Unit 2 Agenda

UNIT II: Personal Essay / Lyric Essay (4 Weeks)

 Week 5: What is the personal essay? / The self as a social actor

Weeks 6-7: The lyric essay / researching the “self”

Week 8: Revision work: developing the personal/lyric essay

Unit 2 Assignments: Select one piece of flash non-fiction from your Unit 1 portfolio and develop the piece into a personal or lyric essay, OR choose a new topic (6-8 pp.); separate reflective essay (2 pp.) Due Nov .2.

 Objectives:

  • Students will focus on a single “burning question,” and will compose one extended creative nonfiction essay that demonstrates increasing awareness and expertise in mobilizing elements of the craft of CNF, as well as attention to ethics, positionality, and awareness of their own ideological biases.
  • Students will engage in brainstorming, writing, and revision exercises designed to help them interrogate and develop their topic, continue to take chances in their writing, forge connections across shorter pieces of writing, build transitions, deepen their perspectives and positions.
  • Students will examine the role of history, culture, and systems of power and privilege in shaping their overall approach to the essay, as well as specific depictions, characterizations, and rhetorical choices in the essay.
  • Students will read longer works of creative nonfiction and engage with a wide range of formal experiments in order to more broadly conceive of the possibilities for movement, structure, arrangement, and framing.

Calendar (approx. 4 weeks):

Week 5: What is the Personal Essay? / The self as a social actor

  10/5 Revisit the personal essays we have read-

Reading ad unpacking: Tell It Slant, Ch. 9: “The Tradition of the Personal Essay,” 89-105; Lauren Slater, “Three Spheres,” 3-23, Brenda Peterson, “Growing Up Game,” 115-119 (What is the burning question the author explores in each essay? How is it exposed to the reader? Explicitly or implicitly?)

Writing Prompt: Write a 1-p. description of your “burning question.”  Your burning question should take root in some aspect of your existence that you need to explore in writing.  You do not have to frame your concerns entirely in the form of a question, but try to work your way into a question or questions that represent things you want to further explore.  It may be that you already know what story you want to tell, but the story is bigger than just one moment in time, and your exploration will involve connecting the pieces around a certain topic.  In confronting this question, consider the ways in which you feel a little unsettled inside, conflicted, uncertain, or where things feel unresolved for you.

Homework: 1) Read “Gathering the Threads of History,” Tell It Slant, Ch. 6, 55-62; 2)Use the Brainstorming Exercise: Finding a Topic for your Personal Essay (heuristic) to continue exploring your “burning question”. 3) Bring a paragraph or two of your writing to share in your group.

10/11: Focus-historical context

Reading and unpacking: “Gathering the Threads of History,” Tell It Slant, Ch. 6, 55-62; Jewel Parker Rhodes, “Mixed-Blood Stew,” In Fact 382-394; Jana Richman, “Why I Ride,” In Fact 395-418 ( How does Rhodes and Richman add historical context in their essays respectively? How does the historical context expand the writing or complicate its meaning?)

Writing Prompts: Call up some “key facts” or things you know about your burning question.  Make a list. Tap into one of the “key facts” you listed and develop a scene or narrative paragraph that links to or expands on this fact. Using researching to develop your scene.

Or

Write a story or scene based on something that led you to your burning question—a moment or incident, or something that happened to you, or something you observed or experienced directly or indirectly.  Maybe you have many such moments, and just need to make a list. Or maybe there is one dramatic moment that led you to your question, or relates to your question.

Homework: 1) Write a description of a place that relates to or grounds your thinking about your burning question, or that you connect to your question in some way.  This could be a place where something specific happened relating to your question, or this could be a place that is central to your question.  Think about the question of landscape as broadly as possible—not just as nature, but as place and environs.  Incorporate as much concrete observable detail into your description as possible.  Use your five senses to access these details. DO research and find some historical context as the backdrop of your narrative whether there was a direct or indirect connection. 2) Read Phillip Lopate, “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character” (PDF)

10/13: Focus- Self as a character

Reading and unpacking: Phillip Lopate, “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character”;

Carol Bly, “An End to Still Lifes,” In Short 185-190 (framing, dialogue, quirks) (How does Bly write about her quirky character as an artist? How does she dramatize her young artist’s experience? How does she incorporate other characters such as her aunt and Mrs. Sasson? How does she use dialogue to dramatize the scene?)

