“Go and Love Some More”: Memorializing and Archiving Feminist Grief

Peitho Volume 24 Issue 4, Summer 2022

Author(s): Brooke Boling, Laura R. Micciche, Katie C. Monthie, and Jayne E.O. Stone

Brooke Boling is pursuing her PhD in rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests focus on queer rhetorics, critical pedagogy, anti-racist education, Appalachian rhetoric, and professional writing. Her current research focuses on how queer Appalachians negotiate their identities and utilizing critical pedagogy in professional writing classes. 

 

Laura R. Micciche, professor of English at University of Cincinnati, teaches and researches writing pedagogy, composing practices, feminist and materialist rhetorics, professional editing, and style. In addition to her recent co-edited collection, Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What it Means to Fail (2020, with Allison Carr), Micciche has published two monographs and an edited collection, all of which have something to do with the affective swirl of writing, teaching, and/or administering. She is currently co-editor, with Chris Carter, of the Parlor Press Writing Program Administration series and formerly served as editor of Composition Studies for six years.  

 

Katie C. Monthie is a second-year English PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati who primarily studies social media rhetoric, queer theory, and new materialism, as well as writing pedagogy and writing center work. Her current research focuses on copyright in the composition classroom and the rhetorics of queer fiber art. 

 

Jayne E. O. Stone is pursuing her PhD in rhetoric and composition at University of Cincinnati where she also teaches undergraduate composition classes. Her research interests include revision pedagogy and processes, the effect of varying rhetorics on first-generation and aspiring farmers, and the writing environments of single parents in academia. She is currently working on a co-edited collection of revision narratives, as well as a study of single mother graduate student writers’ writing environments.

Abstract: Reading across the extensive in memoriam sections of Peitho published between 2013 and 2022, we take stock of memorializing as a potentially feminist act guided by an ethic of love. We explore what we call Peitho’s “grief archive” through multiple frameworks—as feminist memory pitched toward change, as evidence of the tight braid between our personal and professional lives, and as a reminder to keep on loving one another through the ordinary moments, the celebrations, and the walloping losses.

Tags: embodiment, feminist grief, in memoriam, love, memory, Mentoring

Hal Ashby’s classic 1971 black comedy Harold and Maude tells the irreverent love story of Harold, a young man obsessed with his own death, and Maude, a 79-year-old woman with a love for life. The two meet the week before Maude’s 80th birthday, a day which Maude herself has designated as her last, though this is unbeknownst to Harold. Throughout the course of the film, Maude teaches Harold how to live and love. Thus, when she announces on her birthday that she has taken pills to end her life, Harold is understandably heartbroken. Near the end of the film, Harold rides with Maude in an ambulance, begging her not to die. As Harold tells Maude again of his love for her, she smiles, telling him, “that’s wonderful. Go and love some more.” Harold, in the midst of his grief, takes what he has learned from Maude to heart, and resolves wordlessly to “love some more” by going into the world and emulating Maude’s joie de vivre. Harold’s grief is offset by Maude’s joyful imagining of Harold’s life, knowing that, though she will not remain with him, he will go on and be better for having known her. For Maude, grief is fertile ground for envisioning an active future filled with continual loving.  

Reading across the in memoriam sections published in Peitho between 2013 and 2022, we find Maude’s imperative to “love some more” an apt descriptor of how grief is processed in the tributes to Linda Bergmann, Win Horner, C. Jan Swearingen, Nan Johnson, Lisa Ede, Kate Ronald, and bell hooks. In this piece, we wander through this grief archive, as we’re calling it, to take stock of memorializing as a potentially feminist act, especially when guided by an ethic to keep on loving. The extensive memorials ranging from 15 to 44 pages exceed typical announcements of a colleague’s passing published in other academic venues. In Peitho, grief is not inconspicuous or quiet reflection; it needs more than a paragraph or a page; it is showy, indulgent, and, above all, active. Readers encounter usable grief in each collection of vignettes and assorted materials. Here, we read this grief archive multiply—as feminist memory pitched toward change, as evidence of the tight braid between our personal and professional lives, and as a reminder to keep on loving one another through the ordinary moments, the celebrations, and the walloping losses.  

