Essay #1 Assignment

Paper #1:  Autobiographical narrative essay
3-5 pages
(Examples of this type of narrative:  The Liar’s Club, Live From Death Row, Brothers and Keepers, “Love Letters”)
Write an essay about an event and/or series of events that have occurred in your life.  This piece should reflect on your experience(s) in order to connect with issues that speak to a wider audience.  In other words, even though it is a personal essay, it still needs to have exigency, significance, purpose.  Re-create this experience “in good faith.”  Stay “true” to your memory, true to remembered speaking styles (if using dialogue), true to you and the reader (and/or anyone else involved in or with the story).  Remember that the topic should be crucial (this is not a “what I did on my summer vacation” essay); always keep in mind your purpose.  Your goal is to make at least some reader(s) care.  In other words, your piece, though a story of sorts, must have a central idea, and your story is being used to illustrate that central idea.

Some possible ideas to draw upon include:
•    A particularly meaningful incident or event
•    A specific symbolic moment within a family’s history or personal relationship.
•    A meaningful artifact (photograph, family heirloom, sentimental object or keepsake).
•    A special or “sacred” place or meaningful journey.

Be vivid, detailed and descriptive in your prose; use dialogue when appropriate.

Note:  In this type of writing, it might be better to allow the ideas and perspectives (what we call the central idea, “argument,” or “thesis” in expository writing) to emerge from the experience, rather than fitting an experience to meet the demands of a preconceived idea.