text: Word by word - Wheaton College Massachusetts
  We are all part of a community and vulnerable to each other because we want to understand truths that are hard to articulate. There is suffering; there are things left unknown—there are many, many loose threads.
  The acceptance of this uncertainty is what, perhaps, makes up a community and leads us toward conversations and dialogues. When we gather together, we are not isolated in our struggle to confront what we or others have experienced.
  When Provost Renée T. White called for faculty to host Community Conversations in response to the rash of shootings that were occurring in September 2016, we responded as writers and as professors of writing. We offered to facilitate a public conversation that would, through writing, voice our reactions to the ongoing racial violence that undermines the very meaning of democracy and provide the same opportunity to colleagues, staff members and especially students.
  Provost White had used the word "grapple" to describe the deeply profound struggle to articulate both what we are feeling and thinking as we witness a world grown once more bloody and filled with doubt. As writers, we understand writing as a way to grapple: It allows an inner confrontation with what, on the surface, we cannot accept. Writing is at the center of all we do; it is the foundation from which we facilitate thought in students and in ourselves.
  As teachers of writing, we are called to writing as a method to collaborate—to give scope and depth to our ideas. Though we may each see the same incident, played and replayed, our perceptions differ. It is the knowledge of these differences that inspired our discovery workshop, "Writing About Images of Racism, Past and Present," presented in November 2016.
  At the workshop held in Meneely Hall, we asked attendees to focus on photographs of racial conflict and struggle and then to write about what they saw. The writing that people did was for themselves; we didn't collect any of it. We asked them to share their responses with the larger group. Our goal was both to demonstrate that writing can be used to discover (rather than report) and to give the students space in which to consider their own responses.
  We selected images that spanned generations, locations, gender, class and race, as well as different responses to oppression. The photographs were all powerful for different reasons, and we hoped that writing about them would create a deeper conversation that allowed the audience to react, reflect and respond as individuals. We also allowed students to witness our own grappling and struggle, even as we guided them through a discussion about the issues.
  That November evening there was no conclusion. We all left engaged in a mutual search for understanding and a commitment to continue the dialogue.