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I’ve written a note below the images, but here’s a link to the 1989 WPA Summer Conference Program. Doug

Today (July 10, 2025) I’m taking part in the CWPA summer conference program, which is happening virtually, in a robust Zoom platform that allows lots of interesting interactions. It made me recall the very first WPA conference (in the days before the organization acronym acquired a C) that I attended, in sweltering late July, in Oxford, Ohio. It was more convenient just to walk down to my basement this morning for the first session. But 36 years ago, we all got on a riverboat in Cincinnati for dinner and dancing (with Susan Jarratt, Mary Ann Cain, George Kalamaras, Lynn Bloom, Bud Weiser, Susan Miller, David Bartholomae, and so many others) on a Friday night, and I do miss those days.

Here’s a link to the full 1989 WPA Conference program.

On a flight last week, I struck up a conversation with a woman and her husband sitting next to me. They were retired physicians, she a pediatrician at the university and he the chief of radiology at a big Denver hospital. We were both returning from visiting kids and grandkids. She asked how I liked retirement, and I said I enjoyed having time to write a book, but mostly I was just happy to be able to pull weeds out of flowers each morning without worrying about the clock.

She was bemused, even aghast.  They’d moved into a big downtown high rise condo precisely so they didn’t have to worry about a yard, especially since they were spending retirement traveling. In fact, they’d just be in Denver for a couple days before taking off for a ten day bicycling tour in Austria, the third such European cycling tour they’d done. She recounted their other travels, though I lost track somewhere between Thailand and the Galapagos.

For hardly the first or fifth time, I felt like I was failing retirement. My one-year anniversary was July 1, and I have no big journeys to recount, no significant accomplishments, no next calling, no momentous volunteering. At times I feel a little ashamed. It seems that some many retired friends—not to mention retired strangers—are doing Meaningful Things, while I’m puttering around writing letters, reading books, and pulling dandelions. There’s the nagging feeling I’m derelict.

I’m warned, “One day you’ll be too old and sick, and then you’ll regret wasting your early retirement.” Maybe. And maybe there’s something wrong with me, some lack of imagination or late life ambition. I certainly had plenty of the latter until the day I retired, always in pursuit of something, often professional leadership roles, so it’s been wonderful not worrying about writing reports, balancing budgets, or worrying about struggling colleagues. Maybe I’ve become Odysseus among the Lotus Eaters.

I think of my father’s retirement. He stepped off the garbage truck where he’d worked 25 years, the last of his many jobs and small businesses. His knees and hips were shot, and he was relieved not to have to worry about paying fuel bills, working through the flu or snow drifts, or losing a contract. No one ever asked Dad what meaningful things he planned to do next. His trips consisted mostly of putting his flatbottom boat into the Wapsi or Cedar Rivers to go catfishing with Ray Cole or John Camp. Big journeys were visiting kids and grandkids in Georgia and Texas, seeing school events in Iowa and Illinois. 

I regret never asking Mom and Dad if they were satisfied in retirement. I’d like to have asked if wish they done things differently. I know what they’d have told me. I don’t know if that would have been accurate.

It’s perhaps an occupational hazard of a certain professional class—including professors, whom I know best—to have goals in retirement. Mind you, I have the goal of making closer friends, which turns out to be pretty challenging, despite best intentions. The friends I’ve made over the years have all moved away at various points—or I left them—and starting over, virtually, at age 68 takes more wherewithal and less introversion than I can easily muster. I spend embarrassing amounts of time screwing up the courage to make a phone call or a plan.

I thought the independence of retirement would feel different, but I find a new dependence on satisfying expectations, anticipation future regrets that, in fact, may never come, all the while figuring that others are doing things better and doing things the way I should. Meanwhile, I buy postage stamps and pull hoses and sift archives. 

The American Bicentennial  happened the summer I turned 20. That July 4^th I ran a 10K race in Clinton, Iowa. Riverboat Days. I was in good shape, but I hadn’t planned well, especially for a hot morning. I’d gone by myself. Fortunately, Dr. Ash was running the race, and some of his family saw me after and shared cold drinks. That afternoon, Hazel Tech took me to a nursing home in Davenport, where she played piano and I sang a few patriotic songs. Mrs. Tech, my best friend Vance’s mom, was the church choir director at Grace Lutheran DeWitt, and she was the first person to encourage me to sing.

