A Letter to Jean Anyon

This is a letter in dialogue with and memory of Jean Anyon, whose students opened a "letters to Jean" blog in her memory last month.


Dear Jean,



I first read Radical Possibilities about seven years ago when I was teaching kindergarten at a public school in a large urban district. I have been rereading the same copy this week and found a bit of marginalia on the first page of chapter one: "Okay, schools are part of that [the proactive role of the federal government in maintaining poverty]. So do I subvert from the inside? Is that the only way? How long can I maintain?"


The question remains for me today, especially knowing that I taught in the public school classroom for only another year and a half after I wrote that note to myself. I wonder about the toll and possibility for teachers when the work of teaching feels and materially exists as so isolating and individual. I think that your message in Radical Possibilities for collectivity and public discourse are crucial to social change and it has left me wondering about the interplay between the narratives of teaching that are "on the airwaves" right now. I wonder about how to remake the idea of what teaching is to include an activist agenda.


Last week Steve Forbes wrote in his op-ed piece in the LA Times about the "heroic effort of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker" to diminish labor union rights. The article is titled, "Trampling the Rights of Teachers," and spins the unions as separate from and not supported by teachers. This is certainly the story of teacher unions I have long heard in the south. Here in North Carolina, a right to work [for less] state, the idea of collective action seems distant. And yet in other parts of the country labor union issues are alive. I am imagining that if the labor movement was really as dead as it sometimes appears, there would be no Steve Forbes articles hyping up anti-labor.



Just over a year ago the Chicago Teachers Union massive striking made the deal for a contract with pay raises and continued honoring of higher degrees and years of experience (and concessions for portions of teachers' evaluation to weigh student test scores per state law).




In the face of the current cuts to teacher pay in North Carolina, how is Chicago an image of possibility for teachers here? I wonder without labor unions what power is possible in our Moral Monday protests?


At the end of the Chicago strike Mayor Rahm Emmanuel said, "“This settlement is an honest compromise. It means returning our schools to their primary purpose: the education of our children.” I wonder about the mayor's purpose of schooling as separate from the action on the streets. In Service and Solidarity, John Trimbur names the need for seeing schools as sites of labor rather than places to get "ready" for work. Schools are already deeply entrenched in issues of work and workers and this is a source of learning and engagement in the authentic context of social struggle for teachers and their students. I wonder how we might name new counter narratives for the purposes of schooling.


In an article in International Socialist Review David Harvey says that to create social change we have to appropriate or create social institutions for the purpose of change with the idea in mind that these institutions can become the organs of a different social organization. What are the possibilities for appropriating or reclaiming spaces and time chunks inside schools and re-narrating these as sites of collective action? Teachers meetings? The teachers lounge? Three minute walk throughs? Peer observations? Parent-teacher conferences? Advisory committees? Teacher preparation?



In imagining what this could look like, I'll take on the last one for a moment. There was an article in Sunday's New York Times, "An Industry of Mediocrity" in critique of teacher preparation programs. It seems university teacher's colleges are another place in danger of private takeover and one that like the public schools could be a site for social action. The article calls for more rigor, higher standards for program entrance and training in entrepreneurial charter schools not college classrooms. These are interesting demands for pre-service teachers in states like North Carolina whose pay is being cut and where there are no pay increases associated with further university scholarship. So I wonder, rather than more "rigor," what if teacher preparation engaged students in understanding labor rights, community organizing and macroeconomics? What if Chicago CTU Local 1's 2012 striking was an image of possibility for teaching and learning? What if pre-service teachers found and considered together a history of teacher activism and engaged together in the kinds of critical literacy work that their students and no doubt they themselves if they become public school teachers will need.


Jean, your work has shown me images of (radical) possibility for social change in schools. And these beginning images seem to fodder more images, like that of Chicago. Since this counter story has come into my frame of reference, I can name it more easily as part of the work of teaching and learning. The stories are out there. I see one role for me as a literacy teacher and teacher advocate is to collect and share these stories and name them as teaching and use them as mentors to my own teaching practices. I am left wondering, though about my old question about sustainability. And maybe critical pedagogy's answer is that this struggle must continue resurfacing over and over, with no utopian ending available. Maybe another answer is in a shift in the question from how long can I maintain to how long can the social protest maintain? To focus on my own role and primacy is probably to continue the thread of teacher martyrdom. I wonder about striking the balance then, between an important focus on people, their lives and experiences and the systematic and collective-bound story necessary to unwind the grasp of individualism, private ownership and surplus value.

