2.25 Who am I and how did I get this way? and more segmented essays

Tonight's (secret) focus was on creating an essay that knows where it is going from the first word of the title: an essay that sets up its focus in the title and the first scene (even if the reader can't say it = the idea is to get her/him to FEEL it).  An essay that drops readers into carrying metaphors (like the home movie with no sound that stands for the cultural tug that keeps us in that conga line of behaviors from our past long after the real events that evoked them are over;- or like "the patch") that evoke feelings and ideas central to its contemplation.  

Brainstorming to mental flash shots.  For the brainstorming activity started by writing about who you are: what you believe, what is important to you, your assumptions, values, and beliefs about the way the world is.
When we shared lists, and tried to see if there were patterns or groupings for the different kinds of words/ideas we used to say who we were.  We came up with something like the following.
Internal values(about me): dependability, respect, hopeful, self worth, harmony, independence, trust, mistrust
Relational values: religious committment; importance of image presented to others
Personal aspirations/belief systems: education, environment,
Abstract principles: stand in the middleground, don't judge people, keep a positive outlook, balance, karma, you are on your own (only room for one person in your coffin), intensity
Social justice: gay rights, children's rights, domestic violence bullying
Other: music, food, conscience (we can see th way the world is going by the way we treat our children), 

Granted, the classification has some problems, but it got us talking about the different kinds of values, beliefs and preferences that make us who we are. 

Next, you picked four "key" features from your list and did a freewrite where you associated - connected to anything that came into your mind about those features.  Then you underlined any repetitions or really important connections that came up in the freewrite, and thought a little about what that said about who you were = and then thought about how you might have come to that belief.preference, sense of who you were.

For the last part of this exercise you wrote about/portrayed an event that was part of the experience (your life) that made you into the person your earlier writing was describing.

The last part of this exercise, which we didn't get to, was to write a scene that sets up/portrays/connects to (without stating directly) the kind of person you are/the experiences that led you to be that person.

This exercise set you up with a "bundle" of writing, some ideas/some associations - and maybe (maybe not) gave you some place to starte with an idea for an essay.  

The Patch and Silent Dancing
.We talked about these two essays using similar processes (though I did most of the talking about the structure a little more in McPhee's essay).  First we generated a list of what the essay was "about" = themes/ ideas or feelings that operated as a kind of center for the stories/material the author presented.  Then we talked about how the title, opening and closing material, key scenes contributed to/emphasized in terms of these themes.   Then we lookd at the essays' different threads:  how the author used the sequence, juxtaposition, repetition, and so on the "build" an overall felt response - the reader's takeaway for the essay.  We also noticed how these two essays lead us to a final scene which calls upon much, if not all, of the material the authors have drawn to our attention, as if, they are orchestrating an experience of reading an essay which will allow us to "see"  thoughts and feelings evoked by their writing  both in terms of our own experiences, and theirs. 

For next week:
I forgot to set up the readings on "truth" we will be talking about. This is different from the way things are listed on the calendar.  I will explain in class next week.  Thanks for the great discussion tonight and see you next week.

Read:  Smoking gun expose of A Million Little Pieces

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory =>Read the overview at the preceding link, and then follow the link on that page and listen to the retraction episode  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction

Blog 5:  Brainstorming for draft 2 for the long essay.  Try listing some of the feelings/ideas you want your essay to be about, identifying "scenes" to create the experience of those feelings/ideas, listing some metaphors in your feelings & ideas that will "carry" your concept.  This may not be the way you usually write - but see what you can do with it.

2.18 Things you would never write about, workshop, Monopoly

Note: The schedule for conferences has its own post (see previous).

In-class writing. The writing prompt for this class was to make a list of "things you would never write about."  This prompt is not original to this class - or even this genre - and it is a great place for scanning the landscape of what is there to write about, and considering what is "between us and what we have to write about".

After you wrote and pondered for about 10 minutes, we started a list of descriptors for the things you would never write about.  You weren't asked to say exactly what it was you wouldn't write - just to describe/name the why or what that makes the topic not possible.  Our list looked like this.

Descriptions of why/what stops writing

Important people might get angry

I might hurt someone I love

Being embarassed

Too intense

Unbearable

Too afrad

Not part of my life  - belongs to someone else

Afraid I will be judged

Overdone - too many stories like this

Illegal

It’s not my story (except that it is)

Death

Violence

Gossip/slander

Religion

Politics

Shame

Regrets

Open secret within a relationships (something that someone you care about doesn’t want to know)

Internal thoughts about someone\

About the dead

Envy

What is between you and writing certain topics. As we continued to talk about this and to notice issues associated with our topics, we noted that many of the obstacles had to do with audience issues or with the material being too intense. So, after classifying the categories in our list - you went back to your personal lists to notice whether you decided a topic was "unwritable" primarily for audience or inside you (intensity) reasons.  This offered a few surprises, some affirmations, and more questions.  

