Using Wavelength in EN 101

Overview: In memoir, we balance ‘situation and inner story’: what we experience, and what we make of that experience, so that we tell a personal story that resonates far beyond ourselves. This can be accomplished in myriad and often subtle ways. We see the compelling shift from first to second person in Amy Undieme’s ‘Blueberry Pancakes,’ in which the personal details of the aftermath of a divorce suddenly become universal. In ‘One of the Boys,’ Delaney Dunn recounts an afternoon spent whizzing around the desert on motorbikes with her brothers, which, in her telling, becomes a moment of identification and acceptance. And Tiaya Hubbard (in the first of four pieces in this collection) conveys unspeakable heartbreak through an emoji in ‘Hide and Seek.’

Questions for students: What specific events are recounted in the memoir you’ve read? What principles and / or assumptions seem to guide the author in choosing those events? How does the author develop the events, or make them come to life? How do the authors ascribe meaning/significance to these events? What moments seem most true, most authentic, in these essays? How do you know? Can you know? At what point did you find yourself connecting with the author’s story? Why? Based on these readings, what might you conclude about how to organize a memoir?

Resources:

Brief and bullet-pointed, this guide emphasizes key moves (show don’t tell, theme, etc.) and audience awareness. Links to various professionally written memoirs are included.

Sure, it promotes a self-publishing school, but also neatly lays out some excellent tips for process: among them, ‘write your memoir truthfully’ and ‘write a memoir you want to read.’

‘Finding the Inner Story in Memoirs and Personal Essays’ is a compelling overview of the challenge of writing strong memoir. For teachers and students alike.

See Natalie Loper’s ‘Memoir Techniques Lesson Plan‘ and ‘Memoir Peer Reviews.’

Additional memoirs (also courtesy Natalie Loper) include

Menace (about a four-year old in a dragon costume)
”In search of the man who broke my neck”[18:19] (TED talk by Joshua Prager)
“The Fart That (Almost) Altered my Destiny” by Anna Lind Thomas

Overview: We see a creative dynamic akin to memoir in literacy narratives, in which writers recount foundational experiences with language that speak to the work language does. Cami Chamorro (‘A Bilingual Journey’) takes her learning of Spanish as an opportunity to discuss how language enables deep and complex family relationships; Tiaya Hubbard (‘My Life Be Like’) recounts her struggle with a racist teacher; and Matthew Oakley (‘Baseball In Me’) shares how he learned the value of signs in baseball.

Questions for students: How does language shape and inform the authors’ life experiences? What is the role of language in personal growth? Does the way the narrators experience language differ from the way others experience it? What are the implications and consequences of this? How does language connect us? Isolate us? What conclusions might we draw about the connections between language and identity?

Resources: Be sure to check out the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives.

This is a wide-ranging, expansive and inclusive public archive, curated by Georgia State and Ohio State, and it’s quite possibly the best place to begin developing a literacy narrative unit.

For a creative take on the literacy narrative, see Brooke Champagne’s ‘Non-literacy narrative’ slides.

Overview: With profile, we begin a move away from the subject-as-meaningful self to the subject-as-meaningful other. Profiles convey a single dominant impression of a subject, and as such verge much more closely to literary journalism than purely academic work. And they require some keen writerly sensibilities: the ability to convey an angle, share a personality, and animate a human subject so that it lives and breathes.

Trinity Barnett’s ‘Wresting: A Sport with Much to Offer’ explains, teaches, and reveals a world of athletics that many of us (especially here in the South) may not know anything about. Celia Browne’s profile of swimmer Missy Franklin shows the role research can play in compiling a profile. Caitlin Garnett’s ‘Jack and Raif’ positions the author as a co-subject, and by doing so suggests that profiles can be focused on other people yet still retain qualities inherent to an author. ‘To Be Both the Leader and the Teacher,’ Trey-Lee Orndorff’s profile of Fred Rogers, conveys Mr. Rogers’ widely shared gifts of humility and kindness. Amy Undieme’s ‘Devastation Struck Home’ focuses on mass shootings in general, and the Pulse nightclub in particular: and there is a haunting power to the author’s choice to end the piece, not conclude it. If you find yourself rooting for Manny in Tiaya Hubbard’s ‘Mr. New York,’ you are not alone. Reading the piece, it’s as if he’s walking right beside you. And we read two events framed by family in Elizabeth Winsor’s ‘New Life’ and Daniel Flores-Zelaya’s ‘Politics of a Civil War’: Winsor relates a personal account of a devastating loss, and Flores-Zelaya relates a personal account of a civil war in El Salvador.

