Work on memoir/ Continue reading Breaking Night

Continue working on writing your memoir which may be a series of remembered anecdotes or a single remembrance of a time in your life or an encounter with a significant person.

Remember to TELL A STORY---use characterization, description, dialogue--anything that will make your story come alive!

Also, continue to read Breaking Night, aiming to have the book finished for Friday.

PENFIELD POETRY contest entries this week!

Writing Your Memoir

Begin working on your 5 page memoir.

 Which of the events on your "Chapters of my life" map/timeline offer the best writing possibilities?

Things to consider as you write your memoir:
Description of setting
Details
Informal, conversational tone
Dialogue recreated as appropriate
Thoughts and feelings described

Continue reading Breaking Night---If you have read it and can write an essay for ROC reads, that would be great!
Extra credit and a Wegman's coupon!

Also, PENFIELD POETRY contest----and make sure you have posted a story on figment.com...

The Six Word Memoir Project

I thought you would like this.  It's an interesting way to think about memoir...

Here is a site for six-word memoirs:

http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/


http://www.smithmag.net/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejndNExso9M

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18768430

http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/features/2008/02/memoir/gallery/index.html

The Chapters of My Life

This exercise is a simple biographical process, offering you the opportunity to reflect on your whole life, generate a picture of its significant moments and then engage with it with a bit of distance, to begin to clarify and perhaps make sense of things and the relationships between them. While it is very simple, and may appear undemanding, it can surface powerful memories, bring about startling insights and help you see new connections.

Ensure that when you start this exercise that you will have a good span of uninterrupted time to work through it (no less than an hour). To begin, spend some time thinking back on your life, particularly key events and also phases. ‘Map’ this out on a piece of paper. You might want to draw a time-line, from birth to the present, or simply brainstorm and see what emerges. Once you have completed this, begin to identify phases or ‘chapters’ in your life. If your life were a story, where would the chapters begin and end, and what would their titles be? You could also take this process further and assign colours to each of these phases, with the colours representing the qualities and moods that characterise each period.

When you are satisfied that you have worked ‘into’ this sufficiently, join up with your speaking partner (who should, ideally, have been working on the same task). Share elements of the story with your speaking partner. It is important in this exercise (and the ones that follow) that you share only what you are comfortable with. You might want to share only the chapters and colours but little detail. You might want to leave out whole chapters. It is up to you. The speaking partner’s role is to listen carefully to whatever you present. At the end of your presentation, your partner might ask some questions for clarity, or point out things that struck him or her particularly, but should not push any of this too far.

Swap roles. Once you have both shared, you might wish to discuss the exercise and anything that you have learnt about yourself, in particular, or the process of human growth, change and development, in general.

Writing a Memoir

Here's an interesting npr article on writing memoir:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137822505/start-your-memoir-project-with-a-relatable-story 

And another:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5340618

 

Drawing Out the Past - Writing Exercises for Memoir Writing

If you've decided to take the enormous task of writing your life story, you may find yourself scratching your head from time to time, stuck on a particular point in your life, or missing years. Here are some simple exercises to jog distant memories and draw out your past.

 Photograph Jumble: Sort through that box of old photographs in your attic. Mementos, cards, letters, and old photos are a wealth of material and can instantly bring you back to a moment in time. Select 10- 12 of them from any given decade, spacing them out chronically. Now, construct a timeline in those ten years using the photos. Take each photo and write at least 1 page about that day-what was happening? Who is there with you? Were you the one taking the photo? What events brought you to that place in time? What did that time mean to you?

Can You Smell That Smell?: Use your senses, in particular, the sense of smell. Scent is the strongest of the 5 senses tied to memory. Recall a scent that always jogs a memory, and write about it. Perhaps it's L'Air de Temp, and your first love wore it. Or the aroma of apple pie cooling in the window might bring you back to when you were a child. Some scents are unusual or even unpleasant, but they invoke pleasant memories. Other examples that have come up in discussion are root beer, licorice, witch hazel, mothballs, the ocean, gymnasiums, leather, or the aroma of fresh cut grass. Choose from the above list or remember another smell that immediately transports you back in time. Write about how it makes you feel? What happened? Why do you think the memory it triggers is so important?

Letter Writing: Choose an event from your past and write a letter to someone you know about it. Address the letter Dear_____, and start to tell them the story. You can choose a child, a friend, a spouse, a niece or nephew. Consider the person you are addressing, and tell the story as you would tell it to them and explain to them why it was important to you. This personalizes the story and makes it familiar to you and to the reader.

Who's on First? We've all had our share of firsts. First time you rode and bike, first day of school, first date, first kiss, first time you drove a car, first time you crashed a car. There are endless possibilities of "firsts" to write about. Choose a "first" experience and write about what it was like, what you were feeling.
These exercises can be used over and over every time you get stuck, or can be used to gather important details for your memoir.

Some exercises for writing about what you know

1. Surroundings Freewrite

   • Following the freewrite idea suggestions of professional essayist and poet Sheila Bender, place yourself in a comfortable setting and describe your surroundings. Describe what you see, how you are sitting, the things you feel and the things you think about as you are sitting there. Let your thoughts flow as quickly as possible and don't worry about using correct grammar or sentence structure. Write until you completely run out of thoughts and have nothing else to write about in regards to your surroundings. What ends up on the paper in front of you may or may not be useful to you, but taking your mind off your essay for a bit to write about something else completely different can help you break outside the box, and you may discover some fresh ideas for things to include in your essay.

