For the CCCC convention in Cleveland, March 4-7, 2026, program chair Melissa Ianetta invited 5 past chairs to talk about the convention itself in a plenary session. We explained our own experiences and speculated about the future. Gwen Pough, Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt, Holly Hassel (through Melissa), and I spoke. (Vershawn Young was unable to make it.) Following are my 5-minute opening remarks.

Iowa City, 1979. Richard Lloyd Jones passes flyers in class and says that most our readings came from this organization, 4Cs. So I join it.

I go to my first Cs in Washington DC, 1980, to interview through the job service then vibrant. Lynn Troyka is program chair, and 25 years later, she invites me to co-author some books.  

My first time on the program is as respondent to Rick Gebhart, Anthony Petrosky, and Ed Corbett. 1982 in Detroit. Gebhardt, who later become editor of CCC, gave me his talk ahead of time. He is middle speaker, and I ignore him while panicking over what to tell Corbett. 

I was program chair for San Antonio 22 years ago, choosing the theme “Making Composition Matter.” Of course, I was playing with the double sense of matters as verb and as noun. Composition studies deserved wider impact, and we should keep making material knowledge about writing. I saw myself as a steward, entrusted with traditions and trajectories I surely neither created nor owned. Cs members tilled many fields and tended many orchards. Some interested me more than others. But all that work, in all those aspects, constituted what Wittgenstein would call a vast serious game:  understanding writing and making writers. My role as program chair was to stage a farmers’ market, or perhaps better, a potluck, for people to share and glean ideas. Here are three memories from 2004. 

  • #1: Coming upon Wayne Booth studying a map and pondering how to get to the convention center. I’d invited him to talk, but in that moment, I saw how frail he was—almost as frail as Kenneth Burke at the 1989 Seattle Cs. I said, “Mr. Booth, let me get a cab and we’ll ride over together.”
  • #2: Hosting a dinner for Gunther Kress, Robert Scholes, and Gail Hawisher and having the good sense just to listen about semiotics, technologies, and multimodalities, there on the Riverwalk, as badged professors floated by.
  • #3: Walking past the Alamo with Claudio Sanchez, the NPR education reporter I’d invited to speak. The night before, Billy Bob Thornton had premiered a movie about The Alamo with a parade of longhorns through San Antonio. I asked Sanchez what he thought. He replied, “What the hell do you think I think?”

Booth, Kress, Scholes, and Hawisher are dead, as are countless other novae in my 4Cs firmament, from Janet Emig to Wendy Bishop, Mike Rose to Lynn Troyka. Sanchez lives in retirement, as do Shirley Brice Heath and Deb Brandt, Steve North and Victor Villanueva, Shirley Logan and Erika Lindemann, Kathi Yancey and Keith Gilyard (well maybe not Keith). But now in the C’s nebula are Lydia and Will, Anis and Angela, David and Kelli and Kelly and Kofi, Jeff and Liz, Eliana and Heather. Compose your own star charts.

My point: I’ve experienced the annual conference as the trajectory of tradition becoming subsequent, a Burkean parlor or, perhaps better, a Russian Ark filled with galleries refashioned each spring, Brigadoon-like, assembled by and embodied in people. This is the third sense of matter: the physical, the corporeal, the synchronous analog, the anti-Bezosian. We each inflect that material space. Gathering constellates us to better matters. At least it has, and I hope, still can.