On the Fourth of July, 2025, the American President announced he’ll celebrate the nation’s 250^th birthday next year by holding a UFC Fight on the grounds of the White House. Maybe this will be in conjunction with the reality TV show he’s mused about, the one where longtime residents with jobs and kids and hardworking dreams are made to compete with each other to avoid deportation through Alligator Auschwitz. For our entertainment.

I don’t remember, but I highly doubt my heart’s desire July 4, 1976, was to sing “America the Beautiful” for incontinent geriatrics on a hot afternoon. I did partly because, as someone who grew up as a “good boy,” something I repeatedly heard my whole life, I figured it was a good thing to do. But I’m sure I did so partly because I hadn’t planned ahead, didn’t have a more desirable option, having simply wandered into the holiday as I’ve wandered into retirement. 

Clearly America has wandered profound since that day. I’ve been joining protests and writing to politicians, but without method—and certainly without effect, as yesterday’s vote for stupid cruelty revealed. My single consolation is that a clear majority of Americans—whether by polling or by representation—don’t want this. That’s small solace when North Dakota has the same number of United States of America Senators as does California. But I have to believe that most Americans, however gerrymandered into idiocy, have a stronger, historical vision on our democracy than the selfish despots some have elected. Probably the most meaningful “project” for retirement will be to figure how best to spend waning energies and talents to counteract the greedy decline that Republicans under Dear Leader have charted. 

Saturday afternoon I was walking back from our small neighborhood grocery store, where the annual customer appreciation event included free hot dogs and one dollar beers (from the in-store bar) when I passed a Little Free Library down the block. Our neighborhood has a dozen of them, and I’m well-acquainted with their owners’ reading tastes. (I can’t imagine any pedestrian saying, “Hey, I want that 1986 accounting textbook or C+ manual,” but that’s just me.)

This particular library is reliably high quality, and two books immediately caught my attention. One was a hardcover first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism, a 1973 book whose 50-page introduction is a landmark statement of what came to be known as creative nonfiction, or a substantial corner of it. I’ve cited and taught the piece many times, from photocopies and a pdf I acquired years ago. But, heck, even in retirement, I thought it would be nice to have a copy of the thing itself.

The second book was Emily Watson’s 2023 translation of The Iliad. It was a pristine copy that had unceremoniously been discarded from the Denver Public Library. I hope and figure that the Library kept another copy or two around, that they’d just bought a bunch of them, expecting a run on Homer, and were now just paring down after the reading frenzy. It’s not that they’re lacking shelf space. My local branch, the Woodbury Library, on Federal, has about 40% of its shelves occupied. I get that folks are reading (or listening) digitally these days, but I’m thinking it wouldn’t be terrible to keep stocked at 75% or so, for the decor even if not for reading.

Anyway, I’d never read The Iliad. It seemed like something I ought to have done, and dotage wasn’t too late to check it off. I’d read The Odyssey as a sophomore in college, in a marvelous course called Biblical and Classical Literature, in which we read everything from Job to Sophocles. Liked it. Of course, I knew all about The Iliad (I thought) from pop culture references, way down to Brad Pitt’s Achilles sprinting down the beach, gold hair flying, in the movie Troy. It was time to pay dues and make good, so last night I spent three hours starting the book.

It’s good, and the translation is spectacular, happily readable. But a few things struck me. Foremost is the petty vanity of so many characters, who are motivated, yes, by a sense of duty and pride in nation but equally or more by ego and entitlement. Am I sitting the place I deserve at the banquet table? Am I getting a good cut and portion of meat? Do people respect me sufficiently? I mean, am I doing the proper thing to get recognized and honored?

So much of what’s going on is brand management.

Even when characters are doing the right thing, their reasons are misguided and conflicted. Hector comes from afar to defend Troy because he knows Greek invaders are bad for local lands. At a crucial point, he knows he should lend his considerable skills to the city battlements, staying inside where he really can do most good. But where’s the glory in that? Where, further, do people expect him to be? What will they think if he’s not out there leading charges? What will he think of himself? So he goes out, kills Patroclus, pisses off Achilles, and ultimately gets his carcass drug behind a chariot for a few days.

I can’t help but think of Iliadic behavior these days in so many Republican leaders for whom Trump is their Zeus, entertaining himself at the expense of humanity. Some of those leaders even understand that the bill, while big, is really bad, but they have reputations (for hatred? for meanness? for fascist nationalism?) to uphold. They want to sit at the right hand of Trump and eat the tenderloin. They have no greater motivating principle than keeping stature before a group of petty electors, though they may conjure some pretext of past greatness they fancy themselves restoring. Meanwhile, on the plains before Troy and in the city itself, tens of thousands die needlessly because Paris and Menelaus think with their crotches and egos, and convince enough of their bros that fame and glory are there for taking. In the end, Troy burns and arrows hit heels. I hope the latter, at least.

