Writing, Gardening, Automation
Some updates, and a note against the industrialization of language
Hello friends,
I’ll begin this post in the conventional way by noting I haven’t written here—or anywhere—in a few months. In my last installment, from December, I shared that I have a book manuscript under way, so you might surmise that my writing time had been dedicated to that project. Your surmise would be right. At the same time, Rachel and I were preparing to welcome our fourth child, whose birth took place safely and blessedly on Holy Saturday.
So. As of today, my son has been born and my book manuscript exists as a complete draft. (I will certainly let you know once publication is immanent, next year, but will try my best not to shill.) Accordingly, I hope to return to writing in this space soon.
I will be shifting focus somewhat, however. My project to this point has been writing about the garden and the spiritual life. With my book manuscript complete, the blogging portion of that project is complete.
My next project, just recently conceived, will be to write about language in the age of ChatGPT. Although I’m a gardener by avocation, my professional training is as a scholar of rhetoric, the arts of discourse. For my next long-form writing project, I want to return to the material I studied in graduate school—Plato, Cicero, Quintilian—and the issues of language that now preoccupy many of us with the advent of software that uses language like a human being.
That’s not to say that I’ll be leaving the garden behind. Indeed, I think that care of place and care of language have much in common with one another. Language was traditionally often compared to a garden, as something we need to cultivate and care for. So if you’re here for the nature writing, please be assured it’s not going away.
Indeed, in the one thing I have published in the past few months, I made this connection explicit. Front Porch Republic was kind enough to publish a talk I gave about teaching writing in the age of ChatGPT in early May. In that essay, I compared writing to the garden task of loading brush on a wagon. Here’s a taste:
Composition as the art of loading brush suggests that we should not prioritize a critical habit of mind but should rather embrace and exalt making things with language. We should help students write good sentences and paragraphs, help them tinker and make order with the smallest building blocks of language. The genre doesn’t particularly matter; no matter what we ask students to write, we ought to choose projects that encourage them to see themselves not so much as critics, but as laborers in the fields of text, laying out a line of words.
My writing about the garden and my writing about language both serve to defend fundamental human needs—care, good work, thought, quiet—against the onslaught of “creative destruction” produced by the industrialists and the disrupters. Accordingly, I hope even those of you who came here for the garden writing will find something of interest in this next project. Thank you, as ever, for reading.