When Abigail Reardon began her academic career as a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, she originally thought her career path would lead her to become “your classic lit professor.”
That was until she discovered how much she loved to teach—and, in particular, to teach students how to write.
“I love that in writing instruction, we get to foreground the ‘why’ questions. Why does this idea matter? Why is this argument worth making?” said Reardon, who started her role as the inaugural executive director of the University of Chicago Writing Program in July.
Originally from western Massachusetts, Reardon comes to UChicago after spending the last 14 years at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, where she earned her PhD in English and went on to direct the University’s Expository Writing program.
We sat down with Reardon to talk about what brought her to the College, her passion for teaching writing and her plans to build on the strengths of UChicago’s nationally recognized “Little Red Schoolhouse.”
You started your new role as the Executive Director of the Writing Program on July 1. How have you found your first six months at UChicago?
In a word: invigorating. There’s so much that has excited me about being a member of the UChicago community. One thing that has amazed me is the intellectual energy of this place. Every conversation I have, whether with students or colleagues, is so clearly motivated by a desire to develop deeper, richer understandings of whatever topic we’re discussing. And every time a conversation “ends,” I don’t have the sense that it’s over. There are always more questions to consider and new perspectives to explore.
This experience of ongoing, never-settled, curiosity-provoked conversation has always been one of my favorite aspects of both teaching and writing. It’s been incredible to discover just how much that quality is part of the general atmosphere here. I’ve also been delighted to meet and work with a wide range of colleagues across the College and University who value writing as essential to student learning. Writing is one of the practices that unites all disciplines, scholars and students in an academic community as diverse as UChicago. It’s exciting to be part of a program that can help connect folks across disciplinary boundaries.
What drew you to your new role as Executive Director of UChicago’s Writing Program?
This is an institution that foregrounds “how?” and “why?” questions incessantly (and in the best way possible). I’ve always tried to do the same when working with students, mentoring teachers, designing curricula and administering programs. When I learned that the College was interested in thinking critically about how and why writing is taught in the forms that it is in the undergraduate curriculum—and is invested in ensuring that students and teachers across the University receive the best possible support when teaching and learning with writing—I thought how fantastic it would be to contribute to this work.
Before joining the College, I admired how the Core curriculum encourages students to take intellectual risks and to grapple with complex issues and questions they might never before have thought to be curious about. Now that I’m here, I admire this quality even more intensely. I’m especially excited about how a new writing seminar we’re currently developing—a major goal for which is to help students early in their undergraduate careers become attuned to the challenges and rewards of the writing process in new and enlivening ways—will contribute to the College’s educational mission.
I was also drawn to this opportunity by the prospect of leading the program that launched one of the most innovative approaches to writing instruction in the country, the “Little Red Schoolhouse.” This class is remarkable in so many ways (as a 2020 UChicago News “Meet a Chicagoan” story about one of the creators and longtime leader of the program, Larry McEnerney, attests). In a single nine-week quarter, Schoolhouse teaches advanced undergraduate and graduate students to write effectively for a variety of real-world audiences. It is an intensely pragmatic course and one that has inspired writing programs across the country and world. I’ve spoken to several alumni who took this course while at UChicago, and, to a one, they’ve all described how transformative this program was for their eventual career success.
What’s one thing that you want to share with student writers at UChicago?
So many students understand themselves to be either a “good writer” or a “bad writer.” I want to help them break down this kind of dualistic, fixed-identity understanding of what it means to be a writer. Writing is something one does. Ideally it’s something—or, really, a lot of somethings, given how multifaceted the writing process is—one does every day and not only when there’s a term paper or lab report deadline looming. I want to help students come to understand writing as a set of habits, practices,and processes through which we discover and develop our best ideas, so that we might then test and refine those ideas in conversation with others.
That last part about being in conversation with others is crucial. I always have students pay particular attention to the acknowledgments section when introducing an academic text in class. When we read acknowledgements, students habitually notice that these sections tend to be long, and that writers, even the most accomplished and well-practiced scholars, always include something along the lines of “I couldn’t have written this book alone; countless people helped in countless ways.”
I want students to experience how writing happens in a community, even if many stages of the process happen in solitude. What we write matters because people read it, and we’re able to write curiously, creatively and even courageously because we learn and draw from writing done by others and benefit from the feedback of readers who trust that what we write will actually matter.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
As a once-and-always English major, I love to read, and I read for pleasure as often as I can. I’ve done serious damage at the Hyde Park bookstores since moving to Chicago this summer. Some new-to-me favorites that I’ve read in the past several months have been The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, The Open Road by Jean Giono, and 1919 by Eve L. Ewing. I like to read broadly across genres and time periods and have been making a special point to read more books in translation in the last few years. I’ve been on an audiobook kick in recent months, too, which has been especially nice as I’ve been exploring the city and the Midwest!