Documenting Presence, Embodying Grief (Laura)  

On April 10, 2020, feminist compositionist Alice Gillam passed away. She mentored me and  many others who were beyond lucky to work with her at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she taught for nearly three decades. After she died, a group of her former students wrote tributes to Alice and shared them on what was then the WPA-L. Threaded through our accounts were details about Alice’s infamous gatherings at her home, often accompanied by wine, fresh fruit, pastries, and her favorite, a gin martini. Reading through the Peitho memorials, I began to conjure Alice in my mind—her iridescent white hair that seemed to fall in place effortlessly, her warm easy smile, her mischievous sense of humor and infectious laugh. Her mentoring, teaching, and collaborative practices were legion and admired by many. But, upon meeting Alice and getting to know her, what came first was an appreciation for her as a person—the immediate sensory experience of being in the presence of someone you’d want to know your whole life. 

The person, the personal, matters. Living, feeling women inhabit this archive, reminding us that we are all more than the sum of our professional accomplishments. While this is not a profound statement, sometimes academia obscures the obvious and mires us in layers of bullshit. The archive, however, takes us to the person. It teems with sensory details that resist quiet contemplation and instead court life and activity. Lynée Lewis Gaillet will miss Nan Johnson’s “soft yet urgent voice.” Linda Hughes’s memory of first meeting Win Horner was her “wearing a blazer—red?—and holding her shoulders in a way that conveyed confidence, excitement, complete delight.” Writing about C. Jan Swearingen, Cheryl Glenn recalls “how good she always smelled. I think of her perfect posture (she was always reminding me that I could stand taller—and she was right!) and that way her little finger fluttered so elegantly.” We almost smell her trademark scent of patchouli, mentioned by Jennifer Bay and Beth Brunk-Chavez in their tribute. We can almost see her upright posture, finger in flight. We do see her in a photograph seemingly snapped in mid-sentence, hands near either side of her face, gesturing. Grief can be specific like this; it can turn us away from abstraction to how someone once moved through the world and left traces, imprints, stories. 

Grieving bodies of those left behind also appear throughout the in memoriam contributions. Writing about bell hooks, Sophia Greco notes, “I am at odds with myself trying to find direction within institutions that perpetuate violence both figurative and literal. I wonder if this sentiment is part of what we call grief; a grief for the liberatory education we seldom (if ever) have; a grief that expands tenfold with the news of her passing.” Michael Faris ends his memorial to Lisa Ede by describing his writing and emotional situation: “I write in coffee shops and bars, with a body—elated, frustrated, crying. I pay attention to the materiality of my writing because of Lisa. I write this at my favorite bar, with Lisa and Andrea’s book near me, a whiskey and coke, a pack of cigarettes, my eyes flooded with tears.” The physicality of grief, the way it wears on bodies and takes over—floods—reminds readers that these accounts are not just about teachers, students, colleagues; they are about human connection and loss that exceeds usual relationship boundaries. 

Where do we look for traces of others in our lives? What personal archives do we assemble in the moment of loss as an act of remembrance? It’s almost like our sense of someone finds a material trace. When writing about Nan Johnson, Judy Segal began by surrounding herself “with the materials of my Nan archive,” which included Segal’s class notes, Johnson’s publications, and “dissertation chapters with [Nan’s] penciled marginal notes in her almost illegible handwriting.” In conjuring Alice, I turn to photos, but also to the cat trinkets she gifted me over the years, the baby blanket she sent on the birth of my son 18 years ago, and my file of seminar papers, where I see her messy handwriting and take in her advice to “look at this idea again.” Likewise, about Ede, Jess Restaino seeks to “count, to label, to weigh” Ede’s presence and loss through their email correspondence. “I searched my email and found over a thousand threads between us. Each thread contains multiple messages. Who knows how many, total?” (emphasis in original). Restaino continues: “Lisa had a habit of titling the subject line of an email thread as a kind of ‘hook’ or half-sentence that she’d finish only when her reader opened the message: ‘Just a quick email to say that…’ or ‘Can’t believe that I forgot to mention…’” This participatory audience-centric habit is a way of saying we’re making something together, similar to how Katie describes patchworking below. Communal grief, multivoiced witnessing, personal-professional knots—perhaps these are ingredients of feminist memorializing.  

Patchworking Memory Together (Katie) 

I got my first knitting kit from my grandmother, a sewist. Although I didn’t fully learn to knit until after she passed, I still think of that kit fondly, and of my knitting, crocheting, and sewing as an inherited love. One of my current projects is a patchwork cropped sweater for my sister made up of different thicknesses of wool yarn, which requires different techniques to stitch them together evenly. Despite the differences in each patch of yarn, when placed together, they all work to create a new visual display. The fabric these yarns make will be called a sweater and will reflect love for the person they are made for, as most crafted objects do. 

