Writing Together, Writing to Gather

[guest_blogger]

By Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune

This is the first post in a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Learn more below from Chief Capacitator Jenn Fishman and WIS heart and soul Darci Thoune. Also look for posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

The 2025 Writing Innovation Symposium was the 7th we’ve hosted since 2018. This time our theme grew out of questions we had for anyone and everyone who writes:

How do you get ready? What—if anything—do you do, assemble, or otherwise prepare ahead of time? What shapes your practices? And what makes you break or revise any patterns you follow?

We were motivated by more than idle curiosity. The writers and writing educators who attend “the WIS” each year bring keen interest in all things writing. Our group includes undergraduates and graduate students, some new to writing instruction, others serving as assistant directors in writing centers or programs. WISters are also faculty of various ranks, roles, and years of experience at 2- and 4-year colleges and universities. Some WISters work in campus libraries; others direct academic and arts outreach efforts. Close to three-quarters of participants attend onsite at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, and the rest log on from coast to coast in North America and from locations as far flung (so far) as the UK and India.

Our questions about prep apply to cooking as well as writing, and that’s no accident. The WIS has always been a food-forward event. We like a little nosh during our Thursday morning write-on-sites, and we relish the hors d'oeuvres served during our Thursday reception and poster session. The coffee and tea flow throughout the symposium; we start Fridays with breakfast sandwiches; and no one leaves that afternoon without a boxed lunch. Too, thanks to the generosity of Macmillan Learning, we treat each cohort of Bedford/St. Martin WIS Fellows to a family-style meal across town at Braise, where (among other things) the mushroom risotto is renowned.

Given all of the above, it was just a matter of time until our theme was mise en place. The phrase names the practice of gathering or preparing ingredients and equipment ahead of time, before starting to cook. The great French chef Auguste Escoffier gets credit for coining mise en place and for establishing the protocols that have been associated with it since the late nineteenth century. Of course, there is controversy. While mise en place is a mainstay in professional kitchens, opinion is divided among home cooks. While some like to set up everything just so before turning on the first burner, others prefer to prepare as they go, slicing and dicing in between stirring and popping dishes in and out of the oven.

Notably, the WIS is less about taking sides and more about exploring the year’s theme, and WIS ‘25 was no different. To make the most of mise en place, we started with a plenary roundtable led by Ashley Beardsley. She directs the writing center at UMass Dartmouth, and her research spans from food media to sourdough rhetorics. At the WIS, she led everyone in an initial mad libs-style getting-to-know-you exercise, and she facilitated a thought-provoking conversation among three luminaries from the Milwaukee food scene. The roster included 2 James Beard-nominated stalwarts, Ryan Castelaz (Discourse Coffee Workshop, Agency Cocktail Lounge) and Gregory León (Amilinda). Joined by Caitlin Cullin, the true mensch of the group (Tandem, Kinship Community Food Center), they talked about everything from their favorite Wisconsin dishes to the politics of food, the ethics of hospitality as an industry, and the ways culinary workers can be agents of change in their communities.

The mainstay at WIS is concurrent sessions, which feature either panels of 5-minute flashtalks or 75-minute workshops. In 2025, the former, flashtalks, included menus for belonging, potluck approaches to curriculum design, and strategies for using stories about meals to spark questions and related research. The latter, workshops, gave participants opportunities to roll up their sleeves and try new approaches to activities such as assessment, visualizing data, writing with AI, and writing personal stories, whether autoethnographies or personal statements. Additionally, Macmillan sponsored a workshop on transnationalizing first-year writing led by Lauren Rosenberg. The author of a custom-published Macmillan textbook, she directs the award-winning first-year composition program at the University of Texas-El Paso.

Flashtalks and workshops are not the only WIS genres, however. We now have 2 just for undergraduate writers: 3-minute flares, which we introduced at WIS ‘24, and 30-second sparks, which were new to WIS ‘25. Both are audio or audiovisual compositions, which enable undergrads to pre-record their contributions and participate asynchronously as well as at no charge. An overview of the genres along with the 2026 prompts are available online; submissions are due 11/21.

Annually, our reception features posters and interactive displays. In 2025, they addressed topics as varied as picture books and narrative writing, creative data visualization, digital literacy, and new materialist feminist rhetorical praxes, which took the form of #ConferenceCreatures. In addition, in 2025 the WIS boasted not one but two installations. Together, historians Amanda Seligman and Lillian Pachner reanimated successive years of live tweets by students in a UW-Milwaukee course dedicated to recovering and retelling the city’s history. Through their work, events such as the first official weather forecast in the US and the birth of Zero, a legendary polar bear, went live once again. In addition, Jasmine Rodriguez shared the first issue of “Mic Drop,” a newsletter about the transformative power of music, written and illustrated by incarcerated students at Stateville Correctional Center. Her installation showcased how creative work can foster communication across both real and metaphorical barriers.

No surprise, no one left WIS ‘25 hungry or empty handed. Instead, WIS ‘25 souvenirs included copies of The WIS Community Cookbook. With 34 recipes from symposium participants 2018-2025, our spiral bound book is the latest published manifestation of the WIS. It includes recipes for cocktails, kombucha, and coffee drinks; campus collaboration, blues harp, and humble pie; deviled eggs, salmon cakes, and anise animal cookies; stir fry tomato eggs, fried gizzards, and besan pinni. From “Chef’s Frosted Flakes Supreme” to “How to Make a COVID-19 Commemorative Quilt” and “Agnes’s ‘Nice’ Dinner,” our book captures both the spirit of the WIS community and some of the many, many ways that writing nourishes and sustains us all.

If your curiosity or your appetite is piqued, join us for WIS ‘26. Our theme, artifact, invites prospective participants to think about how writing triangulates with art and facts, and special features will include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals for flashtalks, workshops, posters, displays, and installations as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; recorded sparks and flares are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026.

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.