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Composition Studies As a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1998 Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration Lynn Z. Bloom Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Bloom, Lynn Z., "Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration" (1998). All USU Press Publications. 122. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/122 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Composition Studies as a Creative Art Composition Studies as a Creative Art Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration LYNN Z. BLOOM UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Logan, Utah 1998 Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Copyright © 1998 Lynn Z. Bloom. All rights reserved. Publication credits appear on page 268 which constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Typography by WolfPack Manufactured in the United States of America. 98 99 00 01 02 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom, Lynn Z., 1934- Composition studies as a creative art: teaching, writing, scholarship, administration I Lynn Z. Bloom. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-246-4 (pbk.) 1. English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching. 2. English language-Composition and exercises. I. Title. PE1404.B589 1998 808'.042'07-ddc21 98-8968 CIP For Martin Bloom With my writing every word of the way­ in the beginning, between the lines, beyond the ending ... CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION: Composition Studies as a Creative Art 1 PART I: Teaching Writing and Teaching Writing Teachers ONE Finding a Family, Finding a Voice: 15 A Writing Teacher Teaches Writing Teachers TWO Teaching My Class 25 THREE Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise 33 FOUR Textual Terror, Textual Power: Teaching 54 Literature Through Writing Literature FIVE American Autobiography and the Politics of Genre 64 PART II: Teaching and Writing Creative Nonfiction SIX Teaching College English as a Woman 79 SEVEN Creative Nonfiction, Is There Any Other Kind? 88 EIGHT Reading, Writing, Teaching Essays as Jazz 104 NINE Why Don't We Write What We Teach? And Publish It? 118 TEN Subverting the Academic Masterplot 130 PART III: Creative Scholarship and Publication in Composition Studies ELEVEN Coming ofAge in the Field That Had No Name 143 TWELVE Anxious Writers in Context 158 THIRTEEN "I Write for Myself and Strangers": Private Diaries 171 as Public Documents FOURTEEN Making Essay Connections: Editing Readers 186 for First- Year Writers FIFTEEN The Importance ofExternal Reviews 198 in Composition Studies PART IV: Writing Program Administration as a Creative Enterprise SIXTEEN I Want a Writing Director 209 SEVENTEEN Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades 212 EIGHTEEN Initiation Rites, Initiation Rights. (with Thomas Recchio) 223 NINETEEN Making a Difference: Writing Program 229 Administration as a Creative Process TWENTY Bloom's Laws 238 AFTERWORD: Free Play 241 WORKS CITED 248 INDEX 260 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HEN I'M WRITING, THE BOOKS AND JOURNALS MIGRATE FROM THE W shelves and cupboards that line my sunny study and end up in heaps on the floor, around the desk, under the worktable-on which still more are stacked-and in the storage closet and the furnace room that catch the overflow. Although the result is a decorator's disaster, I know exactly where everything is-all around me like an embrace, exactly where I need it. If the authors of these works were here in person the room would look like a CCCC convention, enlivened by a swirl of teachers and writers great and good, philosophers, psychologists, rhetoricians, travelers, social commentators, anthropologists, and more, and student writers, genera­ tions past and passing. I would greet them with the hugs of welcome, and of thanks, that I extend figuratively not only from this page, but on every page of Composition Studies as a Creative Art. What a conversation we could continue, what a celebration. Space limitations on the printed page, although not in my imagination, confine my acknowledgments by name to those whose involvement with the work here, new and reprinted, has been most immediate. The editors of the journals and books in which many of these writings were originally published offered advice so good (such as "Stick to the point!") that I took most of it. Among those editors who reinforce my understanding that Composition Studies is not only a creative but a collaborative art are: Katherine Adams, John Adams, Bill Bernhardt, Wendy Bishop, Suzanne Bunkers, Ed Corbett, Sid Dobrin, Linda Flower, Sheryl Fontaine, Diane Freedman, Olivia Frey, Toby Fulwiler, Barbara Gebhardt, Rick Gebhardt, Kristine Hansen, Joe Harris, Doug Hesse, Cynthia Huff, Chris Hult, Susan Hunter, Joe