Word of Susan's passing has just trickled down to me on the bayou. I have appreciated reading the tributes to her that I've been able to find, and I expect there will be many more at C's, which I shall miss.

Susan was so much smarter than I am in so many ways, but she always made me [and many of you, as I read now] feel like I was keeping up: when we served on so many tedious committees, doing the work that was precious to her--giving new intellectual life to a field mired in service and the blindspots of rhetorical and cultural history; when we traveled together (my latest communication with her was an envelope full of pictures taken in Edinburgh over a decade ago, sent just a few months ago as she was meticulously, always meticulously, going through things); when we shopped, even though everything fit her and I just tagged along as a commentator--for handmade soaps in Utah, for a particular orange scarf at the Mall of America in Minnesota, wherever we found stores connected to conference centers; when we gossiped over food and wine--sometimes about some of you; and so much more. Wherever you are, Susan, I hope you are able to write again. I want so much more. Maybe someday we can talk about it. Lilly

Lillian Bridwell-Bowles
Rhetoric, Writing & Culture
Louisiana State University

Susan was both kind and smart. I will miss her on both a personal and professional level.

Where to even start? Having been a student in Susan's later time in the writing program at U of U ('99-'04), these stories all sound exactly like the Susan I knew. To this day, I can hardly write anything without citing her because her thinking was so foundational to the field. We had a sometimes antagonistic relationship in classes, and I think she was surprised at first to find I would cite her -- but how could anyone not?

One of her greatest contributions to Writing Studies (of SO many) was, I think, one of the simplest -- this line (which I'm quoting approximately rather than exactly): "What we know that other people don't is how [a piece of] writing got that way." Whenever I need to explain the particular expertise of our field, I will forever return to that seed-crystal. It is a tremendous legacy to those of us who do this work in contested realms where we're so often still framed as "expert" only in grammar rules people should have learned in high school.

Probably her greatest contribution to my own understanding of rhet/comp was in setting me on the path to really *getting* rhetoric deeply, beyond the pablum too many make of Aristotle, and to realizing that the best understandings of rhetoric are inevitably feminist. Her greatest contribution to my career, hands down, was giving me the WPA Workshop to manage after she helped bring it to the U of U campus in 2002. The workshop (and the conference in Park City, which BYU ran) took me from WPA-L to WPA-actuaL, where I met so many of you and really began entering this community.

And one story. If you ever took a class from Susan, you know that she could be both demanding and a bit capricious, and then top it by being unclear about her capricious demands. :-) She also didn't mind changing her mind: if she said one thing one day and another thing the next, and we complained, she would say, "Why would you think I have to think the same thing today that I thought yesterday?" I was in a rhetorical theory seminar with seven or eight other students when Susan gave us this fairly complex summary assignment, which we all dutifully completed and submitted. She came back in the next class shaking her head, saying in her near-whisper that not *one* of us had done what she asked, and that we'd all completed the assignment so badly that she didn't even know what to do with it. We protested, naturally, and showed her how our assignments followed the instructions she'd given in her assignment sheet, and she just kept shaking her head. "Well, these don't do me any good." She let us go on for maybe 10 minutes and then she said, "Well, what would you like me to do with them?" There was dead silence and then I said, "I dunno, just put smiley faces on them and call it a day?" She swept the papers back up and we finished class.

The next time class met, she handed back the papers with her typical incisive, challenging comments that simply took your brain new places every time. The papers were ungraded, and at the top of each one, a smiley face.

Here's to Susan.

--Doug

--
Dr. Doug Downs
Asst. Professor, Rhetoric and Composition
Department of English, Montana State University
406-994-5193
Wilson 2-272
PO Box 172300
Bozeman, MT 59717-2300
- Show quoted text -

Susan Miller, our colleague and friend, passed away February 22, 2013 after a ten-month struggle with cancer. Susan’s legacy to Rhetoric and Composition, or as she came to call it, Writing Studies, is immeasurable. As an intellectual icon in the field, she was always posing difficult questions, forging new territories of thought, breaking molds of complacency. And this was the beauty of Susan; she viewed the world through the potential for perfection. Her life was guided by a principle of respect for intellectual curiosity.

Susan’s award-winning books, most notably Rescuing the Subject, Textual Carnivals, and Assuming the Positions left a hefty imprint on the scholarship we do today. Most recently she compiled The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Susan was the perfect scholar to undertake this volume because of her knowledge and love of the field. Of course, she had dozens and dozens of articles. And grants and fellowships, and awards and followers. Susan was quality to the nth degree.

In addition to her scholarship, Susan established the University Writing Program at the University of Utah. She arrived in 1983 and essentially built the program from the ground up. She hired faculty members, increased the scope of the curriculum, drew graduate students, and managed to win over the whole university. Her efforts have been, and will continue to be, felt everywhere on this campus. Her dream, to establish a “culture of writing,” has in many ways become a reality.

There is no way for us at Utah to express our feelings. She was for so many of us one of the most intelligent persons we had ever met, had one of the wickedest senses of humor, and please, we cannot forget her defining sense of fashion. Today is a sad day for us, as a field and as a program. We lost someone bigger than life, someone who literally gave us life. Some of the words that have been spoken today are “heartbroken,” “hollow,” confused.”

Although Susan’s scholarship was very much in the public eye, she was a very private person. Those close to her knew that her feistiness was offset by her moments of giving, both as an intellectual and a friend. All of those moments will be cherished. Susan will be missed…

Maureen Mathison, Director

University Writing Program
University of Utah