9.24 Thinking about your stories & segmentation

Announcements: We started class with a reminder that the blogs you post are public documents, and that you need to consider content (nothing illegal or anything that might compromise your future) of your writing.

We then previewed  the way McPhee uses segments in "The Search for Marvin Gardens",  You noticed that at the beginning he moves between descriptions of playing Monopoly, and walking through Atlantic City - the place with the streets/places that that gave the Monopoly properties their names.  He later includes sections which fill in the history of the game and theories of game play, as well as the history of Atlantic City.  As you read this essay, notice how the sections work together to develop a "meaning" - really a set of interrelated meanings - that work more effectively than if he pounded readers with his points.

And, you signed up for conferences (schedule at the end of this post).  If you need to change your time - send me an email

Activity to reflect on your predispositions in telling stories (about yourself)
We started with you writing 3 adjectives to describe your self.

Then I asked you to mak a big list of the k stories  you tell about yourself.  And you did.  After everyone had at least 10 stories, I asked you to classify the stories in terms of the following questions/features.

1. Did you edit your list or jsut put down every story that came to mind?
2. Classify your audience: close friends/family = intimate audience; for a rhetorical purpose; anybody= good story,
3. Describe the dominant feeling
4. Were you active or/passive?  Did you act upon events and make them happen, or were you responding to events/people acting on you.
5. Was your story resolved or unresolved?
6. Which pieces would make a good CNF piece for you?

You then did some reflecting on yours classifications, and you shared a description of patterns you noticed in the kinds of stories you told.  In this discussion, each of you presented a slightly different profile in the kinds of stories you told to represent yourself. .There were not good or bad patterns - what was important was for you to notice what your patterns were.

For the final part of the exercise, you went back to the adjectives you used to describe yourself and noticed  how the adjectives  did or didn't connect to the features of the stories you tell about yourself.

We observed that the only one who can interpret what these similarities/differences mean  is you, because  the request for  adjectives to describe yourself (at the beginning of class) was in a sense a request for a story meant for a particular audience, and only you know what audience you imagined. At the same time, this reflection might suggest some of the differences in the way you "tell" your self (through a set of assessments in the form of adjectives) and the way you "show" yourself (as a story).

Why would you do this exercise?  What does it tell you?
1. what kinds of stories you have a tendency to tell about yourself, and in light of that, what you might block from yourself
2. CNF is writing about yourself = examine the kinds of stories you have a tendency to tell
3. examining differences between how you would "tell" your self and how you would "show" yourself.
4.illustrating the differences between showing and telling
5. begin to think about the different ways you tell your stories for different audiences
6. think about why you tell the stories you do and for what purposes (why you write)
7. be conscious of the implications of a story

Analysis of segmented essays
You divided into groups to analyze the three essays you read.  Each group was asked to do the following.
1. Noticing what is there: What do the segments look like?  how many sections?

2. Interpreting how sections work: What does each section do (what is its function)? how do they create the flow of the narrative?  how do the sections contribute to the story?

3.  Generalizing how the sturcture works:  How does the structure contribute to the meaning?

Teacher Training
regular font + italicized = alternates
regular - expereinces in classroom as a teacher in the present
italicized, in the past, in the 5th grade, experiences with Mrs. Crane

Transitions from experience as teacher to experiences as a student, each paring illustrates what she learned from her experience as a student

Segments work in pairs, to make a series of XX experiences
Sequential AND interconnected

Below are my notes from your reports on what the essays "did"

Stripped for Parts
3 segments
each of the three segments focuses on organ donation from a diffrent focus

1. background and research + focus on dead man
2. organ donation in gnerl and set in ICU
3. surgery + where the organs are goingmore or less unfavorable presen

works as a story, points are there but not in your face
the last sentence of each section casts an unfavorable prespective


My Father Always Said
sections are clear and separate but not stark like they are in Pope.  Facilitate the flow of the story as a progression.  Each segment is related to the next, build on one another,segments are chronological,
set in a dual perspective = Schwartz and Father with respect to how they feel about their past
they approach that past from different perspective: Father re-;iving it, Schwarts discovering it
Their perspectives on their past change
Father goes from idealizing past = to letting it go
Schwartz goes from not caring about her past to valuing it

Workshop:
You only had about 10  minutes left,  So I asked you to use your time in your groups to talk to each other about what kind of feedback you would like on your brainstorming - feedback to help you work the piece into a complete draft - as well as some conversation about what kind of feedback you DON'T want.

