1200-word Creative Blogpost assignment.

We've had a chance so far to respond analytically to some family memoirs; now it's our turn to try to make sense of something in our family. This assignment, though, is a bit different from other personal narratives you may have written. Because we have blogging capabilities, you can use images, videos, and links to tell your story.

If what you choose to write about is too personal to share with the class, we can arrange for you to pass something directly to me. I want you to feel comfortable confronting difficult issues if you feel that you need/want to.

Personal writing is not just about recapping events. As we've seen in The Liars' Club, Mary Karr selects specific events to suggest to us what she's come to know about her family and about herself. She's chosen to be a certain way, to have a wise, bruised, unflinching persona who can step back from events and look at them critically. This selection of who you are in writing is one of the most difficult things in nonfiction. You may say, “I'll be myself,” but constructing yourself and your family in words may be harder than you think. You'll want to pay special attention to the Phillip Lopate lessons that we discussed in class and to keep in mind what you liked about The Liars' Club and The Memoir and the Memoirist.

Oftentimes, amateur and experienced writers find that their real topic emerges only after quite a few hours (or drafts). In the last paragraph of an essay the writer may admit a crisis of faith or a pressing concern with a family member—a resentment or some other complication. We might find when reading each other's essays that the apparent topic becomes overwhelmed by some wound or joy that appears later. We will want to hear more about this sensitive subject, about this writing that seems more alive than everything else. That's why it's imperative to begin early, to revise, and to step away from our own writing to ask “What Do I Know?,” “Who Am I?” and “What Am I Trying to Say?”

I don't expect us to answer these questions in the next seven weeks, but we can make some investigations. We can look to write toward a better understanding of something about our families and ourselves that has always puzzled us. Or, we can unburden ourselves of a sadness, try to say something inventive about love, or both.

This particular assignment will probably build to your final, though that's up to you. That final essay will have some additional requirements, including some research and a longer word-count.

But, for now, I want you to generate writing about those issues in your family that seem most pressing. If nothing comes to mind, great: that's your chance delve into something specific, from your father's baldness, to your Aunt's hatred of cursing; from your brother's relationships with women (or men), to your own only-child situation; from your mother's love of race-cars to your step-family's strangeness.

There are very few restrictions. Remember that this is creative writing and this is meant to address issues of family. Beyond that, go for it. Write a play. Write a letter. Write a long poem, a series of poems, an epic song. Anything you like. No shortcuts, though. This is a great, sanctioned chance to be freaking artists, people. Let's make some family art.

We will work on this project in class on Feb 4, 16, and 18, but I encourage you to get started before that. Write 100 words and your mind will start going. You'll think about it once or twice a day and you'll be further along than if you start late. Good luck. Due Feb. 22nd by midnight.

Questions for Peer Critique

Good Wednesday to you. Here are some questions to consider while you critique your classmates' blogposts. A revision of this post is due February 2nd. Your post will make up 70% of your grade for this assignment, and the success of your group members will make up the remaining 30%. You have an interest, then, in helping as much as you can and I will take into account the substance of your assistance.

1. Is there a clear, argumentative thesis? Please identify it. Is the thesis about two images, or has your group member gone in a different direction? Does the thesis still make sense within the context of the assignment?

1b. Are the name of the author and the name of the work immediately identified?

2. What support is offered for the apparent thesis? Are there applicable direct quotes from the text? Are they introduced properly (we can talk about this--See below)?* Are these the best examples to strengthen the thesis? Can you think of other parts of _The Liars' Club_ that might be more applicable? After direct quotation, has the writer analyzed the text or are quotations left to stand alone? Does the analysis connect to the thesis?

3. What parts of this post seem like summary? Are there places where this summary doesn't help the argument? Are there places where a bit more summary is necessary? Remember, we should assume that a reader of this post is familiar with the book but looking to the post to be reminded, instructed, convinced.

4. What are possible counter-arguments to the thesis? Have they been addressed? Identify some counterarguments and help your group members refute them.

5. Identify mistakes in grammar, punctuation, spelling. Be polite, but not too polite!

6. Is the writer's opinion used as proof? Remember, opinions are terrific, but there's a difference between an opinion and proof. Though you're arguing a case, and that is, of course, a form of opinion, there's a way to do that with direct statements of fact. Be confident in your arguments and support everything.

7. Are there places that don't follow the thesis, that seem to get off track? Why do you think the writer included those? Are there ways that they can be integrated into the thesis, or should they be taken out?

