Monday, February 28, 2011

David Sedaris/Creative Nonfiction

 David Sedaris on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/lists/sedaris/


http://www.macobo.com/essays/epdf/Me%20Talk%20Pretty%20One%20Day%20by%20Sedaris.pdf

http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/dashton2/autobiographywebpage/index.html



Some good websites for the topic:
http://www.creativenonfiction.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_nonfiction
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/druker/nonfic.html




Goals of creative non-fiction
1. Deal with an issue/problem people are concerned about or find a way to make them concerned or interested.

Consider your audience
Use non-fiction techniques to draw the reader in:




narration
characterization
setting/place
personal involvement
Give background to educate your readers
Give your readers new information to help them understand themselves, the world better

2.Provide accurate data.

Be truthful.  Be honest.
Research thoroughly and carefully (the more you look, the more you’ll find)
Use a variety of sources:


primary (interviews, trips to the place, personal experience, surveys)
secondary (library research . . . .)
Cite your sources so readers know how you gathered the information
3. Report fairly.

Be objective.
Be logical.
Select information carefully.
Provide details.
Use facts, real people, real situations. Be frank. Don’t be too personal.

4. Interpret your information.

*Introduce
*Give facts, examples, quotations, . . .
*Analyze, interpret, explain, synthesize.

5. Draw conclusions.
6. Organize your information.

Put your information in a logical order (chronological, spatial, dramatic, general to specific. . . .).
Put your information in an interesting order.
Use clear paragraphs (topic/purpose).
Deal with information in blocks.
Consider using headings.

7. Use interesting language.

vivid, useful details
quotations / vernacular
metaphor
imagery
humor
rhythm, pacing

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

So be sure to post your thoughts about the book and its ending!  First, check out this AP English Lit blog where students have posted their thoughts.
http://yhsapenglish.edublogs.org/2007/09/15/in-the-lake-of-the-woods-o%E2%80%99brien/

Your post should be of an interesting length and should address the following:
Topics to consider in your post:
• the elements of fiction (point of view, setting, plot, character, and theme);
• author’s intent;
• author’s style (mood, tone, syntax, detail, diction); and
• connections to class discussion, other books read this year, or concepts from the course



And check out this college blog:
http://collegian.lasalle.edu/en/16/6/699/

Text and speech of O'Brien about the Vietnam War:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WritingVietnam/obrien.html

You might find this interesting:
His award-winning novel, The Things They Carried, has been called one of the finest volumes of fiction bout the Vietnam War, and Stewart O'Nan, in his Vietnam Reader, called The Things They Carried "a mysterious blending of the real and the imaginary." O'Nan said it makes us feel the loss of friends and innocence, and the resulting confusion that gives the war a deeply personal resonance. Growing up in a small town in Minnesota, the son of an insurance salesman and an elementary school teacher, Mr. O'Brien was a self-professed dreamer and a self-taught magician. He once said that he was inspired to be a writer by his father's personal account of Iwo Jima and Okinawa which had been published in the New York Times. He could not have known, then, reading his father's clippings, how close he had come to what would be the ultimate truth of his life. He was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam as an infantryman; he spent the tour of his duty in Quang Nai province and was stationed in My Lai one year after the My Lai massacre. From a small Midwestern town to Vietnam is, we can imagine, a very long journey, and somewhere on that journey, the writer inside Tim O'Brien was freed. But he was more than merely a witness to the tragedy of the Vietnam war. He was hit by shrapnel in a grenade attack and awarded the Purple Heart. Like his father, he had written and published personal accounts of the war which had made their way into Minnesota newspapers. When he returned from Vietnam, he studied for his doctorate at Harvard's Kennedy School, and while doing so, he experienced his personal accounts into a book which would be, of course, his first. So with the publication of If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home), he began his writing career. 

Friday, February 11, 2011

Reading Group Questions

Discuss with other students and post an answer to the reading group questions.  If posting as a group, be sure to list the names of the people in your group for credit.   You can write the answers in a word document before you post, so that you have a copy.
Also, work on your short stories and for homework, finish the novel for Tuesday.
Have a great weekend.

1. Almost from this novel's first page we know that Kathy Wade will vanish, and it is not long before we discover that her disappearance will remain unsolved. What, then, gives In the Lake of the Woodsits undeniable suspense? What does it offer in place of the revelations of traditional mysteries?

2. Instead of a linear narrative, in which action unfolds chronologically, Tim O'Brien has constructed a narrative that simultaneously moves forward and backward in time: forward from John and Kathy's arrival at the cabin; backward into John's childhood, and beyond that to Little Big Horn and the War of Independence. It also moves laterally, into the "virtual" time that is represented by different hypotheses about Kathy's fate. What does the author accomplish with this narrative scheme? In what ways are his different narrative strands connected?

