David McGee, a famous rock critic and music writer, whose work has appeared in Rollling Stone, Spin and countless other music magazines. He has also written acclaimed biographies on B.B. King, Cat Stephens, and Steve Earle.
McGee went to OU and cites the late William Foster-Harris, a PW professor from 1939 to 1974, as his writing mentor:
He was a crusty old fellow at that time, in his late 60s or early 70s, and had been at Oklahoma a long time--the joke was that they had built the journalism school building around him... In addition to classroom lecture, I had one-on-one sessions with him that required me to write a new short story every week and bring it in for him to "edit." What he did was to take a red pencil and rip each story apart--he wrote as many words in the margins as I had written in the story, and there were angry red streaks all over the manuscripts from changes he had made.As I wrote earlier, this is the first in many posts on successful writers from OU's PW department. Any nominations for future profiles? --- Will Prescott
I endured this for two years until I finally worked up the nerve to ask him if he would tell a student to consider some other course of study. He answered that sure, he was always up front about things like that... He explained that all those red streaks and the margin commentary were meant to instruct me in matters of structure. "You’ve got the one thing that can’t be taught," he said, "and without it you can’t be a writer: Imagination."
...He wrote a wonderful book on fiction writing called Basic Formulas of Fiction, which was our text in the professional writing curriculum at that time. The title is deceiving: Foster-Harris’s theories about writing were rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, and his book elucidated those theories and provided practical instruction in clear thinking and, hence, clear prose. I loved that man, and was sorry he didn’t live to see me published in Rolling Stone.
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I first met Foster-Harris in September 1967 as a freshman at Univ. of Oklahoma. Not only would I take all of his classes but he was assigned as my official academic 'advisor.' He was a fascinating personality. In class he seldom spoke directly about writing but rather taught his students about the duality of all things, how every positive had a negative, every light was complimented by darkness, every good offset by evil-- both metaphorically and actually. After a while his lectures would literally alter the way you viewed the world forever. He was a fan of ancient Chinese philospher Lao Tzu and recommended we study the 'Tao Te Ching' to learn more about life. He was blind in one eye due to a retinal detachment years earlier and said that when it happened he "had to learn to think all over again" because everyone was "right-eyed or left-eyed" just as they were right handed or left handed and it affected the way your mind worked. A tall man, he had a powerful presence that was felt instantly. He habitually wore a Stetson hat when outdoors and an old-fashioned Western tie and when he strolled around the campus it was as if he were enveloped in an aura all his own. He was one of the most unforgettable characters I've ever met.
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