An Interview with Donald Murray: "Lose Yourself" (Writing on the Edge)

THOUGHT: I note the way even the title of this piece is a bit misleading: "lose yourself"--is that what Don was saying in this piece? Is that his message? How do we frame Don in this way in ways that allow us to see certain things in his work and miss others? This seems important.

Notable:

WOE: What do you see as the real successes of our profession, and I'm talking about writing, adn what are our future challenges?

We've got to connect the autobiographical with the feminist movement. They came along at the same time. A lot of the memoirs in the beginning were clearly feminist manifestoes or dealing with things like rape that had been unspoken, where women had been mistreated.

We have encouraged individual voices to speak honestly about the things that concern them, the things they've experienced. I think that's the biggest accomplishment that we've done.

And we've got to keep fighting the more academic members of our profession and continue to do it, who think that way. They don't realize that most academic writing is so simple, that it's a formula and that writing about something that is very close to you is quite different and very important. I think the first thing in the future is just to keep protecting that voice.

With the current political climate we have, one way of looking at this war that we're in is by looking at the kind of things people are doing to suppress voice and the kind of voices that the administration are doing this to...So I think we have to maintain the opportunity for people to express themselves. They may express things we don't like, but our job is to keep encouraging the individual human voice.

When I first came into teaching writing in 1963, we wanted much more similarity than we want now. We're willing now to accept the fact that many voices in a classroom are legitimate, that people should be writing individually and not just following us. (12)

Things I note:

Murray's engagement with the political. He sees speaking and writing, simply, as considerable political acts. And perhaps this is how he differs from Berlin--Berlin wanted to start with the politics, Murray, to start with the political realities of individuals. Can I support that assertion? Not really. I think Berlin probably started with the political realities of individuals--Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures would be the book to look to on this question. It does seem that Berlin wanted to make those issues explicit and the focus of the course whereas for Murray, they would emerge organically or perhaps not emerge at all (and that was okay and if so, for some like Berlin, that wouldn't have been okay).

Also, Murray's argument that what he was trying to get writers to do was somehow more difficult than academic writing and his claim that academic writing is simply following a formula. Interesting.

Murray the nonconformist:

I feel a kind of teen-age need to conform from time to time and I am suspicious of it. We never grow beyond the need to be loved, but we should control it, not try to appeal to every editor, every reader, every helpful friend.