By Nicole Guinot Varty
Tags: Community, Friendship, Family, Food, Time Passing
I was an MA student at Eastern Michigan University when I attended my first CCCC conference in the spring of 2007. I remember feeling anonymous, excited, and overwhelmed as I wandered the conference center halls, consulting my giant program book, searching for the friends I had shared a hotel room with to split the cost. Everyone seemed to know where they were going or had a pack of friends to hang with. One night, I sought out my mentor, who was at that time, the director of the writing program. She seemed genuinely happy to see me and graciously invited me to dinner with some of her conference buddies. Like a puppy being taken to the beach, I was just happy to be brought along. The restaurant was all dark, smoky colors and leather banquettes. Candles on the tables flung tiny bursts of warm light through the wine glasses so they flashed like jewels. And there I was, like Mia Thermopolis before she got her makeover, sitting at a table with several people whose books I’d read for class or who I’d cited in my seminar papers, just feeling so young and out of my depth. They all knew each other and were carrying on what seemed to me at the time, tremendously important and ongoing conversations about the discipline and their research. I listened and tried to grasp the tenor but mainly felt like a kid who’d been invited to sit at the grown-ups’ table for the first time. I left that dinner in a bit of a daze, grateful for a glimpse into what might be my future if I stuck with this career.
This memory surfaced as I reflected on my time at the 2025 CCCC conference in Baltimore, and on the power and importance of community for myself and other college writing teachers like me. Community is an essential nutrient for us instructors; it helps to ward off burnout and possibly scurvy. It is something that grows with nurturing and attention, and it can be shaped and pruned. We don’t always talk very openly or metacognitively about it, so if you’re new to the discipline, you may feel like you’ve been transplanted into unfamiliar ground, with no one tending to you or helping you know where to sink your roots. As a documentarian, I took time to record details about my time at CCCC, including the spaces and places I inhabited. I spent this conference mainly in the session rooms and hallways, in restaurants or other social spots, and in my hotel room. These three main locations highlight my goals at a big conference like this, and what I need from my community: I want to be attending interesting sessions, learning from fellow scholars about their work which might overlap with or inform my own, driving it forward. This reflects my own personal desire to leave a conference inspired and energized in my scholarship and teaching. But I also want to have fun, and I certainly need rest. The essentiality of community to support these goals and needs came through in sharp relief this year.
Airports become funnels, pulling together folks from a state or region who happen to be travelling to a common destination. By the time I’d landed in Baltimore, I’d met up with my presentation partner, and we’d reconnected with a former colleague who now works at another regional university. By the time I’d dropped off my bags in my hotel room, I was turning to walk back out onto the streets for a tour of the harbor with my friends whom I’ve known for over a decade. We followed the slightly salty tang in the air as we chatted, our energy high, our legs still un-cramping from the plane. We took in the historical ships, majestically anchored blocks from the conference site, and over soft-shelled crab, we caught up on mutual colleagues, each other’s kids or partners, gossip on program changes, and conference plans. We were all approaching the conference strategically, ready to get what we came for: up-to-date research that could inform our own work, inspiration even. The years of conference-going experience we had accumulated made us canny in our plans, and we recognized it in each other. “Game recognize game,” as they say. The human connection fostered in chit-chat and walking tours became the seed bed for our planning. The dynamics changed: small groups gave way to one-on-one planning sessions; walking by myself through the halls gave way to sitting in a crowded session with hundreds of people. In one of the sessions I was in, we were prompted to reflect on something we wanted to remember, and I wrote about both connections between a panel speaker and my own experiences, and "the sweet and kind interactions with my friends and colleagues.” These two aspects of community worked together to create a meaningful conference experience. The energy of being part of the national conference community stayed constant.
Another constant at this year’s CCCC was that of institutional responsibilities brought with me. My best friend from work, who is also my writing partner, and I had planned to “do the conference” together. All week, this meant that we got to have fun, eat good food, and get a tremendous amount of work and processing done—arguably much more than we could at home! To continue on with work from home might initially seem dull, if not for the unlooked-for moments of professional inspiration that not only framed this work but energized it, providing essential value. The energy of CCCC provided a fresh perspective, not to mention focused time, to work on tasks and problem-solving with new intensity. And while several of the sessions I had expected to be helpful or informative were...not, a few experiences were delightfully, surprisingly inspiring and affirming. For instance, there was the treasure of attending the Community Writing SIG, where I found a potential connection and encouragement for the work I'm just starting in that area. Or Andrea Lunsford's panel with Krista Ratcliffe and Cheryl Glenn on hard listening, which was bursting with firecrackers of inspiration for me. The opportunities to connect my ongoing pedagogical development to these really smart women and the lines of inquiry they presented filled me with what I can only describe as intellectual awe and intellectual humility. And like the spark of a firecracker that sets dry grass ablaze, my own work was alight in my mind.
