I recently had my students write an “About Me” essay as it might appear on an Electronic Portfolio, a cover letter for a job, or an application for graduate school. The assignment comes from a campus initiative toward incorporating ePortfolios and from what I’ve noticed about students’ writing who come to me as they approach graduation and are faced with writing such texts. The students met with writing center consultants and wrote reflections about their visits. With the students’ permission, I’m sharing some lines from their reflections. I also snapped a few pictures of the writing center at St. John’s University where I teach.
Welcome to the Writing Center!
The people at the front desk are cheery and good-natured. I quickly passed this off as a trait of English majors.
–Max Blitzer
My expectations prior to going in [to the writing center] were to meet with a nerdy, potentially socially awkward valedictorian type of student.
–Daniel Herrera
Consultants Not the Grim (or nerdy) Writers Some Students Expect
I realized that I was actually doing most of the talking; she [the consultant] was just a mediator and I answered my own questions.”
–Malgorzata Stapor
Students Often Surprised How Nice It Is In The W.C.
When we were first assigned to go to the writing center to get help on our “About Me” essay, I was honestly confused. How could someone help me write about myself?…When we sat down I tried to explain to her [the writing consultant] how I did not really understand the purpose for me being there. Shortly, she explained to me how their job was to bring out ideas that we ourselves might have missed.
First I thought I wanted to make a documentary film. Now it looks like there might be two. The original idea was to be about my dad and his buddies’ morel mushroom hunting obsession. A second film has jumped out and seemed to be demanded to be made about my recent trip to the Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend weekend. My impulse to try the films probably comes from what my students and I have been up to in the classroom and also the trip I took last summer to Providence for the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
The Mushroom Hunters
In the classroom, my students write a documentary-style research paper we call a scholarly personal narrative. They tell a personal story, weave in scholarly research, and then “write” a short documentary film as a culminating writing project. This seems something along the lines of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. It’s a story of personal grief with research layered in.
Working with film is a craft I find can take me away. In other words, what should be an hour of fiddling with iMovie or Windows Moviemaker turns into several hours and staying up half the night to finish a project so that my family can see it the next morning.
As for the festival last summer, I had a great time, went to films with my sis, films with my wife, and also met lots of indie filmmakers who I peppered with questions about their work. I enjoyed a lot of the films (Sailcloth, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore) but there was one funny and clever documentary short called Two’s a Crowd that acted as the catalyst that caused my sister and I to think, maybe we can do this.
Some Pulpwood Queens at Girlfriend Weekend
It’s my thinking that I’m going to write here about how these projects are coming along with hopes that some of you will join in and set me back on course when my thinking goes astray.
A writer has a lot of choices when writing and an example of those choices can be seen in all the ways a writer might choose to open a piece of writing. In the coming weeks, I invite you to experiment with opening sentences as a way to not only generate new material, but also as means to begin the habit of looking for the choices writers make as they work.
This week’s experiment asks you to open your text by orienting your readers to a specific place. Because most of the comments I’ve received come from those working on blog posts, essays, or short stories, I’m giving examples from those sorts of texts.
Before we look at the examples of writers orienting readers to place, try to think of a text you would write that might open by orienting readers in this way. If you need help getting ideas for your writing, you can check out my post on developing your writing territories.
Here are some examples of writers who open texts by (among other things) orienting their readers to a place:
Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
“Sade and four of his twenty-something friends are at a hookah café almost underneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn.”
From Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Notice also the specifics of the name of a bridge and a borough of NYC. Is it appropriate for you to include these sorts of details?
“Well, a couple weeks ago Stingray and I were prancing up S. Congress Ave after having anointed ourselves with hipster fumes at Jo’s, when this wacked out hipster kid comes careening toward us, chanting nonsense.”
Appeared on iblamethepatriarchy.com The word choice is interesting too with words such as “Stingray,” “hipster fumes,” and “careening.”
“On the flatlands of South Los Angeles, blacks and Latinos share neighborhoods of neat houses and broken institutions, a hospital shut down by federal regulators, a community college that has lost its accreditation, police districts where gang crimes fill the blotter.”
by Robert Suro in the Carnegie Reporter. Not only do we get details, we get relevant details. The shut down hospital has a lot to do with what the article will be about.
Rob Sheffield's love is a mix tape
The playback: late night, Brooklyn, a pot of coffee, and a chair by the window. I’m listening to a mix tape from 1993. Nobody can hear it but me. The neighbors are asleep. The skater kids who sit on my front steps, drink beer, and blast Polish hip-hop—they’re gone for the night.
From Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape. I haven’t lived in Brooklyn, but I have lived in Indiana, Georgia, and North Carolina. What details would I give (in the spirit of Sheffield here) that would allow my readers to visit a specific spot in a place I’ve lived or am making up for a story?
Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to write a piece that begins by orienting a reader to a specific place. I’ve given examples from blogs, scholarly articles from journals, and creative nonfiction. So it’s a way of opening that can work for all sorts of texts.
Once you write a text, feel free to leave a comment on this post with your link, so we can all see what you wrote when it came to orienting a reader to place.
Thanks for participating! I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on iTunes by going to the store and typing “digital book club.”
In order to win Jane Roper’s novel Eden Lake I had to agree to read the book and participate in the accompanying Goodreads discussion as a part of The Next Best Book Club. I am a finicky reader who has probably put down at least as many books as I’ve begun, and so I wanted to make sure I had a decent chance to like the story okay before I agreed to have it shipped to me. I could already see myself ten pages into 300, not enjoying the read, but having to stay with it because I said I would.
