In my sometimes-murky role as a writing program administrator, I often think about Eli Goldblatt's chapter "Lunch" in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum.Goldblatt posits the main job of a writing program administrator is to have lunch with as many people on campus as possible.His advice is simple.I tell myself it's a lesson I already know.Yet again and again, just as I begin to wonder if I should renew that WPA contract the next time, I run into someone new on campus, we discover all that we share in our hopes for our institution, we make a plan or two, and I remember I have Eli to thank.This kind of move characterizes Goldblatt, both as a person and as a writer and scholar.His personability leads, distracting us from the fact that he is also a profound thinker whose writing models what we value most in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies: it gently sets aside our concerns with form-genre form, forms of difference, disciplinary forms-and helps us commune, instead, through practice.For that reason, we are lucky now to have Goldblatt's new book, Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined, a compilation of his published writing from the beginning of his career in rhetoric and composition to the present, between 1995 and 2022.Divided into three sections by topic-Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Community Literacy, and Poetics and Practice-the collection reveals, at last, just how much is really going on in Goldblatt's work when we see it in its wholeness.In the excellent new introductory chapter, Goldblatt shows us how he's been thinking of his tripartite work all these years, straddling university writing programs and literature departments, community literacy settings, and the poetry community.Goldblatt loosens literacy and literature from their disciplinary forms and reframes them, so that "literacy" denotes reading and writing in the world, and "literature" means reading and writing for art's sake.Then he argues that this reframing allows us to make our way around and through their politicized institutional histories.While we in composition have often lamented our precarity and lesser status in relation to literary study, Goldblatt shows us how to respect our own grounding in our peculiar intersection of college writing, English literature, and English education.But what Goldblatt also achieves-without stating as his aim-is a tender embrace of the varying stances, and dare I say open conflicts, within composition itself.He extols Aja Martinez's work drawing on Critical Race Theory, for instance, seeing a kindred spirit in the conviction that "argumentation divorced from accounts of lived experience too easily leaves oppressive structures in place" (7).He brings this newer critical work into conversation with the earlier energies of the social turn, especially the "often . . .

This issue centers the stories of people who (re)define what meaningful literacy practices are from such positions as an aging mother, women refugees, a returning student, and formerly incarcerated people.These articles explore how literacy practices shift and change over the life course and across contexts in ways that ask us to reorient our own understanding of the relationship between literate subjects and the knowledge they produce.In this issue's lead article, "Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing, " Louise Wetherbee Phelps undertakes the study and analysis of an unpublished body of lifespan writing by her late mother, Virginia Wetherbee, as part of her own contribution to retrospective lifespan studies and "literacy lives in relation" (2).Phelps begins by asking how to undertake the daunting task of a project that has challenged her in multiple ways: "challenges of methodof genre of grief, responsibility, and learning under the condition and unpredictable trajectory of [her] own aging" (ibid).One of the sayings Phelps inherited from Wetherbee, "proceed as way opens, " provides a framework for a series of articles in which Phelps considers the intersections of longitudinal and lifespan studies, late-age literacies, cross-generational literacies, slow composing, and ecosystemic and chronotopic approaches to literacy.In this article, Phelps charts the relationship between her own composing project on parenting and her aging literacy in figures that visualize a pattern of moments of disruption and resilience that Phelps terms "bouncing back." Ultimately, Phelps reminds us that our understanding of the intersections of literacy and aging are, to quote an embroidered saying that Wetherbee passed on to her and that hangs by her desk, "It's not as simple as you think."Katie Silvester examines how women refugees living in "protracted displacement" (39), or "decades-long displacement and massive refugee resettlement process" (ibid), use dialogue, narrative, and re-story to offer perspectives on literacy learning across their lifespans.In "At the 'Ends of Kinship': Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement, " Silvester draws from an ethnographic study of women's literacy learning experiences in the Bhutanese refugees resettlement process and considers the relationality they take up as they negotiate various people, places, and contexts.Specifically, she elaborates on "the ends of kinship" (40), which she defines as "a dialogic space of negotiating relational ties that have become stretched and transformed by localglobal forces" (ibid).This dialogic space allows women to "kin-script and (kin)figure their own ideas about and practices of literacy in relation to kin and friends as these relational ties stretch, contract, and become transformed throughout a protracted displacement and ongoing resettlement process" (42).In the process of kinship, friendship, and woman-centered community, these women were able to redefine their literate subjectivities, relationships, and practices through grounded, embodied, and imaginal means.Silverster argues for a dynamic methodological and theoretical approach to better understand adult literacy learning in migration through "the tensions and contradictions of everyday living in relation to others over time" (46).Maggie Shelledy's "Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry" uses case studies to explore "the literacy myths that surround higher education in prison" by foregrounding formerly incarcerated people's experiences with and the effects of their participation

In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.

This article responds to the proliferation of fake news in today’s media by considering how a rhetorical theory and pedagogy more deeply grounded in a rethinking of vulnerability might help us as rhetoricians and writing scholars to address fake news as more than just dis-informative rhetoric. In the first part, I bring together scholarship from within and outside of rhetoric and writing studies in order to frame vulnerability as a fundamental component of all rhetorical encounters. In the second part, I propose the use of trolling rhetoric as an object of analysis that may help students better understand how deceptive and disruptive genres of discourse (including, but not limited to, fake news) may, in the process of trying to exploit our rhetorical vulnerability, actually call attention to this crucial aspect of rhetorical encounters.