| Sumario: | In this article, I describe a pedagogical practice that I argue can augment community publishing’s potential to help adult undergraduate students’ writerly confidence to help them feel like writers and build affirming relationships with wider audiences: writer’s memos. Because writer’s memos are opportunities for writers to demonstrate and build their rhetorical awareness and skills, they serve as mechanisms for building (and act as living representations of) one’s writerly self-efficacy. However, other than Community Literacy Journal’s Coda Section, which asks for reflections to accompany the creative work it publishes, the use of writer’s memos in community publishing for marginalized individuals has not been widely adopted or explored. Data from semi-structured interviews and collaborative field texts suggest that including writer’s memos in community publishing efforts can have positive implications for writers themselves and reader-writer relationships in community writing. Writer’s memos can help build meaningful and affirming relationships across difference between readers and writers: they can showcase how writers and readers can work together to revise socially constructed notions of who gets to read and be read, thereby enacting social change via community publishing.
|
|---|