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!