You Say Hello & I Say Goodbye

This is a post.

This is a post about how easy it is to write words.

This is a post about how easy it is to write words just in case I forget in the next 29 days.

Read on. You’ll see why.

It’s November, and that means it’s Get That Writing Done Month.

Of biggest fare is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and though I am registered on the site, it is mostly for their awesome progress widgets and community write-in sessions. I am not writing a novel. Oh, no.

It is also #digiwrimo (Digital Writing Month), which is the month I wish I was having. In a part-essay part-poem, Sean Michael Morris shared a vision of digital writing that I want to be.

So let me do Mr. Morris’ piece justice and rather than just quoting him, I am going to make it full-blown poem:

This is Third-Order Thinking,
a found poem from an essay by Sean Michael Morris

this writing right here
cannot know except as it is made useful
excerpted | repurposed | discovered | reimagined | plagiarized | undone |
made poetic by an accident (our always already ironic)

if what we say is made valuable
by what readers say with what we say
({re}constructed, not just interpreted
{re}built, {re}fabricated, {re}purposed)
we must write accordingly

thoughts of the writers
(corrupted)
lie between the words
({re}corrupted)
and the way
they’ve been assembled
like archaeologists we detect
meaning
lying below
meaning
our texts, the many layers of Troy

but the real {novelty} of digital writing comes
when words are reflown

no longer responders to History
no longer makers of Literature
we are the writers of partially-realized ideas

and their rewriters.

[btw, to me this "third-order thinking" echoes the kind of the self-reflexive and hospitable stances we (my co-author Glynda Hull and I) noticed in our work with youth who were composing...actually...I should say, that chapter has now been realized in print in Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis: Intersections and Challenges. It's totally worth checking out, imho.]

But no, although I am going to dip my toes in #digiwrimo whenever I can, my month is going to be more of the #acwrimo (Academic Writing Month) variety. In #acwrimo, instead of a cray-cray 50,000 word goal, you come up with your own daily achievement. My plan was to get going under the radar, see how successful I was and eventually add my goals and amazing progress to the Accountability Spreadsheet. But last night, in a midnight stupor, I outed myself. And I might as well let you know I am row 189 on the spreadsheet and you can also watch my “progress” on the calendar widget above and on the bottom of every page: green = I’m truckin’ | yellow = meh | red = kick me

@writerswriting witness!—
lmv (@elemveee) November 01, 2012

Poster by James Provost

So here goes. 30 days to done. You won’t see me here very often, unless I need to remind myself that 500 words is cake, a simple early-to-rise hour, a great #digiwrimo prompt, a get-er-done moment.

How about you? You taking the plunge?

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One Comment on “You Say Hello & I Say Goodbye”

KevinHodgson (@dogtrax)
November 1, 2012

I was struck by these lines:

“… the way
they’ve been assembled
like archaeologists we detect
meaning
lying below
meaning
our texts …”

They capture the strange moment we find ourselves in around writing, and finding meaning when the form of the writing changes, and all of the context that can be just below the surface by digital composition.

Thanks for sharing
Kevin

Reply