Cooking and Composing?

What is about writing and writing research that makes people want to talk about "cooking"? Are we in the feminized composition kitchen?

Peter Elbow once famously likened writing to cooking. Victor Villaneuva begins the "Preface to the First Edition" of _Cross-talk_ with a discussion of making healthy pancakes for his children. I know Victor knows how to cook because he has moonlighted as a short order cook to supplement his once-inadequate professor's salary when he was at Northern Arizona University. He talks about this in his book _Bootstraps_. In the Preface to _Cross-talk_the egg added the touch of leavening needed for the pancake, and Villaneuva modified his cooking process, adjusting it to a more successful result. He did so because he had an "understanding of how eggs work in cooking." He "understood the theory." But many of us who teach writing don't understand the theory. We're busy mixing and matching theories with wild abandon, so that we end up in interview rooms, saying that we are Marxists who align ourselves with Peter Elbow and Ken Bruffee (xiv). We end up not being able to navigate composition's "currents," as Villaneuva puts it. _Cross-talk_ is intended as a guide for those us who teach graduate courses in comp theory, those of us who take those courses, and those of us who have taught comp for a long time and want a refresher (xiv). The book is dedicated to Sam and Tom, two graduate students, and all other graduate students, the users of the book, who have commented on the book's inner workings and logic.

To get back to the pancake/cooking metaphor, through reading this book, we "should be able to come up with quite the pancake recipe, something you [we] can swallow" (xiv).

We get a perspective in this volume, but we don't get a single-point of view. Villaneuva lets us know all the things he has left out in the first edition and all the things he added to address those omissions in the second edition. We get the "Son of Cross-Talk" (hey Victor, what about "Daughter" of Cross-Talk") who has more to say about writers of color, feminists, technology studies, and service learning among others.

I think this is a damn good book, a very useful overview without a lot of apparatus bells and whistles. The sections are set up around the conversation metaphor, with the idea of talk anchoring all of the segments.

The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process
Talking in Terms of Discourse
Scientific Talk: Developmental Schemas
Talking about Writing in Society
Talking about Selves and Schools: Voice, Voices, and Other Voices
Continuing the Conversation

These are broad rubrics with diverse essays housed within. The conversation begins with writing process, which locates composition history in the mid-twentieth century instead of the 19th century or earlier. This locates the reader more in our current historical moment--modern comp studies.

The "given" in the conversation is the writing process. I don't know if it is still the given. Perhaps it functions as the "given" to react against now with the "post-process" movement? But here goes to try to give an overview of the Villanueva overview. In short, the writing process history is narrated briefly and succinctly:

1959: "the National Academy of Sciences sponsored the Woods Hole Conference" with Jerome Bruner at the helm. There was a shift "for all schooling to a process of cognitive development. 'Process' became the new catchword" (1).

1963: Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer call for research on writing (not just product or pedagogy) itself in their book _Research in Written Composition_.

1966: The Dartmouth Conference where "fifty teachers of English from England and the United States met to discuss common problems" (1). The Yanks discovered that the Brits taught writing as "individual development, a matter of self-discovery" (1).

1971: Janet Emig answers the "call" issued by Braddock et al by studying the composing processes of eight twelfth graders.

We're reading Emig's call this week and blogging the chapters, but there were other calls as well: Perl, Murray, Sommers, Lunsford and Ede, Kaustman Breuch, even Ong (?). Where's Elbow?

But what is the backdrop for this interest in process?

Politics?
Social movements?
Art and literature?

Here is a quick speculation: The U.N. with a focus on negotiating and international responsibility for global affairs. The process of global diplomacy.
Civil rights, feminism, gay rights, human rights: all have highly process-oriented components
Art and literature, the avant garde, experimental film, stream of consciousness in fiction, etc
Progressive educational theory stemming from John Dewey's idea of "experience as education" and even earlier notions
Psychological theories that emphasize process-oriented therapies and theories

I think there is much more to say about why process is a "given."

Tom has just informed me is turning off the power to fix an outlet, so I must sign off now as I have no computer battery (it has been recalled).