iMemoir

1. iMemoir Music as Trigger for Contemporary Memoir

2. Getting Started: Your Greatest Hits • To start off with, I’d like you to compile your own “Greatest Hits,” the top five songs that hold some significance for you. The goal with this list isn’t to demonstrate your musical sophistication, but to acknowledge music that has become a marker for other significant experiences or perspectives in your life. Thus, your playlist may include some rather bad music (e.g., the Bangles). What’s important is the resonance the music has within your experience.

3. What is “Contemporary Memoir”? • Russell Baker: “But in Growing Up I was not interested in doing an ‘and then I met’ book.” • Annie Dillard: “[M]emoir is any account, usually in the first person, of incidents that happened a while ago. It isn’t an autobiography, and it isn’t ‘memoirs.’ I wouldn’t dream of writing my memoirs; I’m only forty years old. Or my autobiography; any chronology of my days would make very dull reading—I’ve spent about thirty years behind either a book or a desk.”

4. What is “Contemporary Memoir”? • William Zinsser: “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance.”

5. Memoir and the Young • Russell Baker: “We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.” • Annie Dillard:“There is something to be said for writing a memoir early, before life in society makes the writer ordinary by smoothing off character’s rough edges and abolishing interior life.”

6. Memoir and the Young • Kirby & Kirby: “Now that we have worked with memoir in our classrooms over several years, we have come to believe that memoir’s essential function for both writers and readers is its ability to connect them to their pasts. Russell Baker calls the connecting process of memoir “braiding the cord” of human experience. It is our firm belief that people, and particularly young people, need to be taught to come to know and understand their roots and origins. For this generation of young people we teach, life accelerates at warp speed. The past is a galaxy behind them. […] Memoir is worth teaching because it invites writers to remember, to reflect upon, and then to make sense of their lived experiences.”

7. Richard Hugo and the Triggering Subject • “A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.” • “One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form.” • “I suspect that the true or valid triggering subject is one in which physical characteristics or details correspond to attitudes the poet has toward the world and himself.”

8. Daniel J. Levitin:This Is Your Brain On Music • “Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.” • “A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.”

9. Daniel J. Levitin:This Is Your Brain On Music • “Researchers point to the teen years as the turning point for musical preferences. It is around the age of ten or eleven that most children take on music as a real interest, even those children who didn’t express such an interest in music earlier. As adults, the music we tend to be nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is ‘our’ music, corresponds to the music we heard during these years. […] Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdale and neurotransmitters act in concert to ‘tag’ the memories as something important.”

10. Braiding the cord • Dive into some exploratory writing connected with one of the songs on your Greatest Hits list. The writing does not have to be about the song. It does not even have to reference the song. The song may be simply a triggering subject that leads to the real subject.

11. ENG 490: Some Possibilities • iMemoir: http://imemoir.pbworks.com • Playlists • Shorts • Shorts are characterized by their economy, their compression, and by their ability to please and inform in sometimes unexpected ways. The author for the preface of In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, states it as follows: To write short nonfiction requires an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lense, so to speak, until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human. To read [“shorts”] is to experience…the disproportionate power of the small to move, persuade, and change us. • Reviews • iBio (a.k.a, The 4 Songs Project) • Memoir Essays

12. Integrating Memoir into the Secondary Classroom • What possibilities to do you see? • What questions or challenges can you anticipate?

13. Some Resources: