-less air conditioning in my car blowing air too hot to dry my sweat-soaked back, am I heading to yet another CCCC? Is it truly for the inspiration, networking, and professional growth that conferencing can purportedly provide for me? How did I get on this conferencing carousel in the first place, and what does it have to do with my hopes and my dreams—my frustrations and my desperation—and the grooves I tread between community and isolation?

Maybe I first began attending conferences for the same reason that teenagers try smoking—they think it will make them seem more grown-up. However, it didn’t require attending very many sessions for me to realize that most presentations are less than stellar: even if the subject matter was riveting, the delivery was often boring, the pacing commonly problematic, and the visual aids, if they existed at all, generally competed with rather than enhanced the presentation. “Therefore,” I reasoned, “this was something even I could do!”

My first conference presentation consisted of reading original poetry at a creative writing session of a regional MLA conference. After doing this a couple more times, I realized that the only thing worse than reading your poetry to a group of strangers is reading your poetry to people who recognize you. I believe it is akin to stripping at a nude beach with strangers, or shedding your clothes at this same beach with colleagues. A no-brainer, me thinks, since nothing makes me feel more naked than sharing my creative writing with someone who feels forced to respond—nearly as humiliating as being the recipient of a fake orgasm.

So I switched to more academic pieces, submitting abstracts to sessions on first-year composition. The problem with abstracts is that if yours gets accepted, it is bittersweet, for then you have to find the time (and recover the initial inspiration) to write the darn thing! Unfortunately, my creative process involves both duct tape and vomit as the procrastinator who has taken over my soul cannot be exorcised until the day before I leave for the conference. So I stay up all night typing a twelve-page piece that nearly always contains at least one metaphorical drool stain and may or may not have an ending—and never the one I will actually end up reading.

And technological advances only aid and abet this kind of procrastination as now it is common practice to cart your laptop to each and every conference in order to finish your piece in the hotel Starbucks. This all means fewer and fewer people are attending sessions because they are too busy fighting over chairs in the lobby, so they can peck on their laptops like a murder of over-caffeinated crows.

But perhaps I have not traced (with my big toe dragging in the dirt) the entire circumference of the conferencing merry-go-round. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty about the costly meals and hotel rooms, the courses on campus that conferencing requires me to abandon, the sessions that I miss, or worse—attend but doze off in the middle of. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about lugging my yoga mat and ten-pound weights to every single hotel room, yet seldom using them as bedtimes are pushed back but early morning sessions always start on time. Nor should I too easily believe the grandiose idea that conferencing (or the lines it creates on my vita) makes me a scholar anymore than trying on my mom’s lipstick at the age of six made me a woman.

Still, something within me refuses to jump off this conferencing carousel. As if conferencing were an Olympic event, every year I vow to become a better conference-goer. To achieve this goal, this year I actually plucked down the fifteen bucks required to get a program sent to me a month in advance; ironically, this is also the first year that I have not read the entire program, front to back, tabbing presentations as I go. It is impossible to attend every session—obviously, as forty of them run concurrently—but I am usually vigilant about being aware of what I am missing while I sit in one session rather than another. You might get me to admit—after a Pim’s cup or three—that I have been somewhat of a “session hopper” in the past in an attempt to hear as many speakers-of-interest as possible. Yet this year was different: I organized (and I use this word loosely) my personal conference schedule around what I thought would help me, soothe me, comfort me on a level where the personal is not separate from the political. So I did not choose sessions based on relevance to my own research, nor did I attend sessions out of a sense of duty or obligation towards friends and colleagues, nor even to suck up to those-whose-books-I-should-be-reading or those who could aid me in publishing. Instead of following a strict agenda, I let myself meander through this conference as if it were an emotional maze, asking myself, “Do I feel like attending a session in time slot A? or B? or G? Is there something that would serve my needs better than sitting in a slightly stuffy, somewhat moldy meeting room at the Hilton Riverside or the Doubletree?”

Often the answer to this was “yes,” so I found myself having coffee with a close friend, sharing what we were really struggling with in our lives, as well as whispering about lingerie we would never buy. I took the time to stand and do nothing, admiring the golden spray-painted street performer I call “Statue-man,” whose poses are all the more persuasive because they are steeped in silence. In the Four C’s of the past, I would have witnessed thirty-three presentations in the time I took to walk the streets of New Orleans. But in my fifth consecutive year of attending this conference, I have paradoxically learned that life is too short to pile presentation on top of presentation—that perhaps each speaker, each new idea, each epiphany deserves to be treated as sacredly as a poem on a page—surrounded by plenty of white space, and followed by silence.

So I chose my sessions sparingly and with a deliberate randomness that seemed fitting for a city whose ghosts cannot be confined to above-ground tombs like those that line the freeway between the French Quarter and the airport.

I learned that I am not the only compositionist struggling to make sense of her career trajectory, attempting to fashion some sort of identifiable mosaic out of the torn-up scraps (read: artifacts) of my reading, my writing, my research proposals, my oft-revised syllabi, my end-of-semester course evaluations, my student loan promissory notes, and, last but not least, my secret ambitions to build a program that doesn’t necessarily align itself with my current department’s goals. (This is dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as Pinky & the Brain’s master plan “to rule the world”—but close).

