Monday, September 13

We spent most of the evening working through practices for mining your memories for appropriate topics for creative nonfiction essays. Tonights journal prompt was to think back to your earliest memories - from before you could even remember. As you wrote and shared your notes we reflected on the nature of remembering - how it is often surrounded by a haze of uncertainty - while at the same time (paradoxically) existing as a clear, felt (but not in words) knowing or feeling - a glimpse or flash (words two of tonights readers used) - that feels real and "there" inside you.

Then there is the problem of understanding. Our memory is partial - focus on a piece of what happened that may or may not be at the center of what was "really" happening. Our sense of proportion, or attention to specific details, our knowledge base and experience for the memory is located both in the time of the experience and in the always changing present. So while the memory recedes - our understanding of it grows - even as it disappears into uncertainty?

The point of tonight's discussion was to begin both to accumulate a data-base of memories in your journal - and to position ourselves to see these ideas as emblematic - as something more than the events or feelings they report.

We also spent some time discussing the three readings. Within this short talk we moved back and forth between the details of the story - and the ideas the stories engendered.

And you set up your blogs. Hopefully there will be links to your blogs at the right of this post - soon, if they are not there already.

For Wednesday:

Read: Lowry, 48; Vowell, 130; Bellow, 76.

Blog 1: What is your definition of creative nonfiction? What are CNF essays about - and what do they do?