As discussion continued, we noted that our classification of audience v internal (intensity) was not the only way to classify relationships to unwritable topics.  We noted that sometimes it was because our material was "in-process" = that we were not yet ready to have an audience for what we had to say about certain feelings, actions, beliefs and so on.  This was interesting - because in some sense, CNF is about writing about in-process material.  Another observation was that sometimes a topic was unwritable in terms of our personal integrity - who we wanted to be as a writer.  And while this relates to audience - in some very real ways it is more about who we are/what we believe/what we want to put into the world - and that is more internal, but not about emotion or intensity.  

We could have spent more time on this, and it might be useful for each of us to spend more time with our lists.  Choosing material is an important part of the writing process.  This exercise was in part to give us some practice making those choices intentional - rather than automatic reactions.  

Workshop.  From walking around to your groups - sounded like this went well.   If you want to work on/further revise your piece in light of  your group feedback - feel free to do so.  I will start reading drafts Thursday AM and will give you my feedback in our conference.

The Search for Marvin Gardens.  

This discussion identified the three threads/narrative lines in McPhee's essay:1) playing the game Monopoly with comments on the strategies/practices/objects of play; 2) walking through Atlantic City, noticing the urban decay, on a search for Marvin Gardens; 3)  historical commentaries on how Atlantic City was built (and by whom).  These three strands were broken up into segments that were interspersed among one another.

You noted early in the discussion of what the essay was about that : it was about money but not about money, and that the point was made through the relationships between/among the different threads.  Yep,  That's it.  You got it.  Though we spent about 15 more minutes looking at how McPhee built the particular meaning he builds in this story.  The point the three threads were contemplating is set up in the title, metaphorically - with Marvin Gardens standing in for the middle class (though we don't know that until he makes the connection in the very last sectdion).  The essay is  in many ways about the absence of a middle class and all three threads lead to a contemplation on the importance of economic and political and social structures associated with a middleclass, McPhee accompanies us in a contemplation of Monopoly (the game), monopoly (as it was practiced by the "robber barons" of industry at the turn of the last centuy) and monopoly (the consequences, as seen in Atlantic City). He does not preach at us or argue with us. Rather, he tells us stories that take us to there.

****One important thing to notice in McPhee's essay is that his idea/contemplation - the role of the middle class in creating sustainable communities - is at the center of his essay. That idea, not the stories themselves, drive the essay's organization and selection of material. CNF certainly includes powerfully rendered scenes, characters, and settings, but at the center of the essay is its idea.

As you think about how to revise your essays, give some thought to what idea you are exploring.  How did this story make you grow/feel/see the world differently?  What idea(s) does your story embody?  Use those ideas/themes/contemplations to focus the way you tell your story: the particular material you select, the organization, and the way you portray it.

For next week:
Read: Cofer: p.54, "Silent dancing"; "The Patch" by John McPhee (sent to you in your kean email)

Blog 4: Write some reflections on writing about unwritable material.  What kinds of filters direct you to choos topics?  Does becoming aware of your filters re-shape those filters? Anything on your list which you are thinking might - after all - be worth spending some time with?

Conferences

I think I have these mostly right. If you don't see your name, or if you need to re-schedule - send me an email.

Wednesday, 2.19
3:45 Danielle

Thursday, 2.20.14
10:30 Jennifer, 11:00 Adrian, 1:00 David

Monday, 2.24.14
2:00 Joanna, 3:00 Megan, 3:30 Sharyn

Tuesday 2.25.14
10:00 Brianne, 3:30 Ashley, 4:00 Graig; 4:30 Michele, 5:00 Becky

2.11 Scene and subject; Segmented essays

Descriptions of place.  We started class with a writing exercise where you listed important places in your life = places where things happened to you. You then picked one of those places and characterized events (or a single event) that happened in that place.  Finally, you wrote a description of the place (set the scene) where your "story" (what happened) would take place - thinking carefully about how to describe this place/setting in a way that puts your reader in the emotional landscape where you what her/him to be.   The idea was to work on description as a tool both for storytelling and conceptualizing. Thanks to those of you who shared your jottings and drafts - you did a great job!

