First writing assignment for Intro to Creative Writing

[hani_backup]

Kyle also took this class a few years ago with the same professor. I wonder what he wrote. I remember reading one of his poems, based on sensations, and there was another poem based on a color. I think Kyle chose "white" and talked about sambuca. I wonder if the professor will stick to the same assignments...

For the first one:

Mini-memoir: Bring four copies for workship on TH.

I'm thinking of this as assignment as "memoir as a series of snapshots of short films." You don't need to worry about creating a story at this point, or about whether or not the "snapshot" fit together. Hopefully this assignment will lead you to your longer nonfiction essay: this is practice and exploration time. Your goal is to create (re/create) part of the world you grew up in, to make that world tangible to readers. How do you do that? As Burroway notes, "The trick is that if you write in words that evoke the sense, if your language is full of things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched, you create a world your reader can enter." Burroway provides some suggestions regarding this kind of "essay" in her chapter on Nonfiction, and I've added a couple below based on our recent or upcoming readings and in class writing. Your memoir can be comic or deadly serious. Or both. It can be sweet but wistful. It can be brutal or encouraging. The tone is entirely up to you - tone is, after all, a part of your personality. Work in a style that feels comfortable to you, that feels like you.

Four copies, typed, double-spaced. At least two pages, no more than 4.

Suggestions to choose from:
1) "Tell your life story in three incidents involving hair."
Or-injury, or moving, or moment of humiliation, or friends you've lost touch with, etc.
2) Tell your life story in three (or more) setting regarding the place where you grew up. Try to set your descriptions in different places - e.g. in the house you grew up in, outside the house (yard, neighborhood), and a public place.
3) Ala Hampl: tell 2-3 stories about encounters that are still mysterious to you. Start the way she does, immediately placing us in the moment: "Years ago, in another life, I woke to look out the smeared window of a Greyhound bus I had been riding all night..."
4) Write, in numbered form, a series of memories. Use the abstraction into image exercise from last week if you can. They should be memories that haunt you for some reason. They don't have to have a "good" reason to haunt you. They just do.
5) Notice the kinds of images you were drawn to when you were writing your "image journal" this weekend and write a series of mini-essays on what you noticed and why. What draws your attention to the world? Has this always been the case? Or not? Another way to think about this: can you connect the images you were drawn to with your childhood? Did they "make" you remember anything?

Other guidelines:
* Keep abstractions and generalizations to a minimum.
* Keep voice in mind, but don't worry overly about it. Burroway: "Don't worry about 'finding your voice.' Worry about saying things as clearly, precisely, and vividly as you can...Seek to voice, and your voice will follow."
*This is not a traditional "school essay." Do not provide us with a summing up of why an event was significant or write a five-paragraph theme (introduction, 3 body paragraphs, conclusion).

I will admit some visceral dislike to this "place you grew up in/hometown" theme/question. The Ice-Breaker exercise on the first day of class was interviewing another student. Two of the questions on the handout were "What is your hometown? How would you describe it?" >_> My simple answer was "Malaysia. Hot, humid, delicious food."

Then, the next class we had an in-class assignment of writing "what we were made of" based on our hometown and poet Linda Gregg's describing what she's "made of" of where she grew up. (As an example of writing concrete images.) "For example, I am made of the landscape in northern California where I grew up, made of my father's uninhabited mountain where my twin sister and I spent most of our time as small children with the live oak trees, the stillness, the tall grass, the dry smell of the hot summer air where the red-tailed hawks turned slowly up high, where the two of us alone at ten did the spring roundup of my father's twenty-six winter-shaggy horses. Down below there were salmon in the stream that ran by our house, the life of that stream and the sound of it as we lay in our bunks at night, our goat and the deer standing silently outside in the mist so many mornings when we awoke." I know the professor told us to avoid generalizations or abstract concepts but the first thing I wrote was "I am made of uncertainty built upon..." Grand abstract concept, that, "uncertainty." I envy Linda Gregg for having such vivid memories of a home-town.

