Chapters (BOOK)

What Murray was not:

A researcher; a scholar

What Murray was:

• A writer
• A teacher
• A reformer

In that order...?

Educational reform--what Murray wanted most was to change schools and to change schooling around the teaching of writing. Why? His personal and professional experiences suggested that the way writing was being taught were ineffective and harmful. (11/16/11)

There is that lovely passage in Lisa and Tom's book where Don talks about being a writer first and then a teacher. That's a really powerful framing moment.

Situate Murray within Education reform...1960s/1970s?

I'm reading "To Heck With Nostalgia" published in New Hampshire Alumnus, Autumn 1987. It's a personal piece, autobiography, Don writing about his life. I'm thinking about a chapter on Don's life that fits into a tradition within composition of autobiographical writing. I'm thinking about a tradition of working class people writing their stories for academic audiences. I've thought about this a good deal before and it occurs to me now, that this may need to be a reading area for me--find a way to write about issues of class and situate Murray's story within a) the tradition of autobiographical writing we already have, b) scholarly writing about class in composition. This might be an opening chapter. This is an important realization because I feel like just telling his story is not enough--he's already told it and for some reason I feel like autobiography needs to be framed by something else. I want to situate Murray's story as he might have, had he been more a part of the race/class/gender discussion that came after him in composition.

The task I am giving myself:

To imagine Don reading well known books by compositionists--folks like Rose, Gilyard, Lu, Villenueva, etc. and to imagine his contribution to this body of work.

---

I am beginning to think of an alternate kind of organization for the book...

• A chapter which is on Don's essaying on his life. A kind of analysis of his autobiographical writing--situated within discussions of autobiography and literacy and class.
• A chapter which is an an analysis of defenses of/homages to Don by former students
• Perhaps a chapter synthesizing the trajectory of his scholarly writing

I am, frankly, sort of bored by the biography of Fred Newton Scott. It gets the job done, but...

Given how much Don has already written about himself, how much others have written about him, too, it's interesting to think about how to write about him--there is such an abundance of material...