by Jenn Fishman
This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that Jenn leads as Chief Capacitator. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”
OpenAI went public with ChatGPT not even two years ago on November 30, 2022. It’s worth pausing to think about how we, as writers and writing educators, have been affected. For old times’ sake, find a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper, and make a list. Don’t stop to correct yourself or sort the positives from the negatives. Just tell yourself all the ways that AI and GenAI have had an impact on you.
Some version of this exercise might be a good question of the day or freewriting topic. It makes me think about how quickly Facebook spread twenty years ago, extending from Harvard to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale in 2004; to other colleges, universities, and high schools in 2005; and to anyone with an email address and access to the internet by the end of the next year. I was a graduate student when Facebook launched, and two years later, while I was navigating the changing face of writing and writing instruction as an assistant professor, Facebook registered its 12 millionth user.
The velocity of writing change, both measured and felt, prompted the cross-institutional group of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium or WIS to make 2024 the year of “Writing Human/s.” For us, and perhaps for you too, writing is fundamental to our human being. So we practice it again and again, and we build lives around it. We have favorite writing tools, spaces, and snacks, and if we are lucky we have writing groups that sustain us. There is writing that stays with us, writing we feel compelled to write, and writers it is our privilege to advise, mentor, and teach. To echo Donald Murray (with a dash of Elizabeth Bishop), writers write or (say it!) writers must write, and students and teachers of writing must write, too.
With a sense of imperative as well as a sense of play, we gathered online and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Marquette University in the first days of February to affirm, explore, question, and contend with the complexity of being writing human/s in the mid-2020s. The WIS program featured workshops about AI and collaborative writing, autoethnography, mail art, and post-ChatGPT assignment design as well as shimmer stories, the social stakes of peer response, teaching in times of crisis, and ‘zines as sites of radical possibility. We also offered a series of 5-minute flashtalks on topics as varied as robot peer review, climate change, critical making, and the embodiment of emotions, problems, and solutions in writing classrooms. In addition, along with research posters and displays, WIS ‘24 featured more than two dozen flares or 3-minute audio- and video-recorded thinkpieces by undergraduates.
The opening workshop, “Multimodal Writing, Drawing, and Listening” led by Tracey Bullington set the scene. Tracey joined us from the doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At WIS, she began with a simple lesson. Observing it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn something if we believe we cannot do it, Tracey led us in a series of drawing exercises inspired, in part, by her teacher, Lynda Barry. Following Tracey’s instructions, we drew breakfast (bacon and eggs) without looking down at our index cards or felt-tipped pens. We drew self-portraits and pictures of ourselves as animals. Then, flush with evidence of our ability, we listened to one another tell stories, and (coached by Tracey) we drew our takeaways. The results were a combination of documentary-style notes, impressions, and embellishments that inscribed what and how we heard what others were saying. We were writing human/s, and we had the pictures to prove it!
Our closing activities also featured the writing arts, starting with a spoken word performance by Donnie McClendon, a PhD student in English at the University of South Florida. Through “When 4 is 6,” Donnie taught a complex lesson about remembering and forgetting by telling the story of Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware. They were murdered the same day in 1963 that the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. We listened to their story, and then, we ended the way we began: by drawing our takeaways along with our gratitude.
In the same spirit, the blogs that follow offer a coda to WIS ‘24 as well as a bridge to WIS ‘25. We hope you’ll join us here on the Bits Blog and in Milwaukee next year.
The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November.
