Composition Forum 43, Spring 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/43/

On The Creative-Nonfiction of Composition and Rhetoric: An Interview with Lad Tobin

Michael Michaud

Abstract: In this interview, on the eve of his retirement in spring 2020, I speak with Dr. Lad Tobin about his career and work in composition and rhetoric, his commitment to the teaching of writing, including and especially personal or expressive writing, and his arguments about the continued relevance of creative-nonfiction to composition.

Michael Michaud (MM): While reading through your work in preparation for this interview, I noted the following two author bios, the first from your College English essay Self-Disclosure as Strategic Teaching Tool (2010), the second from your TriQuarterly essay The Third I: Character, Narrator, Author in the Personal Narrative (2016):

Lad Tobin is associate professor in the English department at Boston College. He is the author of Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Class and Reading Student Writing: Confessions, Meditations, and Rants. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, Fourth Genre, Slow Trains, and other literary journals and collections.

Lad Tobin’s personal essays have appeared in The Sun, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, New Orleans Review, Full-Grown People, and The Norton Reader. He is the author of two books of creative nonfiction about teaching creative nonfiction: Reading Student Writing: Confessions, Meditations, and Rants and Writing Relationships. He teaches at Boston College.

It would seem that these days you are having it both ways, working in two fields simultaneously, composition and rhetoric and creative writing. Is that right?

Lad Tobin (LT): You’re right in noticing that: I do teach and write in both Comp/Rhet and creative nonfiction (CNF). In some ways, my focus on creative nonfiction has been a shift. For the past ten years or so I’ve been writing more literary essays than academic articles and focusing more on teaching creative writing workshops and courses on memoir than on doing WPA work. Even though it’s a shift in some ways, it’s really something I’ve done my whole career.

The connection for me between my Comp/Rhet and CNF work has more to do with the way my writing has slowly evolved over the years: very early in my career, I published only academic articles for academic audiences. But after just a few years of that kind of writing, I found myself drawn to more literary forms and I began thinking I wanted to write essays that were truly essays—more narrative, more personal, more digressive, more abut opening up a new avenue than trying to close down a question through argument.

I also became more self-aware about the form and language and rhythm of my writing. So even when I was only writing about Comp/Rhet issues for a Comp/Rhet audience, I tried hard to create articles that employed elements of fiction-writing. I don’t mean I was making up the material in my articles, but I was trying hard to use literary tools—creative narrative structures; literary language (e.g., alliteration, metaphor, a pleasing rhythm, etc.); even suspense and humor—as a way to make my essays more pleasurable to write and, I hope, to read.

MM: Could you say a bit more about what drew you to writing creative-non-fiction?

LT: Looking back, I think I started writing CNF rather than continuing to write Comp/Rhet articles for a lot of different reasons. First, I wanted to write about topics besides writing and teaching and rhetorical theory. I wasn’t sure at the time what the topics would be—they’ve turned out to be my adolescence, my parents, rock music, aging, New Orleans, food, fashion—but I just felt a desire to branch out content-wise.

Second, I wanted to branch out audience-wise, too. A Comp/Rhet article or book gets read by a pretty small audience; it’s an audience I’ve always loved, but it’s small. On the other hand, the work I’ve been able to place in literary journals, magazines, and websites—like The Sun or Utne Reader or The Rumpus—gets seen by audiences that are much larger and much more diverse.

Third, I wanted to experiment even more with form and language than I could do in Comp/Rhet. Early in my career the Comp/Rhet scholars whose work I liked best were Don Murray, Peter Elbow, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Wendy Bishop, and Tom Newkirk. I loved what they were saying about teaching but I also loved the way they were saying it. It was through reading their work that I saw a place where I might enter the field and even carve out my own niche. Over time, the writers I was reading, the ones whose work was most in my head as I wrote, were literary essayists: Joan Didion; James Baldwin; David Sedaris; JoAnn Beard; Janet Malcolm; Lauren Slater.

Finally, I just wanted a new challenge and a new focus. Most jobs have a shelf life—or at least they have for me. I’ve loved and will always feel grateful for and loyal to my career as a Comp/Rhet specialist, but teaching the same courses and studying in the same field for twenty or thirty or forty years can get old. Shifting to CNF gave me a chance to re-invent my role and to make the last part of my teaching career feel almost as new and exciting as the first part.

