Russell C. Markert

I was born in Syracuse, NY, but grew up in Westerville, OH. Westerville was a small town surrounded by farms in the '50s and '60s, and I, like many my age, was given free reign to go where I wanted when I wanted, as long as I was home for lunch and dinner. It was a great way to grow up, and I mourn the fact that it is available to a smaller number of kids these days as small towns disappear and suburbs are surrounded by high-speed roads that blockade children from exploring the space around them.

I moved to Minnesota for my last year in high school, then attended and graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Secondary Education, majoring in History and English.

I taught high school in Alexandria, MN and in the Twin Cities for a few years, but got married and entered the private sector, which in the '80s was more secure than teaching. Eventually, I started selling the newest thing, personal computers, and wound up spending 20 years in the industry, 12 of them with Hewlett-Packard.

In the early 2000s the business ceased to be fun, and I returned to the classroom, teaching high school again while I went back to school and earned an MA in Rhetoric from St. Cloud State University. There I was introduced to rhetoric's history and practice, and found myself angry that I hadn't learned a lot of that while an undergraduate.

I found that classical approaches translated well into my college teaching, and have been advocating a more rhetorical perspective for college composition ever since.

My masters degree led to adjunct work for two Twin Cities area community colleges. Since the textbooks didn't treat classical rhetoric, I developed and fine-tuned classroom exercises over that time. I compiled these into "worktexts," as Don Killgallon refers to his sentence composition workbooks, after which mine are modeled. Those are presently "Copia," a book focused on building a sentence-level rhetorical repertoire, and "Martin Luther King Teaches Rhetoric," an examination of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that also presents exercises to practice what King models.

After nine years of bouncing between the two campuses, I retired. and I am now on a new path, using satire from a new angle to expose the dysfunction in the world. I hope you find it entertaining as well as thought-provoking.