I went to Amazon and checked out the opening pages. I was happy with how things got started: “Just before noon on the morning after Memorial Day, Eric filled the tank of the John Deere, started the engine and rolled out of the barn into broad sunlight.” One of my favorite authors, Richard Ford, often starts books on a holiday (Independence Day, Easter) and there’s a lot competent in Jane’s sentence: it placed me firmly in time and in the sort of setting where there would be a John Deere and a barn. I knew I wasn’t in Queens anymore, and felt like my reading life was safe for the week I put it in Jane’s control.
Jane Roper's Eden Lake
Maine, complicated relationships, secrets, and summer camp. These are the primary ingredients of this story that bring together a group of brothers and sisters to run a summer camp that their parents ran when they were growing up. There are surprises here—excellent ones—and they are spaced out nicely that in such a way that just when I got comfortable with how things were going, just when I thought I could see what was going to happen next, there was something that threw me for a good reading loop and reinvigorated my interest in the story.
I’ve heard several writers say that they don’t have one idea for a book, usually the book comes when several ideas seem to collide and this book has a good bit of that going on. There are romantic and familial complications along with the tricky balance that running a camp that’s good for kids must be while at the same time paying attention to the fact that there are bills to be paid. “Materialism is the opiate of the masses,” one character quips in part about all the upgrades to the camp over the years (i.e. a climbing wall). Another remembers how in the old days the camp was supposed to be, “A vision of what the world might be.” That last line, it reminds me of something fiction can accomplish as well. Eden Lake creates a world I was thankful to have visited, enough so that I still haven’t stopped thinking about packing up the car and heading north to see if I could find some version of it.
Click Here to Watch a Very Funny Book Trailer
Roper, Jane. Eden Lake. Boston: Last Light Studio, 2011. Print.
As Josh Henkin’s novel Matrimony kicks off, there is no sign of marriage, just college dorm hilarity when the PCC-ers—Peer Contraceptive Counselors—come for a visit to educate the new freshman dorm dwellers. Given the pacing, I forgot that this was a book that purported to be about marriage and I started to expect a story that took place in a small college over a couple of days, or at most, a semester. I could feel some of my own Love on the Big Screen story coming on when there was some early bathroom talk between the protagonist Julian and his roommate Carter:
It’s bad enough to pee in your own shower,” his roommate said. “But in a communal shower?” He looked up at Julian. “You don’t pee in the shower, do you?”
“No,” Juian said. From time to time, he had. Didn’t everyone?
Joshua Henkin's novel, MATRIMONY
I love Henkin’s timing with his “From time to time, he had,” line. The sentences are full of those sorts of attention-grabbing surprises, and you’ll hear a lot more from Julian and his roommate, interesting stuff, about how men navigate relationships, especially when those relationships overlap. Henkin deftly takes big jumps in time when it comes to the narrative, and this is mostly achieved by dividing the story into geographically organized sections: Northington, Ann Arbor, Berkley, Iowa City, and New York. It’s with these jumps in time that Henkin is able to go down into specific detail while still telling the story of what it is to be married, at least for Julian and his wife Mia.
Julian and Mia make decisions that have consequences and things happen to their marriage that sometimes happen in relationships. In reading the book, I’m reminded that I heard Henkin say several times at the Wesleyan Writers Conference something to this effect: When writing, you want smart characters who are capable of intelligent mistakes. While none of the events or mistakes that concern Mia and Julian are shocking, all of them are a surprise, probably because the range of things that can happen to any couple—get hit by a car, find out the apartment is full of rats, or make a million in the stock market—is nearly infinite. Things happen to the couple and it’s interesting to read about how each character responds and interacts with and toward their spouse.
A Picture of Henkin from His Website
Matrimony can sometimes feel like a book on the art of writing. Julian and his friend Carter are both writers who attend a workshop class taught by a Professor Chesterfield who spouts guidance such as this: “THOU SHALT NOT CONFUSE A SHORT STORY WITH A RUBIK’S CUBE.” I sometimes hear folks criticize writers who write books about characters who want to write books (I see their point) but I think the writing process of everyone who writes is so highly personal and individualized that it’s usually interesting to hear how writers do what they do. This is a book more about marriage than writing, but there’s also a funny bit where a character writes a story with a character who thinks about breaking up with their boyfriend for over 20 pages. Thankfully we don’t have to read the pages; we just comically hear about the story from other characters as the novel proceeds. In this way Henkin is a skilled comedian who uses repetition to make the joke even funnier than it was the first time.
Henkin keeps the language fresh, and for awhile I was thinking that maybe there was at least one vocabulary word for me on every page. Here’s a few I jotted down that I had to look up: petard, jejune, peremptoriness, bathetic, somnolent, and bivouacking. Of course there is much more to fresh language than my vocab list, but I found myself marking interesting word choices as I read. Most of the characters are book lovers and part of the reward for reading this novel was their lively wordplay banter.
For a guy like me who has spent a lot of time thinking about how relationships work and don’t work, Matrimony presents a view of marriage that makes sense to me: hard stuff happens and the couple tries to hang in together and on some levels they succeed and on others they fail. Part of what was interesting here was to see what the couple decides to do about splitting up or staying together. From the complexities of in-laws to a crazy dog in a small NYC apartment, Matrimony shows readers a marriage worth paying attention to.