Writing Prompt: Reread all the writing you did during Unit 1 and see if any of this writing seems to be connected to the writing you’re doing on your burning question.  Choose one piece of writing from Unit 1, and try establishing some points of connection to your burning question by adding an additional character or dialogue.

Homework: 1) Read “Judyth Har-Even, “A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony,” In Fact, 269-287 ( How does the author become a character and her life an intense drama? How does the author even use dramatic acts to develop her narrative? ) 2) According to Phillip Lopate, “It’s having made the wrong choice, curiously enough, that we are made all the more aware of our freedom and potential for humanity.” Recall a time when, in retrospect, you made a wrong choice. What was the circumstance that led to the choice? Who was hurt by your decision? Think about the consequences of your actions, whether they were prompted externally or self-imposed. What did you realize about your character as result of this choice?

 10/14  Focus-Self as a Character/social actor

Reading and unpacking: 1)Phillip Lopate, “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character”;

2) “Growing Up Game“ by Brenda Peterson (Consider your own gender. What expectations are on you because of your gender? How do you feel about those expectations? Were you ever envious over another gender? If so, why? Have you ever been discriminated against because of your gender? What sorts of tasks do you perform at home, in school, in life, which are gender-based?   What does your gender “get” you? What does it exclude you from?) 3) Judyth Har-Even, “A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony,” In Fact, 269-287 ( How does the author become a character and her life an intense drama? How does the author even use dramatic acts to develop her narrative?

 Writing Prompt based on the following essays:

  • “ On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character” by P. Lopate,
  • “A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony by Judyth Har-Even, and
  • “Growing Up Game “ by Brenda Peterson

Think of yourself in the 3rd person–seeing yourself move through the world as a protagonist.

  • First, make a list of your quirks ( “mine your quirks”) -idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, antisocial mannerism, and so on that set you apart from the majority of your fellowmen( learning to drive at a much later time in life; growing up game). Quirks can also be those small differences that make us feel self- conscious when standing among a crowd. Then focus on one particular “quirk” and describe it in details using all the five senses if necessary.
  • Now dramatize the protagonist. Situation yourself in a setting or a social situation. Describe it. Put yourself in an action scene(s), engage in a dialogue and see how your quirky characteristic gets played out (revealed) layer by layer (typically characteristic gestures, the ways the character speaks, i.e. “ I imagined his fingers twirl them with his blunt carpenter’s fingers”
  • All good drama needs tension. What is the tension (conflict)- physical, psychological, emotional? What seems to create the tension? Does it involve other characters? How? Portray other characters’ “quirkiness “through thoughts, direct speech and action. Let the readers feel the tension through characters’ action and words.
  • Finally, draw connections between the physical event and philosophical reflection, which may serve to help the readers question themselves or the world they live in.

Homework: 1) Continue working on the writing you started on the prompt. 2) Read Stephen Corey, “A Voice for the Lonely,” In Short 178-182 3) Use the Stephan Corey’s essay as an inspiration and write about a song or your favorite singer whose song inspired you or connected you to your “ burning question”.  Write down the lyrics, or at least those you remember, and then take a few minutes to jump off of that into a freewrite.  With whom do you associate this song/rhyme?  Is there a particular occasion, place, or time of day you connect with it?  When you think of this song/rhyme, what feelings and/or memories do you associate with it? 4) Bring a paragraph or two to the class for a read-aloud tomorrow.