Make Cycle 2 Newsletter for 1103

Hi students and more readers,

I want to take a moment to reflect on some really interesting work in our writing classes. This work is mostly framed around a make cycle, in which we try to unravel our understandings of truth, science and literacy.  I am pointing below to some class artifacts that really attend to some of the core values of the class.  These posts and makes have pushed my thinking and hopefully yours!

 Author’s Craft: If you haven’t already, check out the craft involved in RC’sminecraft make.  He made a virtually simulated map of his one page experiences and then narrates us through the space.  As you experience the space and hear RC talk about his process you can pick up on how intentional he was in the small details of craft, from the texture of blocks to the layout to the symbolic expressions in each room.

Process: Many of us really enjoyed David’s ukulele composition during this make cycle.  If you haven’t read his corresponding reflective blog, check it out.  In the first paragraph he tells us how his work connects to a mentor.  In the second paragraph he shares in some detail his process for creating the music.  He explains what he was thinking and what his actions were.  This is the kind of reflection I encourage everyone to try for in make cycle 3.  Put us in the moment(s) of creation with you.

Multiple Drafts: I was really intrigued by Spencer's Lego Make and the accompanying blog.  Not only is this a really great segue into our toyhacking, but you can see in the blog post how Spencer moved from his beginning map to a more fully developed lego map.  We could see both the map and the lego make as drafts here.  They are both interesting but do different things.  I definitely encourage all of us to consider following Spencer’s lead in creating multiple drafts.

Extending thinking: One of the goals of our blogging is to extend thinking began in other places, like in our daybooks, in class discussion, etc.  Henry’s prezi make really does this!  He took the tape badge make and ramped it up and pulled out the threads of ideas with the text and visualizations in prezi.

Reflection and Depth of Thinking:  Kaleb’s midterm reflection is a really great example of complex thinking generally.  Read to see how he digs below the surface to unravel some his ideas by considering his own history and experiences.  I think what makes this post work so well as a reflection is that he is asking real questions about his identity and learning and his position in the world.  He brings the reader into his own experience with examples. 

Voice: Reading Lukas’ blog, particularly this midterm reflection, you can totally hear him talking to you.  This is really what “voice” is in writing: the feeling that you can hear the writer.  Back to our discussion of

Presentation of Self: Check out the revisions Lauren Price has made to her blog.  You can get a feel for who she is as a learner and writer with a few clicks and without having to scroll all the way back to the beginning posts.  Her “about” and “current projects” pages do a big part of this work along with her title and background choice.  How could you tinker with your blog settings to upfront more about who you are as a writer and learner?

Connecting to Others: The conversations in g+ are really showing the connections between ideas in the room.  I hope that more of this shows up in our blogging as we continue.  Particularly, Austin Meyer’s posts seem to generate some great convo!  Here are screenshots from some specific and in depth thinking shared by Kempson, Nhadreik and Briony in response to Austin.

 

~Dylan Miller

And finally, here is a golden line from Dylan’s blog: “I also noticed that in my blog posts that I can sometimes be a bit stiff, and by that I mean I don't really express myself, but more like, I express the assignment I was given. Noticing this made me want to change it of course. I don't want to be a robot, I want to be an alien.”

I am totally inspired to be an alien not a robot, too.  Thanks writers and makers,

Lacy

Harvesting Electronics to Become English 1103

"Does this vacuume thing have a motor inside!!??"

I stood holding a broken hand vacuume yelling this across the house late last night. I had an emerging plan for the next day's writing class, which involved some electronic items, like motors, batteries, and wires, and I was scavenging the house for any spare electronics that more handy household members might have stashed. When I saw the broken vac, it occurred to me that I was surrounded by electronic parts! I just don't usually see them that way. It was one of those shift moments. The vaccuume was a little red pill and I was seeing the world without the veil of coorporate plastic casings. All the noisy toys I had previously rolled my eyes at, now seemed like treasures chests. Inside there would be more motors! In fact inside the vacuume was not only a motor, but the wires and a fan!

