Introduction

In particular, we received few submissions from writers who identify as male, and especially few from R1 institutions. In fact, we did not have a single paper submitted from a tenure-line, male faculty member at an R1 institution. We are left to ask, why? We wonder if the idea of “serving” as a Documentarian was not particularly attractive, if the labor of the position and/or the investment in training seemed too demanding, if the newness of the role made it seem too risky, not legitimate enough, too hard to justify on a CV. We hope that, in future iterations of the Documentarian role, that more male-identified Documentarians from across the diverse reaches of our field will volunteer to serve in the role.

When we initially inquired about disability status (Figure 5), we considered the ways this might impact navigating conference and social spaces. When the conference was canceled, space and place took on a whole new dimension with people no longer navigating a new city or location, but instead navigating intensely familiar home spaces but with new work demands imposed upon those spaces. Some challenges gave way to others as those with underlying illnesses or disabilities expressed concern over the danger of the COVID-19 illness. Anxiety and depression took on new shades as isolation grew. Many expressed challenges within the narratives they wrote that did not necessarily show up in the demographic identification. 

The overall demographics of the project provoked us to consider Documentarians’ motivations for participation as well as how this group of people represented our field. Who was missing? Why? Was it the design of the project itself that appealed to particular people? Did this initial group offer some insight into labor conditions, participation, and voice in our field? Many of the Documentarians in the collection write about their professional roles and working conditions in a professionally diverse—and not always equitable—field. We believe that the matter of how the invitation was taken up, and by whom, surfaces this story, as well.

Writing as Archiving, Editing as Curation 

The Documentarian Tales collected here began their lives as responses to four sets of daily (morning and evening) surveys sent out to all who wished to participate as Documentarians 2020 (pandemic version). We designed the surveys that Documentarians would complete to serve three purposes: 1) to provide writing prompts for the authors themselves, 2) to amass an archive of each Documentarian’s evolving experiences, and 3) to offer a means for Documentarians to share an experience during the days when CCCC 2020 would have taken place. In that they are records of a kind of shared experience and of a particular moment, the surveys were our convention. A foundational premise of the Documentarian project all along has been that when we each go to the same convention, we each come away from a common place with a unique (even uncommon) conference experience; similarly, we assume that we have each had a unique experience in writing individual responses to the same survey prompts.

We designed our surveys both to define a shared experience and to document one. And we were confident that those documents would have things to teach us, each and all. For these reasons, we have named the particular sort of reflective writing that is produced by acts and archives of documentation Experiential-Learning Documentary (ELD), in keeping with a term Bump and Julie had created to describe the acts and resulting products of students’ reflections on the archives of their learning experiences (“It’s Never About What It’s About: Audio-Visual Writing, Experiential-Learning Documentary, and the Forensic Art of Assessment”). As part of their writing processes, Documentarians returned, in late April through early June, to their experiences of the span of time from March 25 through 28 via their documented survey responses, in order for their current selves to learn from interactions with those documents created by their former selves. In fact, the title of this collection, Recollections from an Uncommon Time, arises from acts of documentation: collecting observations, and then re-collecting storyable information from that archive. We find, in reading these collected Documentarian Tales (ELDs), that there is a diverse range of ways acts of documentation show up in the finished narratives: some make specific reference to survey texts—jottings of the moment—and some are more mediated, operating at a greater remove from the original acts of documentation that informed them. We suspect that, were the authors collected here to return to the writing produced by the original surveys now, rather different stories would emerge from reflections on those same survey responses.

So it goes with documentation and reflection. 

So it goes with present and former selves. 

Our first step, after the surveys were completed, was to take stock and to reflect back to Documentarians what was showing up so far. We did some reading and reviewing around and across all the responses to observe common trends and themes. We collected a sample of responses to be shared with Documentarians (along with a list of the most frequently occurring words) so they could begin to see the kinds of topics, concerns, and experiences that were being expressed and taken up and so that they could begin to imagine what kinds of stories that “data” such as these may suggest. When we did a scan for the most frequently occurring words (as indicators of thematic threads) across all the survey responses, we found the most frequently occurring words to be work, time, and students. Among words for emotions, hope showed up most often.