Janangelo, Peter Miller, Gary Olson, Hans Ostrom, Jim Raymond, Mike Rose, Mimi Schwartz, Louise Z. Smith, Todd Taylor, Joe Trimmer, and Art Young, as well as a host of unidentified journal and press reviewers. My ongoing professional dialogue with, among others, John x Composition Studies as a Creative Art Brereton, Don Daiker, Peter Elbow, Rebecca Faery, Beth Flynn, Anne Gere, Lee Jacobus, Carol Peterson, Linda Peterson, Nancy Sommers, Kurt Spellmeyer, Ed White, and Rosemary Winslow-has also proven a signifi­ cant formative influence for the writing in this book. The University of Connecticut, the Aetna Foundation, and the University of Connecticut Research Foundation have provided the research support­ time to read, think, and write-that led to Composition Studies as a Creative Art. Colleagues John Gatta, Donna Hollenberg, Lee Jacobus, and Veronica Makowsky asked tough questions and expected answers to match. My grad­ uate research assistants have proven to be uniformly resourceful and imagi­ native in finding and using research materials, and incisive critical readers who have willingly vetted every draft of every paper: Sarah Aguiar (now of Murray State University), Valerie Smith Matteson, Tom Moore (now of the Maine Maritime Academy), Bob Myhal, Kathy Tardif (now of Platinum Technology, Inc.), and NingYu (now of Western Washington University). Valerie Smith Matteson and Jenny Spinner my current research assistants, Lori Corsini-Nelson, Aetna secretary, and Michael Spooner, Director of the Utah State University Press, deserve particular thanks for their perseverance and meticulous care in bringing the manuscript of this book as close to per­ fection as possible (the errors are mine, alas) on extremely short notice­ with generosity, goodwill, and amazing grace. Others, too, emerging from the recesses of real life to be reinvented in creative nonfiction-the quick and the dead, the intimate and the anony­ mous, the adversaries and the advocates alike-deserve recognition here for their dramatic contributions, sometimes to the text, sometimes to the sub­ text of this book. I am grateful beyond measure that the drama provided by my immediate family-my husband, Martin, our sons Bard and Laird, their wives Vicki and Sara, and our grandchildren Paul and Elizabeth-has been essentially comic (despite the scary parts recounted in this book), full of the excitement, enthusiasm and energy that make living, like composition stud­ ies, a creative art. Martin Bloom, social psychologist and professor, has read every word of every major draft of every chapter with uncommonly good critical sense, and a parodist's intolerance of jargon ("I never noun"). He has provided a retentive memory for titles and key words that I've called out from an adjacent lane during our early morning lap swims, homemade apple pie at bedtime, and all the comforts in between. Best of all, he has trusted me to tell the stories I tell here. Every day, every word, is a gift. University of Connecticut January 1998 DEFINITION OF POETRY Once I took a course in aesthetics: Three hours credit If I could learn What a poem was. A poem was "the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds"; "The best words in the best order"; ''A criticism of life:' But what was "best"? Would "happiness" necessarily dwell in a criticism? And if a poem "tells us ... something that cannot be said;' how could we discuss the ineffable? A poem was a poem, we learned, if it made you feel as if the top of your head were taken off, Or if your spine tingled Or your gut quivered, Save the classics, and with them, the more cathartic, the better. A poem was metered, rhythmic, regular- Except free verse. A poem rhymed- But not blank verse. A poem had consonance, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia­ Or none of these. A poem used a "higher concentration of imagery" than prose. "But how high is high?" asked we bourgeois gentlemen, speakers of prose all our lives. A poem was "poem-shaped;' Yes, just as a human being was man-shaped, unless she was a woman. Finally, we were told, "a poem should not mean, but be." Be what? To answer the question for myself I wrote a term paper, ''A Definition of Poetry:' The instructor gave it an A. But I never wrote A poem. INTRODUCTION Composition Studies as a Creative Art SOME WRITERS' BEGINNINGS: THE STUDENTS IN THIS BOOK his semester my undergraduate writing class meets in a slightly dilapi­ Tdated ISO-year-old farmhouse, a Designated Historic Site, across the road from the central campus's swath of lush lawns and venerable oaks. Out of the line of devastation from the bulldozers, cranes, and other heavy machinery employed in (re)building the university from the underground up, we are on the flight path of the Canada geese and the blue heron that dwell on the campus pond visible from the front porch.
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