A Conversation with Cheryl Glenn:
A Writer's Studio Event
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Jennifer Novak: What research are you doing now?
Most of the work Glenn's doing now is related to work with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). She warned, If you ever decide to become a chair of CCCCs, do away with any other part of your life. It takes a lot out of my research time. Right now she is working on a textbook, The Harbrace Guide to Writing, which has four sections: a rhetoric, some readings, a research guide, and a handbook. However, right now she is also mentoring graduate teachers who are new to teaching composition, adding that it is important to composition to have a commitment to pedagogy.
As far as research, right now she is working in the archives, gathering ideas for doing historiography, explaining that history doesnt exist without the without the graphy. History and historiography are not the same thing. Historiography is more representative of the rhetorics in play. Currently she is working on improving methodologies in rhetorical studies, saying that we have great methodologies for studying composition that we can improve upon, but we need to go beyond just reading rhetoric. In rhetorical studies, the methodologies are murky. However, in oral, field history, its different. Many different types of studies have already been done, so there is a lot more to work with.

Another research goal she is currently working on is to leverage rhetorical work with identity studies to improve rhetoric. Rhetoric is a conservative discipline, more conservative even than philosophy. For instance, philosophy has done quite a bit of work with feminism, while rhetoric has just gotten started. So, she would like to use the rich work done in other disciplines on identity politics and apply it to rhetoric. Identity politics is difficult to research, but theres so much more to do. In particular, we need to pay more attention to rhetorical performances in other groups disabled as well as cultural, ethnic groups for instance.

Rebekah Shultz Colby: After reading Commanding Silence in Unspoken, an ethnographic-based study of Native Americans and their use of silence, I wondered what you think are the affordances and constraints of doing this type of interview-based research within the field of rhet/comp?
Glenn explained that she was replicating a 1973 study done by Kenneth Basso, in which he didnt quote or name anyone. So, instead, she wanted to do ethical ethnography. She wanted her participants to speak for themselves. She sent the transcripts of her interviews to participants. She interviewed 50 people, and it took over four years to build relationships with them. She never interviewed her participants on the first visit and never paid them. She became acquainted with most of her participants through a network of friends and relatives. When interviewing on the reservation, she never introduced herself as an English professor and always wore jeans and a T-shirt just like them. Consequently, some of her participants felt comfortable enough to use non-standard English in their interviews.

How did you get started on your rhetorical work with silence?
She was inspired to start exploring the rhetoric of silence because her husband is a slow talker. Once he didnt get a job because they thought he was too silent for the job. Glenn started with a grammar of silence, examining silence poetically, socially, and politically. Then she examined the genderedness of silence with Anita Hill and Lani Guinier. While engaging in this research, she was struck by the fact that everything she was reading was about Indians who were silent, so she decided to replicate the Basso study to see if his 10 assertions about Indian silence were correct. In her book, she called them Indians because thats what they wanted her to call them. It was four years of going out there to the reservation and chatting to build trust. They asked, Are you an anthropologist? Are you gonna pay me? And she would say no. She couldnt go in there as a superior being or as an anthropologist. She didnt want to interview someone and make them feel bad. Its important to make people feel like they are not being interviewed down.

Doug Hesse: Do you have any advice for young researchers starting out who are interested in pursuing ethnographic types of research?
Glenn explained that ethnographic research is possible for young researchers if they dont have to buy a plane ticket. While conducting interviews for Commanding Silence, she would fly out to reservations in the Southwest three or four times a year. Consequently, young researchers need to live within the same proximity of their participants and have fairly easy access to these populations.

Geoffrey Bateman: How do you make other texts work within a writing class?
Glenn starts off every class having students draw from two or three things they know for sure about the topic of the class. In a writing class, students can draw from their personal experience with writing. She often uses Toni Morrisons Sight of Memory in which she writes that the only truth is in literature. Facts dont need people. About the reading, she tells her students, I dont care if you like it or not. It is what it is. What can you take from it?

John Tiedmann: How does your rhetorical research inform your handbook / textbook?
While she writes her textbook, she thinks about the rhetorical situation. For instance, she understands the critiques about exigency, whether the writer creates it or is simply responding to an external situation, but in the end she says she doesnt care: everyone simply needs a reason to write. She explained further that there is always a reason for silence as well. What is appropriate to say and what is appropriate to leave unsaid? We always need an audience and a purpose to write. Even grammar and mechanics are situational. So many people judge others based on small grammar mistakes. A handbook lists the rules for standardized English; however, standardized English isnt always appropriate. So many people make judgments about writers based on a small corpus of knowledge.

Jeff Ludwig: Where is CCCC headed?
Glenn laughed and said that CCCC has the oldest and whitest membership; it needs to work on diversity. We need to have a bigger voice in state legislation. We need to find a way to coalesce to face down educational challenges in the political sphere. She said that many university professors, particularly in Ivy League institutions, think that educational policies such as No Child Left Behind will not affect them. However, this is only a matter of time. In 20 years, if current policies continue, the CCCCs community might not be in charge of college writing. We have to decide who knows the most about writing and find a way to reclaim that public trust. Weve lost open admissions. With English only laws, we have lost student rights to their own language. Language is legislated.

Jennifer Novak: What lessons have you learned from your research process?
She did twice as much research on women rhetoricians for Rhetoric Retold. Ed Corbett once told her that he hoped she didnt find anything about women rhetoricians at all. She also learned to send early drafts to people and ask for help. For instance, in researching Aspasia, she sent drafts to Corbett, George Kennedy, and Richard Enos. They would all point her to more good research to help her. She also learned that when she did this, she would get her draft back, and her writing wasnt perfect. However, she struggled through it and persevered. Corbett did later apologize for rhetorics historical sexism during her presentation about Aspasia at CCCC. She learned that revision is a lot of hard work. We can only read and write through our own terministic screens, so we need to share our writing and work together. The process of writing is never easy. Even when she finally got published [in College Composition and Communication] and even won acclaim for it, the glory didnt last. The acclaim passes all too quickly and nothing lasts forever.

Rebekah Shultz Colby: What inspired you to write about Aspasia, since, as you write in the after word of your Braddock award winning essay, sex, lies, and manuscript, no one previously had done any work with women and rhetoric it simply didnt exist in the 80s?
She explained that she started out studying sociolinguistics. However, she didnt like one of her professors, so she started taking rhetoric classes and fell in love with them. She was in the same class as Krista Ratcliffe and some other women, and they simply saw no place for themselves within the profession of rhetoric. I needed to find some women in this field. Cindy Selfe had written a paper on Aspasia for James Kinneavy. It was only seven pages long because she could find so little research on Aspasia. Selfe had submitted the paper to CCC, but Corbett wouldnt publish it. So, after hearing that Glenn was interested in researching female rhetoricians, Selfe sent Glenn her paper, saying, Maybe you can do something with this.

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