One of our first editorial tasks, after reading each of the submissions we received in early June, was to make decisions about which would go into the print version and which would be included in the digital-only collection. We asked ourselves: what would inform these choices? Our first priority was to choose a set of narratives that we thought rendered diverse experiences of pandemic work lives. This diversity expressed differences in embodiment and identity (e.g., race, gender, and sexual orientation) and in institutional positions, labor conditions, and kinds of work. We are not, as a field represented by CCCC membership, overdetermined by positions of high prestige and visibility in Research 1 institutions. Most of us, in fact, are teachers working under rather more precarious labor positions; many of us are graduate students looking ahead to an unstable job market. We saw that the new Documentarian role for CCCC was taken up mostly by people who were not, or not yet, in positions of high prestige and visibility in our field; accordingly, the CFP for Recollections drew authors whose stories of work experience and professional lives were not likely to be those most available, in published accounts, to the Cs community.

We also found ourselves drawn, for the purposes of this collection, to narratives that demonstrated that reflection is ongoing. Reflection is no static noun; it is a progression that emerges, always, as the product of a present progressive verb. Similarly, we found that many of these tales, as narratives that began their lives as records of experiences documented in real time, often came to us without a clear destination (or “lesson”) in evidence at the onset. We saw this quality of unfinishedness—of becoming—to be a virtue in rendering the uncertainty and disorientation of life during the early days of the pandemic.

Some of the pieces describe what the authors would have done had the 2020 convention gone on as planned. These stories teach us not only what many of those in our community do at the conference, but also what the CCCC convention means to them in their lives—one of the things we most hoped to learn in the original Documentarian project. We learn what Cs goers (or Cs didn’t-get-to-goers) feel they’re missing from their professional lives in the absence of a F2F meeting, often via reflections on other mundane activities.

Thematic Resonances: Work Life and Life Work 

As you read through the collected Documentarian Tales, you will notice a pattern of themes: for example, labor, home, family, work routines, community identity, precarity, access, aspirations. Many of the authors in this collection reflect on the experience of documenting and reflecting on their experiences as a writing practice that can be (among other things) difficult, vexing, enlightening, sobering, and/ or therapeutic. These thematic resonances are not surprising given the nature of the writing task and authors’ everyday concerns, but they are also products, and expressions, of a particular historic moment. In our CFP, we wrote:

Of course, we recognize that this is not just any uncommon time. It’s a time of a dangerous pandemic that is unprecedented in our lifetimes. By the time this is published—possibly by the time you get this—some of us may be sick. Many of us will know somebody who is, or has been, sick. The stakes will have grown higher, the situation, more dire. To make sense of that (future) moment, we will likely return to the stories of this earlier moment. In sharing the experiences of having our practices and routines upended when COVID-19 hit, we may find that we are in different phases of this experience, different positions in relationship to it. Each story is a radically generative partiality: our collective stories are a way to map that experience in time, as well as across place.

As we reread these tales, we see that they are, in fact, products of a very specific moment in pandemic time, in the lifespan of a lockdown (lock, unlock, relock, rinse, repeat). As we finalize our preparations to release this collection, one year into the pandemic, these tales, grown from a set of inquiries in March 2020, speak to the novelty of the pandemic world—of a nascent new world, yet to be formed in its new set of expectations, reconciliations, hopes, and routines. At this moment, these would be different stories: they would surface new work routines, accommodations to a new relationship between home and work life.

In fact, another story these collected stories tell is one of a very particular moment in time and of the changes that have come with time elapsed.

