Podcast 154: The Material Culture of Writing

The Preservation Technology Podcast Episode 154

Catherine Cooper speaks with Cydney Alexis, Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University, and Hannah Rule, Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric about studying the objects that are part of writing practice.

The Preservation Technology Podcast is a series about the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation. Read articles based on episodes, listen, or subscribe. This podcast is produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT).

A Fascination with Writing Objects

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-

Cydney Alexis: Cydney Alexis. I am an Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University. My favorite National Park is Grand Teton National Park. I was very excited to see that you work for the Park Service, because I am a big fan of the National Parks.

Hannah Rule: And I'm Hannah Rule. I'm an Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric, sometimes called Writing Studies, at the University of South Carolina. And my favorite National Park is … --I'm afraid of the outdoors!. [laughing]

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me today. So, you just wrote a book called The Material Culture of Writing. And I was wondering what led each of you to be curious about the objects that surround and are used in writing practice?

Cydney Alexis, Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Kansas State University.

Image courtesy of Cydney Alexis

Cydney Alexis: Well, we were lucky in that we had a friend professor bring us together, because she knew... She had been working with Hannah closely, and she knew that I was writing about objects. And so, we did a presentation together at a conference, which was great. And quickly the book idea began to evolve, but I'd always been interested in objects. When I was a little kid, I loved Richard Scarry's Best Story Book Ever!. And I would just spend countless hours for years with this book. It has little people and little objects that are labeled. Never knew you could study objects in this way, until I landed at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And I was in the English Department studying Composition and Rhetoric, but found that they had a Material Culture program and a Material Culture certificate. And that's when I began to study objects in a scholarly way. The field merges art historians, archeologists, historical archeologists, people from every discipline really. And so, I was so excited to actually be able to study the theory behind this obsession that I had always had.

Hannah Rule, Associate Professor of English and Composition Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina.

Image courtesy of Hannah Rule

Hannah Rule: Just to go off what Cydney was saying. I think that the origin story of us getting together was possibly eight years ago, and that original conference presentation, from then we were starting the book in a sense. So, it's been a long time coming. But I think for me, I think what brought us together, Cydney is really coming from the material culture studies perspective and has taught me a lot over the course of our collaboration. For me, my work in composition and rhetoric has been focused on composing processes and how people get writing done.

Writing itself is a technology of human invention, and it exists only by virtue of things. It literally could not exist if humans didn't take up various objects to make writing also a thing, a material thing that exists and circulates in the world. So, oftentimes in my discipline, people talk about writing in terms of something that happens in the mind or in the imagination, as this ephemeral human act, but I'm really insistent upon and interested in the ways that it's full-bodied and material. So, that's part of, I hope, the work that the book does for people, both inside our discipline and interdisciplinary audiences as well.

Catherine Cooper: What was the impetus for putting together these passions into a book and at this particular time?

Cydney Alexis: I don't know if Hannah had also been thinking about this book, but I had been obsessing about it already. But when you're thinking about a book and you have no idea how that works, it felt very distant and far away. And when our colleague and friend, Laura Micciche, did bring us together, she said, "You two should know each other. You two should work on this project together." And every time someone encourages you, it just feels a little bit more possible. And of course, Hannah had already been working on a book. I think you were already working on your book when we met. She was able to also show me how it works, which was really nice.

Hannah Rule: Yeah. And I think part of our coming together that's been really fruitful, is we've been able to encourage one another that our passions or just casual interests... With that conference that we keep referencing, I was on about writing about keyboards and the stability of keyboards over technological change. And I thought, "Is this a thing? Is it interesting? Does it have stakes?" And I think over our collaboration, we just encourage each other that, yeah, there's something there. There's something interesting. So, I think that's something that we've really benefited from in collaborating is coming from different perspectives and different frameworks, and using them to write about things that we think are cool. And that's been a real pleasure.

Which Objects and Whose Stories?

Catherine Cooper: You mentioned in the book that the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement impacted your thinking while you were putting the book together. Would you be willing to share some of your thoughts on how the material in the book, the choices you made, what chapters you included, how you would approach that possibly differently if you were to do an edited volume or a second edition?

Hannah Rule: Cydney and I have thought a lot about this, and I think there's two things that came up while we were in the long process of publishing the book. And one was really aided in part and brought to light through Laura Micciche, who is a mentor of mine and who, again, brought us, Cydney and I, together. And she wrote a foreword for the book where she muses on access. And that's something that we realized was of course part of the book the entire time, but it wasn't at the forefront of some of the stories our contributors were telling. And the other was preservation, which is to say many of our contributors are thinking about contexts, human lives that are historical. And we took for granted, to some extent, the amount of effort and leveraging of power and money that it takes to get someone's stuff to remain.