And to think I just started the afternoon wanting a free hot dog.

I’ve had occasion this week to think back 22 years, to Urbana, Illinois, where I’d organized Stage 2 Reviewers to help put together the Conference on College Composition and Communication Program for March 2004 in San Antonio. Prior to our gathering, dozens of reviewers had rated hundreds of proposals, and we had the results in thick folders of printouts, one proposal per page. I divided the group into small teams and assigned each some clusters to review. Their task: decide what to put in the program. This included combining similar-enough papers into groups of three and conjuring a title for the result. These were days of sifting piles of paper at tables, in energetic conversation.

That was the technical process. What stays with me, however, was the camaraderie. We met occasionally as a whole group to discuss our work, but most of the time was in small rooms scattered around the NCTE headquarters at 1111 W. Kenyon Road. We’d share funny paper titles or read aloud striking lines, but the side conversations were vital: stories of our teaching and families and projects and summer plans.

At noon we’d walk across the street to the Urbana Garden Family Restaurant, a familiar midwestern code for a place with a menu a mile long, from salads to burgers to plates. At night, we’d go to one of several excellent restaurants in Champaign/Urbana and have a couple bottles of wine. One evening, Peter Mortensen had us all over to his house, a sprawling place on a tree-arched street. I recall he and his wife serving an amazing Stilton cheese, so good that a couple of us went the next day to the small cheese shop to buy some for ourselves.

About a month after the Stage 2 meeting, I got a big package of note cards. Each contained a session for the program. Lori Ostergaard, then my program assistant and now editor of College English, and I arranged a room of tables in Stevenson Hall at ISU, right across from the English Office. We spread meeting times for the 4-day program, then deployed sessions across them, looking for balance, avoiding conflicts, sifting and resifting until we got things as good as they’d be. We joked about who’d be upset with us for sticking them at 8 am on Friday or late morning on Saturday, but someone had to be there.

In the fall, Lori and I traveled to San Antonio to preview the convention site. We got a sense of all the rooms, their shapes and sizes, information that was useful when we got back to Normal and I had to place sessions in rooms. Who would be the big draws? I had, after all, Sandra Cisneros, Gunther Kress, Bob Scholes, Deborah Brandt, Wayne Booth, Claudio Sanchez, and dozens of other luminaries. While we were on that trip, I took the photographs that would be used in the program, the subject of an earlier blog post.

I contrast that experience, born in a different era, with how things are done now. It’s deemed too costly and–this saddens me–too inconvenient to travel to gather in person. Of course, at a high level I get it. But it was special to spend a few days physically with people you didn’t know very well, people from different sorts of schools and with different scholarly interests. There was time to learn about backgrounds and families as well as classrooms and projects. Now we Zoom, and it’s almost entirely business, finishing tasks with minimal interactions and certainly no shared Stilton on a midwestern summer porch beneath oaks and maples. Sure Zoom is more efficient and likely more inclusive of people for whom travel is hard, but it comes at cost of in-person interactions that foster trust and occasionally friendships. Having recently Zoomed a couple of days for an organization, I can say there will be no tales remembered 22 years from now. I took a desultory screen capture at one point. Less than a quarter of us looked at the camera and each other.

I recently found a forgotten recording from 20 years ago that includes me singing a solo. I was nervous about listening to it. I have a certain sense of how I used to sound–and of how I sound now. Maybe I’d learn my memory was flawed. Vanity. Maybe my memory is accurate, and I’d be depressed at my current ability. Reality.

Cantus Novus was a small amateur chamber chorus of 24 or in Bloomington, Illinois. We were competent, with some flashes of artistry, but we sang challenging music and had a great time doing it. That concert had six songs by Aaron Copeland, and my turn comes on “The Boatmen’s Dance. In addition to some good fiddling, the recording features a song suite, “South Dakota Shadows,” which I remembered as a really pretty piece. Not only had I forgotten the recording, I’d forgotten that my son Andrew, and his then-girlfriend (now wife) Molly played in a string quartet.

Here’s a link to our recording of “The Boatmen’s Dance”

I took all of the photographs, except for a couple, that were used in designing the 2004 Program for the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Antonio, for which I was program chair. I’d taken my camera on 2003 trip to San Antonio to scout the convention site, then sent several images to NCTE. Some were printed in the pages of the program. However, a few of them were selected for the cover by an outstanding artist at NCTE, who then used some brilliant design skills to create a spectacular cover image.