Questions for students: How would you distinguish between a profile and a bibliography? Other than this collection, where else have you previously encountered a profile? What skills do you need to develop in order to write a strong profile? What resources will help you? How would you say the process of composing a profile differs from the process of composing a literacy narrative or memoir? Why do profiles matter?

Resources:

The graphics are outdated, but the emphasis on profile as a story that requires research and interviewing is just what students need to know.

How to Interview “Almost” Anyone | Mike Dronkers | TEDxHumboldtBay. A Ted Talk.

Seth Stewart, Jenifer Park, and Natalie Loper have provided profile assignments as well. Seth’s approach emphasizes the musical taste of profile subjects, and Jenifer’s take emphasizes strong interviewing skills. Natalie gives a step-by-step breakdown of her approach, which features the musical ‘Hamilton.’

Overview: Evaluations and textual analysis can function as a kind of bridge to more formal research, as they bring those two important critical thinking skills to bear on a wide range of subjects. Kate Killean’s appreciation of Beyonce’s ‘Pretty Hurts’ invokes, as per Killean’s title, ‘The Harsh Impact of Beauty’s Standards on Women.’ Kendrick Lamar’s seminal album To Pimp a Butterfly is the subject of Franklin Nwokoye’s ‘The Blacker the Berry,’ in which Nwokoye links his experiences with racism to the artist’s. Olivia Van Fleet’s ‘Shop ‘til You Drop’ unpacks the economic critique of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. And Mackie Aladjem and Sarah Morrow take an HBO series (‘Euphoria’) and a Tuscaloosa restaurant (‘Taco Casa: The Superior Tex-Mex Restaurant in Tuscaloosa’), respectively, as the subjects of their reviews.

Questions for students: What criteria do these writers use to craft their evaluations and analyses? How convincing is the evidence they use to support their claims? Where do you see the writers’ own opinions and judgments come into play? Identify each writer’s thesis statement. How are these thesis statements supported? Comment on each writer’s ethos (credibility), pathos (appeals to emotion), and logos (use of evidence/facts). How do these writers achieve credibility and use pathos/logos to develop their claims?

Resources:

Consult the Purdue OWL for a presentation on writing literary analysis. (Important: If you use this or any other Purdue OWL resource, you must attribute the source).

Shanti Weiland has shared several creative exercises that can be used in class to identify and develop strong rhetorical awareness. In her evaluation assignment, Jenifer Park asks students to review music videos; her materials include a rubric and scaffolded activity that will get their creative juices flowing. In the same vein, Natalie Loper’s materials provide tips for building an evaluation assignment around an album review. And Ashley Palmer’s textual analysis essay assignment includes several tips for close reading.

Thank you for reviewing this resource. Again, I hope you find it useful, and I hope you will take some time to review the other materials in Wavelength, which you can find in the ‘About’ and ‘Students’ sections of the website. If you have any questions about these materials or this project, please don’t hesitate to contact Luke Niiler at lpniiler@ua.edu. For technical matters, please contact Brian Oliu at beoliu@ua.edu. If you’ve read this far and find yourself thinking, ‘yes, but,’ or ‘that’s fine, but they left out,’ or ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I want to hear from you. Wavelength is intended to be crowd-sourced and perpetually growing, so there’s no reason not to register your voice and your ideas.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank everyone who’s contributed to this project to date. Thank you, first, to all of the students named above, and all of their amazing instructors: Sarah Sprouse, Brett Shaw, Louise Stewart, Vic Kjoss, Juliella Parsons, Angeline Morris, Heather Roach, Brian Whalen, Abbey Perschall, Sarah Cantrell, Ray Wachter, Ashley Palmer, Brock Guthrie, Natalie Loper, and Rachel Morgan. None of this would have been possible without y’all. Thank you, too, to the First-Year Writing administrative team of Jessica Kidd, Natalie Loper, Kathleen Lewis, Melinda Fields, and Brian Oliu. Brian gets a second shout-out as well, as he has very capably digitized this formerly analog project. Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to this work in the past, when it was known as Analog—Chase Burke, Marni Presnall, Brooke Champagne, Lad Tobin, and all previous authors and their instructors.