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.