At Digital Pedagogy Institute 2017, Kate Bowles shared with the Intercultural Collaboration group the language of warp and weft as metaphor for the relationship between structure and agency. A colorful woven scarf gifted to her from Maha Bali, track co-creator, surely helped prompt this metaphor.
Prone to invoking knitting metaphors myself–this blog is titled where warp meets weft for a reason–Kate’s reflections on warp and weft, and in particular the idea that it’s the very tension between them that makes the material object possible and particular, just captured me last summer. Kate was helping us make sense of the relationship between structure and agency in a vocabulary that spoke to my identity as a media scholar, and in imagery that spoke to my larger identity as a maker of meaning. Reading these final lines in her blog post published today helped restore within me some of the hope and possibility that I felt last summer at DPI:
Writing is the gift we give to ourselves. It’s the soul work of our agency, our refusal, and our choice.
It’s that important.
–Kate Bowles, Writing to the dark
I took up knitting when my kids were tiny. I needed a creative practice that was easy to carry along with me to wherever they were playing. Although my beloved potters’ wheel had kept me connected and grounded for years, it lives in the basement at a far remove from where the kids played and rested, too far out of eyesight. I could carry my bag of knitting with me to swim practices, karate lessons, the park. And in those first years, most of the objects I knit were gifts for others, mostly my children. A poncho and alpaca leg warmers for my daughter, a variegated vest for my son. Their interest in these hand-knit garments waned as they grew, and except for a baby blanket for a friend or mittens for my aunt, I feel about my knitting the same way Kate feels about writing:
It’s a gift we give to ourselves.
But time to write, like time for knitting, has to be cultivated and sheltered. And blog posts started but not finished gather like my yarn stash. Well-intentioned projects I mean to pick up when there’s time. And there never seems to be enough time to make meaningful progress, so I rarely pick them up.
No one observes my digital presence with as much dedication and care as my father. A typo in a bio. A c.v. in need of updates. A hard to find article. Aware of what a demanding year it has been in my work, my father has only very delicately hinted at these languishing tasks. He recently returned to my website and took note of its new banner image–the one update I managed this year that I feel really delighted by. 
Dad: “I’m trying to read it. What does it say? I can’t tell. It’s not very clear.”
Me: *shrugs*
Dad: “It really just kind of unravels.”
*pause*
Me: “Dad, you’re right. It really does just kind of unravel.”
We laughed a bit at that. He still thinks it’s hard to read but more importantly I think he recognized he’d helped me grasp at something I was struggling with, something more important. And instead of feeling impatient with his gentle reminder that my website was much in need of attention, I mused that his comment would be a great title for a future blog post.
A blog post that never developed beyond a few sentences in a draft, but an idea that continued to stay with me and present in my thoughts.
Present in a conversation with Sean Michael Morris, who kindly suggested to me that “we are all always in a process of unraveling and re-raveling.”
Present in a conversation with Jenna Azar who knows more than anyone that metaphors help me think through complexity, who patiently helped me find some meaning in wondering about the way a particular bundle of yarn you thought was meant for a scarf actually is better suited for a sweater. And so you just unravel and begin over. You let go of your image of a lovely scarf and turn instead to the shape of the thing the yarn really wants you to make of it. And what any of that has to do with work and teaching and learning and institutions anyhow.
And what happens when the work you care about and love is to create possibilities for becoming more closely knit together but before that can happen everything must first unravel?
Lessons in embracing not-yetness.
Kate writes that she was startled out of her writing slump by a keynote given by Robin DeRosa last week at St. Norbert. Robin’s keynote (which is terrific!) included a reference to one of Kate’s old blog posts. In sharing her blog post today on Twitter, Kate describes it “a thank you note” to Robin…and to me. I don’t know why I am gathered into that caring tweet alongside Robin. Nothing that I did last week holds a candle to what Robin accomplished in that timeframe, which includes the keynote mentioned above and another talk at SUNY’s Conference on Instruction and Technology, with a whole lot of airport marvels in between.
But I do know that in her caring “thank you,” Kate has startled me out of my own writing slump, reminded me of “the soul work” of my agency.
And so my own post here is a bit of a “thank you” as well, to Kate, to Robin, to Bonnie Stewart, and to others who are writing to the dark, writing about what is difficult, what unsettles them, about our work, our lives and our students’ lives, in higher education right now.
