Drawing from the archives of the Wisconsin Rural Writers’ Association (WRWA), this dissertation examines how ordinary people take on the identity of writer and establish and maintain a writing ...practice. From its founding at the University of Wisconsin in 1948, the WRWA sought to encourage creative writing in rural communities around the state. The accounts of writing lives found in the WRWA’s archives challenge human-centered notions of literate practice. Reports of club activities note weather and geography in vivid detail alongside descriptions of meetings and member successes in publication, suggesting that these nonhuman actors played a vital role in members’ writing practices. While the encouragement and literacy instruction of the WRWA leadership was important in supporting member writing, material forces — such as the rural places that informed the content of member writing and the systems of communication that allowed for the circulation of member writing — mattered even more. To develop this materialist approach to writing, I draw on two bodies of scholarship: social histories of literacy, which demonstrate that the availability and circulation of printed material often defines where literacy can flourish, and the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. Guided by this theoretical lens, my research tracks members’ mentions of material forces across a variety of archival sources to provide an emic account of how objects, places, and other nonhuman actors matter for writers and writing. My first chapter, “Writing as Entanglement,” uses the insights of new materialism to reveal how writing is made possible through the joint, reciprocal, and contingent work of human and nonhuman actors. Each subsequent chapter then examines a different facet of that entanglement, considering the effect of the organization’s rural-romantic rhetoric; the role of place in developing a shared ethos as rural writers; and the systems of circulation that facilitated the sharing of member writing. The conclusion examines the current work of the organization, as well as other sites of extracurricular literacy instruction. As a whole, this dissertation calls for more attention to the objects, places, and systems that, although they are often unnoticed, make a striking difference for writers and writing.
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