Epic Gratitude

[guest_blogger]

This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

By Jenn Fishman

I leave each WIS feeling epically epideictic. I want to sing—and dance and shout—my gratitude to all who come together annually to make the symposia  happen, to make each one such a memorable happening. 

The WIS is what it is—a heady combination of writing, innovation, and symposing—thanks first to WIS attendees. Our registration list always includes a substantial showing of first-timers. Every year, for example, we welcome en masse new GTAs taking writing pedagogy across town at UW-Milwaukee. Other new WIStians find us through word of mouth and our online CFP, which circulates starting in late August or early September. Many first-time WIS attendees arrive in small groups and pairs, and some attend solo, which may be the ultimate act of professional bravery and hope. 

Symposium registrants also include returning WISers. Some colleagues in this category join us every couple few years; others attend even more regularly, logging onto Zoom or braving the weather and the vagaries of the early quarter or semester to convene in Milwaukee. I think of Lansing Community College colleagues Barb Clauer and Melissa Kaplan, who have over the years helped shape WIS themes. I think of co-presenters like Megan Mericle and Natalie Taylor, whose WIS attendance spans their graduate and early post-graduate years. I think of Abigayle Farrier, who has withstood ice storms and institutional precarity to travel from Texas to participate. I also think of Marcia Buell driving up from Northeastern Illinois University with her undergraduate and graduate students. Then, there is the crew from Western Michigan University—Kyle Battle, Tristan Heibel, Emilie Helmbold, Sophia Khan, Morgan Shiver, and David Yarnall—and the group that comes to us from CUNY: an intrepid, merry band led by Mark McBeth that over the years has included Jessica Yood as well as Tuka Al-Sahlani, Dev Harris, Zach Muhlbauer, and Rani Srinivasan.

We gather for WIS in specific spaces. Along with Zoom boxes, we inhabit the Beaumier Suites Conference Center in Raynor Library on the Marquette University campus, and we return each year to a local restaurant, Braise. These spaces and others—The Ambassador Hotel and the Gin Rickey Bar, Bollywood Grill, the Haggerty Art Museum on campus, the Milwaukee Art Museum downtown—are part of the fabric of the symposium, and my epic gratitude extends to the people who steward and maintain them. In particular, the WIS benefits from the radical hospitality of Tara Baillargeon, Dean of Raynor Library, and her colleagues, including Denise Hyland, Kerry Oliveti, Elaine Knaus, and Darwin Sanders, whose job title, “IT Support Associate,” does not begin to tell the story of his talents, his generosity, or his shaping impact on the WIS. Likewise, the WIS is richer and more dynamic for our relationship to Macmillan Learning through colleagues like Joy Fisher Williams, Laura Davidson, Simi Dutt, and Mackenzie Denofio. They afford us both analog and digital spaces to gather and share ideas, first in real-time conversation and then via the Bits blogs.

If there is a sine qua non of the WIS, it is the Steering Committee (SC). A cross-institutional volunteer operation, the WIS ‘25 SC includes the inestimable Darci Thoune, Gitte Frandsen, Grant Gosizk, Jenna Green, Jessie Wirkus Haynes, Kaia Simon, Kelsey Otero, Lilly Campbell, Maxwell Gray, Nora Boxer, and Patrick Thomas. I find it hard to describe or characterize the full extent of their contributions. Maybe the WIS is like sourdough. As Ashley Beardlsey asked us to consider at her pre-WIS presentation, the process of kneading dough by hand means each loaf as well as the persisting starter literally embodies some of its maker. So, too, does each WIS incorporate the time, energy, and attention as well as the savvy, smarts, and care of Steering Committee members, individually and together.

My enduring gratitude is as much for the process of making each WIS as it is for the 2-day event itself.I am grateful for the experience of our work together as well as the phenomenon of our ongoing collaboration. May everyone who reads this post have an opportunity to be part of a WIS, whether it’s our Writing Innovation Symposium or an analogue, whatever form and format that might take. 

The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026.