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The history of Composition Studies is in many ways my history. In 1981, when Composition Studies was still Freshman English News, I began an MA in English. Not far into my course work, I found myself unengaged by my seminars on the Romantic Poets and Bibliographic Methods but excited by teaching composition. The only scholarly article on teaching I remember reading in my practicum was an early piece by Kenneth Bruffee on peer response. I longed for more. Without realizing it, I wanted what Gary Tate hoped for when he founded Freshman English News in 1972: "A broadening of our sense of what is possible [when teaching composition], an extension of our vision, [that] might well occur when we know how others have tried and succeeded, how still others have tried and failed" (1).
By 1992, when Freshman English News became Composition Studies under the editorship of Christina Murphy, I was in my third year of a PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition. After completing my MA, I had been lucky to secure a series of temporary teaching appointments at a small liberal arts college, and my love of teaching led me to pursue a PhD. In grad school, I learned that the field of composition involved much more than teaching firstyear writing. The courses I took-History of Rhetoric, Gender and Writing, the Rhetoric of Human Science, Basic Writing-signified the breadth of this field. The newly named Composition Studies/Freshman English News sought to capture this breadth by "exploring the issues that define the fields of rhetoric and composition, rhetorical theory, cultural criticism, and composition pedagogy" (Murphy 2). The journal continues to make representing the breadth of the field an important part of its mission.
When my TCU colleague Ann George and I took over editing Composition Studies in 2003, the journal was already publishing on a range of subjects befitting its more capacious name. We had no plans to change the mission of the journal, but we did affirm in our first editors' note that Composition Studies would remain "a journal where both of these qualities of writing instruction-as a noble service and as an engaging intellectual activity-are exemplified and explored" (15). In the interview Ann and I did with Tate for our inaugural issue,...