Writing With Peter

A tribute to Peter Elbow, the Paul McCartney of Rhetoric and Composition

The page is blank, and my fingers are frozen over the keyboard.

The reality: I want this to be perfect. Something that would make Peter Elbow proud. That, had he read it, would make him reach out to me and provoke another one of our few but pleasant email exchanges.

The irony: Peter Elbow, of all people, would probably tell me not to worry about perfection. He would probably tell me to just write. “For most of my career, I’ve known how useful it is to invite wrong writing on the way to right writing,” he said in his book Vernacular Eloquence.

And yet, here I am, attempting to write not about him, but for him.

As if he is my audience. “The trickiest audience of all.”

And I don’t want to get it wrong even on the first try, much less the final.

In 2001, as part of my graduate studies, I took a course called Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. One of the major assignments that semester was to compile an annotated bibliography of scholarly works by one of the rhetoric-composition “superstars,” to use my professor’s term. He gave us a list of names of scholars—several of whom were still alive and teaching in universities across the country—who were groundbreaking in the field, be it in pedoagogical expressivism, social constructionism, or postmodernism, to name a few.

Those terms may have the average reader scratching their head, and I predict at least one reader will grimace at the word “pedagogy,” but for the starry-eyed academic I was over twenty years ago, I soaked them in and felt their richness. Hell, I wanted to be a rhet-comp superstar myself one day.

Peter Elbow’s name was on that list. I can no longer remember if I’d already been introduced to his work (probably in that same Rhetorical Theory class) or if something else drew me to him, but nevertheless, that’s who I chose.

And, as I recently commented to my former professor-now-friend, Keith, I never looked back.

I delved into countless academic journal articles—the more I read, the more his words and theoretical approach resonated with me.

His book Writing Without Teachers was a game-changer. So much so that I would say to my students on day one: “Teachers are the trickiest audience of all.” I also wrote at the top of the syllabus each semester: “College is short, and life is long.”

Because I didn’t want students to merely write for their classes. I wanted them to write for and about their lives, throughout their lives, well beyond college.

Moreover, when I saw the ripple effect Elbow’s work had on others, I concluded he wasn’t just any ol’ superstar. He was the Paul McCartney of rhetoric and composition.

Which is why I fangirled when I met him. And with every encounter after that. Even in email.

Like, I don’t think I goofy-grinned after meeting John Taylor the way I did after meeting Peter Elbow.

To look at him was to look at a stereotypical English professor. Older. Lanky, Tweed jacket. (Or maybe I’m misremembering the jacket. But he was of the tweed jacket generation.)

Peter Elbow. Photo credit: unknown

Had I bumped into him on the street or been a freshman student assigned to one of his composition classes, I wouldn’t have known I was standing in the presence of greatness. And he was so easygoing, he wouldn’t have assumed it himself. Yet I was wide-eyed when my friend and former colleague Janet told me she’d studied with him while pursuing her doctorate. Referred to him so casually as “Peter.”

Eventually, I casually referred to him as “Peter” too. But I promise you that even now, it doesn’t feel right.

One of my first encounters with Peter (see?) happened when I presented a paper at a small graduate student conference in Albany, New York, where he was the keynote speaker. I was ambitious at the time, having already served on faculty committees, attended and presented at conferences, and led orientation workshops. My colleague Linus Travers used to introduce me to university administrators as being “on a faster tenure track than most tenured professors.”

I don’t remember the subject of the paper; I only know that I had cited Peter’s work—of course—along with others.

And lo and behold, he attended my session. And sat in the front.

I’m a good public speaker—I actually enjoy it. But it took me at least the first two paragraphs of reading my paper aloud to keep my voice from quavering. When I came to the section in which I referenced him by name, I amiably gestured toward him, eliciting an acknowledging smile from him.

At the end of the session, he approached me. “I really liked what you had to say,” he said.

You’d think McCartney just told me he liked a song I wrote.

I got my master’s degree in 2003 and had every intention of entering a PhD program.

But I wrote the first draft of a novel instead. And that changed everything.