 

10/16 Focus: Writing about Secrets

Reading and Unpacking: Sandra McPherson, “Secrets: Beginning to Write them Out” (PDF); Lauren Slater, “Three Spheres,” 3-23; Carol Lucci Wisner, “Stonehenge and the Louvre Were Cool,” 253-258

(Notes from McPherson’s “Secrets”-For what reasons would you refuse to write about it? Have you at some time written about a subject or event that you withheld for a long time? If so, describe what you went through to get it on the page. Writers need especially to feel confident about the decision they have made for themselves- to reveal or not to reveal. Snodgrass wrote, “When events in the poem became no longer applicable in my life, they will be applicable to feelings of other lives.” We should place our work in history. The writer, unlike journalist, maybe struggling to survive a story of much personal anguish. We must ask for things we may not want to hear but which we crave because they are true. We must do it without tattling, or without a tone of tattling, gossiping or babbling.  To write about painful memories, we need to learn to ask questions about what we don’t see and to be good observers of what we do see. Any private story is human history not just your own. It can help someone else to live, some else who is perhaps feeling hopeless. Tobias Wolff says a good writer has “the willingness to say that unspeakable thing, which everyone else in the house is too coy, or too frightened, or too polite to say.”)

Writing Prompt: Write about something you have decided you will never write about—or you were told never to “tell”—without saying exactly what that is.  Try, of course, to do this in the context of your conversation with your burning question.  Have others instructed, urged, or pressured you not to talk about certain issues?  Not to talk or write in certain ways or in certain kinds of language?  Or perhaps actually forbade you to “talk”? You might do this exercise by writing a dialog that imagines someone’s response to your “telling.”  For example, “If I told about X, so-and-so would ______.”  Or by writing an anecdote that tells a story of an imagined consequence of your “telling.”  Or you could free-write a list of reasons you haven’t told—with concrete, narrative or descriptive details for each reason—if for any reason you do not want to “tell.”  (Note: You do not have to include the writing you do here in your essay—this is just an exercise.)

Homework: 1) Read “Meredith Hall, “Shunned,” In Fact, 49-70 ( How does she weave many pieces together to portray the suffocating loneliness after becoming an outcast? She was not only ostracized by her friends, church but her own mother and father.  She writes about her close friendship with her friends from school, her mother’s active role in a church, to the day when she revealed herself to be pregnant and  how the community worked together to forget her and erase her existence. She writes about a small box that contains things that survive the childhood; she even writes about the long lasting effect of her being rejected by the people she was close to after becoming a teacher in a university and her student still refuses to acknowledge her past.  She writes about Mrs. Taccetta from the church,  Kathy and Chris, her best friends, Miss Millet her teacher, her stepmother, father, stepsister Molly, her giving up her baby for adoption, Mrs. Emmet the headmaster of a private school and even Paul her mother’s friend etc.  There are so many scenes and characters described in the narrative. What holds them all together? Is she successful? How does she do so? What’s her burning question?) 2) Laying out all your writing together, do you see any connection among them? How are they connected? Can you see a possibility to put all the fragmented writing together and tie them together by a title or form? 3) Read Tell It Slant, Ch. 10, “Playing with Form: The Lyric Essay…” 107-126 Gretel Ehrlich 4) Email the completed 1st draft of your essay to your group members. Be sure to read your peers’ essays before the workshop and bring three copies of your 1st draft to the class on Tuesday so we can workshop it in a small group of 3.

 

Weeks 6-7: The lyric essay / researching the “self”

During Weeks 6 and 7, we will focus more on crafting an essay: how essays move, how they are structured, how essayists use the white space of the page, how they incorporate figurative language and lyrical turns of phrase, and how they leverage images to complicate the meanings they wish to draw forth in the essay.  We will also incorporate research as a way of enriching the essay.  In this case, research isn’t limited to google searches, but also involves place observations, interviews, fact-checking, etc.

