We Are All Gray Now
By Jennifer Grouling
Tags: Time Passing, Friendship, Food, Community, Mentorship, Caucus, Place
We are all gray now, I realize.
Some of the men I went to grad school with have shortcuts that hide it. The women, long, and freely flowing gray. Mine are merely streaks. Our bodies show the years in different ways. We talk of hot flashes and of children growing, grown. I remember her engagement, the onesie I bought for his first baby. The time has come and gone, and I wonder where I am going now.
Back in my university office is a wall of photos reminding me throughout the year of the love I’ve found at CCCC and beyond.
My friend has wrinkles around her eyes that I don’t remember from two years ago, and her hair is more salt and pepper than before. I wonder if that big bright smile of hers led to the wrinkles—don’t they call it laugh lines?
I have a picture in my office of us from our first CCCC together: New York, 2007. We were both pretty fresh from our MA program and teaching off the tenure track. I had applied to PhD programs and was meeting with professors from them. Ashley was planning to apply the following year. I remember it was the first time I ate an olive. Paul Heilker, the best recruiter for the field, was there from Virginia Tech where I ended up going for my degree. He took us both out at lunch. Whatever I ate had olives. Paul was talking, and apparently, I made a face. Naturally, he thought it was in response to him. “No, I said, I’m just trying to figure out what I am eating.” Without missing a beat, he said, “Oh, that’s an olive. You’ll want to spit out the pit.” Every night in New York, in our cute downtown hotel room, we’d crash, full of life and excitement—for the city, for the field, for friendship. We swore we’d be “CCCC roomies for life!”
Over the years, Ashley and I became foodies, a moniker that has apparently now gone out of fashion. We sought out the best restaurants to meet up at in whatever city CCCC landed us in; olives were old hat. We get private hotel rooms now; we’re just at the age of wanting our privacy. This year we meet at a coffee shop. I’m late, and she comes with a Starbucks already in hand. She recently moved across the country taking an admin job and giving up the tenured-life. I’m a mess. I’m now going to be following my partner’s job across the country, a move we feel is needed for our safety in this country. We talk about the job market in a way so different from the first time. About admin life and negotiating tenure and upending your life, your family. I wonder if I’ll see her next year.
Fig.1. Me & Ashley Holmes in Baltimore, 2025.
It's pouring rain when I meet up with Scot for lunch. We are now working in the same state, dealing with the same political bullshit. Both now former WPAs at our institutions. It’s funny that we live a few hours apart but can only rely on seeing each other here at CCCC.
My office wall has Scot’s picture, too. One we took in grad school when we were in a class that focused on Roland Barthes. We attempted to recreate the picture of “ennui” from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes And there’s the picture of me, Scot, and Ashley at Carolyn Miller’s house at the end of our MA program. It’s the funniest picture. I don’t know what is happening in it, but I look like it’s a mug shot, and Ashley and Scot are delightfully laughing.
Fig.2. Scot Barnet, Ennui, 2005.
Fig.3. Scot Barnet, Ashley Holmes, and me at Carolyn Miller’s MA graduate gathering in 2005.
For a while, Scot and I didn’t see each other at CCCC. He had a big PhD crowd. I remember passing him once on the sidewalk as he was heading to one gathering or another. I was unaware that he was coming that year. These friendships of the field ebb and flow through time but are ones I can always count on. This summer, Scot would help me pack my mother for the move out of Indiana.
I run to Dan as he walks into the documentarian reception and hold him tight before meeting his good friend and co-author who he brought along. I’m glad he’s found her; she motivates him, renews his writing and his spirit. He’s at the reception to see me, but of course, I want to make him a documentarian. Unfortunately (fortunately?), Dan knows I’m going to love him even if he doesn’t do it. So, I stick my co-facilitator Adrienne with making him and his friends’ documentarians.
My photo wall has Dan and me with another PhD student at a club in New Orleans—the three of us were the first graduates from the Virginia Tech program. I remember how chill Dan was, and Dan is not a chill person. But the music filled our souls as the servers filled our cups and in the middle of it all we relaxed.
Fig.4. Dan Lawson, me, and Brian Gogan at CCCC in New Orleans, 2008.
I’m having a bad day when I meet up with Dan for dinner this year. Our house just went on the market, the move is feeling more real, and my wife and I are panicking a bit, wondering if we’ve made the right choices. But Dan, of anyone is the best to love me in that moment, as we’ve done before. I sent him home from CCCC once when he was at a point of personal crisis.
Sometimes we may not talk for months, but this friendship runs deep. Dan is field and family to me. Sometimes the CCCC are laid back a time for relaxation and renewal and sometimes they are emotion-filled, frenetic, and fraught. But each time we are together.
There’s something special about these friendships, this love from those who have known me from my composition beginnings. At one time I felt that CCCC was only about the old connections, the grad school friends. But as I became more involved, I gathered new colleagues and companions.
I met with Labor Caucus folk for dinner this year, still feeling new in this space, but less brand new than I was last time. I know the faces more; I’m a part of the conversation. These people get it, and I have friendship and love here as well.
My documentarian friendship with Adrienne has grown as we are now co-facilitating the project (see Grouling & Jankens, 2026). While I have lots of pre-scheduled CCCC meetups, our timing feels more spontaneous. We end up going for dessert at a pastry place, walking in the rain, joyful and eager. I nearly forgot that Adrienne is gluten-free, and when we are almost there I ask her, “why are we going to a pastry place?” It doesn’t matter, though. It isn’t about the place. She has a flight of ice cream and as I watch her dive in, I’m filled with love for this person and for the way we dive into work, life, and massive desserts together.
Fig.5. Adrienne Jankens with ice cream, 2025.
This field is not about paying it back, at least not to individuals. The love I’ve received, the mentorship, can never be returned. It is about paying forward.
I treat a graduating student to a drink—not one of mine except in the sense that we all belong to one another here at CCCC—and the timing is just right for them to share their complex life decisions and their pain. I was there one time. Sitting with my mentors, spilling forth the pieces of my fragmented life, while theirs felt so put together. And so, I sit, and listen, and I give my graying perspective. I tell my now old, worn tale of my life falling apart while I wrote a dissertation and found a job. How I miscarried; how I divorced. How my now-10-year-old marriage has grown, and what I’ve learned.
Do they receive my graying words as wisdom? Because all it is is years, the wear and tear of having been to this place before.
The institution cannot love you back, we often say. As I prepare to part ways with my institution, I know this is the case. I am tired, and I am torn, and I am grieving. And the institution does not see it, does not care, wants only the most it can get from me with the least amount given in return. Perhaps CCCC or NCTE as organizations are the same. Institutions in their own right.
But there’s something deeper here for me. Something in this gathering. A place-y-ness in these placeless, sterile convention center halls. It’s somewhere I will fight to return to whenever I am able, for however long I may, no matter what happens in the time between.
Works Cited
Grouling, J. & Jankens, A. “Documenting a Documentarian Friendship” in Lindquist, Julie, Bree Straayer, and Bump Halbritter. Recollections from our Commonplaces: 4C21-23 Documentarian Tales, NCTE/CCCC and WAC Clearinghouse, 2026.