NH Writers' Project - Remembering Donald M. Murray

Remembering Donald M. Murray
Writers in New England and beyond lost a good friend on December 30, 2006, when Donald M. Murray died at the age of eighty-two. All of us at NHWP feel lucky to have known him and to count him as a founding member of our organization.

NHWP awarded Don the New Hampshire Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001. He delivered the keynote address at Writers’ Day 2002, led several NHWP workshops, and contributed articles to our newsletter throughout the years.

At Writers’ Day 2006, in his workshop "Discover the Life You Lived: Writing the Memoir," Don demonstrated his writing process to an audience eager to learn. One participant said in awe, “That man is brilliant.”

In the spring of 2006 he led a six-week writing workshop in his home for NHWP; "Write Short, Write Quick" was probably the last workshop he taught. We had set a limit of twelve students, but when twenty students signed up, he said, "Let them all in."

Don’s generosity as a writer and teacher has inspired generations of writers. NHWP will honor him in our newsletter, on our Web site, and at our programs throughout the year.

You can be a part of our tribute. Whether you knew him personally or only through his written words, what memory of Donald M. Murray would you like to share with other NHWP members? Tell us at knownhwp@yahoo.com. Let us know, too, if we can share your answer in our newsletter and on our Web site, and we will print selected responses.

To find out more about Donald M. Murray, click on the links below.

NHWP members and friends remember Don Murray:

Rick Agran - Don's Simple Wisdom
Bob Begiebing - Mentor and Friend
Jane V. Coder - A 38-Year Friendship
David Edwards - A Notebook in Every Pocket
Katie Goodman - Kindness of Spirit
Hope Jordan - "Never a Day Without a Line"
Penny Kittle - He said, "Write your book."

Read an excerpt from Don Murray's keynote address at Writers' Day 2002.

UNH Author Series: Donald Murray: In this 30-minute video broadcast on NHPTV, NH writer, Yankee humorist, and NHWP member Rebecca Rule interviews Donald Murray about his writing process and life and the importance of community. Recorded October 24, 2004 at UNH. (Requires Real player, available here.)

Tribute to Donald Murray on "Here & Now" at WBUR.org features an excerpt from Don's StoryCorps conversation with his daughter Hannah Murray Starobin in December 2006. The complete StoryCorps conversation is currently posted at the bottom of this page. (Requires Real player, available here.)

An Appreciation of Don Murray, by Chip Scanlon of the Poynter Institute

The Take and the Give: A Tribute to Don Murray, by Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute

UNH Journalism Department Tribute to Donald Murray

NHWP Members and Friends
Remember Donald M. Murray

With joy I share Don Murray’s simple wisdom every semester: “I write to know what it is I didn’t know I knew!” With utter regularity, first-year college students struggle with understanding that writing is a discovery process. After high school’s rote drills, a fellow has written only to show he knows the five-paragraph essay strategy. Or a young lady has written to “prove” that she read the chapter last night. Or they’ve written in circles as they’ve tried hard to have passionate, engaged voices while honoring their misguided teacher’s disempowering dictate: “Never use I!” Don Murray joked that at the Herald (pre-Pulitzer) they’d threatened to file down the capital I on his trusty typewriter. Don—ever the looping ambassador of Explore and Focus—unties for students all those constraints and rebuilds the I as viable and authoritative. For that my students and I are most grateful.—Rick Agran, chair of the Liberal Arts Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art

I met Don in 1973 when he was mentoring a group of us as grad students teaching composition at UNH. At the time he no doubt saw me as not quite “process” oriented enough as an instructor, and he was right. I got the process-teaching religion over the years of knowing Don, as he supported my own struggles to write (as he has done with so many others). Around ten years ago we started meeting for lunch twice a year just to catch up and give one another courage and a sense of excitement about our writerly endeavors. We learned gradually more and more about one another’s lives. Don left it to me to make the lunch date, but I usually left it to him to pick a place new or interesting to eat. He expanded my culinary repertoire. I can see him now smiling and waving as I walk into one restaurant or another (he almost always arrived first) because we both knew it was going to be a good hour or so together. We would both leave “high” on our conversation covering many topics: writing (always), teaching, art, our families, university politics, more writing, the state of the publishing industry, and so on. We had missed a second lunch in 2006, and I was just about to contact Don to catch up once again in 2007. But then my wife called from her office at Foster’s Daily Democrat with the news of Don’s death. Hearing about Don was like a slap in the face, reminding me once again of the poignant truth of that old saw: you had better stay close to those you love, because some day you’re going to lose them.—Bob Begiebing, director of the MFA program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University

In 1969 when I was a new English teacher at Malden High School, 5 miles north of Boston, teaching creative writing and advising a new literary magazine, Boojum Rock, my department chair asked if I would participate in a Summer Workshop at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, for two weeks with Donald M. Murray, who had just published A Writer Teaches Writing. The time in Bowdoin and knowing Don Murray changed my approach to teaching, writing, and life. He connected to us, allowing us to see the inner workings of a busy writer. He stressed that we were all writers and he made us write. After Bowdoin I went to Wellesley, Massachusetts, on a regular basis during that school year to attend classes with Don along with other English teachers in a program sponsored by NESDEC (New England School Development Council) and Readers Digest. In return, I conducted an eight-week inservice training for Malden language arts teachers, grades 1-12, to bring back what I was experiencing in Wellesley. It was revolutionary at that time, exciting and wonderful to work with students as writers and to see myself as one also.

Over the years since that early time, I have held numerous jobs in education, published articles and poetry and created visual art. Through it all, Don stayed in touch as he did with so many people. When I was a curriculum coordinator, he came to speak to the teachers as a personal favor. When I taught troubled and struggling high school students, he visited and talked to my classes. He seemed so easy and generous doing these simple things, which made a huge difference to me and the people with whom I worked. He responded to invitations to art shows, sent congratulatory notes when something positve happened to me and, as many others have said, made me feel valued and important.

As life took its unexpected twists and turns, I found myself living in Durham, NH, in 1993 in Don's neighborhood. He welcomed me to town and always talked to me about his writing and art and my own. During this time in Durham, I published a literary magazine, Garden Lane, named after the street in the faculty neighborhood where I lived. For each issue Don sent poems and/or an article, and also drawings. His enthusiasm, interest, and amusement at the publication and its contents were a source of great positive energy for me. A few weeks before he died, we ran into Don at an event at UNH and asked him to join us for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Portsmouth. Always ready to go and always connecting, he came along with my husband, his parents, my daughter and her boyfriend and me. I was glad to have that last visit with him. I miss his spirit, so noticeably absent from Durham and my life. Thanks for the opportunity to tell the story of my 38-year friendship with Don Murray.—Jane V. Coder

I was once a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire—Durham campus and met Donald Murray only once in person, in an informal classroom visit of a colleague back in 2000 or so, where he spoke about the writer's life and habits. I distinctly remember—and to this day retell to my own composition students at NHTI—how Don explained the importance of having pen/pencil and paper always at hand. As he spoke, he held up a one-subject, spiral-bound notebook, then pulled a smaller notebook out of a pants pocket, and finally reached under his sweater and into the breastpocket of his shirt, where he produced a third, even smaller, flip-top pad. "I always have something to write on," he noted with a smile. That was how I met Don Murray, and I will never forget the image of that large, white-haired, bespectacled man sprouting notebooks from every possible angle. It was charming and inspirational at once.—David Edwards, Professor of English, New Hampshire Technical Institute, Concord, NH

Meeting and getting to know Don Murray was one of the best perks to my job as executive director of NHWP (2001-2005). I first got to know Don when we presented him with the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. I remember that year the award was presented as part of the NH State Council on the Arts Awards held at the Capitol Center for the Arts. I was sitting on the aisle right behind Don. Prior to the event a steady stream of well wishers made their way down the aisle to stop and congratulate and talk to him. I watched fascinated as nearly everyone knelt right in the aisle next to his seat to have the opportunity to spend a few moments with him. I later teased Don that it looked as though they were genuflecting at the altar of literary greatness. His speech that evening was typically humble and gracious. Don became a great friend and I enjoyed our correspondence and emails over the five years I was with the Writers Project. His kindness of spirit was unmatched. I had given my mother a copy of Later Life for Christmas one year and Don had graciously inscribed the book for me. She later told me she felt as though she knew him so well through his work. Two years after that my sister passed away at the young age of 45 and my mother’s grief was, of course, tremendous. Don sent me a copy of The Lively Shadow, about the loss of his own daughter, and asked me to give the book to my mother. He had inscribed it beautifully and it was one of the first things that helped my mother begin the healing process. I will miss Don along with so many many others. But I will never forget him.—Katie Goodman, Director of Development, Capitol Center for the Arts, Concord, NH

Never a Day Without a Line. I’m sitting at my computer staring at these words, in Latin and in English. They’re on a stiff piece of paper in calligraphic script, laminated. On the flip side, there are about a dozen quotes from famous authors on the daily practice of writing. This was given to me, and to many other aspiring writers, I’m sure, by the great Don Murray.
I never took a workshop with Don, but he continues to influence me way out of proportion to the brief time we spent together. I met him for the first and only time at the NHWP Writers’ Day last March. Don needed someone to drive him from his home in Durham to the Writers Day festivities in Manchester. After a series of personal and professional crises, I needed to help with Writers Day without interacting with too many people. So I volunteered to be Don’s driver.

I had, of course, heard of Don, and enjoyed his columns in the Boston Globe. I somewhat selfishly thought it would be an opportunity to chat with someone who had won a Pulitzer, who had loved and lost and written about it, who had taught others how to write. If, that is, he felt like talking. I was prepared for him to feel otherwise.

He could have been a curmudgeonly old man, polite but distant, saving his energy for teaching yet another writing workshop to a roomful of hopeful strangers. But he wasn’t. As soon as he folded himself into the front seat of my suddenly tiny Volkswagen, Don shared his thoughts with me.

I don’t remember all we talked about. As a former journalist, I know I asked him questions about his life, apologizing for being so nosy. He didn’t mind; he answered everything with thoughtfulness and grace. So we talked about war. We talked about marriages, and how they change and deepen and sometimes fall apart. We talked about friendships, and the odd and intense relationships people can have, relationships that make other people talk. We talked about loss, and how he lost a daughter who was only 20, and how I lost a father who was 32 and a brother who was 19. We talked about teaching.

We talked about fame and how odd it feels to be famous. Don told me that everyone he’d ever met who really wanted to be famous, who absolutely craved fame and fortune, could never achieve it. In his mind, you got famous by not wanting it. He didn’t seem to think much of his own notoriety.

We talked about art and classical music and architecture. I drove by the two houses in Manchester designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, just to show him where they were. We talked about revision, and how it’s so important to the process of writing.

I can’t remember when he gave me the packet of writing exercises he had created for his workshop that day. I only know that he gave it to me, and I was surprised, and I was grateful.

I opened it sometime during the week after Writers’ Day. I found the laminated sign and propped it against my computer. I wrote in my blog that I would follow Don’s advice. Never a day without a line. I would make it my mantra.

But in the months since I met him, I did not write every day. I started a new job. I talked to my counselor. I took care of my obligations to my family and to myself, to the credit card companies and the medical service providers. But weeks went by without so much as a journal entry – forget writing poetry, forget writing short stories, forget writing nonfiction.
Nearly a year has gone by and Don Murray is suddenly and, despite his age, unexpectedly gone. The value I placed on my two hours of private conversation with him has increased exponentially with his passing. Don’s words still sit beside my keyboard, a quiet reminder of the man who gave them to me and a reminder of the writer I still want to be. Yes, truly, from now on, I tell myself, never a day without a line. Maybe I’ll keep the promise this time. I think the teacher in Don would have liked that.—Hope Jordan, poet, fiction writer, essayist, NHWP Trustee

Don gave generously to everyone. Last May [2006] he designed a writing workshop course for the New Hampshire Writers’ Project that met in his home. He told me he would let twelve people in, but when twenty registered, he let us all come. We sat in a circle listening to him talk about writing his column for the Boston Globe, sharing our processes, reading, and encouraging each other in our own writing work. He said once, “I tell others what Lee’s passing taught us: to listen to each other and to ourselves, to live the gift of life with caring and celebration. Today. Right now.” He lived that life.

Recently Don was helping me muck along through a book about teaching seniors in high school. I told him, “I’m rereading Read to Write and there is no reason for me to write my book. All anyone should do is read your work: it’s all there.”

He said, “Write your book. Your story.” He also reminded me that many people would never write, “so the field is left to those of us with little talent and great determination.” That was Don. He wouldn’t admit to his talent as a writer and a teacher, but those of us who leaned towards his light were inevitably, completely changed.—Penny Kittle, professional development coordinator, Conway, NH, School District; author of Inside Writing (with Donald Graves) and several other books about teaching writing

What a Writing Life Has Given Me
Excerpt from Keynote Address at Writers’ Day 2002
by Donald M. Murray

When I sat at my orange crate desk more than sixty years ago, I had just discovered in the main library in Quincy, Massachusetts, that in the low 800s of the Dewey decimal system were books on writing. The first one I took out was by Burton Rascoe, a Chicago newspaperman. I remember my excitement. After all, I had served with King Arthur and knew that if you were pure of heart you would be able to pull the sword out of the stone. I would find the magic words and learn to write.

I am wiser now. I know that no matter how many books on the writer’s craft you read—including my own—we are apprenticed to a craft that can be practiced but never learned. It is a lifelong apprenticeship in the Writers’ Guild. And for that I am grateful. There are few joys—if any—that equal the pleasure of making language simple and hearing a sentence run free and clear toward meaning.

And unless we get too high flown here, there are some very practical gifts of a writing life. I have obviously eaten well because of my craft. The pay has not always been for the writing I most value, but it is pay.

Writing is a craft that easily adapts to a changing world. Television is written, the movies are written, the words on the Internet are written. I have been a ghost writer. I have written annual reports for corporations, letters for corporate and political leaders, speeches and memos and government appeals and grant applications. It has not all been the poems that I thought it would be when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, but each time I have written for money I have learned as much—or more—about the writer’s craft as when I have written for high art and pure ego.

Writing also allows the writer to play in the game, to speak out and be heard, perhaps even to influence. Information delivered in the beautiful subject-verb-object English sentence is a weapon of great power.

More of me than I like to admit is still the shy, unsure teenager who didn’t think any of the many she’s I knew from afar would go to the dance with me. I did convince a young woman to go to the ninth-grade prom with me—but she soon left me and went home with someone else. Therefore it is no small matter when I am sitting in the Olive Garden in Portsmouth as I was the other night, and a couple came over, asked me if I was Don Murray, and when I confessed I was, they said how much they had liked my last book—My Twice-Lived Life. Better than that it doesn’t get.

As a writer I have an identity. At six o’clock every morning at Young’s I am that guy who writes.

And, of course, as an apprentice at our craft, I read with a special perception. I can pass through the page and imagine the book’s making, some of the roads not taken, some of the problems solved—and some of them not solved. Most of all, I know first hand how many drafts it may have taken to achieve spontaneity. As the writer and economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. However, when I’m greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed before, as I’ve often said, I put in that note of spontaneity which even my meanest critics concede.” I know the price of ease, the work it takes to be casual, the complications of becoming simple, the moves you have to make to avoid getting between the reader and the paragraph.

Annie Proulx said, “Living’s hard. It’s writing that’s easy.” I have come to believe that it is life that gives us the stories we must tell. They may not be the stories we want to tell, but they are our stories and we must tell them. This winter I finished another memoir, The Living Shadow, that Ballantine will publish in January. It is the story of the death of our daughter Lee when she was twenty years old, twenty-five years ago this coming August. The writing wasn’t easy but it was easier than the living.

Writing has given me the opportunity to celebrate Lee’s life and the survival of my wife, our daughters and myself. It has allowed me to explore and understand one of life’s most fundamental terrors.

And, of course, writing is therapy. When I am most depressed I depend on pills, but if I can get myself to the computer and put down a few words that magically lead to other words, I enter into the writing and am lost to my cares. Writing gives me the great gift of concentration.

Finally, I have enjoyed the comradeship of writers. As a fearful and potentially cowardly soldier, I volunteered for the paratroops. I wanted to go into battle with men who at least acted as if they were not scared, and I did. I was honored to serve with men who were lean, strong, well trained, and had a sense of humor—the ultimate defense under enemy fire.

I feel the same way about writers. I have benefited again and again from the generosity of writers, from the support and fellowship of women and men who have the courage to confront themselves on the page. I am never alone at the desk. My writing room is crowded with the ghosts of writers long dead and the active presence of my writing companions: Chip Scanlan, Don Graves, Elizabeth Cooke, Ralph Fletcher, Bob Begiebing, Ursula Hegi, Tom Romano, Becky Rule, Brock Dethier, Penny Kittle, Tom Newkirk, Lisa Miller, Harvey Shepard, Hildred Crill, Tom Osenton, Maggie Paine, Dana Jennings, and so many more who spend their lives telling their stories. I am most proud when other writers consider me one of them.