 

Mon. 10/12 no school ( Columbus day)

Tue.  10/13 Focus- Lyric Essay

Reading and unpacking: Tell It Slant, Ch. 10, “Playing with Form: The Lyric Essay…” 107-126 Gretel Ehrlich; “A Match to the Heart,” 219-220 (What central image does she use to portray her experience of being struck by lightning? How does she use white space of the page, incorporate figurative language and lyrical turns of phrase, and leverage images to complicate the meanings?)

Writing Prompt: In “Three Spheres”, “Mixed-Blood Stew” and “Shunned”, and “A Match to the Heart,” how does each author frame the narrative? Which is a prose poem (flash nonfiction), collage or the braided essay? What distinctive characteristics do we see in each form? How could the form of a braided essay serve your needs to connect your various, seemingly disconnected pieces?

Workshop: Use notes from “Playing with Form” and our discussion about various lyric essays, and provide writerly suggestions to your peers. I will be walking around to listen and give my suggestions when needed.

Homework: 1) Read Brenda Miller, “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” TIS, 234-244. What does it mean to write a “braided” essay? Make some observations and bring them to the class to share.2) Use the suggestions from your peers or me as well as ideas from Miller to help you continue shape the form of your essay by playing with its structure.

 

Wed. 10/14: Focus-Montage essay

Reading and unpacking: Brenda Miller, “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay” ; Lee Gutkind, “Montage,” Keep It Real, 103-108 (PDF)( What specific techniques can we use to create a montage essay? Make a list; Charles Simic, “Three Fragments,” In Short 191-192 (What techniques are used in Simic’s essay? Find an example to illustrate each technique).

Writing Prompt: Select three moments or scenes from your writing. Develop each scene. Juxtapose them as a montage or collage. Separate them by an *.

Homework: 1) Read Richard Rodriguez, “Proofs,” 48-54 and incorporate craft you learn from this piece to our own writing. Is there any particular images you want to add to complicate the meanings of your narrative? 2) Read and annotate “Researching Your Own Life” by Michael Pearson (PDF). 3) Find some photos or any other artifacts that can help you recall a specific scene related to your personal essay. Bring them to the class for a writing exercise.

 

Thur. 10/15 Research- research isn’t limited to google searches, but also involves place observations, interviews, fact-checking, etc.

Reading and unpacking: Michael Pearson, “Researching Your Own Life” (PDF)

Writing Prompt: Choose an event from the past for which you have a collection of photos and write a narrative using the photos to help you create the scene. Use the following research techniques to expand your writing-

  • Reliving the past through photos
  • Doing fact-checking by sifting through notebooks and scrapbooks
  • Old-fashioned research about a particular time and place
  • Research into your own past ( what books you used to read, music you used to listen, a store you used to visit, friend you used to hang out with, )
  • History
  • Time travel ( revisit the place)

As Joan Didion describes, “We write to discover about what we think”. Or as Michael Pearson claims, “Through research, you may be able to reenter the past, relive it in your imagination and re-create it for the future”

Homework: Do research about your past and see in what larger context you can situate your personal narrative. Expand your writing by adding your researched information that could lend itself to more universal truth. 2) Read Brian Doyle, “Being Brians,” 163-173

 

Fri.  10/16: Focus-Linking or piecing together the fragments

Reading and unpacking: Will Baker, “My Children Explain the Big Issues,” In Short 133-135 (How does Baker piece his different pieces together leaping over time, place and subject?) Brian Doyle, “Being Brians” In Fact 163-173 (How doe Brian Doyle piece all Brians’ responses together in his essay?)

Writing Prompt: Now that you have written several pieces. Find a form that you may like to adopt to “host” all the contents (Hermit Crab style).You may also consider emulating one of the lyric essays we have read to connect the fragments together. Or you may use subtitles or simply * to separate the fragments. You may even use lines of a song or poem or a group of related photographs, or different people on the same photograph or a collection of artifacts that remind you of the past to connect your fragments.

