10.29 Journal mining and more about truth

We started class with some work on coming up with a title for the revised long piece.  We noted that the title sets up or frames the essay for the reader in important ways.  It both gives the main idea away by stating it outright, but because the reader has so little context, often s/he does not "get it" until s/he has read the whole essay - when the title can take on a deep rich resonance with the ideas, events, and feelings from the essay.  Think of how "The Patch," "Silent Dancing," "Out There," and "Stripped for Parts"  told us about what the essay was about on multiple levels.

The revised essays are due next week, as a blog post.

Mining your journal.  The writing prompt tonight was really more of a reflective analysis.  I asked you to look back through your in-class writing to look for patterns.  I asked you to look for any kind of pattern that came up.  They might be patterns in content, emotions, or the particular materials you worked with.

Content: repeated ideas or subject materials.  These may involve different material - but evoke the same themes or topics.
Emotions: is there a dominant emotion in your entries?  We did some work earlier where you made a list and noticed yoru dominant emotion.  Was the emotion for that list the dominant emotion for your journal as a whole?
Particulars: do you refer to the same people, places and things = across ideas and feelings?

Your observations of patterns included: lots of references to family, mothers, coming of age, relailizations, jobs, co-workers, relationships.
There were also some observations about persona - some of you presented your selves as listeners, watchers.  Others noticed that they presented experience as "not one thing or another" but the good mixed up with the bad,  and/or with time mixed up (moments stretched into multiple events or longer times).  Or you noticed the kinds of experiences you wrote about: "can't explain" or "don't understand" (not sure what happened) expereinces, or stories about me + a man.   Another observation was that the WAY you wrote changed as you wrote into an entry - that as you approached the emotion of the experience, the writing kind of fell apart.  Some of us write questions, some of write tragedies and comedies.

So what do we make of this?  Journal mining can be used to get a glimpse of your unpremeditated self.  It might suggest what you are interested in, how you represent things, what you are stuck on (or not); what you might want to write about that you are not letting yourself write and what motivates you to write the things that you do write.

The point of this exercise is to think of journals as a snapshots of who we are.  They portray what we are thinking, feeling, wondering about at a particular point in time.  And that allows us to see ourselves - from the new perspective of where we are.

More about truth and creative nonfiction

We talked briefly about Jill Talbert abd Dinty Moore's discussion of truth in creative nonfiction, and then came up with a set of general points in the debate.
1. It's the truth that counts.
changing minor details doesn't change the larger truth versus all details are part of the larger truth and or why change them?
2. CNF as a label makes a contract with readers for a certain kind of "truth"= no lies
Nobody expects 100% truth, all truth is selectve and memory is partial, versus writers should tell the best truth they can tell, no intentional lies, and there are writerly ways to confess and finesse when info is missing or uncertain
3. CNF is a literary form and therefore has certain obligations to the way the piece sounds (the art of the sentences/words).
truth can ruin prosody versus there are many writerly alternatives to lying
4. What is important is the lived truth - not necessarily the facts.
truth is what you remember versus checking facts, revisiting memories with other witnesses can create fuller more valuable truth

We argued both sides of all these general statements - and then you took some time to write a personal position statement on "truth" in creative nonfiction.

Short essays:
At the end of class we took a few minutes to take a look at the assignment sheet for the short essays. You have the option to create multimedia pieces - or to stick with text.  For your brainstorming for Blog 9, I encouraged you to think about medium and content - and to cast a wide net.  If you have an idea you'd like to try but are unsure of how to realize(create it as a multimodal text) put it out there and your classmates and I will be there with some ideas.

For next class:
Read:  Lord, "I met a man," p. 115; Braner, "Soundtrack," p. 29;  McNight, "Mother's Day," p 120;  look around Mike Steinberg's blog http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog.htm (don't forget to read the comments), Bresland, "Les Cruel Shoes," p. 31 (read it first in your book - and then check out http://vimeo.com/17548246 Les Cruel Shoes)  

Blog 9: Post Brainstorming Short essay 1
Blog 10:  Revised (best) Long Essay


Thanks again for the great class - and see you next week!