A confession: I have been thinking about the maker movement for a few years. I think of myself as a maker... of text based writing, digital movies, website code even. This summer though in a workshop on e-textiles with Kylie Peppler I sort of woke up again. Oh!!! This is the part of making I want more of! The tactile tinkering around. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do believe that all the other stuff is making and that it is embodied, too- I mean words don't float out into the universe from nowhere- they are generated by fingers moving along keys, gripping a pen held to my daybook or clumsily keyed onto my phone- in conversation with other people and as part of activities bound to the politics of labor. Still it can be easy to forget the bodily experience of making and writing, when words and even photographs or movies can seem so two dimensional. This is why I have been so intrigued by the integration of improvisation into the teaching of writing... it gets us thinking about how our bodies are deeply connected to language.

That evening of preparing for class at home was another knot-making moment in my maker identity. I knew that I wanted to use this second day of class to identify with, engage as or become makers ourselves. Students would have already watched parts of Connected Learning TV's Webinar Writing as Making/Making as Writing and Dale Dougherty's TED talk, We are All Makers and we had taken science photos on the first day of class.   As part of our fledgling maker space, I really wanted to offer at least one possibility with electronics, but I had hedged all summer on buying all the stuff I thought I would need to make it happen. Then finally planning for class I was looking through websites and images of maker ideas and projects and hacks and realized we really needed some stuff, like leds and motors and battery cases. Finally I found the Scribbling Machine from the Exploratorium's Tinkering Lab, and I had all of the materials at my house- except the motors.

And this is just what my tinkering with Kylie did. I played with alligator clips and leds and sewing conductive thread. I made some plans, ditched my plans, watched other people seem to have working plans, tried my planning again, ditched my planning again, jumped into sewing, went back to alligator clips as tactile planning, tried sewing, watched other people, handed my project over to Kylie, took out stitches, sewed more, took out more stitches, went back to drawing plan, and eventually didn't finish!  This tinkering with electronics was giving me yet another layer to understanding myself and others as makers. I am wondering if for some students this layer coming along earlier might create another point of entry into the conversation on writing as making and making as writing. We'll see what they think about that as they write reflective blog posts over the weekend!

 Hack on writers, teachers and makers!
 #inspired

A Writing Room

Rapid Eye Movement

This is the poem I wrote during Erika's demo in Summer Institute today.  I was playing around with her question of what a workable democracy could look like.  I sort of chickened out by writing about a dream, in which as Kendra pointed out all of Hamilton's elite must have poofed away.


I dream democracy

Not that
I have a dream
But a dream, like in
la la land
of the free thinking

As Jefferson's sleep turns REM
This democracy dream
Collides with itself in
Popular belief
But not contained
In popular plastic packaging of
Corporate market philosophy

Beliefs held tight to
What (the) people
know about our, and thier and her
history of
protest
tribal life
labor groups
world cutlures
academics
women's circles
grassroots collectives
sci-fied futures
and Hamilton's past life

Wrapped in Cape: Whose Stories Are Covered Over in the Primacy of the Hero

Who is on the other side of the hero narrative?  We (and I mean I) spend a lot of time thinking about and problematizing and wondering about heroes.

Another interesting and maybe more equitable and participatory approach would be to concern our selves over re-seeing the stories of the saved.  I mean they are the ones whose stories might be hidden away in rippling layers of cape swooshing over the possibility until they are lifted safely out of danger of being heard or given any credit.

So what if...

We moved our conversation from loving or hating the he--- who?  Toward considering the storied lives of the swept off her feet- lifted to safety poor thingified person, who might give insight into the fluidity and tension of lived experience, especially for those of us often peeking over the flexed muscles of Superman.

Where I Write... Poem from a Demo

Mary Ellen's demo inspired some poems about writing...

Deadline closing in
And the words flow
I write late at night
By myself
But for the notes in Skype
To be read tomorrow
By my sleeping writing group

And at Jackson's Java
(it's quieter than Amelie's)
With coffee cup
Tea cup
Water bottle
Fully hydrated

And in institutes
Fretwell, Cameron, Portland, Las Vegas (even), Denver
Murray cards, freewrites, mentor texts and sticky notes
With

And in airports
Hotel rooms
Conference nooks and crannies
With Cindy
Papers sea around us
in waves of qualitative

#th Sense

This is the comic I have been working on this week during Summer Institute.  I began to draw it in my daybook during Jenny's demo in response to the conversation and readings in Ashley's demo!  #convergence

There are three panels.  Click this link to see full comic.

