community-building and mentoring

Here we use "community" mainly in broad terms (e.g.,  "we who count ourselves scholars and teachers of writing.")

An interview can-—though there is no guarantee that it will-—show that scholars are also human beings with actual lives and personalities and are not disembodied heads containing nothing but academic jargon. Depending on the questions asked by interviewers, we can catch a glimpse of the thought processes and experiences and personal mentoring that went in to the construction of a person's views, and not just their statements as published finished products. 

An interview can reveal that a scholar's published material is often only one stage in a longer process of wrestling with ideas; sometimes we learn that what people thought at the beginning of their careers changes quite a bit over time. This intellectual history (how the person got started, who their influences were, how their ideas changed over time, etc.) is one thing, I think, we try to get at in an interview because it helps us to see the interviewee as a human being engaging in the same kind of work that we all are doing to a certain extent.

One thing that I find interesting along these lines is that most of these very busy scholars whom we interview are very willing to give interviews, which suggests that they see an interview as an important part of community building. They seem to approach the interview as a way to share their professional "stories" with colleagues in much the same way that they approach sharing their research in published books and articles-—it's all part of contributing to the discourse of the profession.

The second form of access I think interviews provide is access to the history of our discipline(s). These "oral histories" help complement the more formal histories that are written. Especially in a relatively young field like composition studies, many of the interviews we do help track the growth of the discipline since many of the people we interview have careers that parallel the discipline itself. For instance, many of the compositionists or technical communication scholars or writing consultants we interview received their graduate school training in literature that on paper seems very different from the areas in which they made a name for themselves as scholars. A common theme in our interviews seems to follow the lines of "how did you go from studying Dream Visions in Chaucer's Poetry to publishing on collaborative writing in online environments?" This dynamic of our discipline's history is worth exploring, especially in the context of an interview that asks someone to tell their own story of how they got from point A on their vita to point B.

Eric Schroeder: Frankly a sense of community doesn't play much of a role in my work. The community that I work very closely with consists of two other people, my co-editors John Boe (with whom I often collaborate) and Marlene Clarke. The three of us read a lot of manuscripts, including interviews, and discuss their suitability for publication. With interviews, the criteria for publication is pretty simple and, I suppose, does involve a sense of the larger composition community: if the subject is a writer, does this person have enough of a national reputation that our readers will have heard of him or her? And with composition scholars/theorists the question is similar: is this someone who has make a significant contribution to the profession?

I realize that there is a notion of community implicit in what I'm doing, but not in a particularly altruistic sense-—I'm not necessarily trying to "build community" (you might start to get the sense that I'm uneasy with some of the clichés of the profession!), but I am trying to publish pieces that will have an appeal to our particular readers. I guess I see what I'm doing as practical and informative-—creating a base of knowledge that others can draw upon and learn from.

I rarely think of the larger world out there except in terms of how I’m going to structure the interview.  I want to start with this person, how this person first got interested in composition or writing or something like that.  I think in terms of a kind of structure for the interview, and in the back of my mind, with how readers are going to encounter it. But I don’t think about the term “community” in the way that we’ve come to talk about it in composition studies—that this work is going to reach all these people out there.

I guess one of the reasons that I shy away from describing what I do as "community building" is that as a journal editor, I get very little feedback on what I do. I'm constantly putting stuff out there but almost never hear anything back from readers. If I go to CCCC somebody might come up to me at the WOE booth, notice that I work for the journal, and say how much they like the journal. Or if I get an inquiry from a potential contributor wanting to know if I'm interested in an interview with somebody, they'll often begin by telling me what a big fan of the magazine they are. But it's extremely rare that someone will talk to me about a specific interview or article that I edited and we published. So because I see true community as a two-way street, I don't really think very consciously about this notion when I'm working as an interviewer and an editor.

On the other hand, when I do step back and look at what we have done over the years at Writing on the Edge, I realize that we have put a fairly large body of material out into the community of our readership and I'm proud of that fact.  

What about interviews functioning as a form of mentorship? That is, does the interviewee serve as a distant mentor to the readers of the publication?

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b a c k g r o u n d s

e a r l y  i n t e r e s t s

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j o u r n a l s

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  &  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

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g e n r e  &  m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
  &  c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

Wade Mahon:  Yes, I think mentorship is related to this idea of access. Just from my own personal experience as a younger scholar, I would say that that an interview can accomplish more in the area of mentorship than a published article. I've learned a lot about what professionals in my discipline do, how they think, how they piece together an academic career, what makes them successful, etc. 

I think that we want to learn from people's life experiences as well as from their formal arguments. This may be one reason why we look for potential interviewees who tend to be senior scholars who have a good deal of personal history to draw on (and when I say "senior scholars" I don't want to equate that with "senior citizens" since most of the people I'm referring to are still relatively young-—in case any of them might be reading this!).  

Do you think the interviews function more directly in a community building and/or mentorship capacity?   

Wade Mahon: Yes, I would agree that they do. They are the one “constant” from issue to issue that regular readers expect, and I suspect they are the one item in each issue that readers are most likely to read, if all the articles in that particular issue are not related to an individual reader’s main interests. Individual articles in a journal are often targeted at specific readers with common scholarly interests, and this probably applies even to an interdisciplinary journal like ours.  But I would think the interview could have some appeal to readers across disciplinary boundaries, even if the interviewee is a specialist in a field that some have little interest in. Of course, this is pure speculation.  

Eric Schroeder:  I can't really answer how interviews function in a mentoring capacity-—I do want them to have that effect. If you read an interview conducted by John Boe and me you'll find that it has a certain form, a certain rhythm that we build into it, intending to open up our subject to a reader who may not be familiar with him or her. I don't build the idea of "mentorship" per se into the form of the interview, but the interview is consciously designed to gradually open the subject up to the reader. 

For instance, you'll find that my interviews almost always start with my subject's early career as a writer or teacher so there's a way into the person through the subject's early history. And gradually I work towards what has defined the subject as a writer or a teacher. What is he or she best known for? The dance that I have to do constantly is negotiate the needs of a reader who knows little about the subject with the interests of someone who might know a great deal.