"I Am a Black Cat, Letting Day Come and Go": Multimodal Conversations in a Poetry Workshop

Why do people bring together different modes of communication? Our study examines multimodal conversations held in a creative writing workshop in an elementary school. Different modes of communication were necessary to enable students to create poetry. We discuss communication modes as a construction between the material qualities of a communication medium, and the cultural and social practices evident in its use. We describe the ways in which persistent and ephemeral modes are woven together to enable creative conversation between students and a poetry workshop staff members. In order to fully understand how persistent and ephemeral modes come together, we problematize their conception with the notion of temporality.