identity

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.

“We didn’t stage this just for you,” Alma said to me after the most dramatic night of my work observing and participating in the community-based writing group to which she belongs. I became associated with City Writers as part of an ethnography seminar. I am interested in extra-curricular writing in part because of Ann Ruggles Gere’s work, particularly “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms” (1994).

Working with first-year students at Purdue University, composition instructor Mary Godwin joined efforts with librarian Alexius Smith-Macklin to explore the efficacy of a collaborative approach to freshman writing instruction at the university level. Combining expertise from the Purdue programs of English education, theory and cultural studies, rhetoric and composition, and library studies, these instructors initiated an action research investigation of curriculum designed to improve the research skills of first-year university writers.