Double agents and triple: teacher-researcher-writers

In this paper, I explore Kroll’s semi-conspiratorial suggestion that ‘we have accepted the role of double agents embedded in the system’ (2010). You, of course, understand that we are the writers who teach and/or teachers who write who are likely to be reading TEXT and attending AAWP. You/we have triple agency too, making you/us researcher-writers, researcher-teachers and other hyphenates. And if Writing programs are indeed as ‘strange’ or ‘uneasy bedfellows’ (Kroll 1999) with literary studies as creative and exegetical texts once were, then, in what bed are we embedded? Is it in Kroll’s (2010) interstitial space or is it within Dawson’s (2005) writerly ‘garret’ within the ivory tower populated by evolved ‘literary intellectuals’? I have interviewed ten practitioners who participate in teaching and researching within the spectrum of programs within the writing discipline to uncover the rich, globally nomadic nature of those who sleep towards, but seldom completely on, the writing side of the bed. This paper analyses responses thematically within a framework allowing for my own subjective, reflexive narrative as a multiple agent (teacher, writer, researcher, linguist). I move on to examine what Richardson (2000) called ‘creative analytic practices’ and suggest that these offer a space for double/triple/multiple agents, occupying a range of spaces between literary studies and writing. I use discourse analysis to consider articles from writing journals written in the deliberately subversive and vitally interpenetrative spirit of multiple agency. In addition to Jeri Kroll (2010), who openly leaves traces of her literary studies back-story to enrich her research, these include texts by Marianne Grey (2009) and Julia Colyar (2009). These works are multi-literate, rigorous, process-oriented records of nomadic trajectories and learning journeys. They also rearrange the symptoms of conventional academic text generation to become post-modern, interstitial, hybrids of ‘creative analytic practices’. This is one hybrid form for the double/triple/multiple agents of the 2010s to continue to take to bed.