Murray as Rhetorician

I come across these moments from time to time where Murray says something that underscores his awareness or rhetoric. Seems so silly, but I feel the need to defend him from the claim that his pedagogy is arhetorical--he may have started with the writer, the student, and as I was meditating on the other day in writing about the Yagelski piece, initiated a student-centered approach, but he does not skip or miss rhetorical issues.

Here's a passage:

The following is a transcript from his interview with Writing on the Edge (2003):

WOE: At the Creative Nonfiction Special Interest Group tonight we'll be offering thirteen ways of looking at creative nonfiction. We have thirteen panelists and they each got to choose one word to give a brief talk about in relation to creative nonfiction. We wondered, what one word you would choose, perhaps the one word to describe the epitome, the essence of writing?

MURRAY: Voice.

WOE: We have truth, teaching, lyricism, ethos, authority, movement, integration, trespassing, motive, interview, cultural context, research, and persona presence. But none of us did voice.

MURRAY: When you look at candidates for graduate school in writing or contest entrants, voice is the element that jumps out at you, that reveals meaning. (10)

Now, if you just read that passage, some of your suspicions about Don might be confirmed. The way he explains voice here seems to be that sort of monolithic thing that you "just know" when you hear it. Of course, we learn later that what we hear is subjective, shaped by who WE are and that voice is hard to pin down--it's far from objective, it's very subjective.

But if you keep reading, you get this passage:

But obviously, the genre and the audience matter too and can make your voice entirely different. In the book about Leah [Murray's deceased daughter], the audience is clearly people who have lost a child or whose parents have lost a child or who are worried about it (emphasis added). That will affect the voice because you don't speak quite the same way to them. On the other hand, you'll have to very consciously vary the voice and put some humor into it. I'm concerned with getting the true voice for the piece that's appropriate for the piece. That's a big search. (10-11)

Here's a very different way of thinking about voice--Murray even uses the terms genre and audience, rhetorical terms that we perhaps don't always associate with so-called expressivists. Interesting.

Also,

My ideal writing course would have people able to write fiction or poetry or drama or essays or creative nonfiction. I think the subject should dictate the form to a considerable degree and the audience, so deciding in spring that you're going to use a certain form in the fall is rather unintuitive. (emphasis added, 11)

And then,

I think that we are attracted to pieces of writing that have a voice, that are appropriate to the subject and seem to be the true voice of the writer. (11)

Contradictions, perhaps: "appropriate to the subject"... "seem to be the true voice of the writer"?

---

As our students shared their evaluation of their work with our response they began to realize there is no right and wrong in writing. There is what works and what doesn't work; what communicates and what doesn't communicate. They found that what is appropriate for one paper in one form, aimed at a specific audience, may not be appropriate in another paper. ("Perhaps the Professor," 170-71).

"There is no single standard, no one way to think or to write, and we must not give our students the illusion there is." ("Finding Your Own Voice," 118)