“What have you read that is like what you’re trying to write?” is a central question in Katie Wood Ray’s Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop. Her question struck me on a personal level. A few years ago, I decided to write a personal essay about my mom’s passing. I made some progress: I brainstormed some ideas and purchased The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present from Amazon. The book is daunting, 770 pages of personal essays. The book sat on my bookshelf for a year, and writing a personal essay didn’t cross my mind again until the ISI.
I just pulled the anthology off the shelf as I did with Penny Kittle’s book Write Beside Them (see my previous post). I truly believe that writing everyday and seeing myself as “a person who writes” has reignited my desire to work on my personal essay.
I am approaching the essays in the anthology with Wood’s question at the forefront of my mind. The anthologist Phillip Lopate has divided the book into themes and forms, such as solitude, reading and writing, analytic meditation, memoir, etc. I do not have time to read all of the essays, but here are a few titles that I intend to read as I prepare to write my own essay:
This Too Is Life, by Lu Hsun
Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin
The Knife, by Richard Selzer
How I Started to Write, by Carlos Fuentes
1 comment:
Ummm...you have a lot of books on your shelves. IT makes me feel better because I thought I was the only one. I like what you said about being in the right frame of mind to accept Kittle's words and now this person's words. It makes me want to blow the dust off some of my books. I know I have a Gallagher book somewhere...
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