Accessing the Archive 

Though Recollections from an Uncommon Time is an edited collection, the Documentarian Tales collected here are more curated than edited. And while the collection is published by an academic press (CCCC/ NCTE), the mission of this project is one that challenges (in the spirit of the 2020 conference theme) our commonplaces about scholarly editing. Even as the authors have contributed their ELDs, we, the editors, have curated them as ELDs. For example, an art museum may curate existing works of art from a sculptor (e.g., Rodin) or a group of sculptors (e.g., those from a specific period who worked in steel). Those artists (should they still be alive) would likely not present drafts of their sculptures. They would contribute finished sculptures. The curators of those works would not send the sculptures back with a list of requests for their revision that would make those works conform to their own ideas of the experience that they hope the exhibit would create for those who may attend the exhibit. They would work with the art as it was submitted/collected. They would curate these works—assemble them—not edit or modify them. In this way, our editing more closely resembles a form of curation. As individual Documentarian Tales, we have aimed to present these works, essentially, as is, working with each Documentarian in the print collection to adhere, primarily, to a maximum word count that would allow us to include as many individual Documentarian Tales as our finite number of paper pages would permit. As a collection, we have aimed to present not what we have determined should be the story of our work or perspective or sensibility or ethical commitment (those that get it, somehow, “right”), but rather the story/stories that the evidence they offer suggests. What was our work during the first weeks of the US response to the global pandemic? What did we experience?

The tales collected here might not reveal the learning until the end. Expect to have some of the tales resonate with your experiences and others to depict a process of sense-making that might not align with your own. Some of the tales, and the learning they depict, are still in process—they’re still happening. All of this is to say that this collection of Documentarian Tales might challenge your sensibilities . . . it might not fall together quite how you expect or even how you hope it may. But, really—given its mission, its diverse sites of origin and diverse authorship—how could it? We ask you to take a moment, read, and listen to each other.

In and across these tales, you’ll discover many themes, many stories. If you’re a student reading this book in order to learn about forms of work and professional lives in writing studies, you can read these Documentarian Tales in relation to a capacious landscape of ideas, with pathways defined by experiences of productivity, precarity, loss, grief, attentionality, reflection, anxiety, dread, disruption, trauma, hope, joy, crisis, resilience, connection, isolation, solitude, race, gender, reconciliation, participation, mundanity, curation, routines, mentorship, identity, self, observation, stress, process, community, perception, purpose, resilience, memory, access, space, learning, disjuncture, mindfulness, holism, time, work, students, privilege, risk, belonging, environment, dislocation, exile, faith, stasis, chaos, uncertainty, story, shame, home, patience, family, survival, inclusion, adaptation (to name a few). Insofar as these are tales of everyday life, you will see multiple planes of meaning, multiple threads and relevancies. We think that one of the lessons of the collection as a whole is just how much meaning, how much “aboutness” that extends into the project of understanding our work as writers and educators, is encoded in the mundane details of experience. Another is the value of reflective writing, something all the authors address implicitly, some of them directly.

In many ways, we struggled over how to create a story arc of these chapters as a collection. The collection seemed to resist that sort of linearity and neatness. We came to realize that a story of diversity is just that, and we came to realize that each reader of such a collection would interpret and prioritize the stories according to their own sensibilities and experiences. We encourage you, as a reader, to do just this—to feel free to chart a course through the collected tales that suits your inclinations, your present needs, and your habits of reading. That said, we understand that most readers are inclined to begin at the beginning of a collection, and to make their way through it in a more or less linear fashion. Because paper pages demand both priority and linearity, we’ve ordered the pieces in such a way to give attention to particular moments of encounter, or points of contact, as each reader makes their way through the collection: first, the experience of entering the world of these tales; next, that of moving from one Documentarian Tale to the next; and finally, that of concluding the reading journey. We begin, therefore, with Adrienne Jankens’ piece as a point of departure; Jankens speaks directly to the fact of the cancellation of the 2020 conference, and the sudden shift in plans that this disruption occasioned. Accordingly, we end with Rachel Panton’s call for reflection and mindfulness as an ongoing practice of learning, healing, and self-care. The pieces that lie between these two points are organized in what you might think of as a braided, or enchained fashion, each one treating the adjacent pieces as present interlocutors, proximity to which offers additional framing and context for what follows and precedes. You might think of the authors in this collection as seated around the table at a dinner party, at which each guest may be in most frequent conversation with those seated on either side, but which conversation across and around the table is also possible.

And with that, let’s meet our dinner companions. 

In “A Sweet Spot, a Safe Space,” Adrienne Jankens writes, “I realized, as I took notes during the week that we didn’t go to Milwaukee, that the conference had become part of an annual restorative pause for me, sometimes in the midst of deep personal pain. The work of conference preparation aside, the experience itself was a retreat into safe being.” Jankens begins her tale looking at the ways CCCC has offered that safe pause. She then goes on to reveal a complicated set of conditions of relative safety in the spaces of her life during the pandemic— safe in that the spaces function as scenes for the acts they contain, not that they are in some way inherently safe spaces.

