Journal Entry # 30: Consecrate your own ground by finding a literary ancestor in Ohio. Then write to that person and establish a relationship. We are citizens and need to come to grips with our own identity.

Journal Entry #28: Write your memoir in 5 pages. Get it off your chest and see where you can step into it.

Journal Entry #29: Write an entry where you do not rely on the living person for information. Instead, research using public records or private written records in order to fill gaps in your memory. (Examples: newspapers, library microfilm, historical company records). Let the sources propel you into another space that the living person cannot provide.

Journal 25: Tell your childhood story as a fairytale using non-fairytale language.

Journal 26: Spend an hour in a place where you learned from a parent: (A place of learning where you reluctantly learned form a parent):There should be conflict between you and your parent and tension within the story.

Journal 27: Describe or recreate a multicultural or bilinugual experience.

Journal 21: Place a child in a room during an afternoon. Make the child find something--an object--that leads to a realization. Maybe it's a life-shattering realization. Reimagine or recover the story without using any irony or sentiment.

Journal 22: Write from the point of view of a disturbed child who is telling a story--not the version that the reader understands; the reader realizes something else. It must be written in such a subtle way that we believe the child is actually telling rather than hiding. The child must be the unreliable narrator.

Journal 23: What is your reason for writing a memoir? Use an event, a term, or a structural contrast for writing. What is your structure going to be? What is your motivation? Your relationship with your audience and with your past? What is your formal challenge? What are you trying to accomplish? What story are you telling and why?

Journal 24: Go to some new place where you've never been and describe it as the house you grew up in.

-or-

Take a trip home to the house you actually grew up in and reimagine being there as a child.

Reading Assignments:

Read through "Shaman" in Warrior Woman.

Journal Entry and Schedules

Journal Entry # 20: Find a ruin and reimagine the place before it became a ruin. Avoid sentimentality.


Workshop Memoir Pieces:

Name...........Hand In...............Workshop

Mel....................9-20...................9-22
Julie..................9-22...................9-27
Aaron..................9-27...................9-29
Stephanie M. ..........9-29........ ..........10-4
Diana .................10-4...................10-6
Joshua.................10-6...................10-11
Bethany................10-11..................10-18
Terri..................10-18..................10-25
Allie..................10-25..................10-27
Stephanie S. ..........10-27..................11-1
Jill ..................11-1...................11-3
Barb...................11-3...................11-8
Mike...................11-8...................11-15
Chad...................11-15..................11-17
Bob....................11-17..................11-22

------------------------------------------------------


Presentations:
9-20 - Chad & Mike
9-22 - Bob
9-27 - Barb
9-29 - Mel
10-4 - Bethany & Jill
10-18- Diana

10-27 - Aaron and Stephanie
11-3 - Julie
11-8 - Allie
11-15 - Terri
11-22 - Josh and Stephanie M.

Open Dates:
10-6 -
10-11 -
10-25 -
11-1 -



Reading Assignments:

Chapter 1 of Woman Warrior

-Chad & Mike

Assignments from 9-8-2005

Journal 14: Remember a moment when you first felt exposed or humiliated. Describe it in great detail.

Journal 15: Find a room in your childhood that you remember in great detail, then recall a conversation in that room that was emotionally charged. Reinhabit the room and see what single detail comes out.

Journal 16: Find the place where you discovered the form and structure of language. What fed your sense of form and what questions did language provide you with?

Journal 17: Describe what your reading experience was like as a child. When you read what was beyond your comprehension, what did you come up with? How did your childhood reading shape your future reading.

Journal 18: Reclaim the place you lived in growing up. Make it a central factor in your writing in order to be yourself. Do what you must to recover it. For instance, if you are from Ohio, don't write about Ohio as a topic. Instead, write a memoir in Ohio. Describe what it's like to be a writer, writing in Ohio.

Journal 19: Take a situation that's supposed to be serious and turn it into something comic without being cute.

Finish Angela's Ashes

Journal Entries for 9-6-2005

Hey, all. Here is the newest batch of journal entries. I also have included the current reading assignments. If you are interested in posting your journal entries here, email them to me at cries55@gmail.com , and you will be published!!!

Here goes. As always, if these postings don't jive with what you have in your notes, leave a comment and let us know.

Journal 10: Write your life as a fairy tale.

Journal 11: Invent your own analogue system of correlations or a non-literary form for the structure of your memoir.

Journal 12: Work with the displacement of scale: Have an important event happen in such a way that we do not attend to it.

Journal 13: Describe a barn where your child has died. Do not mention the child or the event and don't use any adjectives that indicate sad.


Read into the 200s in Angela's Ashes

Read the Introduction, "Learning to Chill," and "Lifting the Veil" in Inventing the Truth.

Writing of Prose Journal Listing

Hello,

If I mess up an entry or it doesn't read as you heard it from Dr. Brady, please leave a comment here to correct me or to clarify.

If you have any questions, ask me in class, and I will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

Let me know if this system is working for people, if you prefer something else, let mike or I know and we will see what we can do to accomodate you.

The journals:

Journal 1: Write a letter to a wealthy, estranged, aunt who is dying. Introduce your side of the family with the intention of reconciliation and the hope that she will write you into her will. Your side of the family is the people in our class. Use as many of the Little Known Facts as possible.

Journal 2: Tell two other people in the class about a moment of decision you made before the age of 8. Choose one of their stories and make it your own. (Must be told in the first person).

Journal 3: Write two scenes involving an act of violence in each. One of the scenes must be an actual incidence of violence that happened to you and the other made up.

Journal 4: Give voice to an eccentric person without quoting them. Imbed it in a paragraph and move into the it.

Journal 5: Write five first sentences to your memoir.

Journal 6: Write the score for your first paragraph of your memoirs, riffing off of one of the lines you wrote for Journal 5. Make your own music, and you must be able to hum it for the class.

Journal 7: Tell the story of two generations in 100 words (and keep it interesting). Keep the exposition going and be prepared to explain how you did it in class.

Journal 8: Does your family have a skeleton? Unlock the door.

Journal 9: Give a scene where we, the reader, do not know whether it is violent or loving.

That's it for now. See you in class.