When Sandra Schor died in 1990 at the age of 58, she had never sent an e-mail or surfed the web. In fact, it was four more years until Al Gore would mention the “Information Superhighway” and several more before the web became widely used beyond government offices and university dorms.

What would she have made of the internet? Allow me to imagine. At first, she’d have been tentative, even frustrated; then she’d have reminded us that she’d won the physics prize at John Adams High School and hadn’t yet met her match in a gizmo; she’d have sent crackling e-mails headed “testing, testing” to her friends and children; finally, she’d have gathered the astonishing, even uncanny powers that the web affords for those who teach, write and read. How many marvelous links she might have forwarded to you or to me, I can only guess.

The idea of creating this website came from Walter Greenblatt, the source of so many good ideas. The initial idea was to gather together all of her diverse writings—poems, stories, a novel, and numerous scholarly articles and essays—in one place and make them available to a wider audience. It soon became clear that images and audio would be at home here as well. I have included a scattering of photos and two tapes of Sandra Schor reading: one recorded at Queens College in 1990, a reading from her novel, The Great Letter E; and another, recorded in 1983 at the Glen Cove Public Library, a poetry reading. (Sandra asked Marie Ponsot to assist her in the 1990 reading since she
was quite ill; both parts of the reading are included, along with an
introduction by Maureen Waters)..

As for the scholarly articles on composition, I encourage anyone interested to print out her essays, forward them to others and make use of them in the classroom. All writers leave legacies of one sort or another. But a writer whose subject is composition leaves a legacy not only in her textbooks and articles, but also in the writing of thousands of student writers, and in their writing lives beyond college. As I scroll through these articles, I am amazed at how current they sound, at how trenchant her intuitions are, at how sensible her advice remains.

Sandra Schor’s writerly range can be appreciated now better than ever before. When we lost her we lost the poems, essays and novel-in-progress she was destined to write but couldn’t finish. But what we do have—poems such as “Weather-Proofing,” stories like “It Takes One to Know One,” essays as probing as “Reclaiming Digression”—are treasures. I have great pleasure in putting Sandra Schor’s writing on the internet and welcome your feedback.

Most of the articles, poems, reviews and fiction are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The FREE Acrobat reader is available for download at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat. The audio files are available in RealMedia format and the RealPlayer is also available for free download at: http://www.real.com.

Esther Schor
Princeton University

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for editorial and technical assistance from: John Cornish, Aileen Forbes, Daniel Greenblatt, and Andrew Krull. Phyllis Bolton and Gideon Schor supplied the audiotapes. Paula Hulick (plhulick@princeton.edu), who designed the website, was a great help at all stages of planning. Thanks also to the Computing and Information Technology office of Princeton University. A final thanks to all of Sandra Schor’s students at Queens College, who were among her reasons for living.