Community Writing, Community Listening
Edited by Jenn Fishman and Lauren Rosenberg
Contributors: Romeo García; Erica M. Stone; Karen Rowan and Alexandra J. Cavallaro; Rachel C. Jackson with Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune; Wendy Wolters Hinshaw; Justin Lohr and Heather Lindenman.
Community writing depends on community listening, which we understand as a literacy practice that involves deep, direct engagement with individuals and groups working to address urgent issues in everyday life, issues anchored by long histories and complicated by competing interpretations as well as clashing modes of expression. When we speak of community listening, we are not simply talking about paying attention, though keen attention is vital to any deep listening practice. Likewise, community listening is not the same as being absorbed as a reader lost in a good book. Instead, community listening is an active, layered, intentional practice. It includes awareness of, as well as responsibility for, being part of an evolving process. It also demands alertness to different interactions and openness to being changed by them. There is always an element of risk to community listening because responding in an ethical and engaged way to others means being willing to change.