Memoir is rooted in the writer’s own experience, memories and observations. Some memoirs, or personal essays, focus on a significant event in the writer’s life, a meaningful relationship, an important object or place, or some pattern, thread, or theme that weaves through his or her life. For this particular memoir you will be looking backwards to explore and explain something about your connection to one particular food item—it could be a fruit or vegetable, meat or fish, a spice or a particular dish, or some other edible item. Food is tied up in our sense of identity, as well as our connection to family and friends and culture. Your essay should include both details that make vivid your experiences with this food (as well as the people who introduced it to you or shared it with you) and some reflection about te significance of this food (or food more generally) in your life. In other words, you will be practicing one of the essential skills of the writer: namely, to connect the specific to the general.
LENGTH: To have the space to flesh out one (or several) scenes, I expect a rough draft should be at least 750 1000 words. It’s fine if your rough draft is shorter; if so, you should expect to receive come feedback from both me and your peer reviewer about how you may further develop your essay,
BRAINSTORM: Spend a good deal of time meditating on possible topics for this essay essay. Think of food items that have been important to you and how and with whom you have experienced them. This could involve cooking in the kitchen with a grandparent or gardening or fishing or hunting, or eating doughnuts with friends at 2 am after a night of partying, or devouring pints of ice cream alone in your room. Think about which topics let you explore something about your attitudes, history, sense of yourself and your culture. When you settle on a topic, make some lists, do some free-writing, draw some pictures, talk things over with your friends and family. Try to place yourself inside a specific scene or two, combining memory with imagination in order to give your readers the illusion they are watching a bit of your life play out in front of them—a particular place and time, particular actions and conversation.
DRAFT: In your rough draft, concentrate on getting down the details of the experience (sensory details about the food, but also the people or experiences you connect with it). Your task is much like a fiction writer’s: to capture lived experience in concrete detail, so that your reader feels almost as if he or she is living it as well. Describe setting, develop character (dialogue is often a particularly good way to do this). Write not a hazy, hasty pencil sketch of an idea, but rather fill in your picture with detail and color.
FOCUS: As you are writing (maybe before or after as well) think about the “point” of this essay. Think about your reader. How does your experience connect to something more universal, to something your reader may have experienced or care about. What are you finally trying to say about this hacked-off corner of your experience? You may not have a neat little lesson to impart, but your sense of the meaning of the experience should have clarified at least a little in the writing.
REVISION: Notes for revision tasks to follow.
GRADING CRITERIA: I will evaluate your essays on the basis of
- the sharpness of the details you use to evoke experience
- the thoughtfulness with which you reflect on the experience
- the grace of your language
- the mechanical correctness of your prose (for this essay focus in particular on avoiding sentence boundary errors).