Course Title: Open Creative Nonfiction – Life Writing & Memoir

 

Course Tweet (200 characters or less)

To what extent is it possible to capture the self in narrative? How do physical spaces affect that story?

 

Facilitators

Vanessa Gennarelli, vanessa.gennarelli@gmail.com

Vanessa Gennarelli is a Project Manager at Flat World Knowledge, where she edits open-source textbooks for courses in higher education.  She received her B.A. in English and Gender and Women’s Studies from Grinnell College, where she facilitated the student-run writers’ group Prozac and Cornflakes.  She’s workshopped at Ragdale Writer’s Colony, the American University of Paris, and the University of Iowa.  Her original poetry can be found at Poor Posture

 

Course Description (no more than 500 words)

This course will tackle life writing and memoir—a slippery, genre-bending, creative venture based on lived experience, your collection of events and facts.

 

Participants will start writing at a particular location of importance to them and revisit that site over coming weeks—whether it’s from a different point of view or a different place in time.  We will cobble those “scenes” together into a longer piece for the capstone of the course.

 

At the same time, we will examine some of memoir’s urgent problems—memory, truth, trauma, language, and sensationalism.  Short examples of life writing will supplement our discussion.

 

Prerequisites

Submit a writing sample, anywhere from 3-5 pages of creative nonfiction, double spaced. This will serve as the primary determinant for participation in the course. Blog submissions are accepted, please link to 3-5 specific pages of post.

 

This course will assume an understanding of basic writing structures—point of view, conflict, plot, and style. (If you are unfamiliar with such terms, see Wikipedia and The Open Fiction Project (http://www.tofp.org/) as two places to start learning.)

 

The course will resemble a workshop, with participants writing and critiquing peers, over the six weeks.  The point of the course is to encourage peer-to-peer interaction and feedback on one another's work.  As such, respect, tact and trust are of supreme importance for the success of the course, so participants should possess and exhibit those traits.

 

Lastly, memoir can be a gristly task.  We will be reading disability narratives, sobriety stories and pieces that address sexuality.  Come prepared to wrestle with discomfort.

 

Theme for the Course: Complicated Locations

To anchor our course, participants will first identify a place to tackle, from different vantage points, over a six-week period.  This place should be specific enough that you have a personal connection to it, rich enough that you could approach it anew each week, and local enough to visit frequently.

 

The writer will return to the same place and create new material each week, in this way adhering to a constant over time. One goal is to uncover something new about the self, the situation, the time, or some one else--by exploring the various facets of a space.  After several written encounters with the place, the final assignment will be to create a patchwork, 360-degree view of this location and your relation to it.

 

At the same time, we will explore the ways in which memoir is deeply problematic. Identities shift over time, memoir-worthy occasions are usually limited to the traumatic or what we perceive as meaningful, and its explosion has led to a confessional culture with merits and disadvantages.   We will read brief, article-length conversion stories, geographical approaches, and disability narratives to inform our understanding of this liberating yet vexing genre.

 

Terms

 

Except for your creative nonfiction works, all other content you produce in this course will be licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike (CC SA) license. This includes critiques of your peers' work, responses to interviews and other works, discussions, and writing exercises.

 

One of the central challenges of writing memoir is the pressure of the audience, the tug-and-pull of “coming clean.”  As such, although you will not be required to license your creative nonfiction works openly, you will be expected to share your work publicly via a shared google doc.

 

We highly encourage all of you to consider licensing one or more of your creative nonfiction drafts under one of the Creative Commons licenses, so that others around the world may see how you incorporated your peers' critiques into your work, or otherwise altered/improved your work.  Such a license would contribute to the longevity and sustainability of P2PU.

 

Class Structure

 

This class will meet online [via Tokbox or Skype] once a week. Class assignments will be due earlier in the week (Tues) and will be discussed later in the week (Thur).

 

Participants will submit their work via a shared Googledoc, and as a class we will all comment on each others’ pieces within the document.  In our Thursday discussion, we will focus on 2-3 pieces (we will rotate who is workshopped) and briefly discuss the article(s) recommended.

 

To sum it up, the writing exercise will be due each Tuesday, and the reading component due each Thursday, along with your comments on your colleagues pieces.

 

WEEK ONE

EXERCISE

You will choose a specific place to write about; this place should be local as you will revisit it each week. Write three pages in the first person point of view, describing where you are. This assignment is due early in week, to give your peers a chance to write critiques of your work. These critiques will be discussed later in the week. Take pictures—we will share them later.

