June 10 Last Day of Camp

I wrote 1700 words toward an essay about the indoor pool as an unnatural place and experience and contrasted it with the Lake as a possibly more natural place.  It's a little clunky and too long, so I'll print it off and read it aloud today to edit it. 

To prepare for the interview of  one of President Wilson's PR guys on Tuesday, I will write up questions for him. 

I will respond to one of my previous interviewees, David Hamilton, Professor Emeritus in English, who wrote back to me after I asked him if he remembered the Ryan Report of 1979. He didn't. He's one of the few faculty still alive who can remember something about the period I'm studying-- 1979 to 1984--and one of the few UI faculty members who was not only interested in Writing across the Curriculum, but taught a WAC course called Writing for Biologists and published articles about it, and conducted WAC workshops at the University of Southern Alabama. 

 June 9 

Goals for today:

I am switching back to creative writing to write an essay on an unnatural place--that is, the places where most of us spend most of our time (unless we are forest rangers): e.g., climate controlled buildings like EPB where the windows don't even open, which means they are too hot in the winter and require employees to bring fans, and too cold in the summer requiring us to bundle up in sweaters and hoodies.  I'm going to write about the indoor pool where I swim and maybe contrast it with where I want to swim once I develop enough stamina--with the I-Cows at Lake McBride. Let's face it: swimming laps in a chlorinated pool is a highly unnatural experience. 

 June 8 

Today's goal: To continue working on organizing docs for a time line.

For the third WAC moment, I am still organizing all the emails and documents into a timeline from Feb 2020 until August 2021 for a time line. I'm realizing that were the following key events from my point of view: 

 1) The acceptance by CLAS of 5 Writing University pre-proposals of very different proposals and proposers, tasked by CLAS to work together on a Mega-proposal for the P3; 

2) The formation of an Obermann Writing University working group composed of the 5 proposing teams to put together that megaproposal; 

3) The surprise of finding out another parallel committee was tasked by the Provost with the same writing/communication mission as ours: the Writing and Communications Committee 

4) Getting myself and other Rhetoric people on that committee; repurposing the Obermann Working Group to focus only on Teaching with Writing across the Curriculum, finding out about Minnesota's program, etc.

5) The second surprise of finding out that there was no source of funding from the Provost's Office for that Writing and Communication committee's proposals and that the only funding available was P3 funding;

6) Working with Rhetoric faculty and CLAS and the rest of the Writing and Communications Committee to put together the P3 proposal, believing what they told us that anything we put together would be accepted.

7) Finding out that the P3 Writing and Communication Proposal was rejected but not finding out why, except that it was rushed and didn't have enough metrics for measuring success.   

 June 7  

Assessment of yesterday's goals and today's goal

I read through the brief case of papers related to our place for my essay and was moved and overwhelmed by the last section before ours of the abstract for the property detailing how the previous owners couldn't pay the mortgage or the bills and had to turn it back to the bank.  I had only briefly summarized what happened in 2 sentences in the short version of the essay.

I had a good session at the archives and wrote up what I learned to my colleague who also does archival research on writing instruction. I emailed one of the few people on the 1979 committee who is still alive to get his perspective. 

Today's goals and assessment: I read and printed out earlier emails from the more recent 2020--present moment, again exhausting and started a timeline. 

 June 6

Assessment of goals for June 3 and goals for today: 

Friday I wrote a decent draft about a Natural Place (where I live) although it was more than 1500 words so I worked on cutting it over the weekend.  I know this is the piece I'll want to build on for my final essay, so today I'm going to read a stack of papers pertaining to our property, especially the abstract to see what would be pertinenrt and enlightening to include in the longer version. I'm going to turn my camera off and read the abstracts in a more comfortable place in my study.  

I'm going to the archives again this afternoon to get more material for my historical project. The archives unfortunately are only open until 4:00.  I realized how I need hours in the archive to make sense of the historical moment I'm interested in: the year 1979 in the General Education Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. That is why I've been spending more time on creative writing. 

 June 3

Assessment of yesterday's goals and goals for today:

I finished the revision of the creative piece (which turned out to be a different pice of writing) and emailed my 2800 words of writing to the course instructor, who said she liked it more than the first piece. 

The topic of yesterday's class was the natural environment. She gave us a prompt for 1500 words for next week:  a personal story we tell that involves nature.  This morning, I started writing about moving from Chicago to rural Iowa and plan to get as much written as possible.  We need to finish and send it by Tuesday so we can read the stories of two other members of the class and give them feedback. 

 June 2

Assessment of yesterday's goals and goals for today: I read and took notes on my chapter and worked on revising my essay to highlight place as a character and include scenes, but in emphasizing the setting (Chicago), it started out long before the events of the previous writing--i.e., when I moved there, so it's starting to be a different piece of writing.  I'll see where it leads me today and maybe it will link up with the previous writing, maybe not. My goals for today are to work exclusively on that creative piece because I spent all yesterday afternoon researching for my academic project.

My visit to University Archives yesterday was successful in that after a half hour with the staff, they found the box that contained the Ryan Report I was looking for, although the finished draft was a yellowed copy of FYI (what is now Iowa Now). So I scanned key pages of a rough draft.  Because it was pre-computer, the rough draft was full of typos and pencil markings. I thought that the content of the Speech, Writing, and Writing in the Major sections would be different in content and language in the final version, but it wasn't.  The content was fascinating. 

I need to go back and copy the report of the Speech and Writing sub committee because they did an amazing survey similar to our recent survey except they surveyed departments rather than faculty, which actually makes more sense.

I'm realizing that there were two writing events in 1979-80 so maybe my article just wants to focus on those because the two projects (the NEH Seminars and the Ryan GER committee) were very different and never came together, although one English professor, Richard, Lloyd-Jones was part of both endeavors. 

 Tuesday, June 1

Assessment of yesterday's goals and implications for today's goals:  

I got 2 of those 3 chapters read and took notes on them, but then I received by email a draft of a conference proposal from my research team that I had to give feedback on (it's due today!) that took up half the camp time, so I will read and take notes on the third chapter today.

I spend hours last night printing out emails related to recent committee meetings about writing across the curriculum from 2020 and 2021.  It was exhausting to read them and made me realize how difficult it will be to explain the chaos and confusion of meeting- and proposal-mania to outsiders. I don't want to do more of that printing out today, but maybe I can put the emails in chronological order. I did put them in their own folder.

I worked on my creative writing this morning and need to revise a narrative so that place is prominent and the narrative is organized in place-driven scenes, so I will do that after I finish reading and taking notes on my chapter.  

I'm going to the archives in Special Collections in the Main Library today, which is exciting for me.  I hope I can find the committee report by Marleigh Ryan that I need. I will also pick up a folder of materials from an English professors, Carl Klaus, recently deceased, that my colleague lent me related to the 1979-80 NEH seminars. The plan would be to look at those materials tomorrow.