I'm Muriel Harris (with a picture documenting my first batch of home-made pasta), Professor of English and Director of the Writing Lab at Purdue, and I can't remember when or why people started calling me "Mickey."

My interest in getting OWL to fly (in the early ‘90s) was that I wanted our Writing Lab to offer Purdue students (and others out there on the Internet) an online writing resource. OWL is a way to have easy access to our files of home-made instructional handouts, to work through our hypertext tutorials, to use our PowerPoint presentations on writing topics in classrooms, to contact us with questions, and to use OWL as a convenient gateway onto the Internet. I see OWL as a logical growth in our Writing Lab's services, but not as a replacement for what we do best: one-to-one tutorials with writers.

Because I was born in Chicago and lived there until I went off to college, I still say "Shee-cawh-go" like any other native. My undergrad days were spent at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where I spent far too many hours in the coffee shop spouting pretentious verbiage with the rest of the English and philosophy majors who also thought we were solving the problems of the universe.

After meeting Sam Harris, I hung around for a Master's Degree in English at Illinois while waiting for him to realize that we were going to get married (we did). Then, we went off to Germany for a year to squander his NSF post-doc fellowship money on great German chocolate and bread and wine. From there, we went to Columbia University, where Sam did post-doctoral work in physics and I completed my doctoral studies in English Renaissance literature. Our daughter, Rebecca Lynn (who has been Becki, Bec-Bec, and Bekki but will always be Becky to us), was our Off- Broadway production (we lived a block away) while we were in New York, and then we moved to Purdue, where Sam joined the faculty in the Physics Department and I direct the Writing Lab as a professor in the English Department. Now we are waiting to see what comes next as we are on the way to retiring. Our Lafayette, Indiana, production was David Aaron.

Bekki, our daughter, is now Mrs. Daniel Kaplan and works as the Director of a large synagogue. Her husband, Dan, works at an alternative newspaper and manages his own web business.

Hannah, their magnificent daughter, entertains and delights us all.