A Hell of a Way to Start

My New Year's resolution is to write more. It sucks to begin doing that with the obituary of the man who taught two generations to write at my side.

Donald Murray was something special. He taught writing as a process; taught the process as no one else has. We were a class of hippie poets waiting for inspiration. He taught us to put words on a page, set within a structure, whether we were inspired or not. When you did it Don's way, the momentum of what you were doing, the "disease of writing" as he sometimes said, took over. You got the inspiration by working to carve it out of the words on the page. His classes were a combination of insightful support, comments about the world and all that is in it, and the most rigourous, severe, and constructive editorial criticism I have ever had. There was little grade inflation anywhere in those days, and none at all in Murray's. If you sweated, strained and struggled, met the deadline, and if your latest story was better than your last, you might get a B minus. I ended the course with a B and didn't know at the time that it was one of his rarely-bestowed treats. Above all, he taught you to work at your writing, always. The day he died, Don had filed his last story just the day before, and had a new and more advanced project in the works. That's a humbling example.

Since I began to fill pages with words for a living, I've had many reasons to thank Donald Murray. He would have no patience at all with the reasons I have written so little, reasons I know are lame. He would also be there, if you needed him, to tease the right word or phrase out of the words you did toss at the page. Once you had the sense to see it, you would feel as if you weren't half bad at this business.

I suppose all of us who were Don's students have always felt his presence over our shoulders. It is hard to sense that empty space now. He'd tell us to write, if he knew: to get busy.

I'm trying, man, I'm trying.