For example, he took my photograph looking out a window from a small museum, onto a courtyard, as the basic frame.

In that basic image, he replaced the central opening courtyard view with my photo of a stunning mural I found on a walk, children (mostly) in white standing in a cornfield, their arms upraised to an angelic figure, doves between them.

Then, brilliantly, he put other images into the side panes of the window. I’ve pasted one of my originals below, so you can see how he transformed those photos. I hadn’t taken a picture of The Alamo, but the designer figured it should be represented, so he used a stock photo. I wasn’t thrilled, but I thought maybe the Cesar Chavez image would counter-balance a bit. I can’t imagine the number of hours he took getting all the angles to work, with all the precise cropping. Then there was that final excellent decision to use a filter on the whole image.

Afterwards, I asked him to send me the massive file with the finished cover. I had two prints made and framed, one for me and one for Lori Ostergaard, who’d served as my program assistant (and who since has gone on to edit College English.) For years, my offices have included a little display: the poster, plus a handful of the contributory images.

The pages of the program itself had interspersed a number of my pictures, rendered in black and white, to serve as decorative filler. Below is an example, though it’s a somewhat cringeworthy one, in terms of design. Following a memorial session for Marilyn Sternglass is a picture advertising the “world’s largest collection of horns and antlers.” Not a very fitting juxtaposition of serious and silly.

If you’re curious, you can see the entire 2004 CCCC program, with my interspersed photographs. (It’s a medium sized PDF, so it may take a while to load.)

Work Worth Doing, Done Better with Friends

St. James Ballroom, MLA New Orleans
January 10, 2025 

Doug Hesse

This is a deeply moving honor. I thank Margeret Koehler, the ADE executive committee, and Janine Utell. I thank Paul Krebs and MLA. I thank Anne Gere, Kathi Yancey, and Rosemary Feal. I thank my wife and kids, for so much time elsewhere.

Tonight takes me back to a spring afternoon forty years past, to PhD days in Iowa City. Richard Lloyd-Jones, better known as Jix, asked me to join him and John Gerber for lunch in the Union cafeteria overlooking the river. I was excited to meet Gerber, who in 1949, was the first chair of CCCC, the key organization in writing studies 

What I didn’t know then was that Gerber had just won the very first Francis Andrew March award. Jix would win the second in 1987, and I’m truly humbled to look through the list of winners since that time. Recipients with personal connections—people brilliant, generous, and kind—include Jacquie Royster, David Bartholomae, Phyllis Franklin, David Laurence, Stacey Donohue, and half a dozen more.

I’ll mention two lessons learned from such exemplars. First was a capacious vision of English studies. Gerber was a Mark Twain scholar and Jix a Victorianist, but they also championed rhetoric, composition, and creative writing. They invited students and colleagues to view all terrain in this complex ecology as worthily fertile.  For example, my doctoral adviser, Susan Lohafer, was an Americanist who taught in Iowa’s creative nonfiction MFA.

My first tenure line job was in a department at Illinois State that fully embraced English Studies. The chair was Charlie Harris, who won the 1997 March award. With colleagues like Janice Neuleib, Bill Woodson. and Ron Fortune, they’d made a doctoral program whose students all took advanced seminars in literature, rhet/comp, linguistics, and pedagogy. I got to co-teach writing with my friend David Foster Wallace, 19th century nonfiction with an old-fashioned Thomas Carlyle specialist, and narrative theory with a Marxist fiction writer. We proudly advanced teacher preparation and learned from our public-school colleagues.

I’ve since watched the field dance with English studies, often in efforts safely federated into tracks, even for undergrads. I do sympathize how forces now thwart fuller integration. After all, I came to college in 1974 straight from a summer of working the back of my Dad’s trash truck. I started as a chemistry major but switched to English when I learned such a preposterous thing was allowed and, actually, unfoolish. Still, I’d like to think that even in 2025, we can make English plausible to first-generation working-class kids, including boys. Doing so requires our best rhetoric to make our passions truly account for their interests and needs.

