Professor: Barbara Mossberg
4 credits
“I went to the woods to live deliberately . . . not to find at the end of my life I have not lived at all”—Henry David Thoreau, Walden. “Midway in this our life I found myself in the woods. . . “ Dante, Divine Comedy. Come right upstairs with me, I have so much to tell, Emily Dickinson.
In which we gather in our own “woods” to “live deliberately” as our writing and reading selves. We will begin with pie (because, pie: an homage to Thoreau’s huckleberry gathering parties) and introductions, and end with a vision of what you will make of your time here in this hallowed space of a learning community—more introductions. How to think about your life so far, what can ensure you are living, how will you have lived? Enter memoir!
We can’t get enough of each other’s stories. Memoir is not only the bestselling prose today, it always has been. It is the most enduring form of literature, and most ancient, beginning in cuneiform’s Gilgamesh. It is headline-making news. It is history. It is a cultural phenomenon across life’s sectors. Our class will explore diverse examples of memoir from all the genres. We will study classic enduring structural models by scientists and poets, from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, to Emily Dickison’s and Walt Whitman’s life epics, St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, John Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez, Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Tell Our Own Story, works by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Rafael Campo, Mark Nepo, Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, and even teachers you know. We will see how writing a memoir stems from deepest sensations of longing, belonging, and layers of loneliness and growth in "this our life," as Dante begins The Inferno.
What is it we are studying? Memoir makes public and permanent one's inner life and reckoning. It is a literature of legacy. Memoir is a brave and even daring act of communion, oddly so; we each are so vulnerable: who are we to think we have a story worth the telling? Yet to write creates our fate, our destiny, our identity. Our class establishes common ground and aspiration from diverse experience as we study stories of dismantling disability, loss, family terror, despair, and survival, transformation, power, learning, and new life--writing whose confessions--instead of shame--liberate us into a forgiven, forgiving, grace. As we study and share a history of comic, complicated, foibled strife and achievement, struggles, problems, and learning, we map out a terrain of respect for what it means to be human. We create reasons to give earth and one another hope.
In the Memoir class sharing of experiences underlying our stories, we will pilfer from the memoirist’s flotsam and jetsam, our own artifacts of our life’s images-- X-rays and MRIs, letters, tattoos, art, photographs of items and beings, mementos from trips, a rock or shell collection, wardrobes, images promoting hope and resilience in the telling of one's story and finding redemption and a path forward. Our class will explore experimental models, including audio clips from Ian Chillag's Radiotopia "Everything Is Alive," which recounts fictional empathic engagements with Other, and what is learned from such experiments in story telling about our environments. We will experiment with interviews with ourselves and others, including nonhumans, thought experiments of the self as a rock, a tree, an oyster, a mountain, an epic, an equation, a masterpiece, and other ways to get into a memoir mindset that expresses you. We will consider in what ways a museum is a memoir; a tattooed body; a photo collection. We will consider prose, poetry, fiction, drama, music, and film; our writers will include scientists, philosophers, teachers, physicians, athletes, trainers, celebrities, artists, musicians, writers, political and cultural leaders . . . and you.
You might think it curious to ask undergraduates to experiment with memoir, what people write who have already done often famous things and are— well, done. This course re-engineers memoir as a way of looking not just back but forward, a revelatory tool for precisely when you are at the threshold of life’s next stages. In other words, you, Clark Honors College student right now. As you ponder possibilities, where do I go, what are next steps of my life and career, engaging with others’ and your own memoir(s) can give you solid coordinates for pathways of imagination and hope. That’s our theory, and we will test it in scholarly and creative ways in our own episodes and moments from this our life in our Chapman woods.