gender

The poet Charles Boebel once explained his view of personal writing: “There are many masks buried deep inside each of us and when we write, these masks, sometimes one, sometimes more than one, surface and are expressed in our written works” (ICEA 2002). Masks provide interchangeable alternate identities, not to be hidden behind, but exposed, processed and developed through writing. Boebel’s concept draws upon connections from the mask theory of W.B. Yeats to the expressivism of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, to the psychoanalytic theory of Christine Brooke-Rose.

In the latter months of 2010, one of my colleagues from the long ago Rhetoric, Linguistics and Literature program at Southern Cal e-mailed to me the news that the county in which I live has the highest high school drop-out rate of black boys in the entire United States, news that my colleague, in fact, is responsible for corralling and analyzing.