Jefferson's chapter, that Diane Ehrenpreis contributed, she's a Curator of Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors at Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello. And she was writing about Jefferson's writing suite, his furniture. There's fascinating stories to tell there, and she tells it. But it also made us really think about his own legacy, and why it is that we have access to these pristinely preserved objects, and what we don't have about the lives that moved through Monticello. And Diane, along with us, we really thought hard about that chapter and whose stories we could try to tell on the margins of this very well-preserved and curated sense of this historical figure, and try to see him truthfully in an extremely complex and fraught context that it would be unethical to ignore.

Cydney Alexis: These are issues that I think Hannah and I have always cared about, but new horrors, what else can you say, emerged throughout the pandemic, that just make the issues crystallize in different ways. And like Hannah said, the various contributors, our Afterward contributor, Kate Smith, and Laura's chapter, it's very interesting to see the touchstones that they pick out. It just raises to the surface the way that someone reads the book. And so, that was very fascinating for us. And then, we could pick up on those issues too. It was something that with us the whole time, and it was very important to us.

Continuing the Work

Catherine Cooper: Is there a second book?

Cydney Alexis: Yes, we have a proposal drafted.

Catherine Cooper: So, did putting together The Material Culture of Writing spark any ideas of what you want to study next or where you'd like to take your next deep dive?

Cydney Alexis: I've been obsessing over a couple of things, other things as well. And one is, I directed the writing center at K-State for a little over five years and came in contact with work in a lot of different fields, the hard sciences, for example. And I would bring in guest speakers from the hard sciences. And they, as you probably know, work on a lot of shorter, newer, fresher research, on short pieces called communications. And it blew my mind that we're still in the 25 pages in terms of consumer research, another field I work in, sixty-page articles in journals. But what people in the sciences are able to do is really prioritize this quick, new, fresh research so that you're not necessarily working for eight years, for 10 years on a project, but you're allowed to take that well-researched quick dive into issues that come up.

That and also just reading the research about everyone who got left behind in the pandemic, parents, moms especially, productivity rates and publishing rates just plummeted throughout the pandemic, because people in parent roles were having to caretake during the pandemic, so much harder to get scholarship out, and underrepresented groups who had suffered in the pandemic because of unequal access to healthcare. And so, Hannah and I talked and said, "I'm starting to think a lot about a book that has shorter pieces, where we generate more histories of writing artifacts that are missing in our field and do it more quickly, and allow lots of different voices to contribute." Because you can take a look around your house or in your collection and find an artifact that you want to research, and write a shorter piece instead of that 25 page piece.

Hannah Rule: Yeah, I think part of the drive, in addition to a lot of the touch points that Cydney laid out is, I think we're excited to really allow scholars, not just in English Studies or Writing Studies, but those working across disciplines potentially. That's something I've really valued about our collaboration is, it's not easy to do cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary work. Part of the drive too is that I think people want to write about and think about their stuff, the writing stuff. There's something alluring about it. And I know Cydney and I feel that and we try to spread it about, but I think common people... Cydney described when she was kicking around this idea with her family, that her father-in-law was like, "I want to contribute something," but what was the object that he was-

Cydney Alexis: And he wrote it. Office printers from the 1980s.

Hannah Rule: There's just something about this that compels people, it's part of people's lives as they make their way in the world in various ways through literacy, through reading and writing. It's through stuff, I think. And I think there's something, I don't know if it's thoroughly scholarly or not, but nevertheless it does compel. And so, we want to give some space for those stories of both personal connection and objects of study.

Cydney Alexis: People are really compelled by this, but there's often also a knee-jerk reaction of, stuff is superficial. Stuff is material, it doesn't matter. And so, people can not have a sense of how deeply this matters. And there's some touchstone figures, historical archeologists, James Deetz and Henry Glassie, folklorists, and their work is so incredible in showing why every day vernacular stuff matters. Deetz was looking at deeds, old house deeds, or a lists of items sold on a farm, whatever it was, to actually find out how did people live? How did these stories that, again, we don't have documentation of because these are people who weren't paid attention to, their stories and lives. The stories of the poor, for example. The objects that they had in their home didn't matter. Material Culture scholars came through in the 70s, ever since then and said, "Yeah, this stuff really matters. You're not seeing it in museums, but you should. We need to look at the "low art, hip artifact". We need to look at the everyday form.

