Hello! Today, we’re going to be exploring the genre of memoir. For homework, you read Augustine and Sei Shōnagon. And you wrote letters as responses to one writer of your choice.
To start, we will go into groups. In each group, we’re going to:
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Share our letters
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If we have time, talk about what we liked, or what impressed, interested or moved us, about the reading.
Our Online Notebooks
In this course, we’re going to use the Canvas discussion board as an online writing notebook. This is a place for you to share writing tasks, and to comment on each other’s task.
You should have posted your letter to the discussion board. So now, I want you to read through some other letters, I want you to comment on at least one other person’s letter!
More on Memoir
When writing creative nonfiction, your starting point is the sometimes messy experience of being human. Even if you are writing about things other than yourself, good creative nonfiction often gives the reader not just a strong sense of the subject-matter, but also of the person who is doing the writing.
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’s 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.
Hot tip: Identity is rarely simple! Our identity can shift from moment to moment, or from context to context.
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).
Exploring the self
For this exercise, you are going to explore this complexity of identity.
Write down THREE different social contexts. These might be face-to-face, or they might be virtual. It doesn’t matter. So, for example, you could have:
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Your family
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Parami
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An online community you are a part of.
Now think about the following questions:
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How do you see yourself in each of these contexts? How would you respond to the question, “Who are you?”
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How do others see you in each of these contexts? How might somebody else from this context respond if they were asked (the questioner pointing at you), “Who are they?”
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What names do you go by in each of these contexts?
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How good do you feel in each of these contexts about:
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how you see yourself,
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how others see you?
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Make rough notes on this. Then we’ll get into breakout groups to discuss these notes.
Writing Exercise: Who I am Not
You may have noticed that most of the energy is where you feel that people misinterpret who you are. We feel more strongly, sometimes, about who we are not than who we are. To take a trivial example, we often identify ourselves much more strongly in terms of what kind of music (or books, or films, or food) we don’t like than in terms of what kind we do like.
So now you have a map of who you are in different contexts, write a short piece with the title, “Who I am not.”
If we have time, we’ll share these in groups!
Homework
There are three homework tasks this time!
Task 1
Of course, memoir also involves… memory! So we’re going to be exploring this by reading the brilliant Tara Westover for your homework. I want you to read the opening section of her book Educated, which I will share on Canvas.
Task 2
Please also post ONE new piece of writing on canvas — either from the exercise you have done today, or the exercise you did in the last session.
Task 3
Finally, comment on ONE other writer’s writing on the shared notebook! It can be any piece of writing you like. In your comment, don’t just say “I like this,” but say what struck you about the piece, what questions it raised, what you wanted to know more about, what you didn’t understand, what images you liked… So think a bit more deeply so that you can get into dialogue with the writer!