Emails from Victor Villeuneuva on Murray and Cross-Talk

9/14/11

Glad to meet you.

The process for compiling the book began with citations.  The most often cited formed the first draft (for the first edition there were no electronic databases; so I used CCC and CE as my sources; the second edition, I used online sources; the third edition I asked Kristin Arola to provide the sources for the tech end of things).  In 1987, when I first started working on Cross-Talk, Donald Murray and Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow were very much the givens.  And I didn't want to do excerpts but whole, stand-alone pieces; i.e., journal articles (the addition of Adam Banks in this last edition becomes the exception; but that's because it's the only strong comp-centered work that deals with technology and racism from a perspective other than the digital divide).  Now, you're right, there is post-process and Sid Dobrin is completing a book on after post process.  But to understand the post, we need to know the pre-post.  And folks new to composition studies might never know of Donald Murray, the writer who taught writing.  And you're probably right that the heading to that section--especially among younger composition theorists--isn't accurate.  They aren't "the givens" in the way that phrase connotes; then again, they're not really the beginnings; and they are the matters still to be contended with; so I let it go.

When I was in graduate school, I'd read CCC (and CE and RTE; they were kind of all that was out there then).  The essays would be thick, ponderous, abstruse at times.  Then I'd come to Murray.  I realized then that it really is possible to convey very complex matters in readable ways.  It's guided my career (my first pub was in 1986; I've written nearly fifty articles or chapters since; with something Tom Newkirk told me that Don had told him: "When you find yourself really liking a particular phrase, delete it; it's over the top").

There won't be a fourth edition.  Time to leave such things to others (I'm 62 years old and rather anxious to do my own work in a very real sense).  So I just had to leave Murray in there.

victor.

Oh, I had no idea you were connected to Tom (and thereby to Don).  So, a response to your response:
1)  I know that you're right.  It wouldn't have mattered to me, though.  Murray is lost to us, almost.  He shouldn't be.  He was the only beautiful writer of the era during which folks like me came up.  Folks want to call my work "creative non-fiction"; I always respond that it's just writing.  Murray taught me that by his example.
2)  Damn, that's a lovely paragraph by Newkirk (sometime you should ask him about when I brought him to campus when I was a brand-new assistant prof; he was appalled by my car, I think; an eco-disaster, but all I could afford, an assistant prof making $18,000 a year with a family of five, not including myself).  And Peter Elbow once said to me that "expressivism" is a whip that Berlin made up with which to whip him and those like him (which would have been Macrorie and Murray).
This has been a particularly good day for me, as it turns out.  I read the centennial addition to The English Journal, where I saw my own work memorialized in a number of passing citations; and then  where I read Tom Newkirk recognizing my homage to Murray.  Pretty cool.
Thanks very much.
victor.

9/23/11

Yeah, I doubt that Murray would show up.  Comp isn't database oriented, as you might guess.  What I did was sheer gut work.  For the first edition, I took as my base date, the publication of Evaluation Writing by Cooper and Odell--1977 (my reasoning being that the Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer was more research oriented than theory oriented, though it too was a consideration).  And then I simply looked through Works Cited pages for every issue of CCC and CE.  And that was so many computers ago, that I sure don't have the data.  The second edition took the publishing date of the first-edition as its starting date.  For that edition, CE and CCC was already online, and that made the task almost easy.  And some of the additions weren't numbers based but based on comments I had received about thematic omissions in the first edition.  The numbers for Murray's article really didn't show, but because A Teacher Teaches Writing was still being cited, I kept Teach Writing as Process in.
I didn't have resource.  I just plain gutted it out.
Hope that helps some.
victor.