A Writer's Studio Event:
A Conversation with Victor Villanueva
Rebekah Shultz Colby

While interviewed by Kelli Custer and Jennifer Campbell, Victor characterized his own writing process as constipation and flow. He said that he tends to write first in long, bombastic sentences, and when he goes back to revise, he breaks them up. Even though his writing often uses many different voices using first and third interchangeably while mixing in poetry, narrative, and rhetorical theory he does not seem to have a specific technique for how he weaves all this together. Rather he decides to interject another voice when he gets bored with it.

He described all writing as craft, saying that writing becomes art only when someone else comes along later and decides to call it art. So, in his teaching, he emphasizes that writing is a craft a craft which compositionists have begun to learn a little bit about, although in an admittedly limited sense, and he tries to impart what compositionists have learned about writing to his students. He also entreats his class to actively engage in research on their own writing process. For instance, he has them utilize Linda Flowers and John Hayes talk-aloud-protocol to investigate their own writing process. He argued that students need to be taught writing theory that they should be treated as college-going adults who are capable of reading Aristotle and Jim Corbetts treatises on rhetoric. However, students also need to learn how this theory can actually apply to their own writing and improve it.

His biggest lament about the field of composition is that it has allowed WAC to become the hand-servant of other disciplines passing along to other disciplines knowledge of what good writing is without educating other disciplines about what compositionists have actually learned about writing. In other words, as a discipline, Victor argued that compositionists should go back to what they were planning on doing originally when they first conceived of WAC educating other disciplines and helping them to reconceive of writing in more constructive ways.

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