Class Activities - Authentic Narrative

→ Memories in Threes

Reflect on a memory of an event from your life. Think about why the memory stays with you. Perhaps something changed for you afterward. Maybe the incident was unusual and never happened again; or maybe it was so ordinary as to represent a long chain of moments in your life.

a. Tell what happened in three short sentences: a beginning, middle and end.

b. Then take one of the sentences and write a short paragraph that takes you directly into the place, time, people, and feelings. Moment by moment, tell what happened.

→ Pyramid Story

Write/Draw a pyramid story using the following constraints:

• The first line will contain the main character’s name.
• In the second line describe the character in two words.
• On the third line, use three words to describe the setting.
• Then explain the main conflict using four words on the fourth line.
• On the next three lines, describe three key events of the plot using the corresponding number of words: five, six, and seven.
• On the last line, use eight words to communicate the resolution of the conflict.

→Memory Seeds

Write a brief description of an early childhood story that has been told to you about yourself, but that you, on hearing the story, have no actual memories of. A story told to you by relatives or family friends.

Look at it. Can you see the event? If so, how did you get the visual memory? Contrast this with the memory you have of a more important event in your life, a contemporary event. What distinguishes them?

Then answer these questions:

1. What is the situation of this memory. Be more precise. Think of, for instance, economic, factors, social factors, emotional factors.

2. What are the motives of the people involved, including the self-character?

3. What are the power relations?

4. What can be changed? Can the setting be changed? Can one character take the place of another, an aunt be an uncle, a grandmother, a teacher? How can you further displace the identities of the people involved in ways that allow you to turn them into characters but to also retain the potential emotional arc and your sympathy for it?

Having thought through all of these answers, write a fuller description of the scene and see where it goes.

In this exercise, you will tell a whole story in a quick scene. It is to be written in five sentences. There are two preparation steps. The first is to remember a person you know well. The second step is to imagine a place where you find the person. Now you are ready for the five pieces.
1. Describe the person's hands.
2. Describe something he or she is doing with the hands.
3. Use a metaphor to say something about some exotic place.
4. Mention what you would want to ask this person in the context of 2 and 3 above.
5. The person looks up or toward you, notices you there, gives an answer that suggests he or she only gets part of what you asked.
Here you are asked to focus on the hands and what they are doing, then explode the poem out to some widely different, unfamiliar context. Now the trick is to come back, but come back by trusting that your subconscious brought you to a place that has some relation to what you have been observing. The way to come back is usually through some tonal or image path related to the metaphor. Finally, the focus is broken again, this time by the subject. Often the other person ends by saying something about the exotic place that makes all the emotions come together.

Make a metaphor that likens you to an inanimate or non-human thing--for example, I am a fan, or I am a car's tire, I am a tree. Make a list of 5 to 7 of these.

Choose one and reflect on the ways that its attributes apply to you. What does this condensation of yourself into this new nature mean for your most precious human attributes--say, your words and language, or, say, your sexuality.

What does this new nature imply for your human body parts? Where and in what condition is your heart now? What would your eyes see and your hands touch?

Free-write on this for 10 minutes.

Go out and sit somewhere close by (no further than 5 minutes from class) and observe. Write what you see, without concern for “poetic” form. Just observe and write for a 10 full minutes or a little longer if you need. Just write what you see. Write everything you see.

Then after you have observed in writing for 10 minutes, return to class to switch to an edit mode. Pull out the images from your writing that strike you as startling for some reason. Say something about those images, why them? What do they make you think of? What are they like? What if they weren’t there? Say something “philosophic” about those particular images--

Use your observation material to imitate a poem provided for you, or simply write any poem you imagine with this material.