10.22 Creative Nonfiction and writing the "truth"

We started class by listing the lies James Frey put into his memoir.  We then classified the lies in terms of what we felt were the most damaging, and then we ranked them (starred entries had the highest ranking).

Frey lies:
conneected himself to the train accident
special relationship to girl who died
closeness to the family of the girl who died
**made himself the "third victim"
**drug addict, alcoholic, rebel, troublemaker, dealer => makes himself into a romantic hero
made policeman "fat" + aggressive
made jail term longer, changed charges
claims multiple arrests + long jail sentences
wanted in 3 states
**got jailtime reduced by a judge influenced by a ganster
hit a cop
crack use/dealing
set record for blood alcohol
**story about Lily - who died for love of him (creates fictional woman = romantic heroine)
**rehab not necessary = went cold turkey
air plane/vomiting bleeding
root canal without anaesthetic
trip to France
**lied about lying
books he read to Porterhouse (Leonard)
said he was suicidal
creates persona of self that matches a romantic hero
maximum security prison

We did not agree exactly on the ranking, but we seemed to be in the same ballpark in terms of what kinds of lies were most egregious in CNF:
lies that perpetuated damaging (and probably untrue?) stereotypes about people (women who die without their man,thugs with a heart of gold), institutions (the police, government)
lies that may touch the lives of real, struggling people (quitting drugs cold turkey)
lies that re-write or damage the lives of real individuals (lying about the connection to the girl who died in the train accident, lying about the policeman);
and lies about lying => lies that compromise the way readers regard creative nonfiction.

The discussion of Daisey was not so extensive, but we identified a short list of lies that raised similar (and different) issues.

Daisey lies:
security guards guns
solvent/shanking
union meeting at starbucks
moment with translator
worker with ipad
workers talked to him in English
lied about lying

We summed up the differences by suggesting that Frey lied to sell his book, a menoir, and that he (under inescapably exposure) owned up to the lies and didn't really justify them (after he stopped lying).

Daisey told his lies for a "higher truth" connected to social justice, and he put his work forward as  journalizm, though after he was caught, he switched to representating it as art as a rationalization for rounding corners, changing facts, and telling outright lies.

At the end of class you wrote a list of  times you've been lied to.  After you had your list, you chose one or two incidents, and considered:

motivation
power dynamics
who benefits
how it plays out

And, we talked about it.

As usual.  this write up does not do justice to the discussion.  What a great class. Thanks!

Conference schedule:
Monday 10/27: MaryEllen 12:00; Matt 3:30; Christina 4:00
Tuesday 10:28:  Patrice12:30  ; Holly 1:00.
Wednesday: 2:00 Cristal; 2:45 Briana; 3:30 Patricia; 4:00 Florie (if you still want a conference after the comments)

After class: Melissa + Osza.

For next class:

Read: Jill Talbert http://brevity.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/border-crossings-fiction-and-the-literature-of-fact/

Dinty Moore  http://brevity.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/what-is-given-against-knowingly-changing-the-truth/

http://ww

Blog 7: Write some notes about which essay you will revise, and what you will do to revise it.

See you next week!

10.15 Workshop, and introduction to journalism, CNF and => LIES

What we did in class.

Brainstorming:  scenes by focus
1. started by writing a list of ideas/realizations/feelings that you might want to use as the focus/aboutness for an essay = what you want your reader to "know" after s/he reads your essay.  This is not necessarily something that can be said in a word or even a sentence, so we will designate it as *****.
2.write the places, times, feelings, incidents, people associtaed with/important to ****.
3. write what you want to tell someone, what you want your reader to know related to *****
4. as you think about /write into 3, you might add to the places, times, feelings, incidents, people list for 2, and you might even slightly edit, add to, or revise 1 in light of more in-depth thinking about what you want to tell your reader
5.  write a scene that will get the reader to feel/know what you wrote in 4.  Use materials from 1-4 to develop this.  In this piece of writing, use description, setting, characterization - but NOT reflective narration where you interpret or tell what the scene means.   