I couldn’t have possibly known what was in store for that novel. I didn’t know who, besides my fellow grad students and colleagues, would appreciate a story about an inhibited female rhetoric-composition professor who meets an uninhibited male escort.

I had no idea that five years after finishing it, it would shoot up to the top of the Kindle Store bestseller list, earn me a publishing contract, and catapult me into my author career.

But that was nothing compared to two years later, in 2012, when I received this email:

Only recently did someone put me on to your Faking It. What a treat for me!

Thank you so much. And I love the basic idea: trading rhetorical training for sexual training. I've always felt there was a sexual element all along in writing and teaching, but you brought it out.

Yes, I’d even cited Peter Elbow in my novel. After all, I was still that idealistic academic when I first wrote Faking It in 2004-05, and thus Andi was an idealistic academic as well, one who was on an even faster tenure track than I was. Even Andi called Elbow the McCartney of rhet-comp.

And I had no idea Faking It was going to become an international bestseller, much less that Peter would eventually be one of its hundreds of thousands of readers.

Peter Elbow was now responsible for highlights in both my academic and author careers.

It got better—as our conversation continued, he coined a term that encapsulated my books perfectly:

Which is what lead me to caption my social media bios with this:

It’s as if Aaron Sorkin and Nora Ephron had a love child. And Judy Blume was her great aunt.

I wished Romance Rhetoric could be an official genre, where you could go to a bookstore and find an entire section of it.

I was honored when Peter sent me a copy of Vernacular Eloquence and asked me to review it. When I sent him the review I posted on Amazon, he was genuinely delighted and grateful.

How amazing and wonderful what you wrote—and THAT you wrote. What an act of generosity. It’s a terrific review in the form of a meditation. I love how you use a kind of personal picture of your thought process as a vehicle for giving useful substantive summaries. You use your own thoughts and feelings about audiences for your writing to give insights about audience as a huge and often troubling dimension of writing.

I thank you very deeply.

Yeah. Still beaming.

I’d forgotten that I’d floated the idea of him writing a foreword for what would eventually be The Writer’s Habit. He was very excited about the approach I was taking and agreed to write the foreword. However, by the time I was finally ready to publish the book, we’d lost touch—I’d assumed by then that he was getting on in age and possibly declining in health.

Last week, when I learned of Peter’s death (I’m out of academic circles now, so I’m grateful to my friend and former colleague Erika for taking the time to inform me), I’d just gotten off a Zoom call with a coach in which we discussed the idea of being a master of one’s craft.

I’d teared up at her mere recitation of the affirmation: I am a master of my craft.

“I haven’t felt like that was true for me in a long time,” I said.

Hell, I’d even rescinded The Writer’s Habit from publication.

And yet, there was Peter, a Master of all things writing, rhetoric, and composition—a freaking Superstar—who had never quite gotten all this figured out himself, but shared what he’d learned along the way, something I’d pointed out in my Amazon review.

Such as this, from one of our emails:

One of the things that took me a long time to learn: as a writing teacher—especially of required courses—we’re always making students write—many of them not wanting to—and write about topics they don’t want to write about. We get the feeling that people hate writing—and “we” (not you and me) get lots of people to hate it. It took me a long time to notice that in fact everyone wants to write! (From conversations in busses or trains; people sheepishly admitting they’ve always wanted to write a book.)

Or this:

It’s so sad to me that folks somehow decided to call our field “composition” or “rhetoric.” No child in the world ever wanted to grow up to write “compositions” (unless they are musicians) or to be a rhetorician. Whereas almost everyone, deep down, wants to be a writer. How could it be that smart learned academics could ever make a bad decision? Oh well.

If Peter-freaking-superstar-Elbow was willing to be so vulnerable with me, to share these thoughts off the cuff and appreciate my input as well—“I liked what you had to say”—then maybe I really did know a thing or two.

And, just as he invited wrong writing on the way to right writing, maybe I could invite vulnerability into perfection. Maybe I could invite “figuring it out as I go” into mastery.

Peter Elbow taught me how to write without teachers. But I didn’t realize until now that I was writing with Peter all along.

And I still can’t help but hope I got it right.

Two of Peter Elbow's many books, these being among the most popular