The second lesson was to become a steward of disciplinary lands that we each merely tend for a time. Like many, I’ve tried to support people, practices, policies, and programs. I’ve tried to understand what predecessors have achieved, however imperfectly, and to see what might be moved a step ahead. Doing so has meant everything from picking up donuts for morning meetings to chairing national committees, from teaching classes when colleagues get sick to meeting with Betsy DeVoss’s staff during the first Trump administration, from leading a university gen ed revision to organizing student writing competitions whose winners met Mohammed Ali. I was always honored to be asked. I said yes as much as I could, though no doubt I was strategically stupid. Still, teaching and learning conditions need care. Someone needs to set the chairs and take the minutes, review proposals and write reports, answer phone calls from provosts, reporters, parents, and politicians.

That said, my career happened in conditions seemingly more conducive to stewardship than those of the current professional landscape, one scoured by climate change, cleft by cliffs. Precarity now seduces us to personal brands.  Memberships dwindle. Reviewers disappear. The mode is no. Professional life threatens becoming a version of gaming Canvas or Blackboard sites. 

I understand. Yet I humbly encourage stewardship beyond self-promotion. There’s work worth doing, done better with friends.

One morning twenty years ago, at an ADE meeting in Monterey, I came early to breakfast. Sitting alone was Bob Scholes, and he gestured to join him. I said as a sophomore I’d read The Elements of Writing, co-authored with Carl Klaus, another mentor. Scholes was gracious and recalled when he was hired by Iowa in the sixties, John Gerber was chair. Scholes, of course, won the March award in 2000. Nearly a quarter century ago, beside that California beach, its bright sky unfouled by Palisades fires, the sea of faith had no melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. There was only generous company and the wild privilege of doing something that mattered. That same kind of company is present in this room tonight, beside America’s mightiest river.

I sincerely appreciate this award and the occasion to remember so many people who have done so much for me and for our profession. 

I heard from one of my sisters that John Camp passed away last week, at the fine age of 91. He was my father’s last fishing partner, and his obituary includes a sentence about their pursuit of catfish on the Wapsipinnicon River over the years. (I’ve pasted the obituary at the end.)

Dad had three great fishing partners in that part of his life when I was aware of such things, generally his mid 30s until his own death at age 91 in 2021. The first was my uncle Gabby Fletcher, a partnership I well remember. Gabby had Mondays off from being produce manager at Barnes grocery store in DeWitt, and Dad arranged his own work (first delivering fuel oil, then co-owning and driving a trash truck) to match. Dad had a large flat bottom boat that could navigate shallow water, good for getting over sandbars, and they’d launch before dawn and fish until they caught their limits (in those days, 16 fish per person), which might take until late morning or, horrors, early afternoon, by which time the Cubs game (then always in the day, first pitch 1:10 pm) would be on Gabby’s transistor radio.

When Gabby suddenly died around 1990, Dad started fishing with Ray Cole, a little older than him. I remembered Ray as the operator of a Shell gas station in town. He was characteristically buck toothed with a big sense of humor and a big heart. His wife, Helen, happily cooked fish and hosted late afternoon drinks at their house after Dad retired. Dad was a fan of Black Velvet whiskey and Seven Up, never more than one, but that one was plenty stiff. After Ray passed, if you were visiting my parents and Dad offered you “a mixed drink,” that’s what you were getting. On the night before his funeral, all of my siblings gathered a last time at the old house on 6th Avenue. Dick and Nancy Capper brought over a bunch of fried chicken, and we sat on the patio, with the last bottle of Black Velvet from the house.

John Camp was later and last. He was one of “the Charlotte relatives,” mysterious folks we saw only at reunions whose connection to you, at least when you were a kid, was always mysterious. Occasionally, Christmas parties would happen at the Lutheran Church in Charlotte (note to outsiders: it’s char LOTTE, not like the North Carolina city), occasionally at my Aunt Gail’s small cafe there. John’s mother, my Aunt Erana, was my Grandma Krukow’s sister, and when I read the obituary, all these names reappear through the haze of history: Paul, Nan, Noel, Gail, and Fawn, those last two still living and but three of their generation. I saw them at my Aunt Diane’s funeral in May.

Dad had three friends that spanned sixty years of his life, men with whom he spent at least one day a week and, later in life, many.

I’m struck that I have not had such friends, at least not in the fashion of Dad’s weekly/daily interactions. I’ve been friends with several men over the years: Dennis, Kaj, Ron, Kim, and Dan. The closest I’ve had to Dad’s fishing calendar was playing racquetball at 6:30 am every Friday with Dan and my still great friends Susan and Laurence, then having breakfast. But that was now 20 years ago, and I’ve made myself no rituals to match those days.

