Slug Stories

Overview

In this assignment, you will participate in a collective story project modeled on two well-known oral history undertakings: StoryCorps (https://storycorps.org) and Humans of New York (http://www.humansofnewyork.com). Your goal is to gather, share, and preserve your individual life stories in an effort to celebrate the multitude of voices in our college community; to forge connections among students (current, past, and future); and to develop consciousness and self-awareness surrounding our personal and collective identities. In this way, our project assumes two key points:

1. that who we are is inseparable from collective and more global realities;

2. that through these stories we can provide a node of continuity with our shared past and future.

You are tasked with developing your own story for the Colleges 9 & 10 archive.

This will be a short piece, but you will be required to record it for the College 9 Archive. Take time to think carefully, to be creative, to develop compelling and coherent ideas and connections, and to compose in your very best prose.

Writing Your Story

Once you’ve decided on a topic, you’ll compose a 2-3 -page story about a single, defining moment or aspect of your life and how it relates to, or expresses the College 9 theme.

As you do this, keep in mind what Julie Beck says about our life stories, that they don’t “just say what happened” but “why it was important, what it means for who [we are], for who [we’ll] become, and for what happens next.” In other words, you will want to think about the meaning and significance of your story and the moment or aspect of your life that it captures.

Why is the story you are telling important?

What does it say about your identity and cultural background?

What might it suggest about your community, both at UCSC and beyond?

What might it imply about our broader society?

What does it suggest about your own future, the future of your community, and/or the future of our society at large?

This is the place to introduce personal experience, to express who you are, what you know, what you have learned, and what this leads you to believe at this moment, now, as you conclude your first quarter in college.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Your aspirations (what are your hopes and plans for your future? How is being here helping you to achieve this? How is this imagined future connected to your past and present? How might telling a story about your life help you create this future?)
2. Your identity (what is the story of your identity? How did you develop this identity? When did you become conscious of it and how? What is the relationship between your individual identity and the community that you come from as well as the community of Colleges 9&10?
3. How you relate to social, political, and/or economic issues we have covered in core (choose one of the issues that we have studied this quarter and tell a story about your personal experience of this issue. What has it been like to “live” this issue? What does it have to do with your identity? Is your experience similar or different from the way we have studied this issue? What might your experience suggest about this issue more broadly?).
4. What paths do you see open to you and your generation? What obligations have globalization and your new knowledge thrust upon you? How will what you have learned as a writer help you engage more fully in the world that you have inherited? How has the process of becoming a better writer and thinker affected your position in local and global communities? What do you want your classmates to know or to remember about you, what you have learned, and what you have to say? What does all of this mean to you, as an individual and a citizen, as you complete your first quarter of college?

Tips:

1. Remember, this is not the story of your life. Rather, it is a narrative about a single moment or aspect of your life, a moment when you learned something, realized something, came to see yourself and your world in a different light.

2. The best stories will be compelling and insightful. They will eloquently narrate a transformative moment that will lead us all to understand who we are more fully. They will connect your individual life our collective experience as humans.

Timeline

Monday 11/25 (or: Wed 11/27) Send me a google-document of your first draft.

Friday 12/6 Final draft of your story due.

Monday 12/9 Record your Slug Story.