1. Introduction

[1] I “met” Michael for the first time in 2010 when he was a senior development editor at Pearson. Michael hired me to write scripts for videos that would supplement Bruce Ballenger’s The Curious Writer.

[2] I wrote some scripts that were . . . innovative . . . that Michael felt honored the voice of the Curious Writer . . . like one where the Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future Tense visit a college student to help them revise their paper. Michael thought the scripts were excellent and encouraged me to keep going. And so I did.

[3] At some point, shortly after Michael showed others at Pearson my scripts, I was “reassigned” to a new editor because, as Michael later told me, Pearson wanted innovation, but not too much innovation. They did not want ghosts interfering with their verb tenses. As I was instructed, I wrote around twenty uninspired video scripts and cashed my check from the publisher.

[4] I wondered where Michael had gone, but I didn’t hear from or about him for three years, until May 2013 when I interviewed for an associate professor position at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). As a part of the interview visit, George Jensen, the department chair, took me to lunch and we talked about the online writing program in professional and technical writing.

[5] George said, “We have this really amazing instructor who is also an editor who is teaching some of our editing classes. He lives in Colorado. His name is Michael . . .”

[6] “Greer,” I finished.

[7] “Yeah,” George said. “You know him?”

[8] “Um . . . I don’t really know him. I think I might have gotten him into trouble with his employer once.”

[9] I took the position at UALR and Michael and I reconnected about a year later when he asked for the syllabus to my online writing instruction class. I said he certainly could have the syllabus, but I would rather that he would join me in the course and give me feedback on how well it was working.

[10] He did, and then he started designing courses for the program, including multimedia for online writing instruction, and we developed the graduate certificate in online writing instruction. He introduced me to UX design and iterative design—things I had been doing somewhat already but didn’t have names for.

[11] In an interview I did with Michael in 2018, he said, “We worked on those video scripts and then we got punished, and the irony was that I was already working at UALR by then. I didn’t tell you that because I didn’t tell anyone. I was kinda moonlighting.” Michael had seen the writing on the wall in academic publishing, where innovation was not always encouraged. If he wanted to be innovative, he would need to spend more time teaching in innovative ways.

*****

[12] The second time I “met” Michael was in the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. The first words I said to him in person, seven years after I met him online, were, “Wow! You have legs! You’re so tall.”

[13] And then we hugged.

[14] Michael and I often joked about our shared Norwegian heritage, as we were both from the upper-Midwest (Iowa and Minnesota). One of us would say something mundane, and the other would say “That’s brilliant. Probably because we are Norwegians, and Norwegians are the best and most humble people.” We talked about how we were just like the residents of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women were strong, the men were good-looking, and the children were above average.

[15] But Michael was, no joke, the best and most humble person. Michael was the Forrest Gump of writing studies. He had been there and seen that. When he was in graduate school at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, he offered to drive a visiting poet to the airport. The poet was reading a manuscript from her friend, a Canadian author, and while he drove, she read the manuscript to him.

[16] The manuscript was tentatively titled The Handmaid’s Tale.

[17] That’s all he said about that. Literally. I have no more information.

[18] Michael was my confidant, colleague, and co-conspirator. His impact on editing and the teaching of writing undergirds much of how we teach and write and think about teaching writing.

2. Editing

[19] Michael was the founding editor of the GSOLE journal Research in Online Literacy Instruction (ROLE). For an editor, founding your own journal is next-level nerd. For an editor who was also the consummate Virgo, being the founding editor of a journal drew on all of his best qualities: his love of order, his excellent communication skills, and his natural propensity to help others, always looking to improve the world.

[20] So, when Michael was offered this opportunity with ROLE, a journal that would work with writers on their visions and give them productive peer feedback and mentoring, he was all in.

[21] ROLE was the result of years of Michael’s experience as a student, teacher, editor, and human. He knew at a visceral level what those new to academic publishing needed. And he knew that many of those who needed the kind of mentorship he envisioned would not receive it because of the cutthroat nature of academic publishing.

[22] He knew that those closest to students were best to speak to the needs of students. And so as ROLE came to be, he envisioned a publication not bound by its H-index impact or by its level of rejection, but a journal that mentored new voices to create and publish hands-on, cutting-edge research.

[23] Michael created not just a journal, but a “different type of journal.” ROLE was the vision that Michael had all his professional life—a place where learning and research were collaborative.

3. Writing

[24] Michael was not only an editor. He was a very detail-oriented writer—so detail-oriented that those who were less detail-oriented spent some time rolling their eyes at his recommendations. His editorial style came not only from attention to written detail. It also came from attention to the audience and the writer of any particular publication.

[25] One of my favorite in-person Michael memories is when we attended CCCC in 2018 in Kansas City, and Michael was so excited because the new versions of The Little Brown Handbook were being released. Michael co-authored the revisions on the books. For a super nerd like Michael, contributing to a handbook made his heart so, so happy.

