CYNTHIA SELFE

CYNTHIA L. SELFE is, in her words, "blissfully retired." A former humanities distinguished professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University and founder and previous co-editor of Computers and Composition: An International Journal, Selfe has a prolific publishing record. To date she has published both print and digital form, four single authored books, a co-authored book, ten edited collections, nineteen book chapters, and sixty-five journal articles. In 2007, Selfe co-founded the Computers and Composition Digital Press.

Selfe has served as the chair of the national Conference on College Composition and Communication and the chair of the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English and held a variety of administrative roles. In 2014, Selfe won the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Exemplar Award.

Selfe began her career at Michigan Technological University, a science and engineering focused institution of seven thousand students located in the Upper Peninsula, and worked there for twenty-four years before taking a position at Ohio State. Along the way, she taught courses in computers including Hypertext Theory and Computers and Writing, composition, scientific and technical communication, and literature, including a course titled Literature and Lore of the Upper Peninsula, among others. Over the course of her career, she has served in a variety of administrative positions including chair of the English Department and director of the writing center at Michigan Tech. Selfe's interview took place on May 19, 2013, in her office at Ohio State University.

christine: Why aren't we studying ourselves as writers? We've studied ourselves as teachers, we've studied ourselves as activists, as literate beings through the DALN [Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives], but when we're talking about our actual writing for publication, the stuff we need to do to keep our jobs, why aren't we talking about that?

cindy: I think it's a wonderful question. I think that part of the response there is that scholars of rhetoric and composition are supposed to be able to write. I think that's the expectation, that we have not only as writing our subject matter, our disciplinary subject matter and the subject matter that we teach, but that we have some facility with language itself and the writing of language and the articulation of ideas through written language as part of being a professor of rhetoric and composition.

christine: Agreed.

cindy: That said, while I believe that's an expectation, I don't think that's always a reality. In fact, I know colleagues struggle a great deal with composing and writing their scholarly work. I certainly do. I mean, I slog through my scholarly work. I only write when I get so uncomfortable with having to write, that I really have to get down to it, and once I get down to it it's not as awful as I remember it. But it is a slow, hard, slog through materials, collecting the materials, doing the research if I'm doing the research or finding the scholarly sources and then fitting them together in a way that makes sense to me, and then the way that makes sense to me is never the way that I know editors are going to like it so I have to adapt it to my audience, my editorial audience, my audience of colleagues.

christine: I see.

cindy: To complicate that, I guess I have gotten dissatisfied with alphabetic writing as a venue for that kind of articulation. I've really have gotten dissatisfied with the flatness of alphabetic writing and so now I can't even start writing until I also start thinking of how it's going to look, what is the design going to be. What's the platform in which I'm going to explore these ideas? Is it going to be a web based text or a Prezi, or is it going to be a blog or comic? Not only the medium, but the modalities of expression and the genre are dimensions I have to figure out in terms of the composing that I do. So composing is not an easy task for me.

christine: Even now.

cindy: Especially now. Especially now because there are so many more choices and expectations of course, both mine and people who read the work that I do. There are a lot of layers to consider.

christine: Can you give an example?

cindy: I was composing a presentation for the Computers and Writing conference about sound. I had to figure out not only how I was going to compose the alphabetic portion of the presentation but also how I was going to present that presentation using Keynote or PowerPoint. Then I had to identify how I was going to show some video clips. And then I had to think about how I was going to caption those video clips to make sure that they were accessible.

christine: There are multiple issues with invention here.

cindy: Then part of the talk was about an audio portion of those video clips so I had to figure out how to use a program that did a screen capture of the .wav form as it played and highlighted specific parts of that .wav form as it played so that the sound, the video, the attention to the specific points of the .wav form would be evident for the audience while I did the talking. That layering of semiotic channels for the kinds of concepts I want to convey when I write are becoming more complex. For that reason, I think that composition is both more interesting and more challenging.

christine: I was looking at some of your recent work on sound, and I did find it sort of ironic that this really cool piece ["The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing"] was out there, the one you just did in one of our flagship journals; it's such a cool piece ...

cindy: It's all in print.

christine: It's all in print. Because it was a sound piece as a reader I expected voice. Somehow you did manage to convey that audio aspect in print, but there is a challenge ...

cindy: ... The challenge was when that piece was put in our flagship journal, the three C's [College Composition and Communication] ...

christine: Three C's, let's mention it.

cindy: Right, let's mention it, three C's! That was before they had an online presence and one of the things that I told the editors was that I can write this piece about sound but readers would have to go to the sound pieces themselves in order to listen to them in order to understand what I'm saying about this piece. We had to come up with a very strange solution by writing about sound and then linking to online...