Of course, for that to happen I had to work out a shift in my role in my department life. I’ve never stopped teaching Freshman Comp or grad courses in Comp theory, but I moved out of WPA work and started teaching creative writing workshops and grad courses in CNF literature. I also switched my conference-going from CCCC and NCTE to AWP and NonfictioNow. The fact that my department has allowed me to make that shift is a real testament to the openness of our creative writing faculty.

I guess the last thing I want to add here is that even though I stopped doing any scholarly writing, stopped doing WPA work, and stopped going to CCCCs, I know that the way I write, teach, and think has always been and will continue to always be influenced by my years as a Comp/Rhet scholar.

MM: In the introduction to your co-edited collection Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the ‘90s, you offer a humorous rendering, circa the early 1990s, of “life before the writing process movement,” which begins with the following sentence: “Once upon a time, in an age of disciplinary darkness and desolation, say about 1965 or so, writing students were subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment...” (2) I’m wondering if you would be willing to offer a similar rendering on the state of “life after the writing process movement”—from your perspective and from the vantage point of the late-twenty-teens.

LT: I could easily write a piece describing the twenty years after the heyday of the process movement (which, in my view, was around mid-70s to mid 90s) in a way that would sound very much like the way I describe the period before. That is, I could say that teaching Comp in the post-process movement era has become, in some ways, as traditional, routinized, and unexciting as teaching Comp in the pre-process movement era was.

What I’m referring to and reacting against is the re-establishment of certain kinds of “content” and theme-based courses that put literary and cultural analysis and the teacher’s interpretations back at the center of the course, instead of the radical pedagogies of Murray, Elbow, and others that placed the act of writing and the student writer at the center of the course.In too many post-process courses, faculty have made Comp/Rhet back into a course that looks more like art history, with a focus on the works being studied, and less like studio art, which places the making of texts at the very center. Where that has happened, where’s there been a displacement of student voices, a disparaging of personal narrative and memoir as if they are inherently easier and less sophisticated than other rhetorical forms, an effort to borrow academic/cultural capital from other fields, and a distancing of our field from the lessons of the process movement—where that has happened I think we’ve regressed.

MM: If we have regressed or moved in directions you find unfortunate, I’m wondering about your own continued engagement in the field, perhaps via reading—mainly, I’m wondering what, if anything, you read in the field these days that catches your attention, inspires your interest, or just causes you to want to know more.

LT: Like I said, I’ve been immersed, over the past ten years or so, in writing, reading, studying, and thinking about creative nonfiction literature, theory, and pedagogy, but I see this more as an extension than a rejection of Comp/Rhet. I’d argue that reading great nonfiction writers—Montaigne, Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, Dillard, Kincaid, dozens of others—should be considered reading work that is in our field. In other words, as teachers and scholars of nonfiction writing, we should be knowledgeable about—and should claim for Comp/Rhet—the history, theory, and practice of essay writing both in and out of the academic world.

MM: In Self-Disclosure as Strategic Teaching Tool you write: “there is a value for teachers in developing protocols and criteria for making strategic decisions about potentially tricky self-disclosures” (197). This line struck me for two reasons. One, it is about teaching, an activity in which we all engage regularly but about which, it seems, we publish (at least in the field’s flagship journals) less these days than we once did. Two, it is about the intersection between the work of teaching and the personal lives and experiences of teachers. I think it may be fair to say that these two areas of inquiry, the activity of teaching and the experience of teaching, have animated a good deal of your work since the publication of your first book Writing Relationships (1993). Why have these been persistent concerns or interests?

LT: I didn’t get interested in writing and teaching because I went into Comp/Rhet. It was more the other way around: I went into Comp/Rhet because it was a way to focus deeply on the activities and processes of writing and teaching. I think that’s another reason I have less interest in the field these days: I’m pretty confident I’m right in saying that the percentage of scholarship on both the craft of writing and the craft of teaching has dropped in journal publications and conference presentations. In some ways that was a natural or understandable development: the field needed to evolve and expand. But I’ve been discouraged to see how much traditional teacher-centered teaching now happens in our field and how much dry, traditional academic writing gets published, compared to more creative, essayistic forms.

