Pre-PWPA: A Few Recollections

by Dr. William Brown, Emeritus Professor of English, Philadelphia University

April 25, 2005

Various regional groups have come and gone over the years. The first that I can remember was The English Club, made up of both college and secondary school English teachers. Their main purpose seemed to be to meet once or twice a year at a dinner which featured a "name" speaker. Another group that kept going for a long time was the Southeastern District of the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English. The executive council of this group met in the White House Conference Room at PhillyU monthly and sponsored a spring conference, again for both college and high school teachers. A good thing about these organizations was the "articulation" (a buzz word at that time) between high school and college faculty, often carried on in an informal way between conferences. Mitzi [Bill’s wife, a retired English teacher who taught at Masterman Public School in Philadelphia and now teaching writing as an adjunct professor at La Salle University] and I would both attend many of these functions.

Another group (the name of which I forget) that had some terrific programs that spanned the gap between high school and college was led by a faculty priest at St. Joseph's University. He poured energy into these gatherings, which thrived while he was in charge. When he dropped out because of poor health, the thing pretty well collapsed.

The writing bug hit 30 or so years ago when the Bay Area Writing Project caught people's imagination. A local leader in the regional writing effort was Elaine Maimon, then at Arcadia University. We had a regional writing conference here in 1984 that I coordinated, and I remember thinking then that the bloom was already off the rose. While initial enthusiasm was ebbing, however, writing per se was being professionalized and institutionalized, a thoroughly welcome development.