Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

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Narrative as a genre

I believe that in order to teach something well I need to have the experience first.  The seminar Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay with Jessica Brantley as the seminar leader has done that for me. 

One of the conversations held in my seminar revolved around “Well, what is a Narrative?”  Before tackling that question I would like to first define what genre is.  The Norton Reader defines genre as a term that is used by teachers who teach composition and/or literature, that genre refers to certain types of writing that have common features, are similar in style, how it is presented, and what the subject is.

When teaching genre the word conventions go with it.  You can’t have one without the other so an understanding of what conventions are is necessary.  Conventions are the guidelines or what is usually done like saying good morning when walking into work, all of the parts, all of the elements needed to distinguish one genre from another.

Norton gives four examples of literary genres: Narrative genres, Descriptive genres, Analytic genres, and Argumentative genres.  For the purpose of this study unit we will look closely at the genre of Narrative.  Narrative genres tell us stories.  These stories include personal essays, memoirs, graphic memoirs, and literacy narratives.⁴ To understand what narratives are we will dive deeper into two types of narrative, personal narrative and memoir.

Personal Narrative

In our seminar we pondered what makes a style of writing a personal narrative or a personal essay.  There were many ideas thrown into the ring.  We discussed the idea that a personal narrative is a snapshot of a life or memory and that the words narrative and essay are used interchangeably.  We hypothesized that a personal narrative should have aspects of story telling along with characters and setting.  We talked about the essay/narrative being a crafted piece of writing.  A personal narrative is a first person true story that is usually found in magazines and newspapers.  These are nonfiction stories, with the purpose of storytelling while having a public point. A nonfiction narrative has a mini- plot line that guides the reader to a conclusion or realization.⁵  A personal narrative has topics that range from canoeing, friendship, death, birth, travel, satire, and humor.  It can cover a person’s personal growth or downfall, racism, and the wonders of sitting on the beach.  This type of nonfiction narrative is also sometimes called creative nonfiction. (Harris)

One of the key components in a personal nonfiction narrative is a climatic event in the telling of the story.  In the essay Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self, by Alice Walker the climatic event that changed how she viewed herself happened very quickly.  She starts the section in which she tells the story with “It was great fun being cute. But then, one day, it ended.”  She then tells us what lead up to the event that changed not only her appearance but also how she saw herself.

“One day while I am standing on top of our makeshift “garage” pieces of tin nailed across some poles-holding my bow and arrow and looking out toward the fields, I feel and incredible blow in my right eye.  I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun.  Both brothers rush to my side.  My eye stings, and I cover it with my hand. “If you tell” they say “ we will get a whipping.  You don’t want that to happen, do you?” I do not. (Norton p.23) 

Because of this decision Ms. Walker’s eye is permanently damaged and she becomes blind in that eye.  This accident changes how Alice Walker began to see herself.  She thought herself to be cute, smart, and fearless, but the BB pellet that hit her in the eye not only blinded her but it left a very noticeable white blob of scar. And because of this scar a young Alice Walker felt at the age of eight that the scar was the only thing that people could see, and for six years she no longer felt pretty, smart, or fearless.

The narrative also uses great descriptive language with the author reflecting and interpreting their experience. This can be seen in Zora Neal Hurston’s essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me;

“Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us.  He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.” (Norton)

In Joey Franklin’s essay Working at Wendy’s show that the descriptive language does not have to be very long to evoke your own imagination and memories.  Franklin writes,

“It’s 8:45 p.m., and I am standing in front of the counter at Wendy’s.  It smells of French fries and mop water.”  With these two sentences I remember being at Wendy’s and smelling the opposing odors.  Loving the French fry smell and not liking the mop water smell.

Another key component of writing a personal nonfiction narrative is what the public point or purpose of the essay is. You don’t explicitly state the idea at the end of your essay but you should allude to your point.  In Brent Staples Black Men and Public Space he ends the essay with,

“An on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure:  I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers.  Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune.  Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.”

With this closing the author is commenting on our society that views black men as people we should be afraid of.  This is a stereotype that has been perpetuated since slavery times.  To counteract that narrative that many people believe the Brent Staples whistles classical music to keep him safe from a frighten society as well as to calm those who  as a black man who has to contend with the stigma of white people always thinking that every black man they encounter in the nighttime is a mugger or criminal.  It also speaks to the extremes black men have to take to be seen as innocent first in a country that only sees them a guilty.

