Paper # 2: Memoir/ Personal Narrative

Length: 3-5 pages double-spaced

Purpose:

Recall, retell, and analyze a significant experience in your life, carefully choosing a sequence of events that supports a specific thesis and helps you fulfill your rhetorical purpose regarding a specific audience.

A narrative based on personal experience can serve to communicate some insight into our experiences, our feelings and our values. A meaningful narrative is more than just a list of things that happened: “I woke up, answered the ringing telephone, heard my mother’s voice tell me that my dog, Rover, was killed by a hit and run, threw the phone down, threw myself down and began to cry…” A meaningful narrative makes a point: “After my dog died,  I threw myself into the work of cleaning out my top desk drawer, culling and sorting through bits of love letters scribbled on angel-blue paper, red ribbons from swim team in seventh grade, a matchbook from Senior Prom at the Fireside Inn, a swatch of taffeta that was ripped from my dress as I clambered over the country-club fence to have a night swim with my date—the domestic energy and descent into living memory distracting me and pulling me through the grief of losing my beloved pet…” That’s the purpose of this writing: for you to draw upon your memory of a real, true experience that makes a point that all of us can learn from.

Invention:

Write about an experience that changed you. Think about a time in your life when something caused you to question or shift your perspective on life. This does not mean that it must be a tragedy or a death, though these are appropriately fertile options as well. A life-changing experience could very well be something that seems, at first, insignificant, boring or small: the summer you spent on your grandmother’s farm, the stranger you talked to at the bus stop this morning, how eating ice cream at the Creamery made you reconsider what it meant to be on your own for the first time. What did you learn from this experience? How are you different for having gone through it? In any case you will need to think of a moment which has stayed with you, one you know deep down had some real effect on you, and try to figure out what and why. Tell us the story so that we may feel what you felt, react as you reacted and learn what you learned.

Remember that you must limit your scope. You can’t possibly write about your entire life (Nor should you! That is autobiography, not memoir.), or even about your entire experience playing high school basketball in one essay. You must focus on some one thing: an experience within a larger context; a moment of change in a relationship.

Be sure that whatever you choose to explore in writing interests you and then write to interest readers and affect them in some way. As you decide what to write about, keep in mind:

* What do you want to say? What point are you trying to get across?

* Who are you writing to and why should they care? What do you hope they will do or feel as a result of reading your memoir?

In the end, you must work to evoke a powerful pathos response in your reader through the use of vivid, memorable, language, concrete details, plot, character and setting.

         

           

Expectations:

A successful personal narrative will:

• Focus on a significant experience;
• Use ample sensory details;
• Include dialogue that reveals information about your characters;
•  Employ transitions that will help your reader follow your narrative and/or logic;
• Showcase a personal narrative voice—your voice! (e.g, use a variety of sentence patterns and Lengths, don’t sound like you come from the bureau of statistics, and so on); and
• Provide reflection and analysis in order to help your audience understand the significance of the experience.  

Join the Staff of Kalliope!

Folks, as you know, I am the faculty advisor for our fantastic literary magazine, Kalliope and we are currently looking to fill staff positions for the 11-12 school year. Below is a message from our editors with more information about how to get involved. No experience necessary. Just bring your enthusiasm for writing and art!

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We're looking for people in the following departments: 

-Readers for all sections: poetry, art, nonfiction, fiction.
-Production (especially: book and advertisement production)
-Social networking personnel

If you're interested in joining the reader, production, or social staff, visit http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SMPR66J for our online application. 

Thanks!

Kalliope Editors 

Nate Davis, Jess Brenn

Journal Prompt #3--The Powers of Description

Imagine a conversation:

"I met this really great girl at the coffee shop the other day! I think she could be The One!"


"Oh yeah? What's so great about her?"


"Oh, well she's just awesome. She's got a lot of interests and she's smart and pretty and has great values."


"Hmmm. Yeah, dude. I can totally see why you're in love." <insert eye roll>

***
Can you see why he's in love? I sure can't. The girl in question sounds like she could be any number of awesome girls in a coffee shop. What in particular makes her "awesome?" What about her is "pretty?" What's so great about her values?

If you met someone who knocked you off your feet and you wanted to convince your best friend that she/he was "The One," wouldn't you try a little harder? Of course you would. You would carefully describe all the particular things that attracted you to her.

Like so:

"Oh yeah, what's so great about her?"