Groups were as follows.
Patrice, Osza, Cristal, Holly
Melissa, Christina, Brianna, Mary Ellen
Patricia, Matt, Stephanie, Florie

Then - give comments to the people in your group.  Be sure to edit Blog 3 to include a request for the kind of feedback you want.  That way I will have some direction in writing comments.

Finally, here is the conference schedule:
Monday, Septermber 29:  Stephanie, 12:30;  Mary Ellen 4:00; Osza 4:30
Tuesday, September 30:  Patrice1:00
Wednesday, October 1:  Matt 4:00  Melissa 7:30
Monday, October 6: Holly 12:30, Flora 4:00; Cristal 4:30
Wednesday, October 8: Patricia 3:00; Christina 7:30

For next week:

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

Blog 4:  Draft Long essay 1

I will try to give you some feedback on Blog 3 soon enough so that it might be of some use to you as you draft your essays.  If you want your feedback ASAP - send my an email and I will put you at the top of the list.

What a great class this was!   Thank you for your awesome participation.

Book Drive

Sigma Tau Delta is partnering with Reach Out and Read to collect books for children from infancy through age 5. Reach Out and Read prepares America's youngest children to succeed in school by partnering with doctors to prescribe books and encourage families to read together.

Please help us nurture literacy by donating books appropriate for children through age 5 to the English Department Office located on the 3rd floor of CAS September 22 - September 25.

 

See attached flyer for information about Reach Out and Read.

For more information on the book drive or Sigma Tau Delta, please contact us at sigmataudeltakean@gmail.com.

www.reachoutandread.org

9.17 Active imagination and finishing up definitions

At the beginning of class we started off with some "brilliant statements" to sum up what creative nonfiction is or does, and you came up with the following.

CNF has a measure of truth, is life written down; is a way to keep from passig away altogether the life we have lived; has standards for reliability; makes stories that put readers in an active role (works the reader); places one's sef in relation to the subject at hand.  Nice - and I appreciate the strategic references to the readings for this week.

Active imagination.  We spent the next chunk of classtime working on another technique for indirect brainstorming.  For this practice, you closed your eyes and got to the "watching" state like last week, only once you got there you intentionally called up a dream place and interacted with what came up.  You seemed to make good use of this approach - and it was only your first time!   In our discussion afterwards you came up with the following list of reasons for why you might want to resort to this practice.

• to access the past (supplement what you remember in your more conscious mind)
• to see how you feel => going there & watvching
• to look at differnt points of view + details
• to more fully understand/relate to characters=maybe people from life look differently in your dreams
• to open up to things you wouldn't otherwise think about
• to gain a more focused & directed look into your "unconscious" than you get from the "just being there" meditation
• to connects to nonverbal thought

Long Essay Assignment (posted to the right).At the beginning of the second half of class we looked at the assignment sheet.  I'm hoping this gives you enough direction so so you can get started on your first long essay.  If you still have questions - don't worry, we will come back to this sheet as we work through the drafting process.

Brainstorming.  After going over the assignment you spent some time looking for an idea.  I suggested that you go through your journal, or develop a list of possible topics through some other process - and then evaluated the possibilities in terms of which ones would give you both: a concept/focus, and some good stories to develop that focus.  As we talked through some of the examples you came up with we noticed how this part of the invention process involves moving back and forth between the stories and the concept to see how the materials work together.  It also involves looking for "natural" connections between the subject material in the stories and the concepts associated with your central idea.  For example, Melissa's story about going to the grand canyon with her family and the differet family members having different interests (associated with age/identity) seemed a good match for the Grand Canyon's layers of stone from different time periods, next to on another but distinct = each embodying a different system.

Lott & Gutkind.  You did an amazing job summing up these two readings in the 15 minutes we left for them.  Clearly you read and understood them.  You pulled out important points from each.  We will definitely be returning to the discussion of "compression" and "responsibility to innocent victims" from Gutkind, and to the list of points identified by Lott. These readings were meant to put out a frame for you both to acknowledge and push against as you write.

For next class:

Read: Schwartz, p. 194, Pope,388, Kahn, p. 95 => as you read these essays, notice how the authors use segments: their purpose, and how the structures effect those purposes.

