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Re-Conferencing

Re-Conferencing
by Mysti Rudd
mystileeo@gmail.com

In a field so “re”-flective that it loves to put the re- in front of nearly everything, (re-invent, re-imagine, re-create, re-envision, and the ever popular re-claim as referenced by Kate Ronald in her panel on Ann Berthoff), re-visiting anything might seem redundant. But since both the MLA and the 4Cs were held in San Francisco this year, I found myself doing just that—though for very different reasons and with very different expectations.

Yes, I was one of those composition graduate students who found herself dragging herself to a conference she had never attended nor ever wanted to attend, the annual MLA convention held in that precious family time between Christmas and New Years. It’s not like I woke up before Santa on Christmas morning with the bright idea that I wanted to spend a thousand dollars to get away from my family, but I did want a job, and the requirements for this new gig included flying to San Francisco to be interviewed. I tried to soothe myself with the cliché: “It takes money to make money,” but clichés can only take a writer so far. So I booked the cheapest flight I could find, flying into Oakland as the fare was much lower, though it did put me lugging my baggage onto BART around midnight. Luckily for me, a street person helped me get on the right train with the right ticket, asking for only my spare change in return.

When I arrived at the Hilton in downtown San Francisco last December, I was surprised by the number of people still congregating in the lobby after midnight, concreted into the lounge chairs of the lobby as if their forearms had become the paws of sphinx after sphinx (with an occasional kangaroo.) “Are these my people?” I wondered nearly audibly, and then had difficulty figuring out which tower held my room.

As for my job interview the next day, it went as fine as interviews can be expected to: in other words, who knows how well one does until well after the fact, so one might as well celebrate being done! Therefore I thought I’d treat myself to a waltz through the exhibit hall, not realizing that I couldn’t browse or buy a book without a conference badge or a “sponsor.” While it may be true that my desire to possess books verges on addiction, I hardly think I am in need of a “readers anonymous” sponsor. Still, I sat on the floor outside of the hall, waiting for a friendly face to find my own.

“I like your t-shirt,” someone finally remarked.

I looked down to read my chest as if I didn’t know what it said: EVERYBODY LIES—a quote from an episode of House.

“You should wear that to an interview!” the well-dressed professor added.

“Does it count if I wore it underneath my purple power suit in the interview I just finished?” I asked.

“Not really,” came her honest reply.

And then this professor of cultural studies sat cross-legged next to me, asking me questions and actually listening to my answers. We shared ideas without judging one another in what I’d like to call an “anti-interview” because neither of us had anything to lose. I never ended up going into the exhibit hall as the Komodo dragon of cognitive dissonance whipped me with its tail onto the street in front of the hotel. I walked and walked and walked past the tourist district, uphill to the apartments with the impossibly steep parking, past the monastery at the top of the hill with a direct view of Alcatraz—and I would have kept going if only I could have walked on water, if only I could trust the promise of an unfamiliar home.

But the visit in March was much different. As is common in San Francisco, the weather was actually warmer in sunny December than on the rainy weekend in spring that brought the 4Cs to the very same Hilton. Though I once again flew alone, two dear friends met me at the airport, and we traveled mass transit together, with the same street person who helped me in December helping all three of us get our train tickets. My friends and I talked non-stop on the platform, but once we boarded the train, we sat silently and separately in the midst of crowded cars. I found myself scanning the faces of the Bart commuters, trying to imagine what it was like to travel to and from work alone while surrounded by people, every single day. Stuck together in a crowded car, trust is scarce, community nearly extinct, as we scatter to increase the distance between each commuter as soon as we can. And even when we sit next to another human being, we tune them out with I-Pods and cell phones, blank stares and hardened jaws. “Don’t even think of messing with me,” goes the lingo of each body’s language; “You stay in your space; I’ll stay in mine.”

“Do I smell?” I wondered as the passenger sitting next to me moved away as fast as another seat became available.

And on the walk to the hotel from the downtown depot, we took a wrong turn, dragging our suitcases past a soup kitchen. “What are you girls doin’ here?” asked a man who may or may not have been urinating on a construction cone. “What are you doing?!” he repeated, as if to state, “You don’t belong here; this is my city, my street, my home.”

I wanted to say “Good question,” or “I dunno.” But instead we sped up our gait and glanced the other way, aware that we were trespassers in his urinal.

Exhausted from the time change, I went to bed at 8 p.m. and slept until my presentation the next day. This, of course, caused me to miss Charles Bazerman’s opening address, but I knew I would be able to read it in CCC eventually. It is unusual for me to begin a conference with my own panel (C.19, which I am certainly narcissistic enough but not objective enough to review), and I felt a bit sheepish for missing the morning sessions. But the research I recently re-visited to prepare for my presentation left me feeling re-newed as I looked at ways to revise the mentor/mentored relationship (particularly as it applies to the dissertation in composition). And what a treat it was for me to be quoting Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly on Thursday and then sitting in their audience on Friday while they expounded upon the importance of re-visiting the work of Ann Berthoff. (See my review of session H.08: Reclaiming Ann E. Berthoff for the Twenty-First Century for an in-depth discussion of this).