Homework: 1) Read “The Search for Marvin Garden” by John McPhee and make observations of how the author uses the moves he makes in a monopoly game to braid his fragments together. 2) Read Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale” ( at least 4 fragments). How does the author connect her fragments? What gaps do you notice between the fragmentation, which emphasizes the unknown? How does the space or gap serve a particular purpose? 3) Is there a strand or central image or thread that you follow to write your narrative? It goes among things or events that change but it doesn’t change?  Or perhaps there are several strands that are intersecting each other but you can create a pattern so that the separate strands give a sense of wholeness? 4) Bring some thoughts about “ braiding” the fragments to share in class.

 

Week 7

Mon.  10/19 Focus- Braiding the fragments

Reading and unpacking: Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale” and “The Search for Marvin Garden” by John McPhee (How does the author connect her fragments? What gaps do you notice between the fragmentation, which emphasizes the unknown? How does the space or gap serve a particular purpose?)

               Writing Prompt: Is there a strand or central image or thread that you follow to write your narrative? It goes among things or events that change but it doesn’t change?  Or perhaps there are several strands that are intersecting each other but you can create a pattern so that the separate strands give a sense of wholeness?

               Share in small groups: I’m considering to braid or piece the fragments in _________________ but I may also consider leaving some spaces blank because________________.

Homework: 1) Read Christiane Buuck, “France in Twenty-Five Exposures” (pdf); 2) Consider the ideas we have shared in class today and work on piecing your writing together.

 

Tue.   10/20  Focus-Collaging exercises

Reading and unpacking: Christiane Buuck, “France in Twenty-Five Exposures” (Can you find the author in the “collage”? How does Buuck use fragments to portray and reveal her whole experience in France? What is the single strand or “burning question” she explores and uses to connect the fragmentation? Hint: her personal romantic relationship and her age)

Writing Prompt: Select 3-5 short pieces/fragments of writing you’ve done since the beginning of Unit 2 that you feel are central to your burning question, and collage them together.

Homework: 1) Google-share your draft. Provide each other with feedback on some of the connections you see across these fragments. 2) Bring 3 hard copies to share in a small group.  3) Read Ander Monson’ “I Have Been Thinking About Snow” (pdf)- How does Monson use a particular form to connect the various scenes? How does the form fit the story? Is there any particular form you may like to adopt or invent for your content, which can enhance the meaning of your essay?

 

Wed.  10/21: Focus-Collaging workshop ( Handout: The Art of Critique)

Workshopping: Share in a group of three your collage essay and suggestions. Identify and share strategies that work effectively to connect the fragments. Look into gaps in between. Do you need to bridge the gaps or they can be meaningful white spaces? How does Monson use a particular form to be an integral part of his essay? How successful is his intent? Why?

Collaging Exercise: Print out everything you’ve written so far for this class—including the writing you produced during Unit 1 and during Unit 2, single sided and double-spaced.

  • Then, using a scissors, cut out the parts that you think comprise your sharpest, most important writing—the parts that contribute to telling/showing your story, and the parts that provide important reflective moments. Some of these pieces may follow very different tracks and may seem not to belong in an essay with other pieces.  Don’t censor too much—just go with your instinct that these fragments belong (or might belong) in the same essay.
  • Next, begin selecting and arranging some of these fragments according to how they seem to be “talking” to each other.
  • Experiment with revision by putting together several of these separately created pieces that feel related. You may combine the pieces in a variety of ways. Use Lee Gutkind’s essay entitled “Montage” to help you conceive of possible relationships between sections.  Other ways of transitioning from one narrative moment to the next are:
    • alternating portions of two or more pieces of writing
    • putting one complete narrative “inside” another to create a “story-within-a-story” (the movement here will be a digression and return—perhaps a flashback or a move to interject context)
    • linking seemingly dissimilar pieces together to form a “chain”—with a word or image at the end of one piece turning up at the beginning of the next
    • using a “container” of some sort to structure the presentation (see TIS ch. 10, “Hermit Crab” essay)

These are just a few ideas. The point is to develop in some way the related meaning of the pieces.  Once you know how you want the pieces to be arranged—how the presentation seems logical to you—then you can work to build transitions between sections to communicate your logic to the reader.

