More On Murray (Lad's Advice)

Recently, had the chance to share a bit of my project with Lad Tobin. While I was initially discouraged by his response, I think it helped clarify things for me a bit:

Hi Mike,

I think that there is potential here, but if I were an editor or outside reader of this draft, I'd be looking for more reason to publish it. The issue is that there are already a great number of reevaluations out there; you cite three and/but of course there are many other (I know since, for one thing, I've published re-evaluations and re-framings of Don in both Writing on the Edge and Guide to Composition Pedagogies). I know that you want to extend and/or critique those framings by coming at things from a new(er) perspective but I'd like to see a clearer statement earlier on of what that new perspective is. Specially I'd be looking to get, first, a clearer sense from you of what the current framings of Murray's work have missed or gotten wrong and, second, a stronger statement about why it's still so important that we get it/him right in the way you are offering.

I hope that helps; good luck with this, Mike. I'd love to see more work out there on Murray's contributions.

Best,
Lad

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What do I find useful about this? Well, I frame the draft that I'm working on now as a kind of re-appraisal and evaluation and doing so has made me feel a good deal of stress to get this piece written and out for review as 2012 is not far away.

Lad frees me up in a way by telling me--this has already been done. Okay, well, I had several framing strategies and this was causing me some problems, so, he helps me to eliminate one of them. He helps me to eliminate another one, in a way, which is Tom's call that a new generation of folks take another look at Murray. That was another angle I was sort of going for and I'm not (yet) convinced that that is the "wrong" angle.

Still, the project feels more and more to me like a historical inquiry and not just a re-appraisal. I want to go to the archives at Poynter. I've been reading all of Don's work. So, why not frame it as a historical investigation (and begin reading a bit more about historical investigations) to try to find a new/different way of framing it? Good question.

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And here is my response to him, which might also be helpful to have at this point:

Lad:

Thanks for your quick response. I hope you don't mind if I follow up. Maybe, by putting this down, I can work through some of what I'm trying to do.

Here are the pieces I have read (re-evaluations):

Ballenger (College English, 2008)
Newkirk (WOE, 2008)
Romano (English Journal, 2000)
Tobin (CCC, 2007)

I think that there are two stories I'm wanting to tell or write and perhaps that's what's got me in trouble--trying to figure out which one and why:

1. The Personal. I alluded to this in my last email: for some reason, I think my own story is significant in some way. There is this great quote from the book 1977:
Why do people teach composition as they do at any given moment? What determines their choices of textbooks, assignments, and daily classroom activities? Of all the possible approaches to the teaching of writing, why do teachers settle on particular ones? [...] Individual preferences and personal styles are certainly involved; so, of course, are institutional values and constraints. But even more certainly, the teaching of composition is shaped by the available means of pedagogical persuasion that are presented to us by intellectual and professional communities (broadly considered)--communities shaped, inevitably, by culture, circumstance, and history. (3)
1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition (Henze, Selzer, Sharer)

I'm fascinated by this idea of the "available means of pedagogical persuasion"--because for me, those means were UNH and Murray. And then I went away from him in grad school (even though I was at UNH...but Paul Matsuda and Jess Enoch and Tom did give me a much larger sense of the field than I came in with). And for a number of years, I've been trying to get back to him. I had this experience a year or two ago where I taught The Craft of Revision. I hadn't taught it in a long time. But I pulled it out because I was teaching a course that I thought the book would work well for. I found myself having cognitive dissonance. Much of what I had come to believe about teaching writing was in some important ways in conflict with what I was reading Craft. It was like the time when you go back home from Thanksgiving break and you realize, you can't go home again... I've been trying to sort that through ever since. I want to make sense of it. I want to have both (genre and discourse community theory AND Murray) and not have to decide.

2. The Professional. Having read a few of those remembrances and re-evaluations, I have felt that others have done a really good job memorializing Don, celebrating him, and defending him. I don't want to do those thing because others already have and have done an admirable job. Still, I feel the need to try to do something else--and this is the piece where I feel as though I am speaking to folks of "my generation." But what is it that I want to do? In a way, give more of him to us. Provide an overview beyond what we get in grad school for those who didn't come up reading him as a part of our regular socialization. I'm interested in two things:

a) all the different "phases" that Don went through. He did so much that I didn't know about until I started reading. For example, I'm fascinated by the way, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he began referencing other scholars occasionally and then saying things like "We need more research about..." I see there, a new or different kind of role that he was playing. In the early years, I'm drawn to his defiant, manifesto-like writings...the way he played this sort of role for us in those years (bang the fist on the table) and how his role changed over time. In an informal way, I've tried to map these roles in my research blog. I'm interested in his evolution.

b) I now teach the Writing about Writing textbook. Two pieces of Don's appear in this book--his essay "All Writing is Autobiogrraphy" and his collaborative composing process essay with Carol Berkenkotter. Here, I see the editors, who I know and have talked to a good deal and who are my contemporaries, doing something different with Don's work. I feel like, in some odd way, this is like an Obama (circa 2004 or so) moment. We know that in the 80s/90s folks sort of squared off and there were these throw-downs about expressive or socio-epistemic, cognitive/social, etc. But I see Downs/Wardle, in the way they put Murray to use, sort of saying--we should take from this stuff what we can use. We're not here to fight it out anymore. Murray is useful. Let's use him to do the things we want to do... But so is the concept of discourse community. So we'll teach that as well. We don't have to do one or the other. We should do both. So, I'm interested in this kind of generational thing...I don't know if that makes sense?

Does this help? Can you help? Thoughts?

Thanks for listening...