   Dream Log

   • Mariana Ashley, author of Pick the Brain writing website, suggests keeping a daily journal of your dreams from the night before.The earlier in the day you do this, the easier it will be to recall event sequence and detail. Write down what happened, as many details as you can remember and how you felt while the dream was happening. Pick The Brain suggests not trying to make sense of your dreams while you're writing them down. If you have time, look back over the dream and see if you can find any resemblance of the dream with your daily life and whether or not you can come up with some kind of interpretation for it. If you're able to come up with an interpretation for the entire dream or pieces of it, it may be able to help you dissect your thoughts and feelings regarding things that are important to you. It will serve as something for you to refer back to any time you need fresh ideas from your past.
   • 
     

   Random Word Lists

   • Create a list of ten or more random words. Use these words to create a composition about a recent happening in your life. Before you start writing, set rules for the composition. For example, you could set a rule that you have to use all the words in order or that you have to use them all and keep the composition under 300 words total. This will get your creative vocabulary juices flowing and will help you break out of writer's block and think of new, fresh ways to phrase boring sentences in your personal essay.

   Fly On The Wall

   • Imagine you are a fly on the wall in your own bedroom and describe in third person what that fly would think your life is like. Remember the fly doesn't follow you out of your bedroom and only knows you from the things that go on there. Since your bedroom is a private place hidden away from the rest of the world, this exercise will help you discover the things that are nearest to your heart and what is most important to you when you aren't distracted by the outside world. This will also reveal information about your character and your values as a person, things that are essential to include in any personal essay.

Breaking Night Liz Murray

 Read the Liz Murray excerpts and check out these web sites for more information about Breaking Night.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSYccnwUcCs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtybvFW0ncY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDQjH816L6E&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGXgEfEcwzE&feature=related 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129753532

Excerpt: 'Breaking Night'

by Liz Murray

Prologue
I have just one picture left of my mother. It's 4x7, black-and-white, and creased in different places. In it, she is seated slightly hunched, elbows touching knees, arms carrying the weight of her back. I know very little about her life when it was taken; my only clue is written in orange marker on the back. It reads: Me in front of Mike's on 6th St. 1971. Counting backward, I know that she was seventeen when it was taken, a year older than I am now. I know that Sixth Street is in Greenwich Village, though I have no idea who Mike is.

Breaking Night
By Liz Murray
Hardcover, 352 pages
Hyperion
List price: $24.99

The picture tells me that she was a stern-looking teenager. Her lips are pressed together in thought, offering a grimace for the camera. Framing her face, her hair dangles in beautiful wisps of black, smokelike curls. And her eyes, my favorite part, shine like two dark marbles, their movements frozen in time forever.
I've studied each feature, committing them to memory for my trips to the mirror, where I let my own wavy hair tumble down. I stand and trace similarities with the tip of my finger through the curve of each line in my face, starting with our eyes. Each pair offers the same small, rounded shape, only instead of my mother's brown, I have Grandma's rich yellow-green. Next, I measure the outline of our lips; thin, curvy, and identical in every way. Although we share some features, I know I'm not as pretty as she was at my age.
In my years with nowhere to live, behind the locked bathroom doors in different friends' apartments, I've secretly played this game in the mirror throughout all hours of the night. Tucked in by their parents, my friends sleep while images of my mother's graceful movements dance throughout my mind. I spend these hours in front of their bathroom mirrors, my bare feet cooled by gridded tiles, palms pressed on the sink's edge to support my weight.
I stand there fantasizing until the first blue hints of dawn strain through the frosted bathroom glass and birds announce themselves, chirping their morning songs. If I'm at Jamie's house, this is just the time to slip onto the couch before her mother's alarm beeps her awake, sending her to the bathroom. If I'm at Bobby's, the grinding noise of the garbage truck tells me it's time to sneak back to the foldout cot.
I travel quietly across their waking apartments to my resting spot. I never get too comfortable with my accommodations, because I'm not sure if I will sleep in the same place tomorrow.
Lying on my back, I run my fingertips over my face in the dark, and I envision my mother. The symmetry of our lives has become clearer to me lately. She was homeless at sixteen too. Ma also dropped out of school. Like me, Ma made daily decisions between hallway or park, subway or rooftop. The Bronx, for Ma, also meant wandering through dangerous streets, through neighborhoods with lampposts littered with flyers of police sketches and sirens blaring at all hours of the night.
I wonder if, like me, Ma spent most days afraid of what would happen to her. I'm afraid all the time lately. I wonder where I will sleep tomorrow — at another friend's apartment, on the train, or in some stairwell?
Tracing my fingertips over my forehead, down to my lips, I long to feel my mother's warm body embracing me again. The thought sends tears streaming from my eyes. I turn to my side, wiping my tears away, covering myself with my borrowed blanket.
I push the feeling of needing her far out of my mind. I push it beyond these walls lined with Bobby's family portraits; past the drunken Latino men just outside, slamming down winning hands of dominoes, seated atop milk crates on Fordham Road; away from the orange blinking lights of the bodegas and over the rooftops of this Bronx neighborhood. I force my thoughts to fade until the details of her face blur. I need to push them away if I am ever to get some sleep. I need sleep; it will be only a few more hours before I'm outside on the street again, with nowhere to go.
From Breaking Night by Liz Murray. Copyright 2010 Liz Murray. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.

Another excerpt:

http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/breaking-night-a-memoir-of-forgiveness-survival-and-my-journey-from-homeless-to-harvard/excerpt