21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography Susan Carlisle
Spring 2020
Essay #3: Mapping Autobiography
Overview
In this final writing assignment for our class, you will build upon both the narrative and analytical skills you have been developing in writing and revising an autobiographical narrative and a personal investigative essay. Your task will be to tell another story drawn from your life experiences, yet this time you will enrich your narrative essay with a visual source or sources. This source could be one or more of the following: map, mathematical figure, photograph, a sketch of an object of any kind, a sequence of drawings like one might see in a graphic memoir or novel. Our readings will once again serve as both inspirations and models for style and structure. Oliver Sacks’ autobiographical essay “Persistence of Vision,” in which he includes his own drawings, offers a particularly good example of how one can integrate visual images into autobiography in a way that adds interest and dimension to the story. We will also analyze and discuss how other writers—such as Roz Chast, Scott McCloud, and Alison Bechdel, along with several MIT student authors—combine a variety of images and graphics with the written word. Whatever you choose to write about, you will find that this assignment lends itself to both storytelling and reflection as well as to experimenting with narrative structure…so be creative.
Guidelines for April Journal
As we have discussed in class, journals and diaries have long inspired autobiographers as sources for their life stories. Some writers, such as Oliver Sacks in his memoir “The Persistence of Vision, ” even use the journal form as the structure in which to write about his experience of unexpectedly losing his vision. As a part of our classwork, this month you will keep a daily journal—either hand-written or virtual. This is not a pre-draft, so you will not be expected to hand it in. The journal will, however, serve two functions:
- Private. Think of the journal as a place where you can write about pretty much anything about your life: what is going on right now; memories; observations about where you live; ideas for stories; conversations you overhear; a family dinner; reflections; a family dinner; your reactions to what you read, watch, or listen to…etc.! As you will see in the assignment sequence for Essay 3, you will be using one or more visual sources– a map, a photograph, a drawing– as part of the story you will tell. So please be creative and feel free to include visual sources as journal entries ; you might even choose to use one or more of them in the essay you will write!
- Public. Once a week (Sunday) you will post one of your journal entries in Stellar Forum. Choose a shorter one (no more than a paragraph or two, or if it is visual, just one image) that you feel totally comfortable sharing with the class. Members of the class can respond to it in Forum and/or in class on Monday. Getting feedback from the class will help you figure out a potential focus or material for Essay 3.
The practice of keeping a daily journal like this is likely to generate some intriguing material for you to write about as well as inspired ideas for subject and structure in your third essay. We are all living during an extraordinary time in history—one with unexpected challenges, hardships, new variables– and hopefully, some moments of surprising insight or joy. Patricia Hampl reminds us in “Memory and Imagination” of both the personal and historical urgency and importance of telling our life stories. I hope that your journal for this class can serve as a meaningful record for you of your life in April 2020—and one that you can take beyond our class.
Reading, Writing, and Speaking
We will begin this unit with three in-class exercises that will help you generate ideas for a topic in the form of a catalogue of things, a mapping exercise, and a page of sequential simple drawings. As a class we will read excerpts from a few graphic memoirs and analyze how the writers use visual images and techniques to tell a story. Applying some of Scott McCloud’s ideas in Understanding Comics will help us figure out how to analyze images and scaffold a narrative in both linear and non-linear ways, which can add complexity and power. When you have determined what you want to write about, you will write a short proposal for your project and deliver this proposal as a one-minute oral presentation during which you will show us the visual(s). In class we will also talk about how one deftly integrates and cites visual sources such as figures, charts, tables, artistic images, and movies in academic writing.
What follows are the three predrafts, along with relevant readings that we will discuss in class.
Predraft 3.1: “The Things I Carry” (inspired by Tim O’Brien’s story)
In-class writing exercise: Empty your pockets, bag or backpack. Look around your room. Think about what what you think about most. What do you carry? Make a catalogue of ten things that hold special meaning for you or that perhaps tell a story about your life and who you are. The “things you carry” can also include something you are wearing (such as your favorite flip flops), jewelry, or tattoos) as well as intangibles (like in the O’Brien story, Kiowa’s “Distrust of the white man.”) Jot down some notes about these things. Choose one of them and post it on the Stellar Forum by April 1. Next , it can also serve as your first “April Journal” entry.
Readings: O’Brien, “The Things They Carry”; Roz Chast, excerpt from “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant”
Predraft 3.2: Memory Map
Writers, visual artists, artisans, neuroscientists, engineers, chefs, carpenters and other thinkers often find it useful to begin a project by “mapping out” ideas and images in a non-linear and graphic way. This approach can help one quickly see what really matters as well as to notice intriguing (and perhaps unexpected) relationships between things . We will begin this assignment with a version of Cecile Goding’s prompt for a “memory map.” Just like your initial pre-drafts for the first two essays—a catalogue of memories and images, investigative questions—this one is designed to help you generate ideas.
Begin with a catalogue: list five places that come to your mind. One of these places should be a childhood home. Other places could be a dorm room, a place you’ve visited anywhere in the world, a lab, a hospital, a mountain, a locker room, a restaurant, etc. Next, do the following:
- Choose one of these places and begin to sketch a map from a bird’s eye view encompassing an area that is one or two city blocks in size. If it is a place from your childhood, you might begin by drawing the house and spreading out from there, adding details like a favorite tree, a yard or front steps, then move out from there: the street that led to your school, the nearest neighbor’s house, a gas station, a bodega around the corner. If you are mapping a place you encountered in your travels, you might begin with your port of entry—a bus station, a truckstop, a trailhead—and then fill in everything and everyone you remember from that place and (ten minutes).
- Here’s how Goding describes the next step: “…choose one area of your map and focus on one, much smaller, point within. It could be a room, a garden, a person, or an object. Then, write… about that one small item. For example, in a camp while on safari, it might be your backpack. It might be the fire , or the outhouse” (ten minutes).
Readings: Butensky, “Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic”; Bechdel, excerpt from “Fun Home”
Predraft 3.3: Cartooning exercise
Inspired by the graphic memoirs of McCloud, Bechdel, and Chast, fold up a piece of paper into six frames and use these frames to tell a story about your life. Artistic skills are not required; stick figures or even geometric shapes are fine! Include some written text in the frames to help you tell the story.
Reading: Graphic Narratives and Memoirs by McCloud, Chast, Bechdel, Barry; “How to Write a Graphic Memoir”; Sacks, “The Persistence of Vision
Draft: 5-6 pages: An autobiographical narrative that integrates at least one visual image (this can include original graphics such as the memory map). Required: you need to include comments and questions for the reader in the form of bracketed annotations in the paragraphs, like you did for Assignment 2. Cite images as “figures” (e.g., Figure 1) and don’t forget a caption!
Revision: an autobiographical narrative (6-8 pages).You must integrate at least one visual source as part of this autobiographical essay. You can also use more than one type of visual image. Remember to include captions for the figures you include. Include a “Works Cited” page, too.