Moving back and forth between directed writing for focus/scenes and the particular needs of a draft can help to sharpen & develop the focus for the piece.  You can also use it to create specific scenes - for the intro or conclusion or to develop one aspect of your focus.  Finally, you can also use it as a beginning brainstorming technique, to generate materials/find something you want to write about.  

Workshop
The last part of class you workshopped whatever you had so far for Long Essay 2.  You designated a timekeepr to make sure everyone had time to work on their piece, and then followed (approximately) the following protocol.

The group reads the author's brainstorming/plan.
1. Author presents an overview of the piece/the form & focus = what s/he is trying to accomplish.
2.  Author describes what kind of feedback s/he is looking for,
3. Conversation between author & peers about how to work on the piece
Talk about audience!
4.  Who do you see as the audience for this piece?
5.  What in your piece (focus/scenes/style) do you think will interest this audience the most?
6. How have you made this focus available to your audience?
7.  How might you make this piece more effective for your audience?


For 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

A complete transcript is available at: http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retraction_Transcript.pdf

As you read the reports on Frey and Daisey = pay attention to: the kinds of lies Frey and Daisey  told; and why the authors told those lies (not "to get famous/published", which is the obvious answer=> but why did they tell THOSE particular lies, how did telling the different kinds of lies change the way readers received their writing?).  Then, think about whether it matters  that they told those lies.

Blog 7: Due Draft long essay 2

I will be writing feedback for Blogs 4,5 & 6 over the weekend - so if you want feedback on your brainstorming, make sure it is posted.

10.8 Brainstorming for Essay 2 and more about form

We started class with an exercise on moments of realization.  You did a freewrite - not so much to get material but to open up your mind - get the editor turned off, and then you wrote a list of reailzations.  Points in your life, moments in time when you knew something more or differently after what ever that point in your life was.  After you wrote your list we talked through the different kinds of realizations we had:

• about parents - that they are human
• about loss and how we try to avoid it but avoiding it cuts out so much of what we cherish
• about unexpected feelings of sadness brought on by seeing something in particular (a short funeral procession)
• about how we are really just like that person who does that thing we can't stand (we do it too)
• how we can go to the same place and see more of it - that we never really see all that is there and it will be different each time we go to it
• how someone is not the person we thought they were but if we think about it they were always the way we see them now only we couldn't "see" it
• how someone had a different interpretation of what they said or did than we understood (the story about the phone number)
• that some people do things right in front of our face that we interpret as OK but when we think about it - it's not quite right (the priest story)
• how we often assume behavior is normal and act accordingly and forget that some people are really different

After talking through these realizations, you wrote a "scene" from in or around the moment when you realized whatever it was.  The place, the people, your thoughts and feelings, any conversation you remember.  Then I asked to you look at the details you provided, and pointedly ask yourself what you left out, or if there were any other ways of representing what you put down, if there were things you weren't sure of, or if there was someone else who was there and if they would represent it differently.

Below is a list of what you noticed about your representations of your "moments of realization."

hazy on the details
tendency to leave out the hard stuff
leave out what confilicts with our ideas of what happened
leave out people things that seem "inconsequential" to the focus
leave out interpretatons
hazy on the feelings
can't recall the context (cause) 


We then had a short discussion of what this process of identifying moments of realization, writing the details/a scene of that realization, and then noting the features of your representation can do for you as part of a brainstorming process.  We noted that this kind of a process might be particularly important when writing about material that we are particularly invested in.  Good enough.

During the last section of class we talked about The Patch, and Silent Dancing in terms of how they were "built" and how the structure created the meaning.  