Another example of ending a personal experience narrative that is not explicit in it’s ending is Joan Didion’s On Going Home;

“It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party.  In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine.  She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for the unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life.  I would like to give her more.  I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.  I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.” (Norton p.3)

With how Didion chose to end this essay, we can draw a couple of conclusions from the ending.  We can pull out that she feels bad that she can’t give the same type of childhood to her child that she had, one filled with the sense of a large family both the messy and loving parts.  She wishes she could give her child a foundation based in their family history.  But as times have changed the author recognizes that she will be unable to provide that type of life for her daughter. So she will compensate that loss with small items that remind her of the past along with some stories to make her child laugh.

Memoir

William Zinsser in the book On Writing Well points out that students today rarely write about the subject they know most about, themselves.  They are relegated to write what the teacher tells them to.  This inability to write about oneself continues on into adulthood, when aspiring writers write what the editors want.  Amazingly this thought pattern plagues our elders where many say one day I will, because they are still under the illusion that they need “permission” masked under fear or thought of inability. 

In the seminar we talked about what the word memoir means, a couple of definitions were brought to the forefront, the first was that memoir is a memory and the second definition expanded that to be a collection of memories.  When it comes to writing a memoir your memory is what is most important. The Norton Reader describes memoirs as “first person accounts of important events or people from an author’s life.”  Matilda Butler states,

A memoir really is an opportunity to reflect -- to look inside yourself and to say, "It’s not just all these external things that have happened to me. It’s really, how has something changed me? Why am I the person I am today? What were the big turning points in my life? What has caused me to have the outlook I have?"

Warner explains that a memoir is a slice of a persons’ life and not an autobiography.  I would call it a snapshot of memories.  In the seminar it was described as a written photo with a message for the reader.  Zinsser likens a memoir to looking through a window into a persons’ life.  When writing about your life in a memoir Zinsser reminds us that all components should be moving the piece forward, this includes “all the details-people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions-are moving your story steadily along.”  He tells us that the best stories have more of an impact when focused not on you but on your actions and how those actions affected you and help you become who you are.

One example of a memoir comes from the essay Under the Influence by Scott Russell Sanders.

“I am moved to write these pages now because my own son, at the age of ten, is taking on himself the grief of the world, and in particular the griefs of his father.  He tells me that when I am gripped by sadness he feel responsible; he feels there must be something he can do to spring me from depression, to fix my life.  And that crushing sense of responsibility is exactly what I felt at the age of ten in the face of my father’s drinking.  My son wonders if I, too, am possessed.  I write, therefore, to drag into the light what eats at me-the fear, the guilt, the shame-so that my own children may be spared.”

This is a great example of how a memoir pinpoints a moment and/or experience in your life. The passage reflects on the writers present and how it reminds him of the past, but with next steps that he can take to change the present for the better.

Another example of a memoir is Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the Kitchen;

“The “hot comb” was a fine-tooth iron instrument with a long wooden handle and a pair of iron curlers that opened and closed like scissors.  Mama would put it in the gas fire until it glowed.  You could smell those prongs heating up.  I liked that smell.  Not the smell so much, I guess, as what the smell meant for the shape of my day.  There was an intimate warmth in the women’s tones as they talked with my Mama, doing their hair.  I knew what the women had been through to get their hair ready to be “done,” because I would watch Mama do it to herself.  How that kink could be transformed through grease and fire into that magnificent head of wavy hair was a miracle to me and still is.” (Norton p.135)

Gates has included sights, smells, and sounds in this slice small slice of his life.  It is a culmination of many days that were very similar and how that experience left a deep impression on his life.  This short passage flooded me with memories of my grandmother and mother pressing my sister and my hair.  We would be getting our hair done for church or a holiday event or  with many of the black forth my memories of a different mother, kitchen, and kid but the conversations between the women in my kitchen, the smell of the hot comb heating up as well as my hair getting press, and feeling of how hot my hair was after the comb was run through stays with me also.