How to Plan a Day of Summer Institute

We are thematizing
our learning
in the present

It's not that we all appeared here.
Poof.
In the most unformed or forming only now way.
There is a room full of history that plans this group.

But a careful organization
script,
protocol,
logic model,
outline,
format,
essential question,
standard,
outcome set,
or google doc
couldn't have manipulated this feeling
of synergy of learning with people

In the room today.

Layering with #gnomes: Beginning to Name Values

Here is a beginning to my credo make.  I have some more layers to add to my thinking in upcoming posts... In fact I think I have a lot more to say, but right now I am going to throw out here some thinking I have going so far in terms of re-purposing my toyhack project and invite more voices to think with me in this voicethread.

Press Any Key

What does it mean to be bootable?  

Ready to go where the electric current takes you?  

Mapping onto the flow feeling, 

The current rippling effect

(Do currents move in waves?)

To understand your own interests and 

Let's do the wave 

That's what it's like

The flow of knowing for sure and still being open

To sparking

Somehow a connection to a teacher, learner, neighbor

Person beside you, whose arms flow up 

At just the moment to make that nice meeting place

Of bodies moving in a current 

Ideas that don't overwhelm to the stopping point

But rather well over the brim, 

Sipping to the next person, next idea, next moment

In activity 

Of making

P.S.

It was this little

Seemingly standstill moment

Overheating laptop

Remembering Kim's phone photography

Inserting (or asserting) my own interst

That became a device

To boot up a poem

Day 1 Poemified Storify

To Wobble

Definitions of Wobble: to shake or wiggle, to be weak, to falter, unsteady movement from side to side, to sway, to shake, to stagger, unsteady motion, to tremble or quaver, like a baby, bad stance, spinning

To wobble usually has pretty negative connotations.  It seems to be a problematic action, one that reflects the unknown, uncertainties, undoing.  I have been thinking with my students about reclaiming wobbling as learning.  Fecho (2005) writes about wobble in this way, as the unsteady places with potential for learning.  When our understandings and current positioning in the world is questioned in some ways and we are given the opportunity to reflect and figure out how to move forward. 

Wobbling is a lot more interesting to me than other words usually associated with learning.  Especially at this time of the semester (finals week here we come!), learning sides up with measurement, success, achievement, numbers, grades, objective (huh?) assessments of knowledge.   For their final blog posts I am asking students instead to narrate:

moment(s) of wobble from this course.  You will be thinking about time(s) when your thinking has been challenged.  When something has felt uncomfortable or different that your usual experiences.  You will unpack your experience of this as well as why you think this has been a moment of wobble.

This blog post should be one with more questions than answers.  More uncertainties than certainties.  This should be about what you are wondering now.  This piece or question or idea does not need to have a resolution.

Be creative.

Be thoughtful.

Dig in.

This is no easy task.  With the dominant narratives of heroes and bootstraps in our heads, it is really difficult to write about our own wobbling, our uncertainty, and call that learning!  Well in my own last blog post (for class) this semester I am drawn again to thinking about wobbling in the field I am studying this semester, gender and language studies.  An essay I read this week, “She Sired Six Children” Feminist Experiments with Linguistic Gender, Anna Livia names, problematizes and values the wobble of feminist science fiction writers.  She takes this lovely approach to Ursala K. LeGuin’s feminist fop aux in the 70’s in The Left Hand of Darkness where she uses the masculine generic (he/him/etc) in reference to the (supposedly) amorphous gendered people in her novel.  Livia puts this work in context with LeGuin’s future works and her own critique of the language.  Livia’s exploration of Marge Piercy and June Arnold’s more progressive moves to create new non-gendered pronouns for their novels is still a messy task as both women struggle to make the transportation hold in their works.  Livia questions and honors the works of these women and the ways that they negotiate their own wobbling.

Anyway as the semester wraps up I am thinking about my own wobbling right now and hoping, like Livia I can  find value and not just judgment in this uncertain, unsteady, rocky stance.

Fecho, B. (2005).  Appreciating the wobble:  Teacher research, professional development, and figured worlds.  English Education, 37 (3). 

Livia, A. (1999). “She sired six children” Feminist experiments with linguistic gender. In M. Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, & L.A. Sutton, Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse.  NewYork: Oxfod University Press.