Homework: 1) Continue working on connecting and shaping your essay. 2) Read Jill Lepore’s “The Prodigal Daughter”( pdf)( Consider: How does the author juxtapose her personal story with that of Jane Franklin’s, Benjamin Franklin’s sister? How does she weave her mother, Jane Franklin and herself, three women from different generations together? Although Jane Franklin lived from the 18th century and could barely spell, she didn’t stop expressing her opinions to her famous brother and chronicling her own life. The author’s mother was young and wild once but contained after her marriage. Although she never stopped painting, she never pursued her passion. Now it seems the mother never stops urging her daughter to go further, college, grad school and writing a book about Jane Franklin. It is through researching about Jane and her mother’s constant reminder that the author finally becomes determined to finish her book. The ways she parallels her personal life and Jane Franklin’s make one wonder if the author is trying to say that behind each great success, there is great inspiration by unsung heroes such as Jane to Benjamin or her mother to herself. What do you think is the burning question that different parts of her writing are connected to? ) 3) Bring your observations of or questions about “ The Prodigal Daughter” to the class for discussion tomorrow.

 

Thur.  10/22 Focus- developing/expanding/shaping the essay

Reading and unpacking: Jill Lepore’s “The Prodigal Daughter”; Adam Gopnik, “Driver’s Seat” (How does each author “ braid” various scenes together?)

Writing Prompt: Go back to a previous short fragment you’ve written, and work to develop it by adding characters, characterization, dialogue, description, backstory, or reflection. Make moves both horizontally and vertically. Does the person or yourself you are writing about remind you of a story you read in a book or history or media? Is there a historical character who inspires you and serves as an aspiration in your life? Does the relationship you are describing parallel with a famous story portrayed in a film or real life? How does the knowledge or connection shed light on the universality of your story?

Homework: 1) Continue working on expanding the essay. 2) Read “The Writing Process and Revision,” Tell It Slant, Ch. 14, 181-192; 3) Read Pico Iyer, “In Praise of the Humble Comma,” In Short, 79-82

 Fri.  10/23 Focus- revision

Reading and unpacking:  Tell It Slant, Ch. 14, “The Writing Process and Revision,” 181-192; Read Pico Lyer, “In Praise of the Humble Comma,” In Short, 79-82

Revision Workshop: As a class, generate ideas about revision.

Homework: 1) Use ideas from the class discussion about revision to help you refine your work; 2) Identify one technique that has truly resonated with you.  Provide the quotation where the technique came from as well as the names of the title and author. Find a passage we have read that illustrates or showcases the technique. Type up the piece. 2) When publishing work, writers usually have to adhere to a strict word count limit.  Word count limitations force an awareness of diction and syntax that might not otherwise be obvious.  Weak language must be trimmed away and sentences rewritten, sometimes leaving room for additional details, images, and points of clarification.  Often, the result is a much stronger piece of writing that conveys a more detailed sense of the story in fewer words.

  • Take a scene you’ve already written and limit it to exactly 101 words. Notice in the example below how the author manages to introduce setting, characters, and a sense of conflict and resolution, all in just 101 words.  The strategic placement of short sentences and active verbs makes a lot happen very quickly.  Perhaps the hardest part of writing a 101 word scene is that you’re forced to make choices about which words and ideas comprise your most vital content. As you attempt this process, think about not only getting your point across, but also about which ideas matter most and why, and how to get the most out of your word choice.  Bring the rewritten 101-word scene to the class for revision workshop.
  • He was sleeping on his side, one hand resting on the cat’s back and one lying free. Early inklings of pink-orange light filtered in from the alley.  I sat on the bed to paint my toenails; he didn’t stir. Brushing on the plum-colored polish, I was struck with the most devilish idea: it was that hand!  Giggling to myself as I worked, I imagined the confused look on his face, the adorable crinkled brow and puckered lips, when he’d wake, and, adjusting his eyes, discover one hand’s nails glistening purple.  I’d be gone by then, but he’d laugh in my absence. (PRETTY IN PURPLE)

