An interview with Jessica Yood, author of “The Composition Commons”

Jessica Yood is an associate professor of English at the City University of New York’s Lehman College and Graduate Center. A former coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum and recent faculty fellow in the Mellon Foundation’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities program, she is active in literacy advocacy and public humanities projects. Her work can be found in Inside Higher Education and the MLA Sourcebook Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition, as well as several scholarly journals. Her new book is The Composition of the Commons: Writing a New Idea of the University (Utah State University Press, 2024). She was kind enough to share some thoughts about that book and college writing courses.

What inspired you to write this book and what are you hoping readers will take away from it?

The Composition Commons is about ordinary people doing something extraordinary in a place most would not think to look, the college composition classroom. I hope readers are surprised and inspired by the stories I tell about writing education from America’s past and present. And I hope they benefit from and advocate for a composition commons: higher education for a shared, public good. 

In your book, you talk about the “genres of the commons”—can you say a little bit more about that?

Genres of the commons are informal writing practices that promote connection and shared knowledge. The book highlights letter writing and freewriting as examples, but there are many more. I encourage readers to try them out.

However, what distinguishes genres of the common from other informal writing practices, like what we might post on TikTok or Instagram, is that they are academic genres. Such genres flourish in shared knowledge spaces, like the composition classroom, and aim to create knowledge networks built by a collective writing experience.

It seems like higher education these days is under a lot of financial pressure and a lot of scrutiny. How do you explain the purpose of higher education when you’re around skeptics or the unsure?

Skepticism can start conversations and stimulate problem solving.

The Composition Commons features several moments in American history when heightened suspicion about higher education increased access and innovation. Here’s one example relevant to my own university, the City University of New York (CUNY). In the early 1970s, when pressure from activists prompted a radical shift in CUNY’s admissions policies, those previously excluded from higher education–students of color, students in under-served high schools–enrolled in college in great numbers. Many hostile to this shift used student work produced in literature and writing classes to question these undergraduates’ cultural literacies and, in turn, their readiness for higher learning. CUNY, like many other universities then and now, was  “in crisis.” This prompted creativity and change. Many scholars trained as traditional literary critics reinvented themselves as literacy scholars so they could better address this moment in higher education. Their research exposed myths, expanded opportunity, and made discoveries that invented new disciplines and changed lives.

Your book involves college writing. It’s something most of us think students should be doing, but something many students don’t want to do. Why is that? Writing is an opportunity for self-expression, it’s budget-friendly, it’s a way to communicate that isn’t public speaking—why are so many students resistant to it?

Writing often serves as a gatekeeper, a way to evaluate or refuse expression, not to encourage it. Many students fear failure and thus fear writing. Yet any author knows that writing is a process, evolving as we do. When we teach writing as a means of inquiry and knowledge making, students can relish writing.

What was your own journey with writing? Did you always enjoy writing or did you come to that later?

I started writing so I could be seen. I continued writing to become invisible. In the fourth grade my teacher told us to keep a diary. Every Friday he collected our black and white composition notebooks and returned them on Monday with comments, mostly by way of happy-face stickers. Occasionally he’d write “tell me more” or “wow, that’s great” next to one of my entries. Being read was a revelation. Noticing my writing was a way to notice me, to say I existed at a time when I felt isolated and alone. As I get older and my life takes a more visible and seemingly predictable direction, I write to get out of my way and disappear into other worlds.

Reading and writing are closely linked. You’ve done a lot of work with students and curriculum. When you interact with students, are there any books you regularly recommend to them? What are some of your favorite books that you think are relevant to college students, or just to people in general?

I have my favorites, teach some “great books” regularly, and hope scholars and critics continue to challenge and extend what we read in school and for pleasure. But I think we spend too much time arguing what books matter and not enough about why books matter.

The book I am working on now is a memoir of reading. It builds a case for what I call a “National Reading Project.”  Even before the pandemic and the proliferation of large language models, Americans were reading less but writing more. And this is especially true for students. While several fields in the humanities struggle to survive, creative writing programs are thriving. Undergraduates, like all of us, are hungry for modes of authentic expression, understanding, and connection. If we encourage writing, we encourage reading. Writing is a gateway to reading.

Rather than focus on threats to higher education or cracks within the system, I’d like to ask you about ways forward. If you had a university of your own to direct, what would you like it to do moving forward? I’m asking in terms of what you think might be successful, but also what you think is good or correct. Are there things we’re not doing in higher education but we should be? Things we’re doing a little bit and we need to lean into more?

What if every high school graduate had to take at least one semester of freshman composition–in person, no exemptions, no credit earned elsewhere–where the emphasis is on practice and the outcome is preparation for engaged civic life?