14.3: What Is Reading Like for an Anthologist?

Creating an anthology with twenty-five texts in it doesn’t mean you only have to read twenty-five texts. It’s like photography—if a magazine photographer knows she is going to publish around ten photos in next month’s issue, she won’t take only ten photographs when she gets out in the field. A filmmaker creating a two-hour movie would be unwise to shoot only two hours of footage. As far as visual art goes, Winston Smith says, in an interview with SF Live, that for each collage that he composes, “I go through literally thousands of images looking for ones that are the right size and position for juxtaposing” (Stentz).

The same principle applies to patchwriters. In the midst of editing her anthology on family morality, Gail, a Queensborough Community College student, writes, “I am starting off working on the Internet reading different types of sources. This includes memoirs, court cases, newspaper articles, impact statements from those families affected. I am also working with poems and possibly works of art. After I gather a wide variety of work, I am going to narrow them down to the ones that have the greatest to do with my topic and help to tell my story.” You might notice from Gail’s writing that anthologists consider a slightly different set of questions than other readers. In other circumstances,
when she doesn’t have her editing cap on, Gail might read for plot, to see what happens, or to be able to say that she’s read it. Or she might read for theme, main ideas, musicality, or pleasure.

However, during the anthologizing process, Gail reads for these reasons and a few others. It doesn’t always matter so much what she learns from a piece, nor whether she agrees or disagrees with the author, nor whether she can identify the main points in it. It’s more about what she can do with the text, how she can utilize it . . . how she can put it to work. It’s a different kind of reading, and anthologists ask different kinds of questions as they make their way through a text, sometimes skimming, sometimes reading more closely. A student named Iga writes, “As I read, I am thinking about how one piece might fit with the others in the section. I am also thinking about how it is ‘different’ from the others (to create variety). Also, I look at the style of writing to make sure it is not just some sloppy work but something worthwhile.” Iga’s reading is very opportunistic. How, she asks, can I exploit this text that I am reading so that it increases the power and overall richness of my anthology?

While anthologists read, they think very strategically, trying to figure out where in the anthology a piece might go, if it will make it into the anthology at all, and what section or subsection it will go into. Gail puts the matter succinctly, saying that anthologists “view the texts not only on a personal level but also from the point of view of the audience it is intended for.”

Unlike Lorraina, the insurance agent who dropped the class, I view the considerable time spent working on patchwriting to be well spent. It is a great experience in an underappreciated kind of composition, a kind that requires “working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered
multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts” (Von Seggern).

However, for all of my confidence (and as much as I would like to convince you to try patchwriting), I’ll end by admitting that some questions remain. For example, I think Lorraina was right to question how our anthological work would improve the letters she writes to customers. How would all of this have helped her at her job? The question of scale plays a big role here. Does improvement at one scale of writing (portfolio management) translate into improvement at other scales (letter writing)? Will your spelling improve as you arrange the books in a library? Will your experiments in patchwriting help you to improve your “grammar”?