institutional support

Do you have institutional support for the journal, or is it something that you have to work at on the side?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

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

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

n u t s  &  b o l t s

r e c e n t
&  f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g  s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
&  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
&  e d i t i n g

e t h i c s  &  v o i c e

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 Well, we have gotten good support—in spirit, if not necessarily in pocketbook. But the university did definitely support us as much as they could. As far as a stipend or anything like that, that really isn’t something that the university provides. 

The department is very supportive, covering a lot of our internal costs in terms of mailing and postage, and picking up some advertising, marketing, and copy costs—things like that. So it really is a very supportive environment in terms of the department. It’d be nice to have some release time or support staff dedicated just to the journal, but it’s not in the budget right now.

I think at one point we had a deal with a local publisher where they donated the production as a gift. That really made a big impact on our bottom line. 

Eric Schroeder: Originally, the reason we started Writing on the Edge was that we were trying to get out of work. The great irony is that we ended up creating so much more work for all of us. For many years at Davis, we had been on a six course load over a year, that is, 2-2-2 on a quarter system. When we unionized, the university decided that one way it was going to punish us was to raise our load and give us an extra course one quarter. Given the nature of what we do, two courses is pretty intensive. We found out very quickly that the third course was very, very difficult. You just didn’t have a life. You taught your classes and you were grading papers every week for seventy five people. 

We were trying to come up with a scheme for release time and that scheme was like an old Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland movie, “Let’s start a journal and they’ll give us some release time to do this.” Brian Connery, John Boe, and me started it up and of course we didn’t have any release time that first year. Our thinking was “Well, if we’re successful, we’ll get some someday.”

I think over the course of fifteen years or so, John has had one quarter release, and I’ve had none. That dream never really panned out.


Cross-Conversations on Writing, Interviewing, and Editing:
A Meta-Interview with Wade Mahon & Eric Schroeder

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 10.1 (2005)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/