\fAssignment Description For this nal assignment, you are going to engage in reection and synthesis of your own. Using at least one work from the readings folder for this module and looking back over your own work from this semester, you will develop what is often referred to as a \"theory of writing.\" A \"theory\" can be a system of explanation, a particular way of thinking that helps explain a phenomenon in the world. Throughout this course we have been working to understand how writing works: what the major conventions are, where they come from, and how to see and understand them. If you have been reading carefully, you should at this point be able to explain how you see this all tting together. In this short essay, you should reect on your development as a reader and a writer and explain how your learning has led you to a particular theory of writing. [For instance, what do you now know about writing, how might you approach writing assignments or tasks in the future based on this knowledge) Your theory of writing should be informed by how you read and write, and by the reflections you have done in class. It should also suggest how your prior experiences with writing and your current understanding of writing will prepare you for successful engagement with future writing tasks. Your essay should include a thesis that makes a claim about what you understand the act of writing to be, and your essay should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. You should support your claims about writing with specic and concrete references