Hello! Welcome to “Trying on Ideas,” a new site I’m developing to post my work-in-progress. Not whole articles or chapters–just ideas as they’re percolating and coming to the surface on a number of current projects. I hope that the segments might pique your interest, encouraging you to respond with connections, ideas, sources, or your own “take” on the ideas I’m “trying on.” Simply click on a post title under “Recent Posts” (just to the right) to view what I’ve been writing and sharing. If you want to read them in the order in which I composed them, start with the post on the bottom and work your way up.
The idea for “Trying on Ideas” came to me several weeks ago when I was listening to an NPR segment on Andy Weir while walking Annie (one of our English bulldogs) at Scioto-Audubon Park. As Weir was composing The Martian, he posted drafts on his website, Andy Weir. Tens of thousands of people visited the site, reading the work–and many commenting on the accuracy of the science. It wasn’t exactly crowd-sourcing the content, but Weir found the process exhilerating, noting that (as NPR reported), his “supernerd readers pushed his realism even further. Whenever he made a mistake, they let him know. And because the book was initially posted online, he could easily rewrite it to make it right.”
It occurred to me that it might be an interesting experiment for me, posting portions of articles, presentations, or book chapters that I’m working on–to set ideas out there for other scholars to see and comment on. I know that in academia it can be risky to post work-in-progress as I’m proposing. We worry about having our ideas co-opted, copied, stolen–and we worry about the possible backlash of setting out ideas that haven’t been vetted by colleagues, editors, publishers. I understand. But, I’m at a point in my career (a tenured associate professor) at which I can absorb the risk–especially when I know that the rewards of engaging with colleagues are so great.
Let me explain a bit about the title I’ve chosen. The title “Trying on Ideas” is inspired in part by a recent post I came across on Careershifters.com: “How ‘Trying On’ New Ideas Could Help You Find Your Ideal Career.” The gist of that article for my purposes is this: Trying on ideas, “fleshing them out,” can help us get “unstuck” from our usual way of thinking, of turning down ideas before we’ve given them a chance.
So, this blog, “Trying on Ideas,” is my way of keeping ideas in play, checking them out, giving them a chance.
The title (and the entire process of what I’m proposing) is also indebted to the work of Donald Murray, a pioneer in the writing process movement, who reminds me, always that writing is messy, difficult, surprising, and ultimately rewarding. It also owes a kind of philosophical debt the work of Hannah Arendt (introduced to so many of us in composition studies by John Ruszkiewicz and Andrea Lunsford, in their textbook The Presence of Others).
So, I embark on this project, keeping in mind that quotation from Arendt: “For excellence, the presence of others is always required.”
I hope you’ll consider joining me as I begin posting. My first topic–introducing portions of my upcoming presentation at the 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Tempe–appears on the right hand menu, just above. It’s entitled “A Peripheral Methodology.”