- Vowell employs stereotypes. What are they? How are they helpful? Hurtful?
- In what way is Vowell's voice defined by her sarcasm?
- In what way do form and content complement each other?
- How would you describe her writing style? (think sentences and syntax)
Arm Wrestling with my Father
- Manning employs stereotypes. What are they? How are they helpful? Hurtful?
- Manning's affection toward his father changes over the course of the essay. Where in the essay is that change present? (find the sentence/paragraph)
- What is the purpose of this essay?
Some thoughts from Sara Vowell
1. What was the process behind writing Shooting Dad? Was this essay part of another story or project?
It was originally a radio documentary. My father and I went up into the mountains and shot off his cannon. You can probably find it on the This American Life web site on the show called "Guns." I think the process was: we were doing an hour on the theme of guns and when we were discussing that in the weekly editorial meeting I told everyone my dad had just made his own cannon and so I was dispatched to Montana with a tape recorder. There really wasn't too much thought behind it--it was more of a hunch. Seemed like a natural for radio, just because of how loud a cannon is.
2. What did your father think of the essay? Your twin?
I think my dad liked the story but I never asked him. My family and I don't talk about my work too much. I think it probably carries over from my family never being too interested in the boring stuff I was obsessed with as a kid, mostly classical music. Like, I was really into Debussy. And I'm pretty sure Debussy's parents weren't very interested in Debussy so I can't really blame mine.
3. We're often asked by colleges, "What makes you tick?" What makes you tick?
Colleges ask this? What makes you tick? This is not a question that comes up very often in adulthood, unless I am attending the wrong sort of parties. If the question is what propels my work, I would suppose it's a combination of needing to pay the bills and curiosity about certain topics. Writing nonfiction, I just latch onto something--one Puritan sermon, a road trip the Marquis de Lafayette made in 1824, the story behind a Hawaiian quilt, etc.--and I just light out from there because I have to know more. Or, if we're getting more basic, I think the thing that propels nonfiction writers is a love for/fascination with/horror of the world as it is in general and other people in particular. Or, maybe more to the point, the thing that keeps egging me on is learning. I'm happy when I'm learning something but I'm happier still when I figure something out after processing something I've learned.
4. How often do you write? And what are you working on now?
How often I write depends on how close I am to a deadline. If I am within three months of a book deadline, I'm writing writing up to eighteen hours a day seven days a week. If I've just started researching a book, I can go months before I'm ready to write a single word. As for right now, I'm trying to decide what my next book will be so I've been researching a couple of ideas.
5. How has your writing voice changed over the course of your career?
I don't think my writing voice has changed all that much. I might have simplified my style a bit and become a tad less colloquial. And there's a definite shift from the first person to the third, not that I'll ever completely give up on the first. I take it from these questions, this class read that essay about my father's cannon. I bet I haven't written a piece like that for at least ten years--something personal and in the first person. Right after I made that radio documentary about the cannon I made another documentary about the Cherokee Trail of Tears and fell in love with writing about American history, which is pretty much all I do anymore. The older I get the less interested I am in myself I'm also much more guarded about my private life. That comes from meeting readers and listeners who know things about me from my work. When I first started telling personal stories on the radio, I was just sitting in a studio by myself and speaking into a microphone. I never really thought about other people listening. Mainly though, a huge reason I stopped writing personal essays and started writing books about history is that after I became a writer and finally had control over my life, dramatic things stopped happening to me. Once I got the congenial, pleasant life I wanted, nothing much happened to me worth writing about so I needed to find drama elsewhere. Luckily, American history is full of the murder and mayhem sorely lacking in my own life.
ESSAY TOPIC #1
Using the narrative and/or descriptive style of writing, write an essay about the legacy of an object or possession given to you.
Be prepared to identify the elements of the SAS triangle (speaker, audience, subject) and defend your narrative structure. We'll be workshopping these essays in class.
Some inspiration:
"How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretions of stories" (The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal — location unknown because it's from a Kindle sample).
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