Please read each post once before writing anything. Then, while re-reading, answer as many of these questions as you can and post your answers in a comment to the writer. You'll have about 25 minutes for each person in your group.

I'll be circulating in class to check on your progress. Also, you should expect responses to your posts and to the quizzes you took last week by Saturday.

Good luck.


* Quotations should be introduced as follows:

Karr writes, "That night I fell right to sleep for the first time in weeks. And the worst dream came to play itself on the back wall of my skull like it was wide-angle TV" (173).

Note that a comma separates the introduction and the quotation and that the period comes after the page number in parentheses.

If your quotation is not a complete sentence, you may write something like the following:

Karr writes that her father's shirt was "spattered with blood" (173), and the image emphasizes the frightening nature of the dream.

In instances like these it's not necessary to separate the introduction from the quotation.

Click here for suggestions on smooth quote introduction and here for examples and rules.

For citation, only identify the name of the author if you're discussing more than one work in your paper. For us, page number will be enough.

Mary Karr Reading from Her Poems

Adding Images, Videos, Comics

A Portuguese Man-of-War, not unlike the one that attacked Lecia.





A strange video about Hurricane Carla with an odd soundtrack; nonetheless, it shows some of the damage, and gives us a sense of the time and the sorts of places Mary and Lecia and family were swimming.





A Comicbookish version of the last few sentences of the chapter using the ComicLife Program.

600 Word Blogpost Assignment

After today's class, we have a week to read and think about what we want to post for Wednesday, Jan. 21st. Our assignment in The Liars' Club is substantial but full of terrific material. I want us to respond seriously to it, and a bit more formally.

In the last class, we focused on Karr's images. You've begun a list of key images and have explicated some of them. I want us to continue this work in our lengthier blogpost.

Please write a thesis-driven analysis of TWO images that you find in the next reading (140-271). This post should be 600 to 800 words.

Remember that a thesis is an argumentative statement that you posit at or near the beginning of your post/paper. "Mary Karr uses images of animals " is a statement of fact, but not a thesis statement because it is not argumentative. Think about a thesis in the following way:

1. An author uses/does/writes something. . .
2. in order to. . .or. . .for the purpose of. . .or. . .and the effect is. . .

Don't feel locked into this phraseology, but remember that you need to bring your ideas to the text. If summarizing what happens in the memoir proves your point, your point isn't strong enough. Also, moral judgments are weak theses. We're interested in the writing, in the psychology, cadence, diction, syntax of the writing, not in passing judgment.

Which brings us to evidence. Once you assert something argumentative, you ought to prove it, right? People often think English papers are a drag, but we engage in this kind of discourse all the time. Maybe my thesis is that Gilmore Girls is the greatest show in television history. Great. I should prove it. Maybe my thesis is that the Browns are better than the Bengals. Great. I should prove it.

The difference here is that we are looking at a book. Ok. In my reading, I'm sure that animal imagery is very important. I need to think about why. Ok. I think it's important because it tells us something about the surroundings Karr grows up in, it tells us about the wildness of the family. YES. I'm halfway there. Now I need to bring up the two passages/images where that happens most clearly, most persuasively. I want to quote those passages. Then I want to write specifically about what's in them so that I can further my point. (If you quote 200 word passages, I will notice and expect you to analyze said passages extensively. Lengthy quoting is allowed but isn't a shortcut to the word minimum).

I care about this, why? Because I love being right. Because ! love showing people something that I noticed about a book (or the world) that they didn't. Because I like to stretch my brain. Because the better I get at this, the better I'll be at challenging what's told to me. These are just some of your reasons. Winning an argument, being persuasive, is central to existing in this world.

A few more complications: it's difficult for us to assume authorial intent. That means, we have to be careful writing something like "Karr obviously wants to show that her family is dysfunctional." When we're reading and writing about memoir, we will be tempted to think we know exactly what the author wants, and we will have more clues; we still want to hedge our bets, though, with something like, "Karr shows a family that seems to be dysfunctional." NOTE: I don't intend these sentences to be example theses. They are not argumentative enough. I merely want to show the kind of assertion that it's safe to make about a text.

Please think about readability. Include paragraph breaks.

This does not need to be a five-paragraph essay. It does need to be thoughtful.

Good luck.

The Pineapple on the Table

Image list assignment: transcribe eight distinct images from The Liars' Club and very briefly explicate them.

Example: "the tower swayed back and forth in the gale" (97). Literally, this is about Mary's father's position during the hurricane. We might read it, though, as an image that exemplifies his bravery (foolhardiness) or the family's insecurity.

