Murray and Pointer

I decided to nose around at the Poynter Institute website this morning. Murray's stuff is there. It occurred to me, this morning, in the shower, that I could ask for money to go to Florida and mouse around in the Murray papers. I wonder what they look like. I wonder how many there are.

An interesting post in a Discussion Forum (The Writer's Struggle):

8/28/2002 9:05:17 PM
Posted By: Roy Peter Clark

You are right, of course, Carter. The craft of writing knows no gender. But I would also argue that male writers of the first half of the 20th century created, or helped perpetuate the myth, that real writers must suffer, and that they should show the dissolution that comes with the writer's agony. Women writers had little choice but to follow our dumb lead -- as the lives of writers such as Sylvia Plath and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings reveal.

I've said before that when I turn to writers for technique (carpentry), I find myself turning to men: Zinsser, Orwell, Strunk & White. When I want to learn how to lead a writer's life, I turn to women: Brenda Ueland, Dorothea Brande, Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg. Very few men cross over. Donald Murray is someone who teaches life and technique.

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Other areas of inquiry:

• I believe that there are people in our field who have written about particular scholar-teachers. Gertrude Buck comes to mind. It might be useful to look at a few of these pieces, to see how others have written about particular figures in the field of comp/rhet.
• Murray's "era"--1965 or so through 1990 or so. What is there to say about this era in the field? How do we situate him within this period?
• Expressivism. I think this is the theoretical paradigm with which Murray is best associated. How do we situate him within expressivism, the movement or system?
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