Okay, getting back to work a bit: this is where we’ll discuss Myka Vilstimmig, “Petals on a Web, Black Bough: Texutality, Collaboration, and the New Essay.” Like the Hesse, this too falls into the category of “an oldie, but a goodie,” from Hawisher and Selfe collection Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies.
“Myka Vielstimmig” is actually Michael Spooner, who is an editor at Utah State University Press, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, who we read earlier this term and who is also a Professor at Florida State. Now, this is clearly a complex and interesting… text… of some sort, one where the authors the writers Vielstimmig (in an effort to question the real role of “the author”– think back to the discussion about Ray and Graeff about the fuzzy notion of authorship in a post modern world) about so VERY much, about writing, “the essay,” editing, teaching, voice, etc., etc.
In a way, maybe too much.
I have kind of mixed feelings about the effectiveness of this… text… and I have gone back and forth between really liking it and feeling like it’s everything and the kitchen sink. So I don’t want to spend too much time now trying to sum things up. But I’ll get you started with two basic questions to consider as we discuss:
- Is this (as Hesse might define it, for example) an “essay?”
- Can you imagine writing something like this or teaching something like this in a writing class? For example, working with one or two other colleagues (or having students working in groups of two or three), do you think this is a “workable” writerly experience?
And of course, if you’ve got other comments or questions, be sure to share.
I was honestly a little confused by the piece, and then, somewhere in the middle of it, I was hit by the idea that I’ve written essays this way. I had no idea at the time that I was playing with the genre of essay like Myka was talking about, but somewhere a couple of years into my college academic career I had gotten bored with the traditional essay and started messing with the genre. I would write a fictional story in a different font and integrate it throughout the essay. Or I would play with interweaving several different stories/narratives into my essay, using the font, size, or other cues/symbols to try to help my reader follow my complex (and sometimes complicated) essay. The reactions that I got from teachers really varied…some loved the creativity, and others were wondering where my essay was. Only a few seemed to understand what I was trying to do or were able to help me grow in this area of my writing.
So I guess in answer to your second question, yeah, I can imagine writing something like this. I don’t know about teaching it though. I think the reason that I could personally write like this was that I’d mastered the basic conventions of more “traditional” essays; most of my students aren’t there yet. Playing with genre requires you to know the genre…Like Picasso and many other artists had to learn the rules of art before trying to break them, I think it’s important to understand conventions of writing before exploring new ways of expression.
That’s a funny story Andrea. Yes, I bet the reactions did “vary” quiet a bit. Personally, I think it’s great!
I’m with you Andrea. I have to keep several blogs for classes this semester and in each of them I have to write about my readings for the week. I decided that for one of my classes I wasn’t going to just write my responses any more, I was going to “take risks”. So instead of just writing a summary or whatnot, I started writing poems about the material or letters to the author about my thoughts and feelings from the piece. I am still meeting the requirements for what this professor wants, but I get to write in a way that has meaning and personal interest/investment for me.
Ha! Well, as long as you’re writing a couple of times a week about stuff in the class and with your research, some poems and letters are fine with me!
That wasn’t a complaint Steve!!! I swear!!! One of my profs just said to “take risks” in our writing so I went there… at least I tried to! I think he was bored of reading summaries so I spiced it up a bit
I actually found that I really enjoyed it, writing in whatever way I wanted to. I actually ended up writing way more that way than I did in the other traditional “summary” mode.
Okay to me this feels like a crot essay. If anyone does not know what that is the basic idea is that a crot is a bit, or a fragment of some bigger story. While it is written by each student the stories they tell are bits of their lives through the years. It is a type of personal narrative in a very different way wherein each crot can stand on its own. I felt this way reading this piece. And while the crots in each person’s writing is their own stories there are times when it feels like some of them are written in a different *voice* from a different perspective of their life. I really like this way of writing and while the students seem to resist it at first because its not an *essay* I think it does draw a lot of attention to the conventions of an essay and many other genres of writing as well. I also think this is a good way to look at the idea of voice, author, audience, intention and all that we as writing teachers talk about. Is this an essay as we think of them, yes I think so. Is this an essay as it was origionally defined, I dont know. But with so many other genres that have morphed and changed over time so has the essay. The biggest issue I have with useing that term in a classroom is that it is a catch all for all forms of writing and there are some assignments that are not essays but teachers call them that. This is where i think students get confused and see all writing as essay writing that they do in school. I know that we overuse that word and need to use others.
Hi, Cristin. I actually thought of your post on Hesse while reading this essay — where you talk about how your school asks you to “teach modes (compare/contrast, narrative, argumentative, etc)” — and I wondered what you thought about the authors’ discussion of the multi-voiced essay as being a mash-up of different modes, “a text that accommodates narrative and exposition and pattern, all three” (91)?
