work in progress: the teaching of memoir
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Maybe it doesn’t sound all that Ivy League or resume building to ask your students to honor the smear of childhood or to heed the rhythms of remembered talk. The negotiation of once with the language of right now is unquantifiable. It’s also a tad shy of rigorous to conduct a classroom full of eased-back kids—dreamers and window watchers, scribblers and flippers of pens, dismantlers of paper clips. There’s no science to teaching creative nonfiction, and there are no rules, and if one or two of the students emerge from the reminiscing haze with a sentence that feels new, don’t bet that they all enjoyed the ride.
4 comments:
this--are you writing a long essay about it?
I just finished reading Ru by Kim Thuy. It's fiction that reads like memoir--and has some basis in autobiography. It makes me think about memoir as a form for me someday.
I like the idea behind this moment...the moment of teaching something that many may find an insignificant thing to remember...thanks for sharing this work in progress
Love "the smear of childhood." It cannot be Penn where these paper clip dismantlers are not hearing your words, it must be some group of underprivileged teens. Hah. It's still worth doing what you do. But you know that.
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