I see, on your CV, that you were at UNH from 1982 to 1995—twelve years. Could you talk about this time in your life? Your time overlapped with so many great folks at UNH doing so many interesting kinds of works, a period when the doctoral program in composition was first established, when the Dons were still working, and when UNH was thought to have one of the best writing programs in the country. What was it like to be at UNH during these years? How did the place change during your time there? How did you change?
A Narrative Logic of the Personal Essay (2017)
Why do you think you are drawn more towards essays and non fiction than fiction? What is it about the essay, personal or otherwise, that has led you to spend so much time thinking and writing about it.
A question about induction...
A question about audience. Who is he writing for and how has his audience changed over the years?
What should be the role of the personal essay in a comp class? Is this a genre for compulsory classes or one students should elect to learn via an advanced writing or some other such elective class? What kind of students are prepared for “an epistemological shift....” (28)
In your essay Tufts of Grass you frequently reference experiences with students in writing conferences. I know that at the time when the essay was written or published, 1995, mandatory weekly or bi-weekly conferences were still the norm for Freshman English students and instructors at UNH. At UNHers, perhaps not all, but many, had very clear ideas about what was supposed to happen in the conference, ideas shaped in large part by the work of Donald Murray, who preached a method where students took the lead. I wonder, though, if you continued to hold conferences with students in the UNH tradition once you left UNH or if your practice evolved with regard to writing conferences. Can you say a few words about your experiences conferencing with student at UNH and perhaps a few more about the role of conference teaching in your practice throughout your career?
In Tuft of Flowers, you said that your writing classes are “more about life than most courses.” This is interesting. I wonder if it continued to be true after you left UNH and also what, exactly, you meant by this phrase.
Same essay, you write, with reference to a quote by Adrienne Rich, “In my writing class, young men have the opportunity both tell stories—and revise them—and to examine the assumptions in which they are dressed.” I wonder how you feel about this statement now, if you stand by it, if you extended this orientation towards teaching and learning after leaving UNH, and what it is that would make you want to construct a pedagogy of this sort in the first place. Why is a writing class a good place for students to, as you put it, “examine the assumptions” in which they are drenched? Is that the role of a writing course? Did you believe that then? Do you believe it now?
Tuft of Flowers is an interesting essay because it begins with a problem you have identified in yourself (your often frustrated orientation towards male students) and then moves on to explore this problem and to work towards a resolution of it, in this case in the form of a kind of promise to do better in the future. It feels very familiar to me, this kind of confessionary kind of writing, and I know it well because I wrote a similar piece myself about teaching Freshman English around 2003. This sort of piece embodies so much of what was good, I think, about the UNH tradition of writing instruction—the reflective teacher, the candid teacher, the teacher with the learner’s mindset, always willing to call himself out on hypocrisy or inconsistency, to share feelings of self-doubt and to enact personal reflection on the page. Where did this kind of writing come from? How did you learn it? Why did you do it? What do you make of it now?
Our Mornings with Murray
There is a story that is, at least to me, fairly well-known about Murray and you recount it briefly in your essay "Our Mornings with Murray." You remind us of Don's frustration, near the end of his years in the field, with the direction research in composition was headed. You write: "He was particularly concerned that the field's focus on interesting but 'peripheral' issues was drawing our gaze away from the act of writing and its many complex realities. I think that Don's frustration was, in particular, with the turn towards cultural studies and perhaps critical pedagogy in the 1990s--particularly cultural studies. You remind us that Don's central interest, throughout his career, was about "how effective writing is made." (41).
This is a two-part question: 1) could it have been that Don was missing important areas of scholarship as he grew disillusioned with the field's direction? For example, I know that in the sub-field of writing across the curriculum, for example, much interesting work on "how writing is made" persisted throughout the 1990s. 2) could it have been that Don was never really a scholar in the traditional sense of the word and so as the field demanded greater scholarly rigor of those conducting research on the writing process, some folks, perhaps Don, got left behind in the increased methodological rigor? 3) Do you have a sense of what, in the scholarship of 2018, Murray would find to like, if anything? I think all the talk about transfer might really engage his interests, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
In this essay, you write: I worry that with the loss of voices like Murray's and Bishop's and the professionalization of our discipline we are moving further away from our--and more importantly, our students'--actual experience of writing. I sit in some sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, for example, and hear composing described in ways that seem to bear little relation to any of my experiences as a writer, or any of the experiences of my students, to the extent that I really know them. (43).
You wrote these words in 2008. I wonder how they sound in your ears now--are you still worried? Did the worry pass? Did things improve? Worsen? What do you make of these reflections about the field of a little over a decade ago?
You write, "There are problems with Don's methodology. One is the understandable suspicion that he attempted to generalize from the peculiarities of his writing experiences and offered prescriptive insights that should apply to everyone" (45). I am glad that you point this out. I think that for those of us who came of age in the field in the context of the UNH writing tradition, we often have to defend Murray to the nth degree, especially in light of the criticisms he received at the hands of Jim Berlin and others. And yet, Murray did get things wrong, as you point out. He was human. What else did he get wrong? Any other thoughts? You can offer observations about what he got wrong WITHOUT casting yourself out of the community. ;)
