Musings from a "Border-dweller"

Of the three articles this week, I found Stephen Westbrook’s “Visual Rhetoric in a Culture of Fear: Impediments to Multimedia Production” to be particularly intriguing, especially since I have been affectionately defined as a “border-dweller” within the academy (also known as a creative writer who enters composition studies and attempts to find how the two fields might inform each other). After Westbrook’s discussion of the conforming nature of creative writing genres, “the big four” (fiction, poetry, drama and creative nonfiction) as it were, I had a sense of absolute déjà vu; I was effectively transplanted back into my undergraduate workshops where we were asked to look at some static image, ascertain some sort of apparent and deeper subject embedded within the image, and then attempt to write metaphorically about what we saw. Westbrook talks about this process extensively when he states that “…most of creative writing’s pedagogical materials, tend to require students to respond to visual art by conforming to the print genres…The dominance of these genres…leads to a positioning of students as primarily readers and interpreters of the visual, who use their writing practices not to combine images and words in their own texts but rather to compose strictly verbal texts” (467 – 468). At the time (and up until about a year ago when I was exposed to “flash poetry”), I didn’t really question this privileging of print; in fact, most (if not all) of my creative writing professors placed a strong emphasis on appearing in print and often snuffed at online periodicals, web-based literary journals, ezines, etc. that published poetry or fiction as the stuff of amateurs or hacks. Like the little lemming that I was back then, I blindly believed them without realizing that many online creative writing outlets are just as stringent (and, in many cases, more so) in terms of their review process and submission guidelines (for example, The Cortland Review), but I digress.

Westbrook has shown me another parallel between composition and creative writing that bears further exploration while simultaneously helping to erode my preconceived notions of what can be considered creative writing, what obstacles students in both fields face in terms of multimedia/multimodal works, and what we as educators have to navigate through – i.e. our fears and expectations in the classroom when we work with visual rhetoric (more on that next time…).