"Dude, she knits and plays Rugby! She's sharp as a tack; she got my Star Wars reference right away. I love nerdy girls. She's got this pixie cut with pink streaks in the bangs and wants to spend her senior year working in AIDS clinics in Rwanda.  Sigh. I'm so in love."

***

For your third journal prompt, I want you to go exploring campus and downtown State College with your senses and then write descriptively about something you discover in order to persuade me that it is awesome enough (or awful enough!) for me to check out.

Look around you. Listen to people talking, traffic moving. Stretch out on the lawn at Old Main and feel the grass under your hands. Walk down Calder Ave behind Fraser Street garage or into Saints Cafe on Beaver. What do you smell? You're hungry, aren't you? Well go get something to eat! What does that falafel taste like?

You can choose absolutely anything that moves you to describe, but remember that to do so effectively, you need to attend to a few things:

1. Situate it in a rhetorical context. Where is it? When did you find it? What time of day? Was there anything else of note going on around you/it?

2. Use vivid, specific, sensory language that will help me imagine how you experienced it. If you want someone to eat the Buffalo Chicken Pizza at Canyon Pizza, you need to make it sound like something they would absolutely love.

3. And speaking of audience, think for a bit about what you know about me. Is there anything you've learned that will help you choose which details to highlight and which to leave out of your description?

Once you've got your subject, write a description of NO MORE THAN 250 words. Part of the challenge here in a small space is to pick the best details. The ones that are sure to persuade.

DUE: Thursday, September 15th by noon. 

The coming of dawn : Journal #2

On my trip to the museum, I encountered many intriguing and captivating works of art including many valuable sculptures and displays. One work of art in particular, a digital print named the "Dance of Death" by Eleanor Antin which was created in 2007, caught my eye as being  rhetorically interesting. This work of art was created completely using digital effects on the computer and had many underlinings and messages encoded within the images. This work of art has 3 x 3 images of death as the centerpiece of the work. The first row, is marked with death playing the drums, posing as a server and as a old man carrying a lantern. The second row is marked with death posing as a alchemist, as a woman carrying a infant child away and as a herder carrying a dead lamb. The third and final row, is marked with death as a angel playing a flute, as a warrior carrying a spear and the last image is of a old man carrying a tombstone above his head. This work of art was created in 2007 at the University of California, San Diego. The artist found the inspiration for this piece from the dark ages of the Medieval ages, from which most of the citizens during this period of history were dying of the plague and had very short life expectancies. This piece is definitely in conversation with this historical moment with death being the focal message of this piece. This piece is making a social comment by stating that death in inescapable and effects all ages from all spectres of society. However, the people of society can find death as a relief in hope that they are leaving this world filled with aggression and torment in order to gain access to a world of tranquility. This piece makes me feel curious but also relieved, for since I am a Christian, I find that death is just another step that every person must take in order to  finally be at piece with oneself and find ultimate happiness. This artist has many sources of credibility. First, both of her parents were born and raised in communist Poland, but integrated to the United States in order to give their daughter a better life so, the artist has plenty of connections to the emotions of anguish and heartache but also to joy for what tomorrow might hold for any individual. Finally, the artist has created many similar works of art that worked around the idea of death, such as her painting entitled "Blood of a Poet's Box" in which the vision of a jar filled with the blood of a hundred dead poets can be seen. The claim that this piece is making is that in some form or shape, death will eventually devour us all but, death can be seen as a sign of relief ( which is illustrated by death posing as a angel), and also as a glimmer of hope and satisfaction for others (which is illustrated by death holding a lit beacon). After this trip, I can conclude that I am definitely a museum goer and that I can count on taking another trip to the museum, since it was only my first time, to look at and read more of the works of art more thoroughly. One of the reasons that I can expect myself to make a return visit is that the museum had many works of art from the early twenty century, and I find myself quite fascinated with the messages and themes that each artist developed into their works of art.

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=when+was+the+Dance+of+Death+by+Eleanor+Antin+created&hl=en&sa=X&tbm=isch&prmd=ivnso&tbnid=huEZwCmRPVCK4M:&imgrefurl=http://www.brodskycenter.org/_pages/ARTISTS/Femfolio2.html&docid=4wCh_KYmUXG0qM&itg=1&w=430&h=412&ei=OqhlTuz7A4XMgQf9_fiKCg&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=1&page=1&tbnh=129&tbnw=142&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0&tx=87&ty=88&biw=1093&bih=538