Two Corners of Same Room, I Think Mine Has a Window, Though

Reading Rebecca Dobkins’ storied research about Native American women and girls interactions in early twentieth century federally mandated boarding schools has me thinking of all things about the open house at a local public Montessori school that I could apply (through a lottery system) to be my son’s kindergarten school for next year.  These two schooling situations in most ways couldn’t be more dissimilar.  The boarding schools described by Dobkins worked actively and without remorse to assimilate Native American children away from their home cultures, languages and lives.  The forces used were long distance separation from family, difficulty in returning home for any reason and use of legal language and even force to maintain the authority to separate families.  Our local Montessori school is the most progressive public opportunity available in my county, I, especially as a white, middle class, academic have a great deal of power/knowledge available to negotiate my and my child’s position in the school and his entrance to the school at all.  I don’t have any power over whether he gets in, but I can choose some other kind of schooling option altogether.  I don’t have to send him at all. 

It would seem that the differences between me and the Native American mothers who I have been reading in Dobkins’ essay are gulfs, but I’m interested in thinking also about the interconnectedness we share.  I was also reading today Dias Soto and Blue Swadners’ The Politics of Early Childhood Education.  The first chapter unravels the ways that schooling (again), particularly college education of some early childhood teachers and mothers worked to professionalize and make scientific some mothers and some teachers.  These professional mothers and teachers, I can count as both of these, are still under the reign of patriarch through discourses of white, male generated child development theories or the more modern neoliberal models of education and child rearing based on new business (still white and male) dispositions approaches to foster problem solving and flexibility, for instance.  Progressive schools that take up, for instance,  21^st Century Learner frameworks, seem to work to the success of individual students, who can be self starters and business-ready but the benefits are not to all students, but to a few who are already benefiting from the corporate model of exchange in late capitalism.  I am left feeling cornered.  I can option to send my child to our neighborhood school, where worksheets abound, possibly to the Montessori alternative (although unlikely since I declined to enter him in the lottery at age 4, where most slots are taken) or I can homeschool him in a local community of thoughtful people, but with political consequences of separatism.  If I’m not interested in testing, structured curriculum, focus on “the basics,” then I am not at all compelled to be part of this public system, and though politically a powerful choice, it is a very difficult family one to make. 

The public schools push me (and family) out in some ways as zealously as they pulled in the children of the Native American children Dobkins writes of.  This power to separate groups of people, like women, mothers, who could be united is a major component in the colonialist efforts of schooling Dobkins illustrates.  So while I am faced with resisting guised power that works through me as a professional and as a mother.  My resistance seems separate and different and scaleless compared to the need for resistance of Native American mothers, who are marginalized and erased from history even.  But as Diaz Soto and Blue Swadner point out my schooling, my professionalization, has been another tool to create a hierarchy of differences, separating me from the other women in the world and in history with whom my resistance could be aligned.  

References 

Diaz Soto, L. & Blue Swadner, B. (2006). The politics of early childhood education. NY: Peter Lang.

Dobkins, R. (1999). Strong language, strong actions: Native American women writing against federal authority, In M.Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, & L. Sutton (Eds.) Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.

Exhilaration for Connected Learning at #nwpam12

There is a
welcome,
welcoming,
well come on
conversation in

A room
Of people who
Aren't only here
But are here
In the convo
From other rooms
And non-rooms
At other moments
Talking in my head
In earphones
And not
Making me smarter
When I hang in
A non room
Of real people

Who care

About having
And being
A conversation
That matters.

Impasse and Detour

I so loved reading Haraway’s A Manifesto of Cyborgs.  I like that the meanings I make  from it are implicitly creative and that the turnings in and backward and round about in the text are defiant of arbitrary naming of a meaning.   I like my own confusions in reading, the wild moves of theory and the momentary connections to the material.  The whole piece is a question.

In the same list of readings this week were parts of Patricia Collins’ Black Feminist Thought.  Her preface brought my hooray for Haraway to a puzzling bumpy place, which for such a text should not feel so out of place.  In the preface Collins carefully names her political purposes for “[not stressing] the  contradictions,  frictions,  and  inconsistencies of Black feminist  thought” (p. xiv).  Collins instead asserts a collective picture of Black Feminism(s) with particular political aims, which she names for doing so. 

