21W.022: Reading and Writing Autobiography

Spring 2015

Instructor: Susan Carlisle

Mapping Autobiography

Overview

In this final writing assignment for our class, you will build upon 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 a map, a mathematical figure, a photograph, an object of any kind, a graphic novel, a movie, a drawing. Our readings will once again serve as both inspiration and model for style and structure. Oliver Sacks’ 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 narrative. We will also analyze and discuss how other writers—such as Dorothy Allison, Roz Chast, Scott McCloud, and Alison Bechdel—combine a range of images and graphics with the written word. Whatever you choose to do, 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 an in-class exercise that will help you generate ideas for a topic in the form of a mapping exercise. In addition to excerpts from several other texts, as a class we will read Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Funhome  and analyze how she uses visual images and techniques to tell a story. Bechdel’s memoir will offer intriguing examples, too, of how a writer can scaffold a narrative in both linear and non-linear ways, which can add complexity and power. When you have figured out 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 object(s). In class we will also talk about how one deftly integrates and cites visual sources such as figures, charts, artwork, and movies in academic writing.

Predraft 3.1

In-class writing exercise (include this in your folder when you hand in revision!).

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 predrafts for the first two essays—a catalogue of memories and images, investigative questions—this one is designed to help you generate ideas.

Begin by listing 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, 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 for twenty minutes 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.” (Twenty minutes).

Predraft 3.2: A Proposal. What’s your project?  You will deliver this as a one minute oral presentation.  You must bring the visual thing (s) for us to see. You can choose how you will show us. We will give you feedback!

Draft:  six to eight pages: an autobiographical narrative

Revision: six to eight pages. You must integrate at least one visual/graphic image.  (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 they do not count as words.