Notes on in-class brainstorming. We started class with some more practices for looking around in your head for stories you haven't told yet. As made clear in the discussion of Lott later in class, CNF (at least Lott's definition of it), is about serious, reflective interrogation of the self "through the subject at hand". This suggests that you will need to find ways to see things differently (from multiple perspectives), and do some of the scary work of questioning experiences, feelings, and intimations that you might not yet have worked out. So while you might write about a story/experience you have told many times before, for that story to work as CNF, you need to see something new in it, to take your reader with you into that experience in ways that are deeper and more purposeful than in your usual tellings of that story.
So that's what we are going for. To do that kind of creative, opening-up new territory, seeing-things-from-new perspectives brainstorming, it can help if you step into patterns for "thinking" differently. And that was my reasoning for selecting the strategies we've spent time on in class.
Active imagination. The technique I walked you through for spending some time in dream spaces is about giving you a place where you can look around at what is going on in your mind in terms of feelings, thoughts, and ideas that you might not even have words for. You shared some remarkable observations and stories (and I am hoping you wrote even more down). Once you have these experiences on your page - cultivate a generous relationship with them. Be reluctant to name them or say "what they mean" too quickly. They are travelers from a different country and you have a lot to learn from them if you don't try too hard to make them "make sense" in terms of the culture/language you already know. Recognize them as different, ask them questions, ponder what they say and allow that you will probably only get a small part of "what they mean".
Associating to assumptions/beliefs. The second exercise was about connecting to ways of thinking/feeling/being in terms of particular experiences. It can help you unpack or understand where your inner core of beliefs/assumptions come from - and maybe even to rethink them through examining the experiences that created them.
I asked you to think of something that you know now that you didn't know when you were younger. We came up with a list of platitudes (which is typical of the way humans tend to "feel/say" the really big realizations - maybe because there is so much associated with them that an overgeneralization is the only way to "hold" them?) - good platitudes - platitudes that many of us connected to, recognized and felt. What this does is it directs you to a kind of "box of memories/stories/feelings" that have a complex focus. Then you wrote about "moments" or particular experiences that were in that box. If this exercise sets you up to write about a "set pieces" - stories you have told over and over again - dig deeper, cast a wider net, or look at the edges of your set piece - how did it get set up, who were the important people and why? Work on seeing it a different way. This exercise can be focused to associate to lots of different kinds of knowing - what you believe/know about being happy, sad, angry; what you believe about fairness, truth, kindness, integrity, personal autonomy, and so on.
Gutkind and Lott.
As our discussion revealed - how CNF writers relate to truth connects strongly to how they define CNF's purpose - or what it does. The definitions we developed last week were formal definitions = in that they functioned primarily on the ways CNF is built. Lott's definition was a functional definition=focused on what CNF does. He developed a list of purposes beginning with the mundane (to keep our lives from passing away) and working their way toward the profound (to answer for our lives), with descriptions of the processes of asking always deeper questions, stepping outside of our own self-interested perspectives, experimenting & taking risks while searching for a personal truth. This definition suggests that the writer's representations of the truths s/he is searching will necessarily need to be carefully crafted - and that was what Gutkind's piece was about. As I said in class, I clearly chose to discuss the two pieces in the wrong order. Oh well. No one's perfect.
Gutkind offered as set of suggestions for how CNF writers need to relate to truth (354). We got to those pretty quickly - though we weren't 100% in agreement about how to "use" them. We spent the most time on rounding corners & compressing (the writer's relationship to the literal truth); and allowing the cast of characters in your writing opportunities to read (and to have input into?) your writing. For the purposes of this class, I want to ground assignments in Lott's definition, and any writing you do which is true to the purposes he sets forward, will have a careful - integrity based - relationship to truth (in terms of fabrication, rounding corners, and compression). In other words, if you know you are doing it (sometimes we don't) - you need to give your reader a heads up.
In terms of sharing your work with individuals whose stories overlap with your own - from my perspective, that is up to the individual writer. If you have told your story honestly, how you work out issues with others who might be involved belongs to you. While I may be able to comment on whether or not a piece has explored multiple perspectives and interrogated its own "truths" in complex ways, I'm not really in a position to make moral judgments about who owns what story and who has the right to tell it. I will say that, because we are posting writing on blogs, you should not mention illegal activities - your own or others. From my personal perspective, I am a strong advocate for writers to write their own stories, and I have benefited immensely for the generosity of writers who have told "dangerous" stories about experiences I would have otherwise faced alone. At the same time, each of us has to consider our relationships to the people in our lives who will inevitably be in our writing - and consider how we want to balance reaching out to strangers (our readers), and being respectful and caring of the people we live with.
For next week
Read: Schwartz, 194; Pope, 388; Kahn, 95
Pay attention to how the authors use segments in their work. How are the spaces meaningful? What do they affect the reader's experience?
Blog 3: Invention writing for essay 1
By this time, your writing journals (hopefully) have some lists, some descriptions, some scenes, and some writing you aren't sure what it is. Read through what you've written, maybe add some more freewriting, and then do a post where you "muse" over some ideas for your first essay. Musings might mention: the idea or question, or feeling you are interested in writing about; a list of stories/experiences from your life that are relevant to that focus; and maybe some drafty indication of what you might put in each story.
Or - you might explore several subjects/topics in less detail.
In class you will talk about your ideas - and comment on each other's blogs. Once everyone has a feel for how to get started, we will talk about segmented essays and how you might use segments in your essay.
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