Cheryl ( Nyland ) Strayed (b. 1968, Spengler, PA)

1. Cheryl (Nyland) Strayed(b. 1968, Spengler, PA) • Then: (hiking the PCT in 1995, at age 26) • Now: (age 45, mother of two, author of three books)

2. Torch: A Novel(published 2006) • Synopsis: When Teresa summons her children Claire and Joshua home unexpectedly, they are floored by her news: Teresa, only 38, is dying of cancer. In a few weeks, she is gone…Claire obstinately protects her mother's memory, while Joshua drifts beyond her reach. • Jacket Copy: The intimate portraits of these fully human characters reveal exacting truths about grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.

3. Dear Sugar advice column on The Rumpus (2010-2012) From Beautiful Tiny Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (2012) • You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else. Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. • The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming. • The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. 

4. Wild(2012) • Kicked off Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 in June 2012 • Reached#1 on the NYT Bestseller list by July 2012 • Optioned by Reese Witherspoon before publication, with plans to star as Strayed

5. FAQs on Wildfrom Strayed’s Website Did you keep a journal while you were on your PCT hike? How did you write such vivid details? • I kept a journal all through my 20s and 30s, and I kept a particularly detailed one on my PCT hike, which I noted passingly in WILD. My journal was enormously helpful to me as I wrote the book, often providing me with details I'd have forgotten. I also researched facts and consulted others about their recollection and interpretation of some of the events I wrote about in WILD, but, like any memoir, WILD is based primarily on memory. I re-conjured moments, conversations, feelings, landscapes, and the people I met as I remembered them from my own point of view. You hiked the PCT in the summer of 1995, but you didn't write about your hike until many years later. Why did you wait so long? • I didn't wait. I wrote Wild as soon as it occurred to me to do so. Wild is not in the "I did an interesting thing so I wrote a book about it" genre. It's a literary memoir. I didn't write Wild because I took a hike; I wrote Wild because I'm a writer. By which I mean until I had something to say about the experience, I didn't have any reason to write about it. After I completed my hike on the PCT the story I most urgently had to tell was the one I told in my first book, Torch. It was published in 2006. In 2008, I began to write about my experience on the PCT and I realized I wanted to write a book about it. I think the years between my hike and writing about it made for a better book. I gained perspective that I wouldn't have had if I'd written about it immediately.

6. Adrienne Rich“Power” Power, by Adrienne RichLiving in the earth-deposits of our historyToday a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climateToday I was reading about Marie Curie:she must have known she suffered from radiation sicknessher body bombarded for years by the elementshe had purifiedIt seems she denied to the endthe source of the cataracts on her eyesthe cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-endstill she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencilShe died a famous woman denyingher woundsdenyingher wounds came from the same source as her power

7. Essay #2: Course Texts • Emerson • Berry • Solnit • Smith • Grann • Krakauer • Strayed

8. Homework • Cheryl Strayed, “Heroin/e” (article on coursesite) **Read it with an eye to comparing the article with the opening sections of Wild • Two-Step Proposals: • 1-2 proposals due emailed to me in the body of an email by noon on Wednesday, 4/2 • Then, please bring a print-out of your revised proposal to class, Thursday, 4/3