Personal Essays

This is an essay that I wrote for a memoir assignment in a writing class my Junior year. I took the opportunity to delve into some memories of my time abroad in Argentina a year prior. After my semester study abroad program, I stayed in South America longer in order to intern at a traditional gaucho guest ranch for three weeks. This was a unique experience that I wanted to document, so I wrote in my journal a lot while I was there. One of the best parts of writing this essay was going back through my journal and processing all I had experienced and learned. My first draft was about my experience working with cattle on the ranch, since the class topic was about animals. But, as I started a second draft, I realized that I was drawn more to talking about the people there, specifically the ranch’s cook, Mercedes. By changing the focus of the essay, I was able to further develop themes of home and familiarity that felt important. I’m proud of the finished product and I think it shows my writing development through my detailed description of setting and ability to weave together several poignant anecdotes into a cohesive essay. Most of all, I’m glad to have this essay on hand to re-read and relive the influential experience of being in Argentina.

This essay remains one of my favorite pieces I’ve written, even though it’s from my first writing class in college Sophomore year. The assignment required me to experiment with form and I ended up writing an essay in the form of a crossword puzzle solutions page. The essay was inspired by a day I spent doing homework at a local coffee shop and observing the other people there, including a couple of older women working on a crossword puzzle. I took notes on my experience in the coffee shop and wrote about it in the essay, which I broke up into blurbs focused around a certain word, or “solution.” What started as mundane people-watching turned into a really experimental essay that my classmates enjoyed reading.

The topic of this essay is admittedly odd: my doorknob collection. As I explain in the essay, I received a few doorknobs as a gift one year from my Mom as a joke because it referred to a television show we watched together. The joke turned into much more than that, and now I still receive doorknobs for my birthdays and Christmas. I like this essay because I got to write about my mom, my great aunt Margaret, and the family legacy of the doorknobs in my collection. I think I do a good job of connecting meaning and symbolism with sensory description of the doorknobs themselves. A unique aspect of this assignment is that we were supposed to do outside research about our topic and include it in our essays. I wasn’t thrilled about this element; research about doorknobs isn’t very riveting and I thought the dry information and citations would distract from the story I really wanted to tell. However, I think that in the end the outside information provides some structure to an essay that originally didn’t have much direction.

This essay was one of my first attempts at a personal memoir. It was inspired by a happy memory of visiting home on a beautiful fall day and the nostalgia I felt as I remembered spending fall in the mountains as a kid. Although the essay is short, it shows how I started to find my voice as a storyteller. I used a lot of sensory detail to reflect on memories of my childhood and the symbolism of falling leaves. My writing in this essay may not be the most original or profound, but it nicely captures my feelings from that semester as I realized that I was growing up and leaving my childhood behind.