In “Other Disseminations,” Erika Luckert invites reflections on what it means to relinquish attachments to the usual routines and desires for productivity and control and to embrace, instead, an ethic of patience. “Other Disseminations” considers the life-cycle of the pandemic and the thorny yet unpredictable effects it yields through the lens of the author’s garden. Luckert wonders, “What is the mortality rate of tomatoes, collard greens, peppers, and kale? I can’t find any projections, nobody online seems to know. I figure seven seeds, or maybe nine, should yield a healthy plant or two.”

In “Seeking Shelter in the Eye: What We Can Get out of the Storm,” international graduate student Xiao Tan chronicles her search for truths during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic—from early reports coming out of China and through the reports in US media outlets (and the very real consequences these reports had for her in her daily interactions in the US). Tan writes, “Having access to both the Chinese and English media puts me at a unique nexus of opposing viewpoints and ideologies. It also gives me a jarring feeling to see the vicious accusation of China downplaying the severity of the disease when all I heard from the Chinese media in January and February was how dangerous it was.” Tan finds that reflecting during this uncommon time offers clarity by way of exposing disrupted commonplaces. She writes, “I hesitate to see the pandemic as an ‘opportunity’ in the usually positive sense because I wish so badly that we would learn about ourselves and the world in a less traumatic and devastating way. But a crisis of this scale forces us to detach ourselves from the daily messiness and to reassess the status quo.”

Nancy Henaku, an international graduate student, shares the effects and affects of her experiences of sheltering in place in the US during the time that was to have offered access to her first-ever CCCC experiences. In “Navigating the Ph.D., and Everything Else, in a Pandemic: Reflections on my New and Not-So-New Experiences,” Henaku writes, “The effects of routines, scheduling, mobility and engagements (with people and news for example) form ‘an archive of feeling,’ to cite Cvetkovich, that reflect my status as an international student trying to be resilient in a moment of crisis.” Throughout Henaku’s tale, we follow her as she physically engages with familiar places and paths, and documents the ways they are altered during this time with the reflections offering an outline to form an “archive of feeling.”

Lynn M. Ishikawa, in “Risk and Refuge: The Role of the Commonplace in Navigating Crisis,” reflects on COVID-19 through the lens of a past national crisis she had lived through in Japan during the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Fukushima. In comparing these two situations, she discusses the role of the “quotidian” and risk assessment as bringing both healing and harm. She draws upon the movie Night of the Living Dead to highlight that what we fear on the outside might not be as terrible as the social inequities and unjust systems we find on the inside. She notes, “For me, home has been a refuge, but it is clearly not so for everyone; indeed for many, inside is more dangerous than outside. In this and other ways, the pandemic has exposed the inequities in society and the ways in which the systems meant to protect are either broken or unjust. What is commonplace for some is fraught with risk for others.”

Morgan Hanson, in “‘Yes, and . . .’: Confronting Work, Miscarriage, and Grief during a Pandemic,” returns to her daily Documentarian writings to narrate the experience of documenting a period of loss and grief in her life at a moment of profound isolation, reflecting on the effects of that reflective practice in her life. She writes, “Even though the Documentarian reflections had me confront the harder parts of my isolation experience and how that affected my productivity and mental health . . . I think of the great relief I felt with each reflection. Through the power of writing, my stressors became more tangible; they were real, and they deserved my attention.” In telling this story of the difficulties and benefits of reflective writing in a time of trauma, Hanson is motivated to consider her relationship to professional “productivity,” a relationship further vexed by isolation and grief, and invites us all into a reflection on the meaning of productivity.

In her piece, “On Choosing,” Lindsey Albracht wrestles with the decision to leave her home in the city and move to her family home. She notes, “The choice to leave or to stay is not the same one.” She reflects on the dynamics and the privilege of being given the choice to leave or to stay and what it means for others in her local community, but also what it means for her scholarly work and the work of education. Her piece ends with a call of sorts asking educators to consider what it means to move beyond “empowerment” and to consider how the machinations of the university are made possible in order to shed light on both privilege and the colonial history in education.

