Dr. Geller asked if there was anything we needed to talk about at the start of class. One question — Should we have read the entire Alexander and Weems book for tonight? — led to the possibility we might adjust the semester’s reading schedule. Leah offered a reflection on the relationship of this week’s reading to last week’s discussion of Foucault and Barthes and a suggestion — we could have started last week with Alexander and Weems’ Chapter 4 as a way into the discussion of all three texts. Leah offered this quote: ” With a recognition that each piece is written in ways that are both particular and plural: particular to the experiences of the coauthors in dialogical play with each other, and plural relative to the experiences with which diverse readers might enter or recognize themselves or others” (46).

This week Dr. Geller began her usual practice of running her ideas for class by some students before class — thank you Heaven and Matthew. We started with a conversation of when anyone in class had co-authored or co-written with others and talked about what those experiences. Then, Dr. Geller introduced the idea of writing collaboratively in pairs about the first four chapters of Collaborative Spirit Writing and and Performance in Everyday Black Lives. Each pair would discuss how they planned to compose, would focus on the ideas of the first four chapters of the book and what the co-authors tell us about how to read the book, and would reflect on the experience of co-composing and bring all of that back to the big group. Groups: Rachel, Cynthia, Will | Pete and Liz | Cody and Heaven | Leah and Andrew | Michelle and Matthew.

When we came back around 6pm, we shared from these — the process of deciding how to compose, composing, reflection on the experience. There was a wide range of experiences co-composing, a wide range of co-composing practices, and a wide range of types of texts composed (from handwritten exchanged back and forth to notes taken while talking, to two texts written separately after talking merged to a paragraph to two different poems built from words from the same paragraph with a co-written ending/coda to to texts composed together in a Google doc). There was quite a bit of talk about the feeling (physical, emotional, intellectual) of this co-composing and its relationship to the notion of authorship as individual. Some talked from their writing, some read their writing. We asked questions in class like: Are teachers co-authors? Are editors co-authors? Are writing center staff co-authors?

For the rest of class we talked as a large group about the first four chapters of this book — much of this will likely come up again (in a good way!) when we talk about the rest of the book next week. Feel free to add anything in comments about the writing or the conversation. I put a folder in the Google Drive folder for the texts composed collaboratively in class on September 14th if anyone would like to put their writing there. You should be able to upload photos of handwriting or share a Google doc there.

We did decide to push the whole semester’s reading schedule one week forward (and Dr. Geller will change that in the schedule here and in Google Drive), so we will finish reading all of Collaborative Spirit Writing and and Performance in Everyday Black Lives for Thursday, September 21st. FYI: Many of the chapters in the later part of the book are quite short (2 to 4 to 6 pages), so it’s possible to read the rest of the text across the week in short bits of time here and there.

Have a good week! Email with any questions. And again, feel free to leave comments to this recap adding/revising anything.