Putting It All on the Table

Abstract

In this autoethnographic article, I argue that the recent and trending new materialist focus within composition studies—which tends to assume the privilege of agency and unmitigated choice on behalf of writers regarding their writing environments (Prior and Shipka, 2002; Alexis, 2016)—doesn’t necessarily hold space for writers whose writing environments regularly yield to and are shaped by the preferences, habits, and material effects of actors outside of themselves—namely, their children. In making my argument about the particular effects of such mutliagent writing environments, I use a materialist lens to reveal and analyze my own and other single mother graduate student writers’ (SMGSWs) scenes of writing, hoping to invite reflection on what assumptions we may hold about the writing environments of our students, our colleagues, and ourselves.