One reason I retired was to challenge myself to elevate friendships a deeper part of my life, with men like Richard, Bob, Tom, with women like Wendy, Susan, Barb, Jennifer, and others. A consequence of having put a lot of energy into national disciplinary efforts over the past 40 years is that I have lots of professional friends, whom I also have come to value on personal levels, people like Erika, Anne, Kathi, and so many more. I treasure them. But we’re not going fishing each Monday on the Wapsi or drinking Black Velvet at 5:00 pm. Instead, we cross paths now and then, Brigadoon fashion, at professional meetings. Now that I’m retired, those meetings fade perhaps permanently into the moorish mists.

I wonder. Is the way we live now amenable to having deep ongoing friendships, anchored in quotidian routines and interactions? Sure, even though transitory lifestyles make some challenges–especially for someone like me, who’s been so beguiled by career connections as to compartmentalize my local world. The question isn’t whether the world fosters such friendships but, rather, whether a deep introvert, albeit one who seems to have faked out the world, can muster them in his last third.

Such are Monday morning thoughts on learning that Dad’s last fishing partner has died.

Obituary for John W. Camp

John Walter Camp, born May 5, 1933, the second twin of Walter Camp and Erana Hoffman Camp. John was baptized into the family of Christ on June 4th 1933. He was confirmed at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Charlotte. IA on March 30th 1947. He graduated from Charlotte High School. John served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1954. Much of that time, he was stationed in Germany. He married Carole Hackett on June 17, 1956 at Chancey Lutheran Church in Clinton, Iowa. John drove truck several years for C&S Trucking in Charlotte. In 1961, John and Carole moved to the family farm at Riggs Station. 

Throughout the years, he continued to drive truck and farm. John was an avid hunter and trapper, earning him the nickname “Skinner.” Among all his hobbies, one of his favorite pastimes was fishing, especially fishing for catfish on the Wapsi River with Don Hesse. He enjoyed gardening, often taking much of his produce to the farmers market with his wife Carole. 

He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Carole. His children Cindy Diedrich (Dan) of Charlotte, Lee Camp (Sue, now passed) of Clinton, Jay Camp (Tina) of Charlotte, and Heather (Brian) Stoecker of Charlotte. John is also survived by eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Sisters Gail Adrian and Fawn Heil. 

John passed away, Thursday, September 12, 2024. He is proceeded in death by his parents, his twin brother Paul, and sisters Nan Robins and Noel Hertensen and daughter in law Sue Camp. 

Visitation will be Thursday, September 19, 2024 at the Immanuel Lutheran Church – Charlotte. Funeral Services will be 10:00am on Friday at the church. Burial will be in the Rossiter Cemetery with military honors being conducted by the Clinton AMVETS. Serving as pallbearers will be Kevin Horan, Gary Steen, Don Luskey and grandsons Jordan Camp, Cody Diedrich, Tevin Stoecker; Honorary pallbearers will be Gary and Jeanee Horan. The Snell-Zornig Funeral Homes – Clinton is in charge of arrangements.

I’ve uploaded the full text and images of a lecture on artificial intelligence and writing that I gave at Georgia Tech, October 5, 2022. I was going to wait until I published full final version, as part of a book in progress, but given the current fervor, I thought I’d post now. (Thanks to Melissa Ianetta, Kelly Ritter, and colleagues for the speaking invitation). “Postcards in the Age of AI: Writing as Burden, Writing as Craft” will take you to a PDF that will take some time to load and will benefit from a large viewing screen; it has has lots of images. It was a talk. It is not polished. The lecture takes a somewhat different slant on the topic, exploring the question not of “how good is AI writing” but rather of why people want AIs to write. I explain (and I hope rather more illustrate) that writing is often a deeply human activity that people want to engage for reasons of building relationships and writing themselves into the world. They want to write even when it’s hard, in fact maybe especially when it’s hard. AI cannot–and should not–replace that kind of meaningful, self-engaged, writing. The lecture also touches on Artificial Reading, Sandy Koufax, and building mandolins by hand.

Note: I started casually following artificial intelligence and writing in 2005, then again around 2012, and most recently since 2017. It’s been interesting to watch higher education and much of writing studies finally, in fall 2022, pay more attention to what entrepreneurs and the popular press, most notably The New Yorker, started covering years ago.

“Postcards in the Age of AI: Writing as Burden, Writing as Craft.” (Note: this link takes you to a PDF that will take awhile to load and will benefit from a large viewing screen; it has lots of images.)

