Re: Donald Murray

In a Boston Globe column of a few weeks ago, carefully cut out and passed on to me by my mother, Don Murray imagines a housecall-visit from his long-dead doctor, the one who changed his life by telling Murray that he need not grow up to be his parents:

"If you're dead, you probably have a lot of time on your hands, Dr. Bartlett, do you know what a hospitalist is?"
"I don't think I want to."
"We've been doing some terrible things to the language since you've been gone. I've been called an expressivist. I think it's an insult or something. I think they mean I'm a writer who expresses his feelings, more heart than head."
Harrumph.
He always had a good harrumph, a Down East, part Indian harrumph.
"I just saw my hospital had hired a couple of hospitalists. Apparently general practitioners don't like to visit patients in hospitals, upsets their schedules, I guess. And young doctors don't like to be called in the middle of the night. Want an 8 to 5 schedule. So they become hospitalists, have a 9 to 5 schedule. No calls at night."
"Patients must cause a fuss."
"Don't think so. They are dealing with specialists."[...]
"They ever come to your home? See what's going on, what the life you lead is like?"
"Of course not. I go to their offices."
"How could they treat you without knowing you?"

This gentle answer to the critics of expressivism (an ugly term Murray clearly disavows), published to an audience not of academics but of fond readers long-familiar with his weekly chronicles of aging and remembering, losing and savoring, made me first smile, then stop for a bit to evaluate, consider, and remember. Though I have only nibbled a bit at the edges of rhet/comp scholarship, I sense that his influence is by now a multiply branched tree of considerable girth, despite his current lapse from favor. As Wendy Bishop puts it in her 1999 CCC article "Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition",

Elbow and Murray were made safe by transformation into figures, by relegation to expressivist categories. Then, as the field professionalized, there followed a progression of diminishment and tuckings-away, a little like the nouveau riche habit of sticking the money-earning but foolishly-dressed grandfather in the back study, not introducing him to high society company where he might embarrass. (24)

In Nuts and Bolts, a collection of practical-pedagogy articles from the University of New Hampshire's English department faculty, Tom Newkirk describes Murray's radical changes at the UNH as the "purification of Freshman English": under Murray's guidance Freshman English became

a course that focused single-mindedly on the act of writing.[...]The concept of "process" was, of course, part of the transformation. Reading finished texts does not reveal the processes that produced the texts. In fact, the finished text is something of an illusion; its very orderliness hides the disorderliness of the creation. Murray argued that we need to let students in on this disorderliness, and he began to formulate (and reformulate, and re-reformulate) the elements or stages of the process. [...] Murray's truly radical move was not to stress the writing process but to claim that the professional writer should be the ideal around which the course should be constructed.  [...] One practical consequence of this transformation was the invitation to students to choose their own topics. [...] The writing was no longer about any specific subject (i.e., literature); it was about the process of making and shaping meaning.    [...] Murray, during his short term as director of Freshman English, virtually banished the use of published writing from the course. The texts that mattered now were those that the students were writing and the texts of their lives from which they drew. Murray also introduced the conference system to Freshman English and argued that one-to-one meetings between teacher and student should be the central instructional event in a composition course. [...] The only firm guidelines were that students write five pages per week and that we meet with them each week for a one-to-one conference. (3-10)

I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire in the mid-1970s. I never took a class with Murray (as I recall he was teaching mostly journalism at the time), but I remember (I'm not sure how accurately) his genial presence, full beard and deep chuckle, a red flannel shirt. I remember his daughter Lee's death in 1977 at the age of 20 from Reye's syndrome, which he recently wrote about so movingly in The Lively Shadow. She had been a year behind me in high school, one of the 9 or 10 students in my advanced Latin class, and to my view such a gentle soul that the imagination of her loss has since then colored, humanized, softened my image of her father. I did not have to take Freshman English, but Murray's influence had by then permeated upward to the next writing class (English 501: Nonfiction Writing), which I did take (in particular, the 5 pages per week and the use of conferences).  A few years later, when I began teaching FYC as a graduate assistant at the University of Arkansas, the first teaching-writing book I bought was his A Writer Teaches Writing, a green paperback copy that I still flip open on occasion to encounter that warm, down-to-earth enthusiasm. 

Responding to a "novice" writer. After retirement in his sixties, my father settled down to write his memoirs, closing himself each morning into a spare bedroom with a stack of yellow legal pads and handful of sharpened pencils. He had been telling us the stories for years, about growing up on a hard-scrabble hillside farm in West Virginia, stories about hunting coon at night, jumping over neighbors' fences with a watermelon under each arm and shotgun shells whizzing overhead, tipping over the girls' outhouse behind his one-room schoolhouse. And he had done plenty of writing in his professional life: fine grey type crawled over the stacks of slippery reprints boxed in the attic, articles with long titles about the albino gene in brome grass and the connection between the levels of some compound named DIMBOA and disease resistance in tetraploid corn (or so I remember). But he just did not seem to be able to make the exotic experience of his childhood come to life on the page. In frustration, after the book had been rejected from numerous publishers, he sought advice from Don Murray, whom he knew from shared service on the University Senate or some such committee and whose more popular writings about the value of autobiography had impressed my father (despite his general tendency to lump liberal arts professors in with native New Englanders as cold and snobbish SOBs). Murray graciously agreed to read my father's manuscript and sent back a pointed but diplomatic letter explaining that he found the piece lacking focus (to which my father angrily retorted,  in the privacy of his own living room, "It's my life, that's the focus, godammit!"). At a later point he passed the manuscript on to me for proofreading. (This was after my stint as copy editor of the college newspaper, which my father had scoured every Monday and Thursday looking for errors that might have slipped past my proofreading, and after the time my father had ceded to my authority in all matters grammatical, though not without an occasional skirmish.)  I started red-penciling corrections, in distressing frequency: needless commas inserted in the middle of compound predicates, verb agreement problems with expletive "there's." In a confusion of smug superiority and embarrassed guilt, I stopped after a few pages and never passed the corrections on to him. I think of my father when I talk to students about writing, about its tremendous value to preserve experience, about how much I value the record he left, about my own failure to adequately respond during his lifetime.