 

Week 8: Revision work- Developing the personal/lyric essay

 Mon.  10/26: In-class writing / conferencing on rough drafts

Reading and unpacking: Tell It Slant, Ch. 14, “The Writing Process and Revision,” 181-192

Workshopping: How did you negotiate to trim down your paragraph? Did you feel the results were satisfying? What particular struggle did you go through? How did you come to terms with the changes you made? Can you see yourself apply the same revision strategy to revising other scenes? Did you change your punctuation? How did the change of punctuation effect the meaning? Share the two versions of the scene with a partner. Give each other feedback.

  1. Introduce one strategy that has been most helpful in  writing the lyric piece. Name the strategy and share an example.
  2. Share your experience of “trimming down”.
  3. Share your “braiding” experience. What decision have you made to “braid” your essay? How did you come to make the decision? What struggles are you still going through with ” braiding”?

Homework: 1) Read Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, “Workshopping a Draft” (PDF); 2) Continue working on the revision.3) Share your draft with two other members in your group online. Consider asking the following questions when proving feedback-

  • What is this essay really about, or what could it be about? Try answering this question in 3 different ways.
  • Who are the main characters so far, and what do you know about them? Pinpoint places in the essay where the writer is providing strong character development, and other places where you want/need to know more the characters.
  • What are you curious to know more about? Draft 3 questions for the writer.
  • What additional scenes could the writer include in this essay to help illustrate some of the questions you raised in part c (above)?
  • Where in the essay would you like to see the writer delve deeper and provide more “vertical” movement or reflection on difficult/complicated parts of the story?

 

Tue.  10/27 Focus-Small group workshops

Reading and unpacking: Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, “Workshopping a Draft” (PDF);

Workshopping: Share your draft-in-progress in groups of three, and work to brainstorm ideas for additional scenes each person could compose.  User the same questions from yesterday’s homework. Share your prepared responses and written feedback.

Homework: Use the feedback you received from your peers to continue working on your essay.

 

Wed. 10/28 Focus-Revision: point of view and verb tense

Workshop: On the surface, the writer’s choices of point of view (first, second, or third person) and verb tense (past, present, or future) may seem intuitive, uncomplicated, and even inconsequential.  However, when we examine the impact these choices have on the essay, we find that point of view and verb tense can be powerful rhetorical tools used to position both the writer and reader in relationship to the subject.  For example, whereas first person point of view is used to establish the writer’s intimacy with and involvement in the events being narrated, third person point of view is the voice of witness and objectivity.  Second person point of view must be understood in context.  Is the writer really speaking to the reader?  Or is there some other imaginary “you” that is the target of the writer’s address?  How, then, is the reader positioned?  The writer’s choices of point of view and verb tense go a long way in shaping the reader’s experience of the essay, so it’s important to think about what’s at stake in making these choices.

Read the following excerpts and analyze the writer’s use of point of view and verb tense, as well as any other features of the writing that contribute to shaping the reader’s experience of the piece.

  • Hank’s teeth were inextricably tangled with long strings of bright green spinach. They sat there damp and alive, staining the linen cloth, while he went on eating.  I began whimpering—what a fool of a child I must have been—and there was a scene.  I wish I could remember how it came out.  I wish I knew if Uncle Hank was drunk that late afternoon; I wish he was here now. (From “Interlude,” by William Kittredge)
  • “I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day.

Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild strokes which cause her to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over. She drinks prodigious amounts of water and pees great volumes onto the folded blankets where she sleeps.  Each time this happens, I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets underneath her, carry the peed-on blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer.  By the time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again.” (From “The Fourth State of Matter,” by Jo Ann Beard)

  • “Out through the school gate, farmers from the countryside hunch behind wicker baskets of potatoes, green beans, onions. A woman in a frayed black coat tilts back her head and sucks on an egg as if it held fine whisky. A tailor cuts patterns on a card table under a tree, and a bald man who looks about a thousand years old smokes a metal pipe. They all stop what they’re doing to watch the dark-bearded foreigner clump by. I draw stares every minute of the day, and not always friendly ones. I smile at the bald man, who is squinting hard at me through his pipe smoke. He makes a fist, sticks up his thumb, and laughs.” (From “Running Xian,” by John Calderazzo)
  • “My mother heard a man plead for his life once. She remembers the stars, the dark shapes of trees along the road on which they were fleeing the Austrian army in a slow-moving-ox-cart. ‘That man sounded terribly frightened out there in the woods,’ she says. The cart went on. No one said anything. Soon they could hear the river they were supposed to cross.” (From “Three Fragments,” by Charles Simic)
  • “You feel a gradual welling up of pleasure, or boredom, or melancholy. Whatever the emotion, it’s more abundant than you ever dreamed. You can no more contain it than your hands can cup a lake. And so you surrender and suck the air. Your esophagus opens, diaphragm expands. Poised at the crest of an exhalation, your body is about to be unburdened, second by second, cell by cell. A kettle hisses. A balloon deflates.  Your shoulders fall like two ripe pears, slack at last.” (From “The Fine Art of Sighing,” by Bernard Cooper)

Writing Prompt: Now that you’ve thought about how point of view and verb tense shape these pieces of writing, select one of your own flash nonfiction pieces, and recast either a portion of the piece or the entire piece in another point of view.  You may or may not wish to alter your verb tense, but it’s important that you make deliberate and controlled grammatical decisions in this regard.

Homework: 1) Consider pov and verb tense for your revision. 2) Read Mimi Schwartz, “Research and Creative Nonfiction: Writing so the Seams Don’t Show” (PDF)

 

Thur.  10/29 Focus-Revision: writing in the gaps

Reading and unpacking: Mimi Schwartz, “Research and Creative Nonfiction: Writing so the Seams Don’t Show” (PDF). Elicit tools observed by Schwartz used by successful CNF authors to create the balance- observation, memory, storytelling, sensibility, imagination and research. According to Schwartz,  research enriches the text, making people , events, and their historic and cultural contexts come alive more fully ; but research can also interrupt the narrative flow and break down the voice so the writing sounds more like a text book or news report than like creative nonfiction. So how do we gracefully weave what’s known and what came from research  so that readers can’t tell what came from where? ( Schwartz suggests conscious research-jogging existing memory of people and place, reading books on the subject, doing research before writing; the more you mastered the new information, the easier “ effortless” is. Reflect on how Lepore incorporates her research about Jane Franklin into her essay in the “The Prodigal Daughter”.

Writing Prompt: Read through all the writing you’ve done so far and look for “gaps” where you see you need to know more or include more information. How would you get that information? Talk to a living, breathing person?  Go to Google?  Go to a book you know or have? Use something you’ve already written, before you began this class? Do a memory recall exercise?  Choose one smaller piece of writing that has a “gap” and revise by adding material drawn from the appropriate “research.”  Label your revision exercise to show which original writing exercise you were drawing from.

Homework: “How can you weave information and personal experience together to make the world of “line and rule” and the world of “our hearts and imagination” feel like one?” Mimi Schwarts.

 

Fri.  10/30 Focus– Revision and One-on- One conference

Revision: Read back over your own draft.  Consider the transformation of the main character in this essay, which may be you or someone else.  Who is this person at the end of the essay, versus the person we meet at the beginning?  What is the central reason for the change?  The transformation may be subtle or more explicit.  It may be that you are the main character, and by the end of the essay, you’ve begun to understand certain things that you weren’t clear on at the beginning.  Work to further illuminate this transformation, either through additional reflective writing or through adding scenes.

Conferencing

Homework: 1) Finish your essay (develop one piece of flash non-fiction into a 6-8 pp. personal or lyric essay) Due Nov 2. 2) Write a critical reflective essay.

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