This interview takes Sharon Crowley’s CCCC Exemplar Award as a kairotic moment to ask her to revisit her work and reflect on some valuable lessons she learned about what it means to be a teacher, writer, and rhetorician. The interview took place in Professor Crowley’s home near Tempe, Arizona in June 2015. The discussion below is a small part of that long and wide-ranging conversation, and it demonstrates well Professor Crowley’s care, her candor, and her critical acumen.

In this interview Susan Jarratt reviews the trajectory of her scholarship and revisits some of the lessons learned from a variety of her projects while simultaneously drawing out historical and narrative continuities of seemingly disparate time periods and contexts. In doing so, she elucidates the value of scholarship as a political and instructive tool that can be usefully applied to both teaching and administration.

Rhetorical invention is the principal source of politics and ethics as contemporary theories from various disciplines demonstrate. The complex reflexive relationship among politics, ethics, and invention demands ethical responsibility, requiring rhetoricians (who hold a key to this subject) to acknowledge and attend to their ethos, used here in the classical sense of ethos as “gathering place.”