Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts

Acknowledgments

135 Acknowledgments This is a short book that took a long time to write.A result has been that an unusually wide range of individuals have contributed to the writing of a slim volume—all to my gain, and I hope also to that of my readers. Several years ago, Carol Hollar-Zwick and Tony English helped me start to think about this project, and I have since watched with pleasure and admiration as Michael Spooner, the director of the Utah State University Press, has turned the manuscript I gave him into a finished book. I also owe special thanks to Robin DuBlanc for her attentive copyediting of my text, and to Barbara Yale-Read for a cover design that enacts the elegance my prose aspires to. When I first conceived this project,I was teaching in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. My approach to writing and teaching has been shaped in strong part by the years I worked in Pittsburgh, and I will always be grateful to my colleagues there—especially Dave Bartholomae , Steve Carr, and Phil Smith. I drafted and revised this book, though, while working as part of a multidisciplinary faculty in the Duke University Writing Program, and the influence of my colleagues in the UWP is everywhere to be found in these pages. My thanks go especially to Parag Budecha, Denise Comer, Van Hillard, Tim Hodgdon, David Kellogg, Jason Mahn, Derek Malone-France, Tamera Marko, Jules Odendahl-James, Marcia Rego, Michele Strano, Jim Thrall, Phil Troutman, Betsy Verhoeven, and Rebecca Walsh for working with some of these materials in their classes and sharing their experiences—and often the work of their students—with me. I am also grateful to all the students in my Writing 20 courses at Duke with whom I tried out one version or the other of this text and the ideas 136 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts behind it. I especially thank Lorne Bycoff, Julie Flom, Pureum Kim, Keith Greenberg, Justin Lee, and Abhijit Mehta—who read parts of the book and reassured me that it felt like the work we had done together in class. And I owe a special debt to Charles Jordan, Justin Lee, Abhijit Mehta, and Emily Murphy for allowing me to quote from their writing in chapter 5. I’ve shared ideas and strategies from this book with faculty in workshops at the University of Michigan, Haverford College, North Carolina State University, and the University of Southern Maine—and in each case came out of the room having learned more than anyone else in it. An exceptional set of written reviews from colleagues at other universities also helped me revise and fine-tune the final form of this book. I owe deep thanks to Tom Deans,Virginia Draper, Eli Goldblatt, Anne Jurecic, Michael Hennessy, Carol Rutz, and Raul Sanchez for their close and sympathetically critical comments on my work. I found their remarks more genuinely useful than any other reviews I have had of my writing. My thanks also go to those friends who read various parts of this manuscript as I was working on it and whose responses helped keep me going. Nancy Koerbel, Frank Lehner, Kate Harris, and Tina Bessias made me feel at an early point in my writing that I might actually have something to say. Mike Rose offered astute and supportive thoughts both as I began work on this project and as I was finishing it. And David Kaufer and Joe Janangelo each took generous amounts of time to make detailed and perspicacious comments on an early draft of my full text. I was also prodded along gently by my friend Pakis Bessias, who at the start of each of our Sunday morning runs would ask me how much I had written the week before, and then congratulate me on whatever my answer was. I was saddened while at work on this book by the loss of two people very close and dear to me—my mother, Doreen Harris, and my father-inlaw , Jose Vilanova. I miss them both deeply. But I was buoyed, as always, by the warmth, laughter, affectionate irreverence, and good company of my wife, Patricia, and my daughters, Kate and Mora. The last book was for Pat, this one is for the girls. —jh Durham, April 2006 ...