Though I don’t typically flit from one star-powered session to another, especially because I think the stars would shine without the “Featured Session” layout in the program, I found myself following Peter Elbow into Session K: Voice in Written Discourse: Implications for Multilingual Writers to see what these panelists had to say about second language writing. I do not have a degree in T.E.S.O.L., but, like many teachers of composition, I find I need to be better prepared to teach my students who have other mother tongues. I believe there is no sharper learning curve than a prestigious conference when it comes to catching up to the conversations in a particular discipline, so I went to session K chaired by LuMing Mao who introduced presenters Peter Elbow, Paul Kai Matsuda, and Christine Tardy.

One of the things I find endearing about Peter Elbow is that he seems to scratch an idea out of the top of his head during his talks. In this case, he appeared to be reading off a napkin he had doodled on at lunch, turning it 90 degrees when he had presumably run out of room. But of all the questions I heard posed during this convention, he authored the one that has stuck with me the longest, following me around like a vigilant stalker or a blossoming flower, sometimes awaking me mid-dream. As he argued against the accepted pedagogy of disallowing students to compose in L1 and then translate into L2, he countered that students should be allowed to compose in the language that allows them the greatest range of expression, then put that writing aside while composing in the second language. As contraindicated as this sounds, this was not the most revolutionary statement that Elbow uttered during this session. While looking at the differences between the writing of American and Chinese students, he pointed out the limitations of contrastive rhetoric by asking, “But why shouldn’t her writing sound like someone whose first language is other than English? Why does she have to remove all the markers when, in fact, she makes it a point to tell the professor that Mandarin is her first language?”

Elbow’s argument directly affects my teaching as I sometimes find myself at cross purposes: directing my students to seek and destroy the incidences of non-standard usage (cultural markers)—yet secretly delighting in the poetic phrases that cling like barnacles between the sea and the land—the cracks between cultures. More than once I have been guilty of advising a student to revise the beauty out of his or her original draft. Of course, I don’t say it like that, beckoning, “Turn this in again—only without the poetic passages.” Instead I mutter something about converting their text into “acceptable academic discourse.” Another “aha moment” occurred for me while I visited session D.22: Labor Rhetoric and Academic Organizing: Possibilities and Predicaments. I would have also reviewed this panel, but I arrived mid-session. However, I did get there in time to hear Rachel Riedner’s presentation on “Immigrant Labor and Universities” and was struck by her recurring question: “Whose life counts?” It is certainly not unheard of for workers in the field of construction to die on the job, but, as Riedner pointed out, these deaths garner little campus attention, while the death of a student is often mourned by the whole community. I couldn’t help but think of the many places in the world where American Universities are erecting satellite campuses and the lives of immigrant laborers are lost in these global pursuits. Why do these lives not count as much as the lives of students? This question cannot be adequately answered without addressing inequalities drawn along lines of race, class, and politics.

It is moments like these—the ones that linger long after the convention is over—that make conferencing something to do over and over and over again—even if we have to spend our own money due to frozen departmental travel budgets. Looking around at this year’s convention, I realized that these are the people I would want to be stranded on a desert island with—these are the people who care enough to go back to the drawing board again and again and again in order to re-write a better world. When Pete Seeger was asked if there was one word that he had more faith in than any other word, he answered with the following:

Despite the current economic times which have caused conference attendance to decline (this year’s MLA attendance, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, decreased by 6% and is “bracing for far worse next year,”), I think it is worth my time and money and energy to “re-conference” in order to be re-inspired to fight the good fight—to listen to others and join the causes that speak to us, including, for me at least, the cause of fighting for those who cannot attend conferences because the funding is simply not there, and this often includes the plight of adjuncts (Young). I share the concerns of Sonia Marcus from Ohio University who worries that “institutions that are particularly cash-strapped or are in states that have been particularly affected by economic downturn are going to be further excluded from the national and regional conversations taking place,” adding, “It’s the schools that need it the most essentially that won’t be there” (Young). I, for one, had to cancel two conferences last fall in the literal wake of Hurricane Ike that flooded my campus community. Even though I offered to pay my own expenses for the Watson Rhetoric Conference since I was scheduled to present, I was forbidden to go (hence the subsequent job search).

Though I already mentioned that I came to a new appreciation of the fellow attendees at this year’s 4Cs, my job is also to notice who was not there. What groups of people were under represented—and isn’t it our job as ethical and compassionate rhetoricians and compositionists to notice their absences, to create forums and spaces for these voices to be heard? How can I or anyone else answer this with anything less than an emphatic “Yes!” ? Therefore I attended an organizational meeting at this year’s conference to revive the Labor Caucus and make it a born-again S.I.G. for next year’s 4Cs. I guess my final blessing to those who stuck with this essay until the end might go something like this: Let us never forget where we are— or why we are there—or who (and what) we are fighting for. And for my brand new tradition of closing with a beatitude, (though I am tempted to quote Claire Bateman’s poem that begins: “Blessed are the flabby people at Walgreen’s / buying Trojan transparent ribbed golden condoms,”), I’d like to say this: Blessed are those who keep going to sessions by unknowns, for their minds are open, their giving natures exposed (Bateman). I hope to see ya next year in Louisville—in spirit if not in flesh.

Works Cited