The Patch and Silent Dancing.
We talked about these two essays.  I meant to get to some more detailed analysis of how the structure worked but we didn't quite get there. First we generated a list of what the essays were "about" = the ideas or feelings that operated as a kind of center for the stories/material the author presented.  Then we puled out some of the recurring images or metaphors the author resorted to in his/her telling of the story. 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 placed in our way, as if, they are orchestrating an experience of reading an essay which will allow us to see the thoughts and feelings evoked by their writing both in terms of our own experiences, and theirs. 

For next week:
Blog 6: Brainstorming for Long Essay 2

Next class will be devoted to work on drafting long essay to, so come to class with some material to work with.

10.1 Things I'd never write about and Monopoly

Conference schedule (if I have you in the wrong slot or you need to switch - let me know):
Monday, October 6: Christina 12:30; Stephanie 1:00   Cristal 4:30; Florie 5:00
Wednesday, October 8: Patricia 3:00; Briana 3:30; Holly 4:00

Things I Won't Write About List.  We started class by making a list of stories you would never write about.  After you had your lists, we talked about the "kinds of things" (categories) you wouldn't write about.    This is more or less what we came up with:

done with it
shameful
conflict with identity
gross
sexuality
too scary
rather forget about it
victim
too private
not ready to write about
religious stories
not my story
not right (ownership or voyeuristic issues)
fear of cultural reprisals

As we talked through this list, we noticed that many of these categories (shameful, identity conflicts, sexuality, too scary, want to forget about, victim stories, private) actually correspond (in a general way) with the kinds of things CNF writers write about: personal, private, contested materials contemplated with the relentless interrogation described in Lott's essay.   We also noted, (or at least I admitted), that reading "true" essays on this topic can be extremely valuable to readers - that writers who take on these topics perform a service in a very real sense.

I haven't really captured the complexity of this discussion - you raised considerations about audience and the problems that public writing encounters in terms of presenting a "self" to a broader range of people than your story might actually be directed toward (as with the religious stories), and you pointed out that in some sense decisions about what to write about often hang on whether or not you have something important to say on the topic - and whehter or not you feel it is "worth saying".   So I am hoping that whatever you took away from this exercise is in your notebooks, and that you keep this list, and go back to it.  Just in case there is material here worth contemplating.

We didn't make the "why do this exercies" that we usually do at the end of the opening prompts - mostly because we had already gone over the allotted by 15 minutes, so I will pose that question here. How might it be useful to you to reflect on materials you "won't consider" writing about?  What might looking at the kinds of topics you put on this list tell you about yourself as a writer?  In what ways might it help you re-consider ideas that otherwise would have remained out of bounds, and is this worthwhile? 

This was a great discussion.  

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 : 

the competitive play took the fun out of the game

it was all about competition and winning

it tells the story of McPhee walking through Atlantic city - seeing poor parts of town/all broken down

he is "living" a monopoly game finding the real places from the board

And you pointed out that the juxtaposition and paralles in the focus of the segments imply connections among the game play, the condition of Atlantic City, and the city's history. 

You spent about 15 more minutes looking at how McPhee built his essay.  We noted that the points the three threads were contemplating were 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 guides 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 get us to "feel" or intuit his conclusion.

As pointed out at the end of the discussion, this essay was first published in the New Yorker, and the indirectness of the point may have made this argument more palatable to that magazine's readers.

I chose this essay as the reading for the day we did the "things I would never write about" prompt in the hopes that the way it presents its "subject" might be useful to you in exploring/articulating/presenting to an audience topics that might feel contested or uncomfortable.  By making his points indirectly - through intertwining related stories - McPhee enlists his reader in creating (exploring) the takeaway for his essay =>  the reader has to come up with what the juxtapositions/parallel stories "mean".  This allows for a less didactic, more open consideration of the subject material; and for topics we are not ready to write, or that we feel shamed by or fear cultural judgment about - this might be a possible way to open a conversation.

For next week:

Read:  Cofer, p.54, Silent Dancing; "The Patch" by John McPhee (link sent through email)

Blog 5: plans for revising Long essay 1

Monopoly