Located here at “the joining waters” with Miranda and there with Hartman traversing oceans, this course engages place-based memoir in ways that go beyond first person narration to countenance prepositions. Our goal is to understand the story-based narration of selves as these are shaped by cultural history, irreparable loss, hunger, and the relationships to, with, and through plants, animals, and ancestors. The writers studied write about writing by crossing genres (poetry, literature, historical records, cognitive theory, visual telling, and material culture) to make mosaics (Miranda) that preposition art as restorative memory. Some, but not all, venture being amid tectonics of rupture and loss. From the deep alluvia of where we are on this campus to the recent hell of the Atlantic slave trade, these narratives (vid Didion in the desert) locate crucial places in between— These are the interstices of memorates (telling and compelling episodes) that make lives in life writing.  Our destination as a seminar includes the origins of the novel, changing and alternative definitions of the self and others, and the recognition of creative non-fiction—life writing—as a healing resource. “Tribal Memoir” exists and must exist as a reparative form; each self-assertion in short form memoir recollects a “Biography of a Place” (Crews). As we read across genres and juxtaposed collage, we chart memoirs of cultural thickness and transgressive shoals to navigate ourselves: readers who are living geographies of the self. 

This is your Senior Seminar. The community of this course and our staged work is designed to culminate in high quality—engaged—creative and critical work. 

Primary texts include:

Saidya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Richard Wright, Black Boy

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds. Modern American Memoir (Selections)

Additional Selections: Knausgård, Didion, Beckett, Bishop, Baldwin, Le Guin, 

Nunez, Erdrich, Crews, Hellman, Kingston

Note: All primary texts, including Modern American Memoir (the anthology), are available used from internet sellers. The opening tranche of Hartman (our selection) is currently available online in PDF form.