Good luck and Good Reading.

Something to Consider. . .

"[. . .] I thought that to teach wrting was to teach my students how to keep on reading until we all saw as clearly as we could what was driving the writer. What, we would ask of the manuscript, was the larger preoccupation here? the true experience? the real subject? Not that such questions could be answered, only that it seemed vital to me that they be asked. To approach the work in hand as any ordinary reader might was to learn not how to write but--more important by far--why one was writing." Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

If we're reading closely, we're, in a sense, writing our interpretation, we're coming to understand the text and the world slightly (slightly) better (a bit at a time).

How can we make what we read come alive in what we write critically and influence what we write creatively?

Quiz Question

A. Please write specifically about Mary's feelings about her grandmother. What are some of her grandmother's habits? What does she suffer from? What does she think about Mary and Lecia? What does she reveal to Mary about Mary's mother?

If you cannot remember the answers to these questions, don't despair. Write as much as you can about the relationship.

B. Briefly, What causes Mary and her family to run from Leechfield? What happens on the bridge?

Quiz on Monday

Hi 152 folks.

Be prepared for a quiz on The Liars' Club this coming Monday (1/12). The quiz will cover the first two assignments (pages 1-96).

Remember that the blogposting assignment for Monday is split into two parts. In one part, bring us to a specific passage and analyze the writing therein. In the second, write exhaustively about ONE image from ONE family event. Neither of these should exceed 200 words.

Enjoy your weekend!

The 152 Club starts The Liars' Club

Dave here. Happy Wednesday.

As we begin The Liars' Club, I'm struck by how funny and sad the book seems to be (Alexis and Todd have mentioned this on their blogs, as well). Let me revise that. There's a lot going on that we could see as sad: child abandonment, possible abuse, a father dead, neighbors murdered, racism. And yet, Karr seems to be humorously detached from it. Think about this line: "When truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head" (9). Are there things you sometimes try to block out? Some injury? Some embarrassment? Some part of you that doesn't make sense any more? Some doubt? How do we write about these things?

Instead of looking at those ghosts at first, she's funny. She writes about her friend melting and eating an entire stick of butter. She's flippant about her mother's marriages ("My mother didn't date, she married" (10)). She talks about her father stomping "a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass" (13). She uses very colorful language when remembering her father's dialogue (as Michelle notes on her blog).

She also has a child's logic about some things (as Brendan mentions), even going so far as to write some of her memories in the present tense (15) (nod to Rebecca for noticing this). To what extent in the writing is Karr the adult remembering and to what extent is she still the child experiencing? Is the adult sad or funny? Is the child sad or funny? How does she mix these emotions?

It occurs to me, too, that Karr isn't complaining much even though some of her circumstances--her "nervous" mother, her insecruity--seem troubling. It reminds me of a line from The Memoir and the Memoirist. Thomas Larson wonders about every piece of writing:

"Where--page, paragraph, or sentence--is the writing alive with a felt intimacy? Where does your attention rivet, your skin go galvanic? [. . .] Where do complaint and nostalgia weasel in, where does the narrator become defensive?" (3).

How does Karr deal with the difficulty of her childhood without complaint? Or does she complain? Is she nostalgic in a way that makes you think she's mythologizing her past and being untruthful? She brings our attention to lying (as Andrew mentions in his post) all the while producing an almost impossibly detailed account of her childhood. Are you suspicious at all? What in the writing makes you believe her?

If you say she seems honest, how do you know?

Welcome to English 152

Hello! I'm Dave Wanczyk. Nice to meet you in words.

Course Description:

This class will be about the family, how we write our families, and how established writers have come to understand themselves as writers by better understanding where they came from. Texts will include Mary Carr's The Liars' Club, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, and Bret Lott's Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: the Men in My Family, as well as Zakes Mda's Cion.

We will have twice-weekly responses to the reading, and an extended piece of personal writing (memoir), all of which we will workshop together in class.

In order to study the rhetoric of family writing, we will use Thomas Larson's The Memoir and the Memoirist, finding ways to make public arguments about our private lives. That work inspires us to develop our ethos through serious reflection of the personal, and encourages sentiment rather than sentimentality in family writing. We will discuss the difference!

The success of our rhetorical appeals relies first on our self-knowledge, and that knowledge is inextricably linked to our families, our memories. I foresee members of this class learning how to analyze (and produce) family writing of a high order while analyzing how we talk about the self in a unifying, universal way that makes us, in Philip Lopate's words, all "feel less freakish and alone."