MM: This is the second time you’ve alluded to your concern about a return to teacher-centered teaching in composition and rhetoric classrooms. I’d like to follow up on this point with a question that may feel like a challenge but is not meant to be. Where is the evidence for this assertion? In other words, what have you experienced (at your own institution? at conferences? within the pages of the field’s scholarly literature?) that has led you to believe that we no longer put student writing and student writers at the center of our discipline?

LT: I should qualify my claim that the field has moved away from keeping student writing at the center of its scholarship and teaching. First, I readily acknowledge that—as someone offering this criticism of the field—I should be more aware than I am of what’s getting published and taught in the field these days. Second, I also readily acknowledge that my definition of what it means to keep student writing at the center of a writing course may be very different—and more radical—than most people’s definition: I’d argue that a Comp course that is theme- or content-based or that asks students to spend as much time analyzing the course readings as composing and revising their own portfolios or that does not allow for much or any writing in which the students know more about the content than their teacher has failed to keep student writers at the center.

MM: Okay, switching gears, if you will, a question about teaching: Of your teacherly self or the teacherly self you have said you attempt to “perform” in the classroom, you write: “I try to reveal myself as someone who is deeply invested in and demonstrably fascinated by each of my students’ ideas or drafts, so much so that I can’t wait to see where those ideas and drafts will go as they become more fully realized and developed” (2010; p. 202). I’m curious how you came to inhabit this teacherly persona or why you attempt this kind of teacherly performance. Is this just who you are, as a person? Or is this the outcome of the culture and community of your professional enculturation? Or is this both?

LT: In all my Comp/Rhet essays and books I focused on the relationship between text and context, on how the relationships in a writing class and community shape, foster, inhibit, enable the writing that gets written and read. So as a teacher I’ve thought hard about the teaching and reading self I want to perform in my classes and I put pressure on myself to do my part in creating a productive context. I came to that emphasis in part through my own experiences—as a student who had to write for some teachers who, because they were too strict or too lax, too directive or too distant, didn’t work for me; as a student writing for some teachers who created just the right level of direction and tension (my first Comp/Rhet grad course was a writing workshop with Don Murray); but also through reading theory in pedagogy, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis and through being in long-term psychotherapy with two different therapists.

I have always thought one of the other main reasons for my commitment to this emphasis on the interpersonal came through being raised by a father who is a classically-trained Freudian analyst. And I still think that definitely has played a role. Having said this, there is also the fact that well into my career, when I was writing an essay about the role of the personal in teaching, I suddenly realized that my commitment to this approach probably comes more from my mother, who was absolutely committed to establishing, maintaining—and almost endlessly processing—intense interpersonal relationships. I think we sometimes underestimate how much our own temperaments and family backgrounds shape who we become as teachers. A lot of this is unconscious; a lot of teachers, especially new teachers, often aren’t aware of why they’re doing what they’re doing, so I’m always trying to get the graduate students I train to work towards constructing the best and most reflective version of their teaching self possible. Part of that process involves figuring out not just what you can teach with confidence and commitment but also what you can’t.

My goal as a workshop teacher and a reader of student writing is, first, to be present; Mary Rose O’Reilley once wrote that there is a way of listening that can change the energy in the room. But I am also trying to establish a degree of “productive tension” in the room and in my relationships with students—not so much tension that a writer freezes up or plays it too safe, but not so little that she gets bored or complacent. In sum, I am trying to act in a way that is mindful of both the personal and the professional demands of the situation. Those two demands or roles can either be mutually inhibiting or mutually reinforcing. And yeah, I often do find it difficult to strike the right balance: It can be hard for me, especially early on in a course, to not give too much or too little criticism or too much or too little direct instruction or too much or too little self-disclosing information.

MM: Earlier you spoke of your mother and of your feeling that her perhaps unintended presence in your work, in terms of the necessity of engaging with students on a personal level, has been significant. Of course, you have long advocated for the value of personal writing in the composition classroom. I’m wondering if you are still, as you once wrote, a passionate defender of the uses of the personal in student and professional writing and if so why.

