An "Introduction to Writing Studies" Screen

I almost never tell students anything about myself, and certainly not in one big, revealing account of my life. But this course is about helping you see the available paths for you as an English major or writing minor at NDSU, and I hope it is also about helping you see paths beyond your BA and NDSU. So here goes—my life by degrees.

High school diploma, Virden Collegiate Institute (1986). Think medium size town in ND or MN (3,000 people), plunk it down two hours north of Minot ND but across the all-important 49^th parallel, and you might have a sense of where I grew up and went to school. My formal education was fine, but not exceptional—it gave me time to do a lot of reading that wasn’t assigned. I read the book that blew me away intellectually, a book that is probably in part responsible for me being an academic and teaching this course: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It is an incredible book that accounts for not only the origins of consciousness, but also the evolution of consciousness, throughout the whole of human history. I have been hooked on seeing the "big picture" ever since.

B.A. in English, U of Winnipeg (1990). U of W is a small, liberal arts school—a bit like Concordia, but bigger, publicly funded, and without an influential religious affiliation (there is a historical religious affiliation). I didn’t take any composition courses, my first-year English course was the only literature survey course I took, I took a second-year "Introduction to English Studies" class which resembles this course a tiny, tiny big (we started with the Odyssey and moved all the way up to teen magazines!), and I took a mix of author classes (Chaucer, Shakespeare) and period/national lit. classes (Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Early North American, Canadian), and one class I can’t seem to recall. My classes were all full-year classes, so I didn’t take a little of this and a little of that—still one of the huge differences in Canadian and American liberal arts education.

I enjoyed most of my classes most of the time, but I worried: what am I going to do with an English degree? What skills am I developing? I asked a lot of professors what they thought I should do, and the word "rhetoric" kept coming up over and over again. In my literature classes, "rhetoric" usually meant "rhetorical analysis": reading texts to try and understand how they acted in the world. Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction was only a few years old at the time, and he argued that rhetorical theory and feminist theory were the two most important directions in English studies—and I think he has been proven right. His book is one of the best selling academic books of all time—I guess others have wanted to read what he has to say, too.

In my final year as an undergraduate, I became a tutor in the U of W’s Writing Program, and was introduced to "rhetoric" as the foundation for teaching writing. This revelation was like the other piece of the puzzle for me.

I had a sense of why I might study and teach literature. Not because it is beautiful and good, which has never worked for me (although I understand why it works for many people), but because understanding how "texts" in a broad sense work in the world seemed to be somewhat practical and even slightly powerful knowledge. Kenneth Burke, a famous 20^th century rhetorician, thinks of literature as "instructions for living"—that phrase works for me!
I also had a sense that I could be teaching something even more immediately powerful—writing. Writing had already brought me some positive exposure: I wrote and distributed a ‘zine in high school, and I was sports editor of the U of W student paper. Like most English majors, I also had some vague notion of being a writer in the back of my head: writing was (and still is) the escape route if I ever need out of academia.

I took one year off and read many things, wrote a few things, worked a bit—I’ve never felt less stress in my life! I learned a lot reading what I wanted to read. I think I remember more of what I read from that year, and from high school, than from many of my literature courses. There is a lot to be said for reading one book at a time, and reading it well, rather than reading four books at time quickly!

Master’s degree in English, at the University of Calgary (1993). Although everyone told me I had to go to the United States of America to study rhetoric, I wasn’t ready to move to the big, bad, empire to the south. I hung out for two years in a literature M.A. (I might as well admit that I have a life outside of school—a relationship shaped this decision for me), learned to use the history of rhetoric as a framework for reading literature, immersed myself in "sports literature" for these years (I’ll explain its relevance below), and matured enough to realize that my only future in higher education was a PhD in rhetoric.

PhD in "Rhetoric and Professional Communication," Iowa State University (1997). Professional communication, you ask—where did that come from? I’m not exactly sure, but a year into my M.A., I decided that the next degree needed to be something radically different, that I needed and wanted to learn a whole new body of knowledge, and Prof. Comm. was it. Rhetoric gave me something familiar to hang on to; PC gave me a new challenge. Professional Communication is not easy to pin down, and at times it can be a dry as the name suggests. You never hear about people curling up in bed with a good Annual Report, do you? But it opened up the sliding electric door for me (the kind that go "whoosh)": I was sitting in a computer lab in 1994 when Mosaic (the pre-cursor to Netscape) made the web "graphical." I made my first web page later that year, I read my first hypertext novel in 1995, and while I remained a "dabbler" in the e-world until I came to NDSU in 1997, I have increasingly become committed to bringing electronic texts, electronic writing spaces, and the "play" of electric culture, to my courses (see the sports lit connection now?).

As you can see, I didn’t take any large chunks of time off to work, teach in high school, join the Peace Corps—whatever. I don’t regret my path, but I can certainly see the value in wandering more than I did. I suffer a bit from tunnel vision, from goal-directedness: I wanted to "be" something, and so I had to get to that spot quickly. I was also a kid who wrote because I liked to, read books like the Origins of Consciousness and really, really like them, and generally went out of my way to pursue art, culture, and learning. I’ve known most of my life that I wanted to be a life-long learner, so staying in school has made a lot of sense. I thought about a few other careers, have applied for jobs that would have taken me out of school at various times over the past 15 years, but nothing else has grabbed or held me. Those other careers might still come along: Information Architect sounds like a great job title, doesn’t it? But for now, I am really excited about being in this spot (in Introduction to Writing Studies, at NDSU, on the Web), and I look forward to talking with you about your possible paths.