After a protracted struggle with cancer, John Tinker, a long-time lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), died on Nov. 4 at his home in San Francisco at the age of 52.
A special kind of pathos fills the heart when somebody as involved with writing as John Tinker was dies. Moments like these remind us that, although many of us spend our lives in the midst of language, no words can ever fill the hole an individual leaves when they pass away. However, as those who knew John and took classes with him or worked with him as a colleague privately sort through and ponder over their reminiscences of their departed teacher and friend, it is important to record for the collective memory how much John Tinker gave to Stanford and to the culture of writing and scholarship here of which we are all parts.
John graduated with a bachelor of arts and highest honors in 1990 from UC-Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation, filed through the Stanford English department in 1996, was on “William Beckford: The First English Homosexual,” with Terry Castle as his dissertation advisor and John Bender and Bliss Carnochan as readers. He maintained his interest in the beginnings of gay culture and the relation between style and subculture in later years, teaching, for example, courses on the Gothic novel and writing articles such as “William Beckford” (2000) and “Vagrant Sympathies: From Stylistic Analysis to a Pedagogy of Style” (2003).
At the same time as he kept working on “style,” gay culture and the novel, John Tinker broadened his interests into other scholarly areas as well. He joined PWR (or Writing and Critical Thinking, as it was then called) in 1997. John was the person who developed PWR’s now long-standing partnership with the Cantor Arts Center. He was a co-founder of the Hume Writing Center and emerged as a crucial figure in the evolution of the Writing Center here at Stanford, serving as its assistant director between 2004 and 2007 and producing scholarship on the Center’s activities, such as “Generating New Cultures of Writing: Collaborations between the Stanford Writing Center and High School Writing Centers” (2006).
Indeed, he was a significant figure in the writing-center world more generally, and he served for a number of years as a regional representative of the International Writing Centers Association and as president of the Northern California Writing Centers Association. Even as John was battling with a fatal disease, he remained an active and uplifting presence in the worlds he cared about. His last public presentation was “Invention and Eloquence: Rhetoric in the Museum,” a videotaped presentation delivered at a conference in New Orleans in 2008. Subsequently, he remained for many at Stanford — students and faculty alike — the real-life personification of a subtle, modest, personal eloquence and invention in the face of direly adverse circumstances.
John Tinker will never be replaced. His loss is irrecoverable. But the Program in Writing and Rhetoric will do its level best to make sure he is always remembered here with the admiration and affection he rightly inspired. There will be a plaque in the Hume Writing Center to mark his contributions in a permanent and (appropriately) written form. But the liveliest and happiest tribute John could have conceived of will be the presence in the Hume Writing Center of classes of Stanford undergraduates raising their essays to a new level of power and generally getting a kick out of writing.
As students, colleagues and alumni reflect on John’s life, many have been reading blog posts he wrote in his final months as well as tributes posted for John by friends at CaringBridge. Many have also looked at a video that fellow PWR lecturer Carolyn Ross put together of a visit members of the Program made last May to John and his partner Adrian’s beautiful house and garden in San Francisco. Thinking of what one sees there — John Tinker smiling amid the profuse greenness and vitality of his plants and flowers — is about as good a way as there may be to find some solace offsetting this sad confrontation with human mortality.
— Courtesy of Nicholas Jenkins, Department of English, faculty director of PWR