Accessing the Heart (Sophie)

How Writing Memoir Can Water and Grow a Writer

Writing memoir comes from story, which is innately in us. Because story-composing and story-telling is such a significant aspect of being human, focusing on personal experiences creates an accessible starting point for any writer. After experience with writing a memoir, students gain confidence, tools, and methods on how to write that they can extrapolate for future genres and prompts.

This page is focused on how to write and read memoir, and how to advance the practice of such in our classrooms.

Guiding Text

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Findings: Writers Can Grow and Strengthen Their Craft When Given Accessible Prompts and Genres

Take Action: A Tool for You

Rules of Narrative and Why We Start With It:

In Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher’s book 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents, they make the case for narrative writing and its importance and influence on growing writers. They say, “We tell our students, “You have stories that no one can tell but you. You have experiences and ideas that can teach all of us.” At its heart, the narrative unit is about finding the storytellers inside each of our students” (137).

The ability to let students write what is innate in them–experiences, memories, tangible objects–starts the writing process for them, because they can truly feel what they are writing about.

Along with that, “narrative is a good choice for the beginning of the year because it’s the genre most of our students are reading independently” (Gallagher and Kittle 138).

Relevance in both what students read and experience is the prime foundational structure in writing, and starting with this will help students succeed in other genres throughout the year and their academic experiences as a whole.

Making the Case for Mindfulness:

In order to access the heart–the main driving force in the memories that ground our stories–have students participate in mindfulness practices that can allow them to sift through their memories and experiences in order to find topics that they could write about.

According to the book The Art and Science of Mindfulness: Integrating Mindfulness Into Psychology and the Helping Professions, “Through the process of mindfulness, one is able to disidentify from the contents of consciousness (i.e., one’s thoughts, emotions, value judgements) and view one’s moment-by-moment experience with greater clarity and objectivity” (Shapiro and Carlson 100).

List of Potential Mindfulness Practices:

-Map the Hand: have students outline their hand on a piece of paper and write what arises in their minds when thinking about their individual hands

-Access the 5 senses: have students write down 5 things they can see, 4 things they can touch, 3 things they can hear, 2 things they can smell, and one thing they can taste.

-Daily Gratitude: have students take 5 minutes to write down what they are grateful for–this is helpful grounding in a world that can seem and feel so negative.

-Tell Me You’re From a State Without Telling me You’re From a State: have students come up with things that make their home states unique without giving away the name of the state.

-If Life Was a Book, What Would be the Title of Your Current Chapter?: Give students the time to reflect on this season on their life in an effort for them to exercise their creative senses.

Final Thoughts:

Undeniably, all of these practices ask students to look for “mesearch.” Accessible data that is experienced and lived creates a context in which writers can write more comfortably and freely. This is an important first step in the writing process, not only for narrative, but for any other genre as well. It is used as a way to get student’s gears turning.

Conclusion

Top 2 research patterned findings:

1. Students typically do not engage well with currently prioritized genres.

2. Writing anything with story--particularly memoir--is a liberating exercise that exposes the students to writing that helps them in other genres.

So what...

-It is important to include works from the canon and practice typical writing forms in an effort to grow critical thinkers, but it is equally important to let writers exercise creativity in writing that stems from their own experiences.

-Writing a memoir can be a difficult, traumatizing, extensive task, but when done well it can be effective and impactful for both the writer and the audience.

-Mindfulness is an accessible, progressive technique in generating "mesearch" that students can write on.

Works Cited