You say your students seem to like this sort of thing. Does teaching the multi-voiced essay take away some of their confusion about different modes? I could see how such an essay could actually create more confusion. And you also mentioned how you tend to struggle with teaching modes; is this kind of mode mash-up easier or harder to teach?
Well, at EMU, we don’t talk about “the modes” in that classic current-traditional model that Sharon Crowley talks abou tand that I referenced in my spiel at the beginning of the class about “what composition means to me.” Rather, the first year writing program encourages assignments that explore different genres, that look at these issues of EDNA in each essay and from different perspectives, etc.
But I think that Brian was right when he said (someplace? here?) that this sort of thing also has the potential of turning into something that might as well be the modes: that is, as teachers who have to come up with some way of evaluating stuff, who have to deal with a high level of repetition, and who don’t usually read student work just for “pleasure,” that “multi-genre” essay or whatever can turn into a pretty route exercise pretty quickly. “Write a multi-genre essay where you include at least 4 different sources from at least 2 different genres. When coloring, be sure to stay within the lines.” And so forth.
BTW, while I’m not necessarily crazy about the word “essay” either (I prefer “project” for classes), I really hate the word “paper” and much prefer essay over that. Essay comes from the French and it has the connotations of “exploring” and “discovery.” Paper, on the other hand, has the connotations of official and enforcing documents– at an International border, you must present your “papers” to pass through– and busy work– e.g., “paperwork.” I prefer an exploration and a discovery.
No that is at Schoolcraft and I have a harder time there getting students out of the *essay* mindset then I do at EMU and Im not really sure why that is.
I dont teach the modes the way they want us to. I use the genre method and show them the different ways that each one can use the modes as well.
My first thought went to the crots as well. I hate the name though so I call them “Shorts”
I did them in 120 after we read a piece by Paul Auster and another by Sherman Alexie and at first the students had a hard time composing in the multiple genres, but in the end they had fun with it. Only thing is, they become just as structured as any other narrative. you must have so many of these type of shorts and so many of those, etc.
I have them do so many differnt things that they do many differnt things. I had that issue the first time, but now I don’t
I’m still learning for sure!!!
I don’t think Hesse had this in mind when he was speaking of the essay, but I’m not sure he’d be completely against it either. As for teaching this in a class, I think a scrapbook-y kind of essay like this would make for a great class-project.
This is a kind of writing that lives on the borders of the personal and communicative, it’s approaching becoming too opaque to actually mean anything to the audience. A reader might simply throw up their hands and move on to something else. It’s not invention that is the problem or creativity, it’s simply that when something becomes overly personal it runs the risk of excluding an audience. However, I do think the students involved in a class project of this sort would find new windows of possibility open, when they move to writing their next, standard (boring?) essay.
Cristin is right when she said, ” I think it does draw a lot of attention to the conventions of an essay and many other genres of writing as well. I also think this is a good way to look at the idea of voice, author, audience, intention and all that we as writing teachers talk about.” It is easy to show these things to students in an essay like this. Could I ever teach it……we could analyze it but I don’t think I could teach it.
Like Andrea commented it is an essay with a mix. You have to teach the core writing of an essay before you involve the extras or mix. Like Brian said if it becomes to personal you risk losing the audience. Yes this would be a good project for groups to work on.
To begin with a brief aside: In a creative writing course I took in college, my teacher talked about arranging the different pieces of a short story. She likened this to the project of a still-life painter, explaining that it isn’t the objects themselves that make the painting successful, per se, but how the painter arranges the different objects so together they become new and beautiful. It’s the ability to artfully arrange different pieces that makes the painter an artist, and the writer an author.
I would say that Spooner and Yancey definitely quality as artful arrangers of different voices, and agree that they are Picasso-like in their skill. (Andrea, your reference to Picasso seems very appropriate here, since this piece is actually rather impressionistic.) Of course, I never feel as if I have anything to worry about with experts — what Picasso would do if I gave him a canvas and some paint and bowl of fruit, for instance, or Keats a pen and paper and a Grecian urn. I feel quite differently, though, about what young artists/writers would do with the same task and materials — they’re still learning their craft.
If I were to assign an essay like this in a writing course (probably not in first-year comp), I would also assign a critical reflection in which I would ask my students to explain /why/ they arranged the pieces the way they did; what was their intended result, and do they think they achieved it? I would ask them to justify their “intuitive leap[s]” (90) between voices and ideas. While the ideas themselves matter a great deal, it’s this logic behind their decisions that seems most important to understanding — and then creating — an essay like this one (objects + arrangement). As Andrea and Gloria say, I tend to think it’s important to teach students the rules and conventions of the standard academic essay first before giving them the opportunity to break them (one of the reasons I would hesitate to assign such an essay in first-year comp). Developmentally, this seems to make sense. What do others think?
