The Sweetest Rum: NaNaWriMo as Market Driven Fantasy AND Subsequent/ Simultaneous Sponsor

1. The Sweetest Rum: NaNaWriMo as Market Driven Fantasy AND Subsequent/ Simultaneous Sponsor of Writer Identity “I use NaNo a lot in my life. I talk about it all the time. I’m always telling people to go buy my books, spread the word about NaNo, NaNoWriMo!” @smkastner Stacy Kastner Mississippi State University 4Cs: March 2014

2. Background/Exigency Students as writers who don’t see themselves as writers • Study Goals • To situate student writers’ theories at the center of understanding what writing is, who writers are, and why “writer” is a challenging identity for many to take on--To better theorize writer identity within the context of writers’ experiences and voices • To better understand how why people construct or resist constructing self-identities as writers • Motivated… • In the classroom, by the surplus of writing-non-writers • Why do some people call, see, and think of themselves as writers when others do not…How do people construct self-identities as writers? • In the research, by evidence of professional writers as writing-non-writers and student writers as poly-literate people who are producing a “surplus” of written discourse (Brandt, Lunsford). • Presentation Goal • Discuss the ways in which National Novel Writing Month served as a sponsor for a 17-year-old female’s (self-)identity development as a writer

3. StudyOrientation Details of Case Study and Methods Case Study Corrinne Marie Burns: “I’m a young writer, barely on the edge of ‘writerdom’; I scribble in the shadow of people that I would really classify as ‘writers.’” • 17-years old • Northwest Ohio • Educated Parents and siblings Enni C. Leowly: The Writer “getting her feet wet in NYC” • 22-years old • NYC city with her sister, who works on Broadway Collection Oral Histories/Literacy Narratives/Life Stories; Self-Designed Writer’s Questionnaire; Perceptual Learning Styles Preference Questionnaire (Reid); Archives Collection/Analysis Anecdotal Tours and Categorization of Archives; Artifact-Based Interviews (Halbritter and Lindquist); Text-Based Interviews (Roozen); Participants’ Mappings of Relevant Activities (Roozen) Re-Presentation Tracing Trajectories of Practice (Roozen); (Digital) Pastiche (Ely)

5. NaNoWriMo: Market Driven Fantasy As a past winner of “NaNoWriMo,” I can tell you that just getting it done is a challenge, never mind actually coming out at the end of it with something readable (though if any publishers are in the market for an unfinished, typo-ridden YA dystopia with a commercially unworkable plot focused on gender issues, feel free to email me). But a surprising number of published books—including some very successful ones—got their start as NaNoWriMo projects. Here are 8, guaranteed to get you started on your own 50,000-word masterpiece:

6. NaNoWriMo: Sponsor of Literacy “I had a special code from “winning” NaNoWriMo—you don’t “win”; if you reach the 50,000 word goal, you win—I had a special code that only the winners get and so I went on to Createspace and you put in the code. You upload the thing, you have to choose the page dimensions, you have to upload your cover art—that’s one of my favorite parts, I love designing cover art, it’s so much fun—anyways, so, then you had to choose whether you wanted it to be on cream paper or white paper and then at the end, it checks and I don’t know if someone has to okay it, because sometimes it’s a day or two, and then a lot of times I have problems getting the right dimensions for the page so that the words fit and everything, so, sometimes they will be like try again, and you have to do it again and again. Sometimes I just make my dad do it; ‘figure out how to make this 5’8”!’ So you do that, you put in your code at the end, and then they send you a free proof copy. Technically, then you are supposed to go through your proof copy and edit it some more and stuff and then, after that, you can, there’s a little sales channel thing on it and you can say ‘make this available like on Amazon’ and you say how much you want to charge for it. So, mine’s like $10 and I get $4—not even half—but, if you upgrade your Createspace account you get more back.”

8. NaNoWriMo Documentary: “I like to imagine that I’m a writer” (And she does so by telling stories about herself)

9. Sponsoring our students to take on identities as writers matters “[T]he actual writing that goes on in typical classrooms across the United States remains dominated by tasks in which the teacher does all the composing... Given the constraints imposed by high-stakes tests, writing as a way to study, learn, and go beyond—as a way to construct knowledge or generate new networks of understandings—is rare” (Applebee and Langer 26).