I was caught when I read this by the power in this naming of the stances we are taking, naming that there are many other possible and useful stances, but that we, for named reasons, are taking this particular stance.  I suppose the danger here, which Haraway attempts to avoid is the washing over of such statements in the use and circulation of the text’s ideas.  Rather Haraway’s Manifesto makes a claim of instability its particular mission and political work.  The creative meanings of the text are not easily washed away by removing prefacing or footnoted or other periphery remarks that might (as in Collins) act to disrupt a sense of stability in the text.  Haraway’s Manifesto is the disruption itself. 

I do think Haraway’s political work of fore fronting the slipperiness and theoretical nature of meaning still gets washed over, just in different ways from Collins.  While Patricia Collin’s thinking might be taken up as any particular flag for Black Feminism, Haraway can just be erased as eccentric, radical and overly theorized, and so dismissed altogether.

I am painting a dim picture in my mind.  Everyone, all the women, washed away.  Another interpretation, and one that might be more useful, even as I should probably keep in mind the first, is that these texts, these stances, in tandem as part of a growing conversation among feminists are difficult to wash away as a collective, however settled or fractured the collective story might appear.

Start Up Science Fiction with Historical-Theoretical Perspective

This week I have been reading about women and science fiction and the surrounding issues of representation, opening and closing off of meanings.  To that end I am making this week’s post an inquiry into science fiction writing.  And in "good" Writing Project style I learn by trying this out myself and letting things get way messy.  

So I am a pretty committed sci-fi and fantasy reader myself, but I have never tried to write any... until now :) I have some rather hefty imagined possibilities for what is right now just a small and possibly needy portion of story.  There is still a bunch of detailing work I have spinning around in my head.  For now, though, I tried to get across, some of the big ideas that seem important about the story and the deets that I could muster.  And through this story I hope to also narrate my reflections on a history of women and science fiction, which is a mixed, emerging and multiplicious bag of utopianism, separatism, images of possibility, and protagonizing of women.  So here we go…

_____

Marni scanned her new Peoples History Card at the gate of the transport.  She let the rise and dip of her newly minted personal quick response code slide unfamiliarly through her fingers and slipped it back into the pocket of her apron as she followed the slightly muddy flashing arrows along the passageway.  She aligned to her internal sense of time and estimated that on Emig the older children would be ringing the dinner bells soon.  Her own stomach rumbled at that and she marched on wondering if they still had dinner bells on Earth IV and if they did who rang them.  Emerging out of the passageway into the night air the city overwhelmed the senses of all but the most sedate, and Marni, once inside her carefully chosen airtax, retreated into her thoughts for the ride through the city.  

It was easy enough to bring to mind Daga and the children.  She let her thoughts flow to a particular story, one that she kept close, while others slipped in and out, whether or not she had recorded them.  This was a good start and Marni breathed a little easier.  She knew that the council had asked her to come on this journey to Earth IV because of her particular imagination work and her familiarity with the inner workings of the Recorded People Stories.  Still, she couldn’t help but feel relief that her mind-stories were safely available, even if she had only been away from home less than a day.  She tuned herself to the images now fully.  Wondering if something different would emerge this time.

****

 She and Daga had been maybe twelve years old.  It wasn’t so long in the future that they would be transitioning away from the children’s circles or at least taking new roles there if they chose to stay.  They squatted side by side at the creek toes sinking into the rather smelly mud bank.  When Marni and Daga had arrived at the play circle an hour ago, Nila, one of the adult teachers this season, looking slightly frazzled with her own infant, Tino, nursing and three other small children playing nearby, had asked the two older children to fill the water buckets for the day.  Marni and Daga were happy enough to venture beyond the circle on this errand, especially when they saw Henry, the other teacher for this cycle, tying on his apron and joining Nila and the younger children.   As the older children walked through community toward the woods and creek, they talked about it being a good thing that this was Nila’s last week before cycling to another workfield.  The children’s circles work was generally the most respected and all out consuming works for a reason.  Marni and Daga thought Nila looked ready for a break.  Marni thought maybe Nila would spend the next weeks with the baby Tino at the Recorded People Stories House, where she might reflect and imagine ways to narrate her times this season in their circle.  Daga thought instead that Nila and Tino might go straight to a conference cycle with the current council to work on a plan the children and she had been exploring for possible changes around the treatment of farming animals.  

