Abstract

Dineson. It reads: All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.I I come to this podium this morning fully conscious of the rather daunting responsibility attached to this occasion-a responsibility heightened by what my distinguished predecessors have said in their Chair's Addresses. Mindful of that tradition, I do not intend this morning to speak for our profession, nor to try to prepare a different focus for our individual or collective work. Nor do I intend to argue for the need to establish either greater coherence for or a different map of the shifting demarcations within the field of composition studies. Rather, I've come here prepared simply to tell a story about writing, about writing as a matter of life and death, a story about how I now know much better what I thought I had known before-about the dignity and the importance of what we try to do each day in our public and private conversations about the importance of the work of words in the lives of our students and in our own lives.