Class 3 - Telling our stories

Notes from Class 3

Welcome back! We’ve been exploring some historical memoir and first-person writing from Augustine to Sei Shōnagon. But now we’re going to turn our attention to contemporary memoir.

Before we do, I want to say something about guest speakers.

Guest Speakers

The first announcement is that we’ve got some great guest speakers coming up. I’m still in discussion, but we should have three writers to come and talk to you in this class. One writer who has already agreed to come and give a talk on her work is the brilliant Michelle Kuo, who is a good friend, and an American-born Taiwanese writer. Michelle wrote a powerful and remarkable book called Reading With Patrick — about reading, education, growing up, race, prison, racial justice, and freedom.

But I wanted to check one thing. For some time zones, the current time of the class won’t work. So would the opposite time work for you to attend a one-off class. In other words, if it is 8pm in your time zone, 8am, and if it is 10am, 10pm?

Response Exercise

Memoir is a very rich area of writing. And memoirs are often as varied as the people who write them. But we’re going to start with some writing, in conversation with Tara Westover. For the last class, you commented on one line from Westover. What I want you to do now, is to go through the discussion board, and comment on one other student’s post. I’ll give you ten minutes.

What lines have caught other readers’ attention? Why? What interests them? It’s good to develop a sense of the different ways there are of reading, the different responses readers have.

You have ten minutes.

Writing Exercise 1: Responding to Westover

Now, I’m going to get you to respond to one of the lines from Westover that intrigues you. It may be the one you chose yourself, or it may be one that somebody else chose.

Open a notebook or a new document (don’t do this on the discussion board), and write down this line. Now use this line as a starting point to write a story — a small incident from your life — as a response to this. Make sure that what you are writing is a story. Not just a set of ideas, but instead, giving the reader a glimpse into your world. This story is creative nonfiction. So it is a true story, well-told.

So it has to be true: Don’t invent. Just tell us what happened.

It has to be a story: A story always involves something happening. So if nothing is happening in what you are writing — if it’s just a set of ideas or fine thoughts —  it’s probably not a story.

It has to be well-told: Keep your reader in mind, and imagine that you are telling them the story. How will you keep their interest?

You have ten minutes.

More about Memoir

The word memoir suggests memory, and we see from Westover’s work that memory is never simple. But memoir is also about exploring questions of identity, and this is what I want to focus on. Who are we? Who am I? How did I come to be the kind of person I am? And this last question is one of the big themes in Westover’s book. So we’ll look at this question today, and talk about memory during the next class.

Your identity isn’t just about who you are, but it is also about how you are: how you speak, think, move, interact or engage with the world. And it is also about how you see things. It is about the uniqueness of your perspective on the world.

Identity is complicated. It is about how we experience ourselves and how we see ourselves in relation to other people, and the many social contexts in which we find ourselves.

Quite naturally, we often find ourselves identifying differently in different circumstances. If you join a writers’ group, your identity as a writer might be first and foremost. Your fellow writers might say, “Who are you?”, and you might reply, “I’m a writer who loves stories of all kinds. I’ve loved books since before I could even read…” On the other hand, if you join a dog-walking group, the first thing you might say when asked “who are you?” is that you are a dog-lover. And it might be weeks before you think it important to mention that we are also a writer.

So for all of us, identity is something quite fluid, depending on the social contexts we are in. But identity isn’t just about how we see ourselves. For better or worse, it is also about how others see us. We may actively identify as being particular kinds of people. But identity also goes the other way. Whether we like it or not, other people identify us in particular ways. And between these two kinds of identities - how we identify ourselves, and how other people identify us - there is often considerable tension.

This complexity and tension can be a rich resource for writing creative nonfiction. Many memoir writers and nonfiction essayists explore these questions. Some good examples are Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging by Tessa McWatt (Random House, 2020), Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance and Social Change by Anjali Enjeti, and Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (Canongate 2019).

Writing Exercise 2: Names

Identity is tied up with our names. I remember having a student who was from Mon state in Myanmar, which speaks a different language from Burmese. My student had two names, a Mon name, and a Burmese name. Their Burmese name was the one they were registered with at Parami, but they told me they couldn’t pronounce their Burmese name.

Now I live in Taiwan, I have a Chinese name: 白忠修 Bái Zhōngxiū, and so if I go to the doctor, or a government office, or sometimes do a writing event, people call me this. In English, I write as “Will”, but my legal name is “William”. “Will” is a horrible name. For one thing, it is a verb. We can say, “Maisie will be serving you drinks,” and that’s fine. But “Will will be serving you drinks,” just sounds ridiculous. Not only that, speakers of other languages struggle with it. Transliterated into Chinese, it is 威爾 Wēiěr, which sounds terrible. I have a middle name, “Hugh.” That sounds awful too. And, of course, friends call me various other names as well.

Think about the names you are called, the names that other call you, your official names, the names you no longer use. You may have a Burmese name, a Mon name, a Chinese name, nicknames, names you call yourself.

So write a piece called My Names, exploring these names and what they mean to you. If we have time, we’ll share these in groups!

Homework

Next time, we’re going to talk about memory in Tara Westover’s work. So for your homework, write a piece of creative nonfiction memoir with the title “A memory that is not a memory.”

Please upload the My Names piece to Canvas. This is a graded task.