 

In your 2-3 page piece, address these questions:

• Where are you?   
• How did you get there?  Not just "I drove," or "I took the subway" but what events led up to your arrival? 
• What is distinctive about it—landmarks, crowds, weather?
• Get tactile—what does the place feel like?  
• What other places in your life does it remind you of?  Follow those memories.   

 

READING:

Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning, Chapter 1: http://books.google.com/books?id=9E4w6HStuV4C&lpg=PP1&ots=fmgy3kEy9V&dq=%22gretel%20ehrlich%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Honor Moore, “The Bishop’s Daughter”: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/03/080303fa_fact_moore?currentPage=all

 

Discussion Questions:

 

• How does memoir differ from other life-writing acts—keeping a diary, for example?
• Consider the memoirs that have received significant attention over the past 10 years.  What do they have in common?  From the memoirs that you’ve read, what binds them together as a genre?
• Who does a story belong to?  To what extent is Honor’s story her own?
• How do Moore and Ehrlich mete out drama?  Which is more successful overall?

 

 

WEEK TWO

EXERCISE:

Revisit your place and approach it as a historian.  See it for its geography, its material culture, and with a longitudinal focus.

 

In your 2-3 page piece, address these questions:

• What shaped its environment?
• Who crossed, visited, or inhabited it? 
• How has nature and natural disaster affected it?
• How has social change swayed its make-up?

 

READING:

Jonathan Raban, “Second Nature”: http://www.jonathanraban.com/article.php?id=27

 

Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia”:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• How do both Raban and Solnit connect the subjects of their pieces to a sense of “home”?
• Where do the writers “show” themselves in the piece?  When do they hide behind the information/narrative?
• Where do the details deepen the story, and where are they overkill?

 

WEEK THREE

EXERCISE: Revisit your place, and imagine a shift in time. 

In your 2-3 page piece, address these items:

 

• Approach the place as you would have in the past—as a younger person, or before a particular milestone in your life. 
• Or, approach it from the future.  If you choose the future, anticipate how you might change in relation to the place. 
• This exercise might be more fruitful if you imagine the time as during your lifespan, but I don’t mean to limit you.

 

 

Mary Karr, “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=175809

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

 

• How does Karr marry the sacred and the profane for comedic effect?  Which moments feel more genuine? 
• Evaluate the sense of authority in the piece.   How is she performing “the converted” role through her language and style?
• The story winds a great deal—from childhood, to early motherhood, through divorce and conversion—using a sort of montage effect.  Is this approach successful?  

 

WEEK FOUR:

EXERCISE:

Change the point-of-view of your piece by describing the place and your relationship to it from second or third person point of view.  Or take the distance further—how would a stranger see this place?  Notice how your relationship to the events change. 

 

READING:

Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple”: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g3hgJT_kwj8J:www.smartercarter.com/Essays/Essay%2520Documents/On%2520Being%2520a%2520Cripple.doc+nancy+mairs+on+being+a+cripple&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

 

• To what extent does Mairs treat her body and her self as different subjects?
• Contrast Mairs’ sense of authority with Karr, who has corralled the chaotic events of her life into calm.  How does Mairs write herself into being?

 

WEEK FIVE

EXERCISE

End your piece.  The challenge here is to create an ending where there might not be one, since the place will always be there. Resist the urge to tie your story into a “bow”—the ending can be complicated, abrupt, peter out—we should just know it’s intentional.

 

Think about this process as if you’re closing of the door with a gentle swing.  You aren’t halting the story forever, just exhausting your written relationship with the place at this point in your life. 

 

READING:

Mark Doty, “Return to Sender:Memory, Betrayal, and Memoir

http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/mdoty01.htm

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

 

• Doty discusses the “reinterpretation of memory”—does his definition mesh with your experience of farming your memories from different vantage points?  Is it possible for stories to ever really be “done” in this model?
•  Does the act of writing the past encourage you to slide from one identity to another? How smooth and facile are these transitions?
•  At what points have you chosen between “honesty” and “coherence”?  When have you felt yourself hedging the past?

 

WEEK SIX

EXERCISE:

Your last task is to take the pieces from our 5 weeks of workshop and weave them together to form one narrative.

 

I encourage you to use a montage approach to flesh out the many dimensions of that place and your relationship to it:

 

 

• Experiment with time: cross cut between memories and present day
• Experiment with point of view: weave between background and first-person thoughts
• Experiment with location: the narrative can move from the physical location and then revisit it

 

These pieces will be due Tuesday [xxxx] and we will discuss your challenges in hanging them together cohesively on our Thursday call.