This is what Hannah and I have been thinking a lot about, and we tried really hard with the first book. We wanted people to pick everyday objects and fell in love with some of these artifacts, like one of the writers in the book who was a student of mine, a grad student. And she wrote about the Victorian baby book. And it is just such an amazing artifact, because this is something that you would see in so many homes.

Writing Objects are part of Writing Practice

Fiona's Moleskines

Image courtesy of Cydney Alexis

Catherine Cooper: What would you like people to take away from your book?

Cydney Alexis: That writing objects matter. Attention to them is a serious thing. Yes, our focus is we're Writing Studies scholars, but we get so much pleasure from the objects that we work with and around, and they also enable our work and writing lives and personal lives in so many important ways, that there is serious work going on there.

Hannah Rule: I think that in our field, in Writing Studies, we can overlook this dimension, even though there are competing underlying impulses that do draw individuals towards these stories and these inquiries. And so, I want people to maybe see writing differently. I think there's an important interdisciplinary reminder that many people in many fields are interested in writing, and writing objects or writing artifacts. There's plenty of work that the discipline of Literary Studies can do, I’m thinking about what it's doing and so on. And one thing I would advocate for is that, we are more alike, us in Writing Studies, interested in everyday writing, and writing broadly construed and what's going on in Literary Studies. After all, we're just all human beings making our way in language.

Catherine Cooper: Are you also looking at other forms of writing? So, quilting or knot work, or there are these other languages that we inscribe into objects that it could just keep going?

Cydney Alexis: Absolutely. That was the main... I did present that piece on the roller skate at our field’s national conference. And it's not the skate that's doing the writing, but the skate is facilitating all of this writing work on Instagram, because people... Skating exploded in popularity in a lot of communities globally, throughout the pandemic. And so, people were turning to Instagram and TikTok to document this, and just creating this voluminous body of writing because of this artifact. So yeah, we have been thinking really expansively. We're so thrilled about the chapters in the book that helped to broaden what people would see as writing. The conservators file was so exciting to us for that reason. Hannah, I don't know if you want to pick up on-

Hannah Rule: This is a proverbial open question, I suppose in our field. What are we picturing when we talk about writing? Because there's obviously, through various movements... In our field, we think about multimodality, which is the other symbolic systems that we use to make meaning, that exceeds language. So, Patricia Dunn is one scholar who's thought about that we over emphasize or value especially written language, as the chief way to do, let's say, intellectual work. And her point is to say, there are so many other ways, symbol systems that humans use to think, and to learn, and to communicate what they know. And so, she's one of many people who has helped us in the field say, let's not over invest or overvalue the word. But we get into trouble, because then it questions where are our boundaries, the way we might conventionally think of writing. But it might be other stuff, right?

Writing is always getting mixed up with other modalities. So, I'm thinking of the baby book chapter. That's a good example. That's a writing practice. That's what the woman whose book that is, that Emilie Merrigan is thinking about. But if you think about the artifact of the book, even this older, not current artifact, a historical artifact, is already... That technology of that book is an entailing image and layout and spatial arrangement, and alongside scribal activity, which we might conventionally think of as writing. But I think our field of Writing Studies in some way, is always pushing the boundary, I think often to good ends, even as it's like, well then what are we actually talking about when we say writing? We don't just mean words on the page, we mean more than that. But then it's like, again, where do you draw the boundary?

Cydney Alexis: There's of course symbolic language systems that complicate the idea of what we mean by writing. But I was thinking as Hannah was talking about a piece that was really electric for me in our field, called “Chronotopic Lamination” [by Paul Prior and Jody Shipka] when I first read it. Because what the authors argue is that, yes, writing can be the final piece, but it's also everything you do in between. So, it's the gardening you do while you're thinking about writing, and it's taking a walk and how you formulate thoughts in your head. The people who can formulate thoughts that way. We're finding out how many people actually don't have internal thought, which is really fascinating in terms of meaning making. And I talk a lot with my students about this, for example, and I have them document all those interstitial moments where they're working on the text, but they're not actually sitting down to write. “And I did a load of laundry, I worked on the problem.” There are a lot of ways to complicate what we mean when we say writing and everything that goes into that final act, sitting down to put words on a page.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining us.

Cydney Alexis: Thank you so much.

Hannah Rule: Thank you so much. This was so fun.

Cydney Alexis: Yeah

Catherine Cooper: It's been an absolute pleasure.

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