In “Pondering the Quiddities,” Miriam Moore takes up and extends the project that we (Julie, Bree, and Bump) began in an earlier moment of encountering the products of the Documentarian surveys, performing a content analysis of the words that appear most frequently in her daily survey responses. In so doing, she identifies the “quiddities,” or distinctive qualities, of her quarantine experiences, leading to a reckoning with, as she writes, “the very difficult lessons of my privilege.”

Cheryl Price-McKell, in “Scholarship Interrupted: How Unsettling Compartmentalized ‘Normal’ Can Inspire Wholehearted Insight,” rediscovers and considers the artifacts of her writing life: a collection of notebooks in which she had kept alive her practice of imaginative writing. By way of these artifacts, Price-McKell reflects on commonplace expectations of academic roles, writing selves deferred, and professional identity. She asks: “What physical, mental, and emotional work does it take to separate, compartmentalize, and choreograph our individual selves? What possibilities reside in that overlooked, wholehearted liminal space where—as students of writing, creators of writing, instructors of writers, and artists—identities overlap?”

Xinquiang Li’s tale, “Pandemic Life: Adventures in the Virtual World,” describes the changes in routines of teaching and interactions with students against the background of everyday life in lockdown. His tale is a meditation on isolation—social, cultural, professional. He considers the affordances for connection within the new virtual social world, reflecting that “With the limits of travel and expense erased, I could actually enjoy accesses to more social gatherings online, sometimes hiding behind the screen listening to the school president’s announcements, sometimes sitting before a background image of a tropical beach and planning summer activities with colleagues, sometimes even attending a virtual film festival held in a neighboring town or discussing a fantastic TV show with an international group in London.” Implicitly, the narrative explores solitude, loneliness, and the difference between the two.

Isaac Ewuoso’s, “Some Lessons and Tales: Moving Classes Online in the Advent of a Crisis for Which No One Signed Up,” offers the author’s perspectives on learning to identify his students’ needs as their interactions moved online. Ewuoso reflects on working to meet those needs both in and out of the classroom, on the challenging work conditions of adjunct faculty, and on the powerful potential for reflective activities to be of value to both instructors and students. He finds that personal connection through phone calls and texts have been instrumental in reaching those students who are struggling with life’s complexities: “I found out about one or more problems they were having that they did not feel comfortable discussing in an email or Zoom. In fact, most would not say anything unless I asked them.” After making these personal connections and hearing students’ stories, he found himself questioning his former classroom policies and how we tend to think about student success and participation.

In “Building Strength in an Uncommon Time,” Catherine Lamas reflects on labor conditions for contingent faculty—both in terms of teaching duties, often carried out at multiple institutions, and in terms of service to their larger professional communities. Lamas writes, “My ‘temporary’ status puts me in a different category than those who have tenure. This faculty divide was evident in the demographics of this activity. As I reviewed the demographics of this activity, I was both disappointed yet not surprised by the contributors to this data collection. We need a well-rounded group of educators to keep this data from being biased. Over 70% of the Documentarians were part-time educators. I wonder why we did not get a greater contribution from the Tenured faculty. There is an unspoken divide that I often witness between ‘Full Time’ professors and ‘Contingent’ faculty in my teaching institutions, and this was also visible at the 2020 CCCC convention.”

In “Feminist Mishmash: COVID-19 CCCC,” Heather McGovern reflects on her everyday routines of caretaking at home and work—that is to say, with family and co-workers—to suggest what the collapsed space and of the pandemic may reveal about the experience of women’s work. In reviewing her daily Documentarian survey responses, she writes, “The observations in my journals about what I planned, what I accomplished, and how I felt are a tangled hair knot, a scramble. They’re likely not a mash up, because that would be more intentional; they are not a hodgepodge because the things in them matter: they are a mishmash.”

