Composition Studies

It was 2004. Patti Poblete woke up to the election results and cried. Then she went on LiveJournal to tell her online friends that America didn’t want her—“immigrant, progressive, brown, q***r, creative, intellectual—personally.”

Poblete calls this “not so much an article as a trio of confessions.” The first: she has lived in the US since she was ten, as a permanent resident, not a citizen. The second: she grew up in a fundamentalist community and has “no metric for ‘normal.’” The third arrives by way of Mark Ruffalo: she’s always angry.

That last confession keeps time. It was 2000. It was 2011. It was 2017, 2021, 2023. Each date opens another scene—an accusation, a complaint, a walkout, a law, a student evaluation—until the litany reaches the present moment.

Somewhere in the middle, Poblete describes her last job search: “I fled West until I hit ocean.” She admits it was technically the Puget Sound estuary, “but ‘ocean’ is much more dramatically satisfying.”

The last time she visited home, her parents told her not to post anything controversial. Just in case—though of what, they didn’t specify. Her essay ends by asking: “Does this count?”

Read the full essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_12

During the pandemic, a first-year writing student named Ann picked up Animal Crossing and found something there her writing class wasn't giving her. She kept running into the gap a lot of multilingual writers know, between what she wanted to say and what landed on the page. In the game, that pressure lifted, and she found room to, in her words, "freely express" herself. She called it "a reset button."

That feeling is what Charissa Che built a whole course around. She designed Writing for Intercultural Communicative Competence for English 101 at Queensborough Community College, where students come from more than a hundred countries. T

he course runs on an idea from Claire Kramsch: the third place, a real, imagined, or online space you enter out of desire, where you stand both inside and outside other people's ways of speaking. Che takes those worlds seriously, as places where writing and identity are already happening, and asks what a first-year writing class looks like when it starts there.

Over four assignments, Che's students pick one of their own and write their way through it. The course aims at something before proficiency: whether a student can say who they are and feel like they belong. Desire, she argues, is what moves a writer.

The full course design: https://bit.ly/53-2_09
The syllabus: https://bit.ly/53-2_09_Syllabus