Thinking about Murray and thinking about writing about him sent me, curious, off on a hunt for what others had written about him. Wendy Bishop's article, mentioned above, particularly struck a sympathetic chord in her deeply thought and deeply felt attempt to find a place for a "self-identified something-like-an-expressivist" (11). In the essay she very much catches herself in the act of trying to understand the "other," namely the writing teacher who does not write (or whose writing is so graceless, jargon-ridden, tone deaf, purposefully indirect that it provides little to enjoy or emulate). She classifies as misunderstandings those critiques that dismiss expressivist pedagogy as nave, while at the same time acknowledging the social-constructivist mission to empower students by giving them access to academic discourse communities. In trying to root out the factors influencing this too-easy dismissal of expressivist intentions, she cites

Current-Market-Forces, an additional figure of fear that urges compositionists into rapid professionalism, creating the perceived (and often actual) need to appear ever-more scholarly, historical, and theoretical. [...] However, the more immediate problem, the reason we fear expressivist figures, may have as much or more to do with our own concerns about authorizing ourselves as writers-who-teach-a-subject: writing. (12)

In a more recent article ("Review: Radical to Many in the Educational Establishment: The Writing Process Movement after the Hurricanes." College English 68 (2006): 531-44) , reviewing a recent reissue of Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing as well as seminal work by Peter Elbow and Paulo Freire, Robert P. Yagelski also questions the dismissal of Murray�s brand of expressivism. He seems to share

Murray's concerns about the rigidity and, in his view, the misguidedness, of conventional writing instruction, which positions the student as passive direction-follower, as disengaged from the world around dhim or her, as un-self-reflective. Writing in conventional schooling is not the active, curious engagement with the world that characterizes Murray's writer�(534)

And goes on to say, provocatively, of the process-approach to composition that

These ideas have easily been co-opted by conventional schooling, because they can be interpreted (wrongly, in my view) as resting on a conception of writing as a step-by-step process, compartmentalized and turned into a canned procedure for students to follow. As a result, the radical potential of these dieas has rarely been realized in conventional educational practice. (535)

Quick response.
Parts of expressivism that I embrace.

• its anti-academic stance (Newkirk: "Can a writing course in the academy be antiacademic (which is not the same thing as anti-intellectual)?" (3))


• the value it places on personal voice


• its attention to process

More questionable issues (wrt UNH's version).

• What is the practicality of conferences? I have certainly seen their value, in times when a verbal comment or response to a question can more immediately clarify a student misunderstanding. And I have wondered about the usefulness of conferencing and the personal relationship it can create on improving student course-completion. But how can the system work on a practical level for those teaching 4 or 5 sections??


• The question of open-ended subjects has been on my mind lately. But Murray's ideal of a curious, engaged writer seems very far from the students in my class. (Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination?)


• I do strongly feel that "outside" reading needs to be an important component of a FYC class, though not as models (since finished product of professional writers seem rarely helpful for students) but to stimulate student curiosity (where does one get information, anyway?) and to provide the content that can help link the personal to the public. And I have been surprised yet again this semester by the poor reading skills (or lack of attention) of some students. To be continued...

Comments

[Deb]

Murray's _Write to Learn_ was the first book I ever taught with--in grad school in the early nineties. I still return lovingly to that book sometimes...

[Collin]

Hey, waitasec! Write to Learn was the first book *I* ever taught with, in grad school, in the early nineties...

[joanna]

WTL was a book I used as a composition assistant in high schools in the 80's! In fact, my copy is a 1984 edition! I agree, Holly, that his students and ours are different, but I do find myself returning to his work whenever I need a common sense approach to teaching writing.

[Nick]

In his May 30th column Murray relates a trip he took with his first year writing class to visit a potter. He writes:

We were invited to visit a potter's studio to see if there were any connections between the writer and the artist at work. He demonstrated his artistic process and we all saw many connections between creating a pot and an essay.

We thanked him and started to leave when he stopped us and asked the class to pick their favorite piece of his work. His studio was lined with plates, bowls, and mugs and it took a long time for the class to agree on the most beautiful example of his work.

I think the class believed what I did, that he would make it a gift. He took it off the shelf, held it high, then purposely dropped it. It broke into a dozen pieces as it hit the floor. We all gasped in horror and then he said, ` ` It's the making that's important.' '

Murray's story strikes me as emblematic of Newkirk's observation quoted above, that for Murray, "In fact, the finished text is something of an illusion; its very orderliness hides the disorderliness of the creation."

[Holly]

Thanks (Deb, Collin, and Joanna) for supporting testimony! There is something so approachable and supportive and inspiring in his voice that I miss from some of the rhet/comp school.

Nick: I got that column from my mother as well. It gave me a good laugh, but I sure do have ambivalent feelings about that "process-is-all" approach. It reminds me of a passage from Bill McKibben's book Enough about a psychologist named Csikszentmihalyi, who studied the state of deep enjoyment he termed "flow." When my writing goes well, I do have a sense of what he means by that, but it is a nice reminder to have the finished pages to look at as well (maybe I'm not as far along my spiritual path?--and somehow I sense not too many of my students are either).