Doug Hesse

I was a member of the committee that formed NCTE’s National Day on Writing. Following is part of my forthcoming chapter, “Creative Nonfiction Accents the National Day on Writing,” which will appear in a book I co-edited with Laura Julier, Nonfiction, the Teaching of Writing, and the Influence of Richard Lloyd-Jones.

[Excerpt follows. Please don’t reproduce without permission.]

The National Day on Writing was born in an 800-word proposal that Kent Williamson brought to the NCTE Executive Committee in August 2008, as Agenda Item 22 of its summer meeting. Kent explained having been contacted by a staff member from the National Association of Secondary School Principals, who wondered if there was such a thing as a national writing day. The answer was no, but the idea generated interest among some NCTE leaders and staff, enough that Kent roughed out a few thoughts. President Kathi Yancey put it on the agenda for formal consideration, and the Executive Committee approved the concept and asked for preliminary planning. 

With an initial desire to have a national day devoted to writing occurring as early as late January 2009, time was rather of the essence. Kathi and Kent put together a committee consisting of Sharon Floyd, Jennifer Ochoa, Kathi, Kent, and me, with NCTE staff including Barbara Cambridge, Millie Davis, Mark Rowe, Sharon Roth, and Mila Fuller. Charged to bring a recommendation to the Executive Committee by September 1, we had our first phone call on August 19, which I took from a Denver kitchen in shambles from remodeling. The group brimmed with ideas that quickly organized around two poles. One cluster was the day itself, which would feature having people write, of course, but also other activities: advocacy, celebrations, and the like. The other cluster concerned possible activities leading up to the day itself. 

In his early proposal, Kent speculated that, “the Council could reach out through its membership to invite not just teachers/educators, but all whom they touch (including students, parents, and other community members) to post their writing through the NCTE website to a national log or archive.” He mused, further, that we might “mine the [resulting] database of collected writings to draw instructive lessons for policymakers during the 2010 Advocacy Month, and may well use the project as the rallying point for our first policy symposium or press conference in DC . . . cultivating grassroots support for future legislation or public initiatives that NCTE may choose to sponsor on 21^st century literacies or writing” (Williamson, National Writing Day). Our committee embraced this general idea. One line of conversation focused on whether to have a theme for all this writing or simply make an open call. The other line focused on logistics and frameworks. I suggested that, rather than an archive or database of writings, we might use the language of a National Gallery of Writing, replete with halls, wings, and salons. Maybe we could have different people open and curate different parts of the gallery, their main job being to encourage submissions and provide some minimal screening. 

We ended that first meeting by agreeing each to do quick writing, which Kent gathered and circulated before a second meeting (Williamson. “Agenda”). During that second conversation, we settled on recommendations to the Executive Committee that included creating a National Gallery of Writing. We also, not trivially, settled on The National Day on Writing—not “of.” The chosen phrase struck many as clunky, but our reasoning is that we didn’t want to imply people should write that day alone; in fact, one emerging interest was in bringing to the national consciousness how thoroughly writing pervaded all daily life, every day. The preposition “on” was to signify that this day would call attention to writing, that writing would be its feature and focus. People very well might write that day, but we wanted people on that day to think about writing. Years later, I’m not sure our subtlety was worth the effort. 

By the time Kathi Yancey delivered her president’s remarks at the November NCTE convention, much of the framework was established, as was the day’s purpose. Kathi explained:

This project affirms individual writers at the same time that it creates a major resource showcasing writing at the beginning of the 21^st century. . . . [It] places the knowledge of NCTE members at the heart of a very dynamic, large-scale enterprise. Second, it allows us to serve a much wider public while also gaining recognition as a community that has much of value to offer society (and needs to be supported!). And finally, it has the potential to “de-mystify” writing for those who don’t think of themselves as writers while subtly making the point that writing is a skill that no segment of society can do without. (NCTE, “Minutes” 6)

With the help of Verizon and other partners, NCTE created http://www.galleryofwriting.org,^[1] an ambitious portal for gathering and displaying writing, and began building the national infrastructure to gather submissions. A brochure published in spring 2009 explained “three types of display spaces.” One was The Gallery of the National Council of Teachers of English, “a broad mosaic of writing” hosted by the Council. A second was The Gallery of National Partners, several spots hosted by the many corporate and educational partners who joined the enterprise, from Verizon to the National Writing Project. Third, and most capaciously, was The Gallery of Local Partners. Any group could apply for a salon in this last gallery, the brochure inviting families, classes, schools, churches, clubs, workplaces, cities or whatever. For example, I formed a Colorado Gallery of Writing, which I explained in an op-ed for The Denver Post, published October 17, 2009, inviting all Coloradans to send their writing. As you can see, NCTE’s impetus was radical openness and inclusivity. In fact, a key point of the National Day on Writing was to make visible and celebrate writing in all facets of life, from the grand to the mundane. We wanted everyone to recognize themselves as writers. Kent asked me to write a few invitational words for the launch brochure and the website, and I embraced the vision and, a little pretentiously, the voice of Walt Whitman. 

