Another Word

I remember very clearly my flight back from the 2016 DLF Forum. I had presented with Mackenzie Brooks on open writing for Small Liberal Arts Colleges. My Facebook feed was full of photos of people voting in the US presidential election. Long lines. People putting one foot in front of another to vote. I flew back home on election night, and I remember the strange way that people in the airport started gathering around the television watching what was happening. Normally, people kept to themselves. That night, the anxiety in the air was palpable. As was the growing excitement (DLF, after all, was in Wisconsin that year). I remember the panic I felt flying and not knowing what would wait for me when we landed. When I got in my car and turned on NPR in a rush at 2:00 AM I first heard the results. I remember not being able to sleep.

In 2024, history rhymed. Conference week? Check. The ACH conference was the week of the election, and for months we had all wondered what the environment would feel like in the aftermath. We found out. Election results that were unexpected and, yet, all too expected? Check. At least this time I wasn’t on a flight: I could climb under the covers in my pajamas between sessions of the online conference.

I wrote both of my talks for this month’s ACH conference when Trump was just a second candidate. I helped to coordinate a workshop on articulating and defending the values at the core of your work with a whole raft of brilliant folks: Amanda Visconti, Caitlin Pollock, Pamella Lach, Kate Ozment, and Crystal Luo. Later that night, I gave a paper on speculative digital pedagogies with Seanna Viechweg, where we talked about the pasts, presents, and futures of imagination in the DH classroom. All of this work felt suddenly more urgent than ever. But I gave these talks in a stupor. As I spoke about advocacy and values I could not help but wonder about the limits and reaches of certain types of power. As I discussed the imagination and the future, I could not stop thinking about the past.

Did I still believe in what I was saying?

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was eight years ago and where I am today. I’ve been at the Scholars’ Lab seven and a half years—roughly the span of the first Trump and the Biden presidencies. In that time, I have supervised dozens of students on a variety of projects. I have comforted them as they cried. Helped find them funding to survive. Worked to prepare them for and find them jobs. Advocated for them in spaces large and small. Organized alongside them in our wall-to-wall union. For some, this work helped. For others, it did not, and I remember every person for whom something didn’t pan out. I’ve learned hard lessons about the limits of my own ability to change things, and at times I’ve described the work as trying to steer a yacht through an obstacle course. You can correct the course slightly, but only so much. I’ve hit lots of buoys.

I believe in this work. I believe it has mattered. But eight years later I will confess to questioning a lot of its power. The words I was about to read to a digital space filled with other dazed people, all zooming in from their own rooms. They felt so small and insignificant. What good were my little words in the face of a country filled with hate, ready to visit and revisit new horrors on its population and on the world?

I recognize my own positionality. I am a cis white man with a comfortable job and salary. I do not face the same dangers to my bodily, financial, and political autonomy as so many who are most likely to be impacted by the new administration. Even so, I have so much fear. For my son’s future in a vaccine-skeptical world. For my LGBTQ friends and family who are worried about access to life-saving medication or the freedom to exist. For the immigrants in my life who are scared for their safety. My own anxieties and fears are a drop in the ocean, much wider and more vast.

As I was searching around for meaning and energy in the days following the election, I came across a few lights that I’ve been clinging to. As Josh Rezek posted on BlueSky, “Writing is part of surviving this! Your own and everyone else’s!” And my dear friend and collaborator Amanda Visconti shared a post by Brian LaRossa containing “a short thread full of words from people who are smarter than me about the vital role that artists play in society generally, and doubly so in the face of authoritarian regimes.” I don’t have any illusions that my own writing is as important or radical as the pieces linked in that thread. Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin. These are real heroes. I should be so lucky as to write anything a scrap as meaningful as what they produced. But these examples are helping me think less about where I was eight years in the past and more about where I want to be in the future. About the writer, teacher, and advocate that I want to continue growing into. And those heroes exist in the present, too, closer to home. Some of the most helpful conversations I have had in the week since the election have been with a pair of brilliant students with whom I share a DH writing group. They are more committed than ever to the pursuit of a better world. They teach me, as always, how to be better and how to help. And the work they produced these past few weeks moved me to tears (though I am a softy, to be fair).

By complete and total happenstance this is my hundredth post on my personal blog. Lots of little words. This post, then, is less a statement for others than it is for myself. A commitment to keep going in the face of fear. To keep growing. I will keep recognizing the limits of words and work to act beyond them. But I will also try to hold in my heart the belief that words carry power. So a week after the election and a bit better rested here I am. Putting one word after another. And recommitting myself to the regular practice of doing so.