Re: CCCC Sessions

[cleveren@garnet.acns.fsu.edu (Carrie Leverenz)]

I agree with Katie that the best sessions I attended were out of doors with
my friends.  I felt guilty for awhile that I went to far fewer formal
sessions in Phoenix than I usually do, but then I thought about all the
mental work I was doing while friends helped me figure out why I feel
dissatisfied with my job and about the planning I did with my friend and
collaborator for turning our CCCCs paper into an article and about the
improvement I felt in my mood after a couple of hours in the sun, and well,
all of those "sessions" were pretty much on a par with the formal sessions I
attended.  Carrie

>> I can never get to as many sessions as I'd like to, and some of our 
>> colleagues had to miss the conference altogether.  Which conference 
>> sessions were the great ones?  Which were your favorites?  
>> 
>> Paula Gillespie
>
>Oh, Paula, I agree.  There were excellent sessions as always this year.
>My favorite, however, was an afternoon session Thursday focusing on
>expressive and experimental writing chaired by Wendy Bishop with Denise
>Stephenson (let's hear it for w.c. folks!), Diane Freedman, and Randi
>Browning.  Not only did the presenters in this roundtable group suggest
>cracking open traditional essay forms and traditional logical patterns of
>thinking with our students, but they also gave two other offerings:  1.
>they suggested that even scholarly research which moves beyond the sacred
>traditions of building an argument toward a certain definable conclusion
>be honored as valuable and necessary to advancing the field;  2.  they
>modeled a more associatively and conversationally linked set of papers
>weaving in and out of one another's parts.
>	I learned at this session that there are, indeed, others in our
>field who agree with the sentiments of Gary Snyder who once suggested that
>we will know we are really serious about certain political issues once we
>quit writing traditional essays about them and start launching poems as
>forms of persuasion and argumentation.
>			Katie Fischer
>p.s  But one session I liked even better was the one where the sun set and
>rose again on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon.  Does it strike anyone
>else on this list odd that we, teachers of writing of all things, shut
>ourselves up inside cubicles to discuss something as alive as teaching and
>writing and ignore the desert?  I wonder if next year at the Chicago C's
>any presenters might request a "lake site" from which to present?  If we
>do it for computers, can we do it for natural bodies of water?
>
>Back to work.
>
>
>
Carrie Shively Leverenz
Director, Reading/Writing Center
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1036
(904)644-5157
cleveren@garnet.acns.fsu.edu