It was this patchwork sweater that I thought of when reading Michael Faris’s “For Lisa: A Patchwork Quilt.” His description of his own memorial as a “patchwork” piece prompted me to think about the ways in which his vignettes—varying in size, style, and shape—work to mimic the patchwork sweater I’m making. Each portion of either the memorial or the sweater is individual and contributes something unique to the overall piece. These portions, or patches, should not work together as cohesively as they do, given how different they are. And yet, when placed together, they create something new and whole, something altogether more complex either narratively or visually than you might’ve at first thought.  

This stuck with me as I continued to read through the in memoriam issues. I became struck by how each unique piece of writing within each issue, each patch, contributes to the larger patchwork quilt that comprises each in memoriam. Similar to how Faris’s patchwork piece includes differing styles and lengths, so too do the in memoriams.  Essays, narratives, speeches, songs, photographs, and (re)printed works of those remembered are compiled together to memorialize the scholar as a whole complex individual. Even beyond genre, mourners contribute different types of recollections of those who have died, including sensory narratives, advice passed down, and values shared, explored by Laura, Jayne, and Brooke respectively. While memorializing each scholar, these in memoriams also give friends, colleagues, and loved ones the space to grieve on the page. This, in turn, is reflected in each “patch,” or memorial entry, that makes up the in memoriam. 

Each patch within these patchwork quilts becomes not just an individual representation of the scholar and their impact, but of the relationships and connections these women made, as Laura and Jayne note. And just as crafting is not inherently a solitary craft, the crafting of these memories is not solely an individual act, but also a collaborative one. Most commonly, these collaborative pieces utilize the collective “we” as the main point of view. Rebecca Dingo, Ben McCorkle, and Rara Pauliny utilize third person and the collective we in “Dim the House Lights” to narrate Nan Johnson’s individual and collective impact on their personal and professional lives. The collective we in this narrative notably allows for shared memories of Nan’s personality as a performer to shine through. Using a combination of the collective we and third person, “The Last Time We Saw Lisa” is a narrative of a final picnic with Lisa Ede written by her students, Vicki Tolar Burton, Tim Jenson, Kristy Kelly, Sarah Tinker Perrault, and Ehren Helmut Plugfelder. Here, the usage of “we” and the third person highlights both the collective group memory of the picnic and each individual’s recollection of it. Finally, Connie Kendall Theado and Brenda M. Helmbrech use “we” in “Begin Again” to create a singular narrative remembrance of Kate Ronald that emphasizes the lessons they learned from her. Like Faris’ patchwork quilt, these collaborative in memoriams demonstrate a way of grieving that relies on community to reflect on the shared memory of an individual, one that uses narrative to showcase not just their contributions to the field, but also a shared understanding of the scholar as a whole person. 

In many ways, it’s almost impossible for me to fully grasp the wide ranging impact these women have had on the field. It’s hard to conceptualize the idea that one person, let alone these seven, could each have had such a wide reach throughout their careers, when I myself am only at the beginning of mine. And yet, I feel these impacts in each of these in memoriams. With each passing issue, I could not help but think about my mentors. The stories shared by past graduate students of these women—the meetings, the jokes, the advice—all feel so close to me. After all, the early days of mentorships shared within these narratives, through letters, through narratives, through patches, are recently developed for me, or developing now. It hurts to think about what grieving those people might look like. But it helps to consider the community that I will likely grieve with, how that community and our stories can all be stitched together in remembrance of them, in all their wonderful complexity. 

Remembering Their Words (Jayne) 

 As Brooke, Laura, Katie, and I sat in Laura’s inviting and homey dining room, sharing what had surfaced for each of us as we read through these in memoriams, I felt compelled to share a sort of confession in our safe, feminist space. “Can I be vulnerable for a minute?” I started. “As I read through these tributes, I kept returning to the thought: I can only hope that I am written about in these ways when my time comes.” I thought I was admitting a self-centered notion, and it had been difficult for me to decide to say it out loud. As a graduate student so early in her career, who was I to suppose I’d make enough of an impact during my career that my death might prompt such wide and personal grief? However, when every single one of my co-authors admi