Shauna Chung writes in “Growing up Again (and Again),” about returning to her family home during shelter-in-place protocols. This movement prompted her to question what is lost in performance and productivity. She composes dialogue with her mother as she faces returning to a life where productivity at times is demanded and her mother encourages her to hold on to her humanness. She reflects, “‘Don’t forget to be human?’ Didn’t I meet my ‘being human’ quota after giving up so much time to be with family? Wasn’t I the most human in the family since I was dedicating my professional life to the humanities? Doesn’t my scholastic striving for attuned, empathetic, civic-minded rhetoric speak for itself?” In answering those internal questions, she finds the need to “re-version” herself, leaving space for the human, instead of reverting to her former life and notions of productivity.

In “Documenting Our Solastalgia: A New Landscape,” Margarette (Maggie) Christensen asks, “what will the university be like after all this? What if we cannot or do not return?” Christensen names the feeling of regarding the familiar as suddenly unfamiliar solastalgia, “Sheltering in place, I was ‘homesick,’ longing for my familiar worlds and routines which were replaced by a gnawing sense of uncertainty and fear. Like many of my colleagues and students, I was experiencing solastalgia.” Christensen offers solastalgia as a reorienting tool and a “collective comfort” even when a sense of closure or normalcy is not possible.

Soha Youssef, in “Self-Reflexivity is/as Resistance,” reflects on ways her Egyptian heritage has influenced her relationship with productivity in her academic career path: a history that adds complexity to her experiences with self-reflection (brought about by way of the Documentarian role) and her revised work pace (brought about by the shelter-in-place orders in the US). Youssef writes, “Being forced to actually sit down, take a deep breath, and watch my own life—for the first time—I got to experience my own life as a viewer, instead of an active agent; as an acted-upon, instead of an actor. It was like a curtain had been lifted to afford me clarity of vision.”

In “‘Tending to My Life’: On Resilience and Academic Work,” Charlotte Asmuth invites us to reflect on our often-invisible work routines and on how graduate students are (and are not) socialized into these. She begins with a meditation on what the scene of her own dissertation work—the details of time, space, and the artifacts of writing—during quarantine have taught her about what it means to mentor students into work habits that are grounded in needs of the fully-embodied self. She situates these observations within scholarship on academic work routines (in particular, that of Paul Prior and Jody Shipka) to call attention to commonplaces of work, productivity, learning, and embodiment. She asks: “How can faculty teach graduate students to take up useful work habits and care for themselves during times of collective crisis? How can faculty support graduate students’ work practices when both their own and graduate students’ working conditions are increasingly precarious and inconsistent?”

In “A Controlled Freak-Out: Mentoring, Writing, and Parenting during COVID-19,” Katrina Powell reflects on her learning about her professional community, roles, attachments, and responsibilities occasioned by the cancellation of CCCC at the moment when the pandemic crisis mandated a transition to working from home. Powell considers the benefits of the Documentarian experience at such a time, wonders how the practice of participating as a Documentarian might be taken up among differently positioned members of our professional community, and asks what the fact of this participation might reveal about professional roles more generally. She writes: “A question that I thought about throughout this time was whether the role of Documentarian and the time to write/reflect in this way has something to do with privilege. I wondered if most of my fellow Documentarians were graduate students and junior colleagues, and, if so, what does it mean that the role falls to them? I wondered if it mirrors administrative, committee, and mentoring work in our field that is often taken up by junior colleagues and underrepresented groups?”

In “Harnessing the Magical Properties of Collaboration for Transforming the Neoliberal University,” Shelagh Patterson considers a complicated jumble of experiences during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US and reconsiders and re-presents them as a sensible rendering of a jumbled life. Patterson reflects not only on her life and professional responsibilities during the days of the conference, but also on both the personal vulnerability and collaborative empowerment she has found in her work as a Documentarian. Patterson writes,“My writing as a Documentarian exponentially increased the quality of my health and wellbeing which grounds me for resisting and reshaping the neoliberal waves gathering in our universities.”

