TIME OUT: Book (3) is Born

The other day I picked up a copy of Jason Palmeri's Remixing Composition: History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy and since then, I've been circling a bit on my project. Why?

As I've begun to work my way through Palmeri, I've taken to writing notes on the back flap of the book--whatever pops into my mind--and it's been a clarifying process. Last night, I wrote the following words in large print, ALL CAPS:

What is the problem this project is attempting to solve? What is the question this book is trying to answer?

Moment of clarification.

Over the past month or two I've written roughly 100 pages on the history of the English Department, various important moments, etc. I've organized just under 100 years of history into three epochs and I've tried to describe important developments within the UNH English Department that impacted the teaching of writing during each epoch. For the first epoch, I relied almost entirely on the annual course Bulletins as my source of evidence. In the second epoch, I begin to have more sources of evidence, but the Bulletin still plays a big role. In the third epoch...well, I've not gotten to the third epoch yet.

I have largely operated under the idea that for now, the best approach is to get the story down and to try to think about BIG PICTURE issues later. I've believed that it's okay to not entirely know where I'm going or, more importantly, why I'm going, essentially, to not have a plan, because the plan will reveal itself to me during or through the writing. The structure of three epochs has been enough to keep me going. Tell what happened during each epoch and why it was significant.

But the question is: why does the field need a book which traces the evolution of the UNH English Department and the role of writing instruction within it? Or, to draw on my questions above, what problem does the story I'm telling attempt to solve? What question does it attempt to answer?

My concern is that I am writing without a purpose, trying to cover too much ground, writing chronologically when what's needed is the development of an argument.

An argument about what?

I've been looking back over the history of the department to try to understand its trajectory of development. Essentially, what I wanted to try to understand is: What came before Murray, before the "grand revolution" as Carnicelli put it.

So there is maybe one narrative I want to address: the grand revolution. My research has helped me to understand what actually took place in the 1960s/70s. Part of me wants to tell that story, to do what? To challenge the narrative of the grand revolution.

Another story I've been telling myself lately is that the question I'm trying to answer is as follows:

How and why did UNH become an important site of innovation as regards the teaching and researching of writing during the late post-war years (i.e. 1963-1993)?

I still feel like I want to answer that question and that it's a good question to ask, a worthwhile question to try to answer. But why does the field need the answer to that question?

Earlier, I wrote about narratives that I feel I am engaged with. One narrative, as I said, is the narrative of the writing process movement, the "transformation" narrative. The other is the narrative about Murray and, by extension, UNH's marginalization within the field of composition. This is the Berlin narrative. This is the narrative where I explore Berlin's 1987 article as a moment of rupture within the UNH writing community, think through the responses to this moment, and then think through how I want to respond, situating my response within the conversation Berlin initiated. There is another project I can imagine, one that takes Murray as more of the center, tracing a life history for him up to the time when he came to UNH, tracing his many contributions at UNH and placing them in a larger institutional context, tracing the trajectory of his thinking as it evolved over the course of his career by looking closely at his published journal articles.

This strain sort of attempts a historiographic recovery of Donald Murray, but an archival one, which none in my tribe have (yet) attempted.

~

I'm struck by the narrative of internal conflict and resolution that Palmeri sets up in the Prologue of his book. He situates the book within his own personal experience and I find this powerful and this causes me to feel as though, if I take as an audience for this book SWR, I can conceive of a slightly different kind of project, one that might begin with my own story of internal conflict. That story is perhaps best symbolized by the irony of CrossTalk when I uncovered it--there, in the lead article of the book, is Murray's "Teach Writing as Process" and yet, a couple hundred pages later there, in Berlin's article, is Murray being written off as an advocate of a politically ineffectual pedagogy. Both those things exist in that book at the same time and so I'm drawn to this and then thinking, besides holding him up as our spokesperson and hero or tossing him aside as naive and retrograde, what else we might do with him?

And the answer is--try to understand him. To try to understand where he came from. Try to understand what his experiences were as a writer and teacher. Try to understand his goals for educational reform. Try to understand his contributions to the UNH community and that larger community of writing scholars and teachers (this last is what many of my UNH tribal aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers and cousins have already attempted).

That's pretty darn good.

But that's a very different story from How and why did UNH become a key site of...

One foregrounds UNH and the other foregrounds Murray. I want to write about both.

Other threads... English Education, I have that book in the back of my head Composition's Roots in English Education, and that ties in with the story I have to tell. And also creative writing, such a big part of the story about UNH in the 60s/70s/80s. And journalism, of course. There is a story, I think, about UNH's "big tent" for writing: journalists and essayists, novelists and poets, writing researchers and theorists, writing teachers. I see these as different strands or groups within the tent and combined, they all added up to a unique place developing at a unique moment. That seems like a story with telling, as well--but again, I'd have to understand WHY.