Though I attended fewer sessions at this year’s Four C’s than I have in the past, I mark this as one of my most—if not the most—significant conference experiences. I made an attempt to use my “felt sense” as defined by Eugene Gendlin and quoted in Sondra Perl’s book Felt Sense: Writing with the Body:

So I let my body lead me, listening to the cells in my feet, the impulses behind my knees as I decided what steps to take, and how big, and where and why. The sessions of the conference that I attended, such as the one I describe in my review of session A.06, impacted me greatly, and I surrounded them with the communion I experienced by dining with friends, striking up conversations with strangers, and swimming underneath a windy sky. I learned to appreciate the art of living as demonstrated by those around me, like Kyle, who worked in a boring manufacturing job in New Orleans but lived for bird watching.

I found myself waking up at seven Saturday morning though I hadn’t tucked myself into bed before two the night before, seeking out the theoretical session titled “Writing Katrina: Breaching Discourse, Inscribing New Realities” chaired by Jim Zebroski. Though the view of the harbor was beautiful from their presentation room, I felt angry—all over again—by the seemingly unnecessary suffering caused not by Hurricane Katrina but by the calloused governmental response to this event. The panelists canvassed the room for a more accurate term than “natural disaster” and a couple of better ones were offered: “the Federal Government Disaster” and, my favorite, “The FEMA Flop.” In his presentation titled “Navigating Rhetorical Landscapes: Writing and Healing in a Post-Katrina World,” Paul Butler marked the shifting uses of discourse immediately after Katrina (discourse as ecology, landscape, synecdoche, confession, and transgression), noting the importance of discourse as it “enables us to begin a healing process,” but also remarking on the missed opportunities for healing by how quickly “we have returned to not seeing things again.” Zebroski also pointed out that “the discourses of social class—the ways we talk, write, and think social class—shifted for a time during and immediately after Katrina” . . . “from a discourse of social class as position to a discourse of social class as power relations.” Not since the lingo of Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Zebroski reminded us, had American dialogue been so heavily infused with rhetoric from “the war on poverty.” The problem, George Bush would repeatedly state, was that people were poor and could not get out of the way of the hurricane—and not that the government had failed them in any way. Nearly three years after the hurricane, many areas of New Orleans have not been re-built, much of the pain and destruction has not been neatly tucked away (except in the tourist sections, of course), and some people have gone so far as to blame the victims, asking “What’s the matter with them, anyway? Why don’t they want to get things back to normal?”

I wonder how many of us at the Four C’s in New Orleans this year ventured outside of our comfort zones, looking at the destruction in the Ninth Ward or St. Bernard’s Parish. I told myself then that I would be resorting to the voyeurism of ambulance-chasing if I were to drive through these neighborhoods, but now I think I was simply trying to avoid the bodily response to that much devastation. Before I drove a friend to the airport, she insisted that we visit Lake Pontchartrain. When we got there, she made us get out of the car so she could gently ask a fisherman and his family about their experiences. Though I felt too self-conscious to participate in the questioning, I realized there was a sacredness in the listening: telling our stories allows us to make sense of things—to matter, to be made visible, to be heard. The fisherman told us where to find the broken levees, and what we would see, but this still did not prepare us for the emotional density. As we drove past abandoned houses with diagonal x’s, coded with numbers correlating to dates of inspection and dead bodies found, there was nothing to say to each other, but silently we wondered “Why? Why did so many people have to die?”

And though my experience of this year’s Four C’s is still amorphous to me, it is beginning to make a bit more sense: the whole time I was there, I felt angry. I tried to rationalize that my anger was a predictable response to driving without air conditioning—or having a good friend subjugate me as a sex object my first night in the quarter—or a colleague treat me as less than competent the next night at a fancy restaurant—or part of a larger, chronic response to a world that no longer contained my father. But the truth is, when you go into the bank and get the angriest bank teller time after time, chances are that he or she is simply a reflection of your projection, mirroring your anger back to you in such a way that offers you a chance to burn through your rage and investigate what lies underneath.

And just like a scratch-n-win lottery ticket, my “felt sense” showed me that anger was simply a surface emotion, covering up the sorrow that on second glance seems to rise from beneath the rage of a “post-Katrina New Orleans”—where the murder rate doesn’t dare to be whispered in the tourist district, and “the war on poverty” has been re-coffined to the sixties. Maybe conferences aren’t supposed to be neatly filed and made sense of, a lovely line on a vita chalking up another presentation to our scholarly accomplishments. Maybe we are supposed to be angered by the injustice around us—and that to be fully human means to be changed by the pain that we meet—whether it is on the street between hotels or inside a city bus or trolley, or in the pissed-in alley that no one wants to smell or see. The call to conference, it seems to me, is a call to wake up and look at the world around us, a reminder to ask the tough questions as we explore what turns us into professional or emotional or social zombies—blind to the humanity of others, detached from our own bodies, unable to sense the next step that would lead toward healing.