Gabrielle Isabel Kalenyi’s tale, “Hitting Pause on Productivity: Finding Mindful Labor in Quarantine,” is a meditation on the meaning and perils of “productivity,” especially for those who feel a sense of responsibility not only to achieve legitimacy and impact, but to do so on behalf of marginalized others. She writes, “I believed my efficiency training would continue to serve me well, despite the unprecedented circumstances. Without clear boundaries, professional productivity has come to mean progress and living my personal life has come to mean a pause in that productivity. As a result, productivity for professional progress has begun to take precedent over what seems like pausing for personal connection.” As a scholar of color, Kalenyi considers the additional burden of the quest for productivity for persons of color who feel a sense of responsibility to their communities: “If I don’t do it, who will?”

Rachel Panton, in “‘You Good, Fam’?’: Mindful Journaling, Africana Leadership, and Dialogic Compassionate Rhetorical Response Pedagogy During a Pandemic,” explores the uses of compassion and mindfulness in a chaotic time, and from a perspective of Black Womanist care and holistic understanding. She describes the benefits of writing as a Documentarian, observing that “reflective and mindful journaling in a moment of actualized trauma, heightened my personal self-care practice, as well as my Africana womanist pedagogical outlook on care in the classroom.” Panton recommends that mindful, reflective writing can be a therapeutic and pedagogical practice, an antidote to pathologies of compartmentalization and hyperproductivity.

Conclusion and Introduction 

As the record here suggests, during those few months in the spring of 2020, we experienced a lot. And while we can find common experiences, we are mostly overwhelmed by myriad differences: we were isolated with our families, we were isolated alone, we were isolated at home, we were isolated far from home, we did familiar work from home, we did uncommon work from home, we ventured out into the world, we were afraid to go out into the world, we were glued to news coverage, we avoided news coverage, we remained healthy, we did not remain healthy, we did not start out healthy, we joined protests, we assessed our privilege(s), we were grateful for job security, we lost our jobs, we witnessed others lose their jobs, we worried for our loved ones abroad, our loved ones abroad worried about us, we had successful exchanges with our students and colleagues, we struggled to stay connected to our students and colleagues, we found comfort in doing the daily Documentarian surveys during the week of the would-be conference, we struggled to make ourselves do those damned things with the world seemingly bursting into flames all around us.

Our recollection of assembling and introducing this archive of Documentarian Tales, thus, ends with a beginning: this small collection of voices from our field points to the need for more and more voices. We hope this collection will be a critical mass to attract more voices—your voices—and ever more diverse representation.

Works Cited:

Carrega, Christina, and Sebina Ghebremhedim. “A Timeline: Inside the Investigation of Breonna Taylor’s Killing and the Aftermath.” ABC News, 17 November 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/timelineinside-investigation-breonna-taylors-killing-%20%20%20%20%20 aftermath/story?id=71217247.

“The Conference on College Composition and Communication.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, February 2021, https://.en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Conference_on_College_Composition_and_Communication.

Halbritter, Bump, and Julie Lindquist. “Collecting and Coding Synecdochic Selves: Identifying Learning across Life Writing Texts.” How Stories Teach Us: Composition, Life Writing, and Blended Scholarship, edited by Amy E. Robillard and D. Shane Combs, Peter Lang Press, 2019.

—. “It’s Never about What It’s About: Audio-Visual Writing, Experiential-Learning Documentary, and the Forensic Art of Assessment.” The Routledge Companion to Digital Writing and Rhetoric, edited by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, Routledge, 2018, pp. 317–27.

—. “Sleight of Ear: Voice, Voices, and Ethics of Voicing.” Songwriting Pedagogies, edited by Courtney S. Danforth, Kyle D. Stedman, & Michael J. Faris. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2018. https:// www.ccdigitalpress.org/book/soundwriting/halbritter-lindquist/index. html.

—. “Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship.” College English, vol. 75, no. 2, 2012, pp. 171–98.

—. “Witness Learning: Building Relationships between Present, Future, and Former Selves.” Writing for Engagement: Responsive Practice for Social Action, edited by Mary Sheridan et al., Lexington Press, 2018, pp. 43–59.

Lindquist, Julie, and Bump Halbritter. “Documenting and Discovering Learning: Reimagining the Work of the Literacy Narrative.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 70, no. 3, 2019, pp. 413–45.

Taylor, Derrick Bryson. “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline.” New York Times, 6 January 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/georgefloyd-protests-timeline.html.

—. “A Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” New York Times, 10 January 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html.