There is almost no pleasure that rivals waking up without an alarm in a clean, quiet room suffused with pale light. The soft hum of hotel air conditioners and vague car noises filter through the wavy curtains hanging on their tracks. No one needs anything from me. No demands waiting to be met other than my own. As someone who is, at baseline, an introvert, I spend a lot of time in my hotel room because I don't just like solitude, I need it. It re-energizes me to engage with lots of "public" experiences and helps me to decompress and synthesize afterward. It took years and several conferences to learn that. This CCCC gave me a space to demonstrate my ability to shape my own experience to benefit from the community created by the conference as a happening. I can shift gears to engage deeply and meaningfully in conversations directing my discipline. I can let myself sleep in. The conference represents a chunk of time set apart, simmering with possibility. Organizing one’s time with attention to one’s own needs is a skill that anyone participating in higher education (hopefully) knows and values, it is equally consequential for conference-going.
While shaping my community to my own needs is key to healthy engagement, I, of course, must attend to the outside factors that claim my attention. One of the biggest things to impact my time was the daily evening ritual of calling home to say goodnight to my kids and husband. The first night, I had to step away from an event and then do some mom-level counselling to help two very tired kids process their own days’ challenges. It was something I had to navigate every night, and it kept me tethered to the reality of home. A few emails trickled through from students and made me realize that I hadn't posted an away-message in my inbox! So, setting that up was an important thing I needed to attend to, to communicate clear boundaries around my conference time. Aside from that, I managed my time in a more relaxed way than I manage my at-home life--not as many required things on the list. But if I'd really wanted to (and I was tempted!) I could've easily just stayed in the hotel and napped and read novels and watched rom coms, emerging only for the occasional pizza or latte. The professional experiences of learning and connecting were worth it...and I even got to eat pizza anyway.
The documentarian project highlighted the ways in which I made conscious choices to keep my workload, learning load, and social load, manageable and as balanced as possible. I chose to sleep in a couple of days. I chose to not attend sessions in order to walk the exhibit hall for a half-hour. I chose to stop grading and go to a baseball game. These reflections demonstrate to me that none of my actions were the products of circumstance alone, but that I was intentionally shaping my community experience in ways that listened to my body as well as my mind. Since there is no such thing as a static "work-life balance" but more of a constantly-responding and adjusting homeostasis, I feel that was carried through my conference experience in a healthy way. The result was that when I returned home and faced the end of the semester and grading finals, I wasn’t totally spent. The freedom and confidence to make these choices hasn’t always been innate, however. I had to learn it over time.
I came to the 2025 CCCC conference feeling like a veteran, an “old hat”, an experienced scout…because I am. And this feeling of familiarity has been hammered out over years of attending this and other conferences, figuring out how I want to shape things for myself and the community.
Well, that really makes it seem like I’ve got it all together, doesn’t it? Ha! As someone who is not-at-all a morning person, not ever, no way, I can see that my morning reflections from CCCC (along with being later than I'd like, every time) often have an undercurrent of "oh shit" about them. Meaning, I've missed a morning session I wanted to go to, or, nope, did not meet those people for breakfast after all...calling up memories of panicked rushing to my first classes as a GTA, and stern glances from grad school instructors when I tried to sneak into their seminars late. But, as Stevie Nicks writes, even children get older. I’ve learned to apply strategies to keep myself engaged and on time, for the most part. I’ve developed a system where I make myself a “short list” of sessions that I want to attend, and prioritize those that seem relevant to my ongoing scholarship, but give myself plenty of grace to “skip” if, say, I run into a friend I haven’t seen since before COVID, and need to give him directions to the check-in booth, while catching up on life along the way. And, as my presentation and other events that I was responsible for leading or attending pass, I get more relaxed and able to "go with the flow" even more. Like walking the halls of a school you used to go to, or returning to a house you lived in as a child, even the overwhelming, anonymous memory of a first CCCC becomes layered with experience, and shrinks down to a manageable size.
If there’s one paradox the 2025 documentarian project revealed, it is that the community of college writing teachers is vast…and also very specific. It is national, but also it is the colleagues I flew in with. It is the buzz of a room packed with people ready to hear prominent scholars in our field, and the deepening of friendship that comes from walking to the taqueria someone heard about on the Food Network, or finding the one wine shop within two miles of the hotel.
At my first CCCC, I was generously brought into a community that already existed, into a conversation that had been ongoing. The wild role-reversal is that now I’m the one having important conversations long before the conference begins and continuing them long after it ends. Very Burkeian. This year, nearly twenty years later, I was one of the people organizing the dinner, inviting graduate students from my institution, and checking in with folks I’d not seen in months, or in some cases, years. We scored a table at a local pub, and I ordered the first round of appetizers as people began to arrive. We yell-talked over the noise, reigniting the connections that had brought us together over time. Between bites of crab-stuffed pretzel and beer-battered pickles, I took in the group of tenured and non-tenured, those looking for jobs or starting new ones, or shouldering the responsibilities of well-established roles. From our varied institutions and personal contexts, we all came to Baltimore to participate in our disciplines’ ongoing collaborative enterprise of making and disseminating knowledge. We are the community.