3. What does O'Brien accomplish in the sections titled "Evidence"? What information do these passages impart that is absent from the straightforward narrative? How do they alter or deepen our understanding of John as a magician, a politician, a husband, and a soldier who committed atrocities in wartime? What connections do they forge between his private tragedy and the pathologies of our public life and history? Does the testimony of (or about) such "real" people as Richard Nixon, William Calley, or George Custer lend greater verisimilitude to John's story or remind us that it--and John himself--are artifices?

4. Who is the narrator who addresses us in the "Evidence" sections? Are we meant to see him as a surrogate for the author, who also served in Vietnam and revisited Thuan Yen many years after the massacre? (See Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me," in The New York Times Magazine, October 3, 1994, pp. 48-57.) In what ways does O'Brien's use of this narrator further explode the conventions of the traditional novel?

5. One of the few things that we know for certain about John is that he loves Kathy. But what does John mean by love? How do John's feelings for his wife resemble his hopeless yearning for his father, who had a similar habit of vanishing? In what circumstances does John say "I love you"? What vision of love is suggested by his metaphor of two snakes devouring each other? Why might Kathy have fallen in love with John?

6. Although it is easy to see Kathy as the victim of John's deceptions, the author at times suggests that she may be more conscious (and therefore more complex) than she first appears. We learn, for example, that Kathy has always known about John's spying and even referred to him as "Inspector Clouseau," an ironic counterpoint to John's vision of himself as "Sorcerer." At a critical moment she rebuffs her husband's attempt at a confession. And in the final section of "Evidence," we get hints that Kathy may have planned her own disappearance. Are we meant to see Kathy as John's victim or as his accomplice, like a beautiful assistant vanishing inside a magician's cabinet?

7. Why might John have entered politics? Is he merely a cynical operator with no interest in anything but winning? Or, as Tony Carbo suggests, might John be trying to atone for his actions in Vietnam? Why might the author have chosen to leave John's political convictions a blank?

8. John's response to the horrors of Thuan Yen is to deny them: "This could not have happened. Therefore it did not." Where else in the novel does he perform this trick? How does John's way of coping with the massacre compare to the psychic strategies adopted by William Calley or Paul Meadlo? Do any of O'Brien's characters seems capable of acknowledging terrible truths directly? How does In the Lake of the Woods treat the matter of individual responsibility for evil?

9. Each of this novel's hypotheses about events at the cabin begins with speculation but gradually comes to resemble certainty. The narrator suggests that John and Kathy Wade are ultimately unknowable, as well; that any attempt to "penetrate...those leaden walls that encase the human spirit" can never be anything but provisional. Seen in this light, In the Lake of the Woods comes to resemble a magician's trick, in which every assertion turns out to be only another speculation. Given the information we receive, does any hypothesis about what happened at Lake of the Woods seem more plausible than the others? With what certainties, if any, does this novel leave us?  

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Wed. 2/9 In the Lake of the Woods

Continue reading book---Finish for Tuesday--TEST!!!!

View movie 1st period.

Continue working on short story 2nd period.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

In the Lake of the Woods/Short Story Assignment

In the Lake of the Woods/Short Story Assignment

View movie.  Post a comment about parallels between the movie and the book that you find effective.

Read to page 164 for Monday.

From New York Times Book Review:
There are three kinds of story in "In the Lake of the Woods." The first is a conventional, remote third-person account of plain facts, the events that can be reconstructed without conjecture, more or less. The second kind of story appears in several chapters called "Evidence": collections of quotations, excerpts from interviews and readings that bear on the Wade case. The third kind of story appears in chapters called "Hypothesis"; it tries to suggest what might have happened to Kathleen Wade in the days after she disappeared. But with these stories, Mr. O'Brien is also building a character, John Wade, whose inner architecture is more emblematic than personal. Wade is the son of an alcoholic father who hanged himself in the family garage. As a child, Wade consoled himself -- isolated himself -- with magic. In Vietnam he came to be called "Sorcerer," and one of his last acts before returning stateside was to make himself vanish from the company rolls. To become a politician was an act of atonement for him, but it was also the practice of magic by other means. Mr. O'Brien quotes Dostoyevsky: "Man is bound to lie about himself." The lie John Wade constructed, as man and boy, was intended to avert the loss of love.

Your assignment:

Write a short story of at least 5 pages that:

1. Has a historical background of your choice--

2. Explores multiple narrative lines
a. traditional 3rd perso narrative
b. Evidence paragraphs or sections--quotes, interviews, newspaper clippings, historical facts, etc.
c. Hypotheses sections--places where you as a writer question what you've written or possible endings