Blog 3: invention writing for Long essay 1.  This post should include writing to dig into both the concept and the stories you will use to develop that concept; this writing does not need to be in "polished form" - rather it should provide a bases for opening a conversation where you work with your classmates to further refine your essay's central idea & to explore & identify stories that will open up that idea.  If  you get stuck - do some writing about what you want to do, why you are stuck, and if possible pose some questions.

9.10 Indirect brainstorming and analyzing creative nonfiction

Indirect brainstorming. We started class with some exploration of what I think of a indirect brainstorming.  A lot of brainstorming taught in writing courses is about developing ideas for a specific purpose.  Indirect brainstorming is more about spending some time inside your thoughts and feelings and watching what comes up.  Time spent in these kinds of processes helps in two ways.  It gives you some experience noticing what you are thinking/feeling; and it allows you to recognize and accumulate writing about ideas/feelings/thoughts/stories that are "in" you.  Think of it as pro-active brainstorming.  It puts you in a position where you might be able to  "look up" (in your journal) writing your thoughts on a topic - rather than generating it specifically for an assignment.

Variation on meditation.   IOur first exercise was to sit quietly with eyes closed and simply notice what passes through our mind -without judging or trying to control our thoughts in any way.  We did this together, for 5 minutes.  After sitting, I asked you to write about your experience - what you "saw" and how it felt.

Your reflections on the experience were about:
noticing the external world
feelings of sleepiness - in a daze - awareness of level of awakeness
realizing that you are alone in our head => can yell and scream in here and no one will know
chains of association: heart beat=> girl friend=>responsibilities
body sensations (feel hands disappear)
connections to music
visuals associations to places = see some place from past images => projecting into the future
image from recent experience (digital clock)

This is all pretty regular.  You also noticed that sometimes your ideas were more vivid.  Some of you had "thoughts" visually - for others it was in language.  There was curiosity and worry, and a wish not to think some of the things you were thinking.  Thoughts jumped around - followed by association.  And feelings were attached to thoughts.  This list reflects what many people notice in this kind of experience.

In our discussion of why we might want to spend time sitting and watching what comes up in our minds, we noticed that this kind of "brainstorming" can help access the unconscious; it can turn of the noise/editor in our heads and make room so we can see what is there in the quiet.  We also noted that it can work to  put the on-going narration of self on pause - so that we might actually have a moment to re-see ourselves outside those narratives.  We also noted that it could promote creativity by opening up new channels for "thinking" other than in words.  What came into your head took the form of images, sounds, movement, felt understanding, sensations AND words.   We also noted that this form of invention/gathering material could take some of the stress out of writing.  It can be a part of writing that is not so hard.  Along a similarline, it can also make a safe place to encounter ideas/feelings that might be too scary/difficult to deal with in words and outside of our own head.  So there are lots of reasons for engaging in indirect/meditative forms of invention.

Sensual association.  The second brainstorming activity was to associate to our sensual memories: smells, sounds, touches, sights and tastes.  In our talk, smells were particularly evocative.  As set up in the introduction to this exercise - memory is deeply associated with the senses.  Researchers have found that when we re-member our past, our nervous system actually re-feels the experience.  That makes sensory association an important technique for brainstorming - and for writing powerfully evocative prose.

Analysis of features of creative nonfiction.
During the second part of class you worked in groups to identify the "essential" features of the fourssample CNF pieces we read - and to note some of the things they did but that were necessarily essential to making them CNF.  I asked you to look at the writing in terms of: focus, organization, directness, literariness, word choice, and point of view.

Some of the points you noted (constructed from memory since I didn't get a chance to copy from the board) as essential were as follows:
told a story 
made a point
included real people and places
were descriptive => richly rendered (shown as opposed to told)
constructed in a way best suited to making the main point/exploring an idea (not necessarily chronological)
written in first person (mostly) => but with a broad range of relationships between the narrator and the material

non-essential features included
talk - included dialog or what people said
moved back and forth between showing and telling (between reflecting + telling a story)
included elements of "fiction" 

We didn't quite get finished with this classification,.  As class end I asked for you to think about one quintessential observation you would make about CNF (one brilliant statement).  Spend some time working on that on - and we will start class with some of your insights on what CNF is and what it does at the beginning of class next week.

Also, it said on the calendar that we were going to go over the first assignment (Long Essay - posted to the right), but I decided we would do that next week.  