LT: I’ve been a passionate practitioner and defender of personal narrative and the literary essay from very early in my career—not as an undergraduate or high school teacher, but at least from the early 1980s, when I started reading Murray, Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Janet Emig. From that point on, I made personal narrative part of my courses. But I also made it more and more part of my writing life.

Initially, I was won over by the power the personal had to generate student energy and engagement in my composition classes. The personal essay was always just one of the several rhetorical forms I taught, but it was almost always in the personal essays that I saw the greatest level of effort and accomplishment in most of my students’ writing.

From very early on in the process movement, there was pushback about the personal—in our teaching and in our own writing—from both the right and the left. There were always the pre-process traditionalists who dismissed the personal as inappropriate because it didn’t teach the necessary academic forms, but also because it encouraged, to their way of thinking, solipsism and touchy-feelyness. I was used to that blowback, but I was surprised when so many of the post-process theorists dissed the personal essay, too. A lot of critics, people like Berlin and Marius and Hashimoto, made what to me were illogical claims, like the argument that the personal essay was necessarily arhetorical or apolitical or even inherently naïve or entrepreneurial.

For a while, I fought against those arguments in my conference presentations and journal articles. But at some point I realized none of us were convincing each other and I took another path: I published an article called You’re Invited to Leave, in which I addressed my readers directly, saying I believe there is great power in the personal as a medium in teaching and writing, that I have had some success in using it, and that I plan to continue using it. And I ended with something like “But if you don’t agree, if the personal is not your thing, then don’t read it and don’t teach it. But, also, don’t dismiss or patronize those of us who do.”

MM: You mentioned Donald Murray, an important mentor of yours, several times in this interview. Following his death in 2006, you wrote a short piece about him that was published in College Composition and Communication in which you wrote:

[A]s much as Don acknowledged and even celebrated the surprises and accidents of the writing process, as much as he might talk about how writing could be transcendent, transformative, and mysterious, he spent most of his career systemically demystifying almost every single aspect of the writing process — and then helping all of us benefit from his rigorous investigations. (548)

I’m wondering, as you approach retirement, if you think back on your early work with Murray and your time at UNH during the heady years of the writing process movement and, if so, what thoughts you might have about that time in your life?

LT: I wrote an essay in the first edition of Oxford’s Guide to Comp Pedagogies in which I described my experience reading Murray and Elbow in terms of discovering a whole “Brave New World.” In another essay I compared them to Emerson and Thoreau. So I guess you can say that their influence on me was pretty profound. And even now that I’m at the end of my career, I still have never found anyone else in the field whose work on the processes of writing and teaching strike me as being as insightful, deep, elegant, or radical as Murray and Elbow’s work has been—the focus on the unconscious aspects of composing; on accident and discovery; on student voice and agency; on craft and revision. Of course a lot of scholars have worked on those questions and topics since, but the outlines of it all were already there in our field largely because of Murray and Elbow’s work.

I had the chance to be Don’s student and friend, so his influence on me was also personal. Since I knew him first from his Comp/Rhet publications, in which he was always so wise and well adjusted and confident, it was surprising but also very comforting to get together over lunch and talk honestly about our insecurities and frustrations. In that way, his personality in “real life” was closer to his persona in the Over 60 Column that he wrote for The Boston Globe (1986-2006) in which he let readers see his neuroses, doubts, and fears right alongside his self assurance, wisdom, and optimism.

The other great thing for me about studying at UNH was that I also got to work with other great teachers including people like Don Graves and Les Fisher and, most of all, Tom Newkirk, whom I respect as a scholar and mentor as much as anyone I’ve read or met in the field.

MM: I’d like to conclude with a question about the road ahead: What are you working on now? Where are you headed?

LT: I don’t know. Like I said, I moved on from Comp/Rhet scholarship to personal or literary essays when I felt like I needed a new challenge. I feel like it’s time now for another one. I’m not sure if that means a new kind of writing, like immersion journalism or fiction, or something else altogether, something not connected to writing or teaching. Do you have suggestions? If so, send ‘em on.

MM: Thank you, Lad. Best of luck in your retirement and in finding your next writerly challenge.