Let’s imagine America writing. 

Let’s imagine essayists and auditors, poets and nurses, tweeters and technicians, blogging beauticians, church bulletin scribes, advocates and analysts, authoring. 

Let’s imagine memoirs and memos, rants and remembrances, oral histories, letters to the future, postcards from the past, profiles profane and sacred, instructions, directions, reflections, retorts, factual and fancied. 

Let’s imagine a living American gallery of writing checked with salons, fitted by school or site, by genre or by identity, but most importantly by you, salons in which a homeless man’s story hangs next to the finance major’s wedding vows. 

Let’s imagine school kids linked to college students, teachers to professors, and all to city halls, shelters, board rooms, all linked by writing. 

Let’s gather writers who’d never thought themselves that: mothers, bus drivers, fathers, and veterans. Let’s have sharings, coffees, contests silly and celebratory, so that the national gallery of writing has myriad outposts, local and physical. Let’s open our writing centers to our communities. 

Let’s imagine October 20 and all this embodied in a National Day on Writing, a day when we cut the digital rope on our Gallery, when the Norman Mailer Writers Colony gives creative nonfiction awards to high school and college writers in a gala ceremony sponsored by famed New York writers, students whose work has been supported and selected by NCTE members. Actually, that day is planned. What’s needed to make it happen is you. Please help. 

—Doug Hesse, National Council of Teachers of English member, former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and director of Denver University’s University Writing Program

After a complex series of emails, October 20 emerged as the celebratory day itself, with a strong factor being the Mailer/NCTE Writing Awards, the logistics of that star-studded day creating a very narrow window. While the day had been set by early spring 2009, it received extra imprimatur October 8 in U.S. Senate Resolution 310, sponsored by Robert Casey (D-PA), which declared October 20, 2010 as the National Day on Writing and called on “educational institutions, businesses, community and civic associations, and other organizations to promote awareness of the National Day on Writing and celebrate the writing of their members through individual submissions to the National Gallery of Writing.” Barbara Cambridge, in NCTE’s Washington office, was fundamental to this effort. Several of us around the country garnered similar resolutions. My colleague Geoffrey Bateman persuaded Governor Bill Ritter to establish October 20 the National Day of Writing in Colorado, his staffer drafting the proclamation making known their preposition preference.

The day itself was a whirlwind. NCTE had set up the day’s activities in studio space at the New York Institute of Technology, at Columbus Circle in New York City. At 4:00 that afternoon, Kathi Yancey and I were live, doing a webcast on college writing. With naive faith in America’s airlines, I flew into LaGuardia earlier that afternoon and barely had time to check into a hotel on 57^th Street to walk over to NYIT. Kathi and I talked about current developments in college writing. Prior to our hour-long session, numerous NCTE luminaries were live, including Cathy Fleischer and Linda Adler-Kassner, Lucy Calkins, Carol Jago, Ernest Morrell, Marilyn Valentino, and Bonnie Sunstein, who share a video, “What is a Writer.” Interspersed throughout the day, which ran ET 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM, hosts shared postings from the National Gallery of Writing.

But a few outsiders spoke, too. The featured presenter at 11:00 AM was listed as “Presidential candidate Obama on the important of writing (10 minutes) [sic]” (Williamson, “just to give you”). After the broadcast, I went back to my hotel, changed into a tux, and walked a mile south to Cipriani, on 42^ndStreet, location of the Mailer Gala. Cipriani was an impressive space with marble columns, inlaid floors, lofty arches, and dramatic lighting, designed for the kind of ostentatious impression befitting the building’s origins as the Bowery Savings Bank and well repurposed for lending grandeur to events. I was barely in the door when the evening’s architect, Larry Schiller, introduced Bonnie Sunstein, Susan Reece, and me to William Kennedy and Toni Morrison. Morrison told us she’d once been an NCTE member.”

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^[1] This website no longer exists. All the writing gathered in the gallery seems lost.