[26] Walking through the CCCC book exhibits with Michael was like walking into Cheers with Norm. Everyone knew him from his work as director of publications for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), or his years with Pearson, or as a freelancer and consultant. Those at the conference who stopped for a hug or a handshake said how happy they were to see him back at CCCC. Since his time at NCTE and Pearson, he had moved out of these more traditional publishing roles to focus on writing and on his original passion—teaching.

4. Teaching

[27] Michael talked often about what empathetic teaching was and what it was not. For him, teaching with empathy was connecting with the lived experiences of students and using that connection to guide them from where they were to where they needed to be, regardless of who that student was.

[28] He loved teaching online, and in our book he wrote about the first time that he taught for UALR:

Having worked in commercial textbook publishing for a decade, where we were enthusiastically converting all kinds of instructional materials into “interactive media,” I simply assumed that online instructors used video in their courses. When I first started teaching online in 2009, I recorded a couple of short videos to introduce myself and explain how the course was organized. I clicked my way through some simple Keynote slides and recorded a voiceover narration. I posted them on the course website. They were tiny little things, grainy and low-resolution to accommodate students who were still on 56K dialup in many cases. On the first day of class, as students began to log in to the course, I started getting emails from them about those little videos. Their response astounded me—they thanked me specifically for posting the videos and more than one of them said something like this: “it helps me feel like there is a real person teaching the class.” (Skurat Harris & Greer, pg. 8).

For context, 2009 was not the height of synchronous or streaming video. Blackboard had just acquired Weebly, a synchronous learning platform, that became Blackboard Collaborate. YouTube was a toddler, and VOIP was “virtually” nonexistent.

[29] Thus, Michael’s little videos in his online class were cutting edge.

[30] When Michael co-created the graduate certificate in online writing instruction at UALR, he became half of my teaching and design brain. We wrote journal articles and gave presentations about cognition and learning. After a few years, our writing styles were so intertwined that we couldn’t tell who had written what paragraphs in our co-authored work.

[31] In 2017, Michael and I were working on a book proposal for what would become Multimedia in the College Classroom: Improve Learning and Connect with Students in Online and Hybrid Courses.

[32] We worked on Multimedia with a Purpose for several years before the book was accepted with Stylus Publishing. We had begun to develop an educational consulting company, SPAN Learning Designs, and Michael had started working with an innovative start-up out of New Jersey called Gadget Software.

[33] He had found his stride with teaching and with his career.

[34] On December 19, 2019, Michael and I signed the contract for Multimedia with a Purpose with Stylus. The book was a product of the graduate class on multimedia for online writing instruction that Michael created for our program in 2015. After three years of talking about writing a book, and two years of proposal revisions, we had a deadline: August 2020. The book was to be a “workshop in a book,” and we were creating a website and planning a second book about writing for online instruction.

[35] Two months after we signed the contract, in February 2020, Michael felt a little dizzy and noticed that his speech was becoming sporadically slurred. Brenda, his wife, called 911 and Michael soon found himself in the ER on a CT scanner. Michael was having a stroke, and he was flown in a helicopter to a large trauma center with stroke specialists on standby. (During his recovery, he frequently talked about how cool the helicopter ride was.) Using micro cameras and digital imaging, Michael’s doctors used a chemical “clot-buster” to remove what turned out to be a large blood clot in his middle cerebral artery (MCA). The stroke damaged parts of the left side of Michael’s brain, which controlled speech and logic.

[36] The long-term effects of the stroke settled in the expressive part of Michael’s brain, and he developed expressive aphasia. He relearned reading and writing in record time, though his speech was sometimes still slurred or confused, or he would get “stuck” on certain words.

[37] In September 2020, only seven months post-stroke, Michael presented the keynote for the Online Writing Community Symposium. Ironically, the closed captioning wouldn’t work during his presentation, and Michael called the lack of a Bitmoji that uses a wheelchair a “design flaw.” During that presentation, Michael talked about the transition he experienced during the stroke. He said, “One day I was producing and posting course videos on a routine basis. The next, I could barely write my own name.”

[38] Michael talked about his new vision of accessible teaching and his realization that, like designer Jen Aldrich says, “we’re all just temporarily abled” (Aldrich, 2016).

[39] The book that was due in August 2020 was delayed while Michael recovered from the stroke. We still worked together, him drafting content and me editing content, which was really hard on a Taurus who so dislikes editing content and a Virgo who so dislikes watching a Taurus dislike editing. But we kept working, and in September 2023, only three years after our deadline, we submitted the final draft of the book to Taylor and Francis, who had bought out Stylus in the interim.

*****

[40] I emailed the book draft to the publisher on September 27, 2023, the day after Michael lost his fight with the Stage 4 cancer that had caused his stroke. He passed away at home surrounded by those he loved.

[41] Our book, and the book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning that he wrote with Jenae Cohn, are the culmination of his lifetime of publishing experience, innovative teaching, and understanding of the human experience.

[42] Michael’s voice lives on in the books and articles he wrote, in the classes and curriculum he developed, in the many videos he created, and in the students, friends, and colleagues he loved and who loved him. Our discipline, our teaching, and our lives are richer for having known him.