For next class:
We will continue work on indirect, associative brainstorming and finish discussion of how to define creative nonfiction.

Read: Lott & Gutkind on creative nonfiction (handout in class )

Blog 2:  In light of your evolving definition of CNF, some writing about what experiences from your life you might write about,  and what you might say about them.  (Putting writing up here is not a commitment to a topic: it is practice exploring ideas => like we have been doing in class).  

9.3 What is creative nonfiction?

We started class with a rambling review of the syllabus and calendar.  I hit the main points in a kind of random way.  It's much more organized in the documents themselves - if you have questions, be in touch.

Class introductions.  Writers share their work in writing classes and to do you need  to know the people you are working with - so we spent the first part of class getting to know eachother.  Not just names (though that is important), but a little about who we are.  Because CNF - in many ways - has a contemplation of truth at its center, this introduction exercise was set up as a way for each of us to explore our relationship to lying.  You were to engage in "party" conversation, and in that conversation you were to tell at least one lie. All but two of you got to tell your lies (I cut off the conversation too soon for a couple of you), and the conversation after the "event" provided us with some thoughts about telling the truth/lies.

A couple of you observed that it was hard to lie to people you were going to know and work with - that it is different (maybe even a game/playful?) lying to strangers.  So when you are writing - are you writing to people you have a relationship with (people you "know") or to starngers?  How do you feel about misrepresenting your self and your experience?  Is it OK because it is "creative" . . . or not?

As you talked about your experiences, I noticed that some of you told your stories from inside the talking - as the person who was telling the lie. You reflected on how you felt and what you were thinking.  Others talked about the experience from the role of the audience - watching for the lie, wondering what was true and what was not.  So there were issues of perspective  - our relationship to truth=> whether we were the author or the "reader" of what was (presented as) true.

We also talked about issues of intentional versus unintentional lies - and how unintentional lies were perhaps more "natural" and more difficult to reflect on in our writing (since we don't know we are telling them).

And you learned eachothers names, so that the blog list on the side should call up some faces.

What is creative nonfiction?
During the second part of class we got into a more direct discussion of what creative nonfiction is.  We identified a list of features associated with a list of text which we put out there as possibilities for creative nonfiction works.  These features included:

autobiographical
making a point
real people
real places
description
factual
journalistic - fact based
memoir

. . . and that's a start.  I added that creative nonfiction has a storytelling part, and a reflecting part; and that one defining feature of creative nonfiction is that it is as seen through the author's eyes.  That said - there are a lot of ways to write creative nonfiction (as illustrated by the readings for next class).

You did a little sample journaling toward the end of class. You made a list of things you might write about.  I suggested that you could go for experiences that were/are interesting to you, experiences that make a good story, or that provide what you feel was/is an important revellation.  You shared some of your ideas and it sounds to me like you will have LOTs to write about.  For now - stay open.  Keep adding to your jorunal. Don't choose just yet.

I am still working on revising the blog list.  That should be done by tonight.

For next class: 

Read:  Check out course blog + browse your text and read carefully:  Beard, p. 3,"Out There," Marquart, p. 118, "Some things about that day," Lopate, p,107, "Portrait of my body," Ebert,p.258, "I think I'm musing my mind," (then check out a couple entries + comments on his blog http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/

Blog 1:  Using the sample essays from your text - identify and discuss what you see as features of creative nonfiction, then make a list.  What are the "essential" features?  What are the sometimes there and sometimes not features? What are some of the differences between short and long forms?

And:  Bring your writing journal to class

Thanks for the great class tonight!   See you next week.

Blog 1

In process!

 Because of my teaching schedule (and because I walked to work tonight and just got home and haven't had dinner) I will be completing this post some time tomorrow.

Thanks for the great first class!

First Day of Class

Welcome to ENG 4017/5017: Creative Nonfiction.

As you can see, I have left the posts and the blogs from last term.  If you like - you can look through them to get a feel for how the class will go.  By the end of class today - the links will be to your blogs, and the posts will be for our class.

As it says on the course syllabus & calendar (posted under course documents to the right), we will use this blog as a hub for course communications.  After each class I will post an update of what we did - and the assignment for what to do for the next class. To do well in this class - you will want to check the blog after every class. If it is more than 24 hours after class and I have not yet posted the update - I am hoping one of you will do me the favor of sending me a reminder!  

So we will see how this goes. .