Frequent rant, I know. I don't know if a lot of people take it for granted, having a sense and feel of "home" and memories of a school and/or a residence that's more than 3 years, but sometimes I feel they do. They don't really see how lucky they are. Even as they grow older and have different homes where they live with roommates, partners, spouse, family, pets, whatever, they still have a "home" with Mom and Dad (or whatever arrangement of parents and siblings there are). I can't imagine what it feels like moving out from a house you'd lived in for 16-18 years, or living/leaving in a house that's been in your family for generations. I can't fully empathize with the feeling of that kind of broken attachment. I can definitely empathize with the hassle of packing and unpacking, and some of the missing-home/homesickness, but I imagine my magnitude and degree of missing-home is different from theirs.

I also know there are a lot of variance in people's home situations. I'm describing an "ideal" childhood home life where there was no moving, a steady physical thing as a "home" where the parents don't move after the children move out, until they're old or in assisted living, where they can go back for (family) holidays, etc.
~End rant this particular time~

We did some in-class scribbling after she gave us the assignment. I have two memories I know I want to do, but I'm a little uncertain about the third one. And which question I'm answering -- three incidents involving moving, or three settings regarding the place(s) I grew up. *shrug*

We'll see how it goes, eh?

Oh, right! Please excuse typos for the assignment. I re-typed it from the handout she gave us (instead of copying and pasting it from Moodle) and my typing skills aren't fantastic now.

Comments

[big-yellow-moon.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's good to have a "home base." My hometown has already changed a lot-- grammar school torn down to make way for a freeway expansion. Even though it might be gone in a physical sense, you probably have old friends and family to share & exchange memories with.

You think you'll be a "nomad" after college?

[hani.livejournal.com]

I sometimes reminiscence with old classmates on Facebook, but then they stop. And we're quite distanced from one another that sometimes bringing up old memories is a bit weird. We never kept in consistent touch after one of us moved, though IM programs are nice for those moments we catch up.

No idea about after college?

[sorayume.livejournal.com]

Instead of getting frustrated when people ask home related questions, why not just prove how unique your upbringing is and describe the lack of home? I think any teach would accept something about how you are NOT composed of any single town/areas influence readily and it would make for an interesting read for them :)

[hani.livejournal.com]

For these "vignette" like scenes, I'm randomly writing them down. 1996, 2003/2004 and possibly one from 2002 or 2003. Depends.

[suburbaknght.livejournal.com]

I like the different prompts. They're all excellent ways to start a piece like this, but you're right that they don't necessarily relate to "home" for you based on your experiences.

On the other hand, that's a great asset for you as a writer, particularly an American writer (nationality aside, some of the best pieces of American literature have been created my immigrants and temporary residents. You qualify to write American literature). The central defining theme of American literature has been the concept of longing for a home and the central image of that longing has been the Road. The definitive American novel is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is a travelogue set on the Mississippi, set off because Huck couldn't give up his wanderlust adolescence and settle into the home provided for him. Modern American road narratives include everything from Jack Kerouac's On the Road to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

While there are many ways you could approach this topic, my suggestion for future pieces that will explore this theme would be to embrace your lack of grounding. You consider other people lucky for having a place and people to rely on (a sense of stability, perhaps?). Contrast this with experiences in your own life where you were confronted with your own lack of stability. Or, on a more positive note, contrast the sense of stability provided by home with moments you've felt that stability, and perhaps safety, in other circumstances and induced by other stimuli. Or focus on what you would hope for in your own life. Or revel your transient lifestyle.

Whatever path you pick, I suspect you'll produce a more compelling piece than most people writing about their mother's meatloaf.

[hani.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like the breadth of prompts and the different formats.

As far as I know, I've never read much American literature/the American classics. None of the ones you listed, at least...

Yeah, my pieces were pretty disjointed. :P But it's the first assignment! I think if I had to write about my feelings about moving and experiences, it'd be rambly and zig-zaggy ish.

But that's something to think of, the lack of stability or my moments of stability in moments not related to a "home."

[paulliver.livejournal.com]

My grandmother was born in an Iowan farmhouse and lived there for 80 years (aside from four years of college). When she married, her husband moved in. She didn't move out until she couldn't physically take care of such a large house and needed the in-town support system.

I, on the other hand, haven't lived more than three years in the same place since graduating from college. Sometimes longer in the same city for longer, but circumstances might force a move within the city.