I think the issue of when to teach something like this is interesting. As Carrie and Andre point out, it might not be best suited to FYC as those students are more likely to be getting the hang of essay writing basics. However, I would argue that an activity like this would go a ways toward opening up new ways of thinking about the essay. I’m reticent to agree to a linear approach to any kind of writing; rather, I see the benefit of experimenting in different genres or mixed-genres in all the stages of a writer’s progress. To draw another analogy to painting, one’s use of charcoal adds to one’s ability to think about and manipulate in oil or another medium.
I have to admit, the format of the article was a little disconcerting for me. At some points I didn’t know what to read first, who was talking, or where to go with my eyes. It was a lot to take in. I enjoyed the fact that they were willing to play with the conventions of the text like they want students to. On the other hand, I like the idea of inventing new genres in the classroom that allow students to explore all these new ways of writing. The multi-vocailty, the resistance of a final end product that is homogenized, the new essay sounds right up my alley! But how do we get there? I need to see this guys lesson plan ideas! The authors aren’t afraid to contradict this, well at least make an important warning, that all these risks in writing can lead to obscure writing, which isn’t what we want. Students will need purpose. Their choices need to be conscious and well-informed, at least I think so anyways. Purpose, audience, message, those things seem as though they should still be important in this kind of writing.
Also makes the great point that we stress to students that their work must be their own- if that’s the case, how can they ever learn to embrace multi-authors in one piece? America stresses the importance of the individual in invention and composing which has caused challenges in the classroom.
I share some of Carrie’s and Angie’s thoughts on this piece. I too, was a bit disconcerted in reading this piece. It felt like I was reading a comic book or graphic novel, having to stop and figure out where I was supposed to go next. But, I think that can be a good thing. I think it draws the audience into a “close reading” of the piece. Not that I would ever do this Steve
-but an piece like this is not really “skimmable.” It requires committment and focus… and I think that is a good thing from a writer/collaborator standpoint.
I think, like Carrie and Gloria mention, I could definately see analyzing a text like this in a lower-level comp class, but I don’t know about teaching it. I think it would be a great multi-genre project to assign, but the students would need to be more focused on process and conscious decision making rather than the “final product.” Sort of like Cathy Fliescher’s Unfamilliar Genre Project. The emphasis would need to be placed on the process and the inquiry, rather than the composed text. But I think studying an essay like this (or perhaps a similarly styled one with a more widely-accessible topic) would be beneficial for students of all ages.
I had some of the same feelings when I first read this too, and I still have kind of mixed feelings about it. I’ve become a lot more comfortable with reading these kinds of texts after I started getting into comics; on the other, I still kind of feel like this is a bit of a gimmick.
On the third hand (!), I do think the gimmick “works” for this piece. It not only conveys the point of the piece, the sort of push and pull of authorship and voices and the like, but it also conveys the conversational nature of collaboration. I like the part about how they point out that people assume that one font is Yancey and the other is Spooner when it isn’t. But still, the idea that there are “multiple” voices here is graphically apparent and also supported by the content.
Okay… let me put my comments here before I read everyone else’s. I don’t want my reaction to be changed/informed by what anyone says before I get this down.
Although I can appreciate the artistry in this piece, I cannot appreciate the practicality of it. I think that the greatest goal in writing is to be understood… and I could barely focus on what was being said because my brain was trying so hard to follow the structure and logic of everything. I read it online and I kept thinking that I had jumped to the wrong page of the PDF or something. Sure, writing is a creative form and can be approached in varying ways… but some ways are more/less successful than others. I think it kinda proved Spooner/Vielstimmig point, though, that there is this coming of “new essays”.
As to your questions, Dr. Krause–
Is this an “essay”?
Hmm. Yes? It did have a purpose. It did have a message. It did have a structure– however disconnected. It obviously took a process to achieve it. Is it a new take on an essay? Certainly.
Is this something teachable?
I think I would use something like this to prove a point to beginning (and maybe upper level) comp students that the essay doesn’t have to be this stagnant piece, void of exploration and artistic expression. It can be approached in different ways. In the same regard, I would want to debate what you would need to do/know to take those steps out of bounds in order to create a piece that is still academically effective.
In the end, though, I did like how it required more reader participation than other, more traditional essays would require. It might be better that way. But, likewise, a lot of people might give up on reading this before they actually get through it all. (Yes, we are a lazy people sometimes.) So then how effective is it?
I agree with what is said above and have grappled with what to say about this essay. I don’t think I am ready to read collaborative essays, yet. I can say that.
It’s hard to control and focus where the essay is going because there are so many writers.
It reminds me of patchwork, which is great. I guess I just want to know who I am learning from exactly.
This kind of essay does call for qualities of a new attention span. It calls for qualities of new thinking. It moves the reader in sharp, jerky ways. I am not used to that.