[Lucas:] How did the National Conversation on Writing (NCoW) come about? Who is involved, and where are things now?

[Vandenberg:] It’s a video project we’re working on to support the WPA subcommittee that Linda Adler-Kassner runs, the Network for Media Action. It’s pretty much her brainchild, and the idea is to connect the discipline and the profession with the larger public—to get the word out about what we’re doing and why.

I think the perception is that the university functions as a barrier between writing professionals—maybe academics of all stripes—and the general public. And there’s not much connection between what we do and what the public perceives about writing. It follows out of work like Peter Mortensen’s piece “Going Public.”

I got involved with NCoW because of a video project I did three years ago. I took my camera around the country and set up on street corners, asking people for their perceptions about literacy, their remembrances of writing instruction, and a general sense of whether there’s an illiteracy epidemic in the country. I made a 22-minute film with an undergraduate student of mine, and that was screened at CCCC, and it was kind of grounded in Mortensen’s initial call to make these connections with the general public.

Linda was there when we showed that film, and in that movie we used some quotations from her book (with Susanmarie Herrington, Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacies, Hampton Press, 2002). When the NCoW project came up, she asked me to help, so I’m now doing all the video editing.

People from around the country are asking a series of questions to writers (both academics and non-academics), and we’re editing all of that footage together to give a general perception of writing across the country. We’ll be taking tapes through the summer and encouraging people to get involved. It’s something that virtually anybody with access to a camera and a microphone can do.

Darsie Bowden and I collected around fifteen tapes full of video from different people, and we put together a 10-12 minute sampling of what we might do with the final project. We showed that at CCCC 2006 in New York, and since then we’ve gotten three or four more tapes. Some more are in the mail right now, and at WPA in Tempe people will be bringing tapes. Darsie and I will be showing an updated version of the in-process project at WPA, and then we’ll show the final version this November at NCTE.

One of the challenges in putting this together is to try to regularize the diverse video formats, the lighting, and all sorts of other differences. We’re struggling with it, so it’s a little bit of a patchwork project, but I think that’s what’s going to make it unique and ultimately reflective of all the different points of location that are reflected in the piece.

Darsie has an MFA in film from Southern Cal, and her area of specialization is screenwriting. She’s doing the story-boarding and the script—finding a theme—and then stringing the clips of video together. I’m doing all of the technical work. Of course, there’s an epistemology of editing. It’s kind of a heuristic or productive activity to engage in the editing. We’re essentially collaborating, with Darsie taking the lead on writing the piece and me taking the lead on editing it together.

Do you hope to get this out to audiences beyond CCCC, WPA, MLA, and other academic circles?

Yes, I think the ultimate goal is to figure out how the piece can be shown in public places as a way of generating conversation between academics and the general public. We talked about showing just the partial project at a library or something in Tempe during WPA, but I don’t think that’s going to happen because we have so much to do. For NCTE in New York, we’ll try to show it in some public venues. The piece will have a life after that as a way to kind of jump-start conversation. But, you know, there aren’t a lot of venues for this kind of work. More venues would be great.

There are really two big issues surrounding the NCoW project. One concern was the extent to which we needed permission to do this kind of work, and if it is covered by institutional standards for protecting the rights of research subjects. When some individuals asked their institutions, they got conflicting answers. Some people were obligated to go through their Institutional Review Board, and some schools didn’t require it. The second big concern was how work on NCoW was going to count in promotion and tenure decisions. Would it be a worthwhile project for people to engage in professionally, or would it be seen as a waste of time (or even counterproductive)?

Anything surprising in the footage you’ve gotten so far?

The thing I’m noticing the most—and it’s not really surprising, I guess—is that when academics think about writing, they tend to think in fairly narrow terms. The folks that have contributed so far have not really gotten very far from what you might expect. We had a whole lot of interviews with other academics and folks who write stories and poems, and that’s interesting, but it continues to illuminate only what we do and the restrictive nature of what we do, who we are, and the kinds of writing we come in contact with. So, the most striking bits of video are from people who have academic training but are decidedly nonacademic in their orientation. We’re really hoping that we’ll encourage the academic contributors into getting outside of their comfort zones and talking to people who are working in genres that are not academic or not academically created.