Murray and the Literacy Narrative

In an earlier post, I wrote about Murray's life in relation to this writer, Yrba or something--realizing that Murray's school life and his home life were significant determinants on his outlook, his pedagogy, his philosophy. And I'm sitting here this morning reading his autobiography and I'm seeing all these connections--it's like Murray LIVED Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary before Rose was ever Rose. I'm thinking of all these memoirs that we have and that I now need to read:

Villanueva

Rose

Gilyard

and I'm realizing that Murray's story is their story...just much earlier and much whiter and yet Murray chose not to tell this story--or didn't tell it for our field. He told it--I'm reading it right now. But he told it outside of the field and so it has gone unnoticed and perhaps un-noted and this seems important--that this story be told.

All the elements are there and here I might return to the piece on male (literacy/school) memoirs that I read and wrote about here last fall to help me with this process. What are the various elements of the basic story that Launius tells and how do I trace them through Murray's memoir?

Class

Gender (masculinity)

This seems like an important theme to take up...perhaps under the category of "depth" in my eventual paper? Perhaps this fits under SIGNIFICANCE: he gave us our prototypical student, our greatest challenge, before we later found him/her in Rose, Villenueva, Gilyard.

And all these fireworks are going off for me this morning as I work through Murray's autobiography...all these connections that basically come down to this: Murray was Mike Rose before we knew Mike Rose's story in Lives on the Boundary. Murray's early life of school and home was very much a "boundary" life. And yet, he never told this story of literacy and schooling on the boundary explicitly to the field. It is an implicit thread running through SO MUCH of his published academic writing--the jabs at "professors," the sympathy for the "doodlers" and "daydreamers." But when you read his autobiography, you can really see the wells from whence his great sympathy and empathy for not just kids who grow up "on the boundaries" but for all students sprung.

As I move forward and begin imaging the article that I am writing from all this reading I am doing, I have now added a new item to my list or agenda of desired goals: and that is to situate Murray's story, the one he tells in the autobiography (a book probably not much read by those in the field of composition and published by a mainstream press), within the list of great literacy/schooling memoirs in our field--I'm thinking of Rose's book, Villenueva's Bootstraps book, Gilyard's memoir. Murray's story deserves a place on the shelf alongside those troubled tales of school and literacy and masculinity and class. I think we need to understand and appreciate his story alongside those other stories which have already earned such respect and admiration in our field. To see Murray alongside those others changes our sense of who he was and the labels we apply to him (expressionist, etc.) and, I would hope, shifts our positioning of him (or at least mine) in relation to other people and ideas in the field. And I don't think anyone helped me see him in this way...or that I understood him in this way until I started reworking my way through My Twice-Lived Life this past weekend.