Brainstorming for Draft 1. The middle section of class was devoted to workshopping your ideas for your first draft (check out the assignment sheet to the right).  I moved from group to group and checked in on the "compelling stories" and "concepts" (emphasized in Lott's definition) and it sounds like you have great material and some good reflections on the "aboutness" of these stories.  I'm looking forward to reading the drafts.  I hope to get to the blogs to comment on the brainstorming sometime before the weekend- just in case my comments might be useful.

Segmented essays.  We spent the rest of the class talking about segmented essays, We looked at Robert Root's classification of the different kinds of segmented essays (p.328).  As you noted when you tried to apply his categories to the sample essays we read - the categories can overlap, and naming the kind of segmentation used by an essay is not so important as understanding how writers use the gaps between the segments (the white space, headings, etc that make a separation between sections that is slightly more pronounced than the separation between paragraphs).

You then worked in groups to identify how Schwartz, Pope, and Kahn used segments (each in a different way) as part of their meaning-making process.  As you noted, the segmentation in the essays ADDED an additional layer of meaning that wouldn't have been there or would have been less forceful without the divisions between the segments.  Our discussion was very rushed but I felt you did a great job of thinking about the role played by segments in each of the pieces we disucssed.

The Kahn group did not get a chance to report -but they did a great job in their group talk.  Kahn uses a kind of accumulation.  She tells different parts of the story associated with the man in the hospital room, before the operation, during the operation, and after (which is a kind of narrative sequence) but the "feeling" of what organ harvesting does - the progressive de-humanization of the body - accumulates.  While she does not come out and directly state that organ donation is wrong - the concluding sentences of each of her 3 sections posed an ever-less-hopeful picture of the practice.

As the group reported (good job!) Schwartz used 6 sections to show the changing relationships to family history of the narrator and her father.  In the first section, the daughter was fully American with little or no connection (and some resentment) to Rindheim, which her father  held up as an idyllic past.  During the trip to Germany, as the family moves from the town, to the Synagogue (now church) to the graveyard, the father remembers the reality of the Holocaust and lets go the romanticized vision of his past so much so that in the final segment he has joined a golf club.  In contrast, the daughter slowly realizes that the town she so resented in childhood was the home to generations of her family - that somehow she belonged to it and it belonged to her.  It is as if, segment by segment, the father and daughter move into new relationships with their pasts and America.  They do not exactly trade places - but there is a kind of growth for both - which takes them to new variations of one another's former beliefs.

As reported by the Pope group, Teacher Training matched up with multiple patterns from Root's classification.  She used 8 pairs of 2 segments to show what she learned about being a teacher from an experience with an "unfavorite" teacher.  The idea of "training" is only in the title, and it is built into (implied) into the essay through the structure.

Extra observation:  We noted that titles were extremely important for setting up the focus of these essays.

For next class: 

Read: McPhee, p. 128, "Search for Marvin Gardens"

Blog 3:  Draft Long essay 1

2.4 Definitions of CNF- Lott, Gutkind and you

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 getting a quick list of "who you are" along with another list of "experiences from my life".  We started out with listing "who you are" in terms of what you like/dislike; believe/don't believe; wonder about/are sure about. . .not a real definite boundary on this list - eh?  The second list was of "things that have happened to you" - anything.  I started out with "startling" things - but that was not what we were going for - just anything that comes up.

The idea in this brainstorming is that it gives you a place to start in terms of an "aboutness" (who you are, something you came to believe or wonder about) and a story (something that happened to you).  Although we didn't get back to the last exercise I had planned after we talked about the assignment & Lott & Gutkind's definitions = the idea was that you might look at your two lists in light of one another.  A CNF essay is about a concept (something you are realizing, thinking about, trying to make sense of) and your past experience as an illustration/vehicle for contemplating that idea.  Some essays are more story (Beard), and some are more "about" (Ebert).  The importance is the rich connetions between the two.  So I though if you had list of concepts (who you are) and experiences - you might mix and match?  Start wondering about what experineces led you to which beliefs?  how you came to think/be some of the things on your list and what it means that you did?

Long Essay 1 & 2.  We then went over the assignment sheet for the long essays (posted to the right).   IF you have questions - let me know.

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 through our analysis/observations about the 4 essays you read 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 the way toward the profound (to answer for our lives). And in between these two poles he points out its inclusion of 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 for will necessarily need to be carefully crafted - and that was what Gutkind's piece was about. 

Gutkind offered a 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 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.  ie acknowledging that you don't remember exactly what was said, or pointing out that you compress some time here - because you can't remember it as separate. . . .

In terms of writing work which may upset 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 2: Invention writing for essay 1
By this time, your writing journals (hopefully) have some lists, some descriptions,maybe 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 we will talk about your ideas - and make 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.

Thanks for your good talk tonight! See you next week.