What Can You Do With Donald Murray?

I begin this article with a favorite Murray strategy: list making. My question: What can you do with Donald Murray?

1. One thing you can do is defend him. Defend him from what? From whom?
2. You can certainly celebrate him, and where I come from, there is plenty to celebrate and celebration is a kind of badge of membership. One becomes a Don-acolyte. The older generation are acolytes. Those who worked with him. But what about those who didn't and who didn't live through that period? How do we feel about him?
3. You can testify on his behalf (it's interesting to think of Don testimonials). Here's one:

From that moment, Don's process approach transformed the way I thought and wrote; it represents the single most important element of my education as a writer and subsequently as a teacher, an influence so powerful it transformed me into a disciple dedicated to spreading his word as often and far as possible. (from "Afterword," p. 232, Chip Scanlon, The Essential Don Murray)

1. You can reject him. I'm struck by a conversation I once had with a colleague (Paul Bender at RWU). I'm trying to get this right. It was something like:

• I used to be an expressivist.
• I remember when I was an expressivist.
• We all start out as expressivists.

Something along these lines. And I think that when he said this, there was a kind of recognition in it for me. Yes. This made sense. He was describing something I, too, had gone through. Of course, there are all kinds of problems with this--everything from the categorization of Murray as an expressivist to the idea of expressivism as a phase. And this last part is what I'm most interested in and what I woke up thinking about this morning. The notion of expressivism-as-phrase embodied in the comment that Paul made that day on the quad. The smug self-satisfaction behind his words--that he (and I) were somehow "beyond" expressivism, beyond Murray. It was like admitting something embarrassing from your adolescence--yeah, I listened "Stairway to Heaven" phase, I wore parachute pants and Beneton shirts... Yeah, I used to like/believe in/sign onto/subscribe to...X. But I don't anymore and I'm embarrassed to think I ever did. I'm so past that now.

The question, of course, is why Don's work becomes something one gets early on and then moves on from. Probably because of the seeming lack of social/political engagement in his work. Can I say these things? A source to consider here might be Fulkerson's two essays on the direction of the field (1990/2000)? How do I show that the field moved in a different direction from Don and that the perception became that he was no longer cool or hip? That he was, instead, something you got in a grad course on teaching writing, but not something that was somehow "serious"? Rigorous. His seeming lack of social/political engagement may be an important point to explore and make...his fall from sexiness. Interesting to note that the positioning of his essay in Cross-Talk comes in the very beginning. It is either the foundation upon which the rest is built or something you get out of the way so you can move onto the serious work.

Personally, Don's work was a revelation to me...when I was 23-28 or so. Until I re-entered academia and enrolled in the PhD program at UNH. How does something go from being a revelation to something one is mildly embarrassed to admit or talk about at cocktail parties?

But, what I've been thinking about this morning and as I've been revisiting Don's work is the extent to which what I thought was a phase may have become so implicit in everything I do that I no longer recognize the role he plays in my professional life. I'm thinking about a parent, trying to instill orientations in their child--be polite and courteous, treat others as you would be treated, be open to new experiences/try things. And if the parent does this well, these things become so ingrained in the child that he/she does them without thinking. They become the stuff we take for granted--unconscious, implicit, below-the-surface. Permeating EVERYTHING.

I like this way of thinking about Don and his work better and I think it is more true. The question is HOW is it more true. What are those bedrocks that have become unconscious for me--that only become apparent, interestingly, when I come into other folks for whom my bedrocks are not in evidence. Working at a university, I am running into all kinds of colleagues who don't share Don's bedrocks and they signal this is many ways. So the things you take for granted are made explicit and brought to consciousness when you confront someone who doesn't share your assumptions. This is no different than anything else, really.

So, what is the new metaphor I'm searching for? I want to say: you can build from and on him. And then the question is, how does this metaphor play out? He serves as a foundation, but also an opportunity. And there is still this implicit assumption that you start with him and then move on. People for whom Murray is still central would be offended. What is a better metaphor--that thing that underscores and permeates all aspects of what you do? What is that? What is it called? What is the metaphor?