And now, knowing that both well routined adults were there at the circle with the younger children, and the afternoon dinner preparations still hours away, Marni and Daga hesitated, the water buckets just hauled up from the deepest water and sitting behind them.   And Daga began the familiar game,

“That tree is not a tree.”

Marni, picking up the lines, smirked, “It’s an Earth IV transport.”

“And this creek?,” Daga asked.

“It’s a marble.  Let’s go, Dag.”

“And you, Marni?”

“Me, what?”

“What are you not, Marni?” 

“I think I can hardly unravel that un-naming but named question.”

Daga stared hard at her, pressed on her palm slightly, did not let this idea go, “What are you not?”

After years, probably, Marni answered.

“Not yours?”  

****  

In the airtax Marni smoothed her hand on the manufactured leather armrest and opened her eyes.  This surface felt firm, much more than her story.  She recalled a rant by her favorite mentor, Sarrah, “Fuzzy is good!  Do you think we want one-sided, firm, hard, completely known, stories, Marni?!  No!”  This made her smile and feel slightly less uneasy, but she couldn’t help wonder about how well fuzzy had played out so far in her life.  Oh she supposed, honing her Sarrah-voice, that that was one of many possible interpretations of events.  Sigh.  She was distracted from her musings by her stomach growling loudly.  She thought somewhat sourly that by now surely families and circles all over Emig had full bellies and she was another thirty minutes from her destination and her eventual dinner.

___________

A day later Marni sat in a conference room at the university center carefully moving her eyes from person to person, from teacher to teacher, she thought, for that is how they called themselves.  She worked to imagine the stories that brought these people together and brought her across space to the planet her foremothers had called home.   She drew her attention to two women, Jaclyn just beside her and Ansor directly across the circle.  Jaclyn had a paper notebook out, not uncommon on Emig, but something that seemed out of place in the highly digitized surrounding here at the university. She knew that Jaclyn’s work over the past year had been the reimaging of Emig’s Recorded People Stories for the context of Earth IV.  She knew that Jaclyn’s own stories were key to the project’s beginning.   Ansor, whom Marni was casting as the group’s wise elder, had in fact several devices she seemed to be worked with at any given moment, a sleek flat screen rising only centimeters from the table surface, a small, clear, handheld data device, which her single thumb seemed to compose with and on a table behind Ansor, to which she rotated to every few minutes, a decidedly not-sleek, homemade patchwork of technologies that reminded Marni of both Jaclyn’s rustic notebook in this room and the digital wares of Emig in general.  

By the end of the day Marni was trembling with excitement of this new project and her possible role in it.  The work this group of teachers seemed so fresh to her, not that she did not feel this newness of ideas on Emig.  She did.  In fact, there, possibilities seemed endless.  To Marni, sometimes too endless.  Today though she had the idea that the Earth IV teachers’ imaginations of a Recorded People Stories felt like a new possibility in a place where roadblocks and ends were everywhere.  That is the difference, Marni thought, here the availability of the closings of meaning makes my open-imagination work more vital. 

Ansor did not seem as enthusiastic as Marni felt, or as anyone in the room particularly.  Though she was fully involved and was the person who had sent the request to Emig Council for someone, for Marni, to come.  Ansor, in so many ways both opposite and matching to Sarrah, reminded the group whenever affect seemed to happily rise, that their last project had ended in the co-opting of their fantastic idea by the National Business, Marking and Learning Association.   At this she held up each time her own People’s History Card at pointed with her red acrylic nail to the row of “badges” imprinting the plastic.  “This, friends, is the way our last imagination project turned out!   I (at my own and this university’s expense, of course) am the proud owner of forty-seven imagination badges.  I am a competitive asset to this institution!  Oh, damn.  This is important work you all, still, but we must be deliberate, so that the stories cannot be easily undone, sized up, quantified .  Marni, tell us again how people talk about The Stories, what do they say?”  

At seven o’clock there was a dinner bell as the group fell into a walk together to the dining hall.   The bell reminded Marni of her question the day before, and she wondered agin who rang the bell and who prepared the dinner?  And speaking of questions of who… looking around her, could it be possible that not one of the women in the group (There were ten people, and eight women, six under 40 she guessed) had a nursing baby to take part in this work?  She shook her head and herself and imagined for a moment the many possible arrangements people may have for work and family on Earth IV.  She breathed out, and asked Jaclyn, “Who rings the dinner bells?”