21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography                                                                                                                           Susan Carlisle

Fall 2019

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.   For this essay, however, 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 Dorothy Allison, 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.

 

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.

 

Predraft 3.1: “The Things I Carry” (inspired by Tim O’Brien’s story)

In-class writing exercise: Empty your pockets and/or backpacks. 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. Jot down some notes about these things. We will discuss your findings.

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:

1. 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).
2. 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).

Due: November 6 (in class exercise)

 

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.

Due:  November 13

 

Predraft 3.5: Introduction: No more than one page .

Due: November 20 (18 COPIES)

 

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!

Drafts due at conferences during week of November 17^th.

THREE COPIES OF (next) DRAFTS  due in class November 26^th!!

Revision: an autobiographical narrative (six to eight pages).You must integrate at least one visual/graphic image 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.

Due: December 6

(Important note: remember that your final portfolio must be comprised of 5,000 words of polished writing. If your earlier revisions were on the shorter side of the suggested length, you might aim to make this one a bit longer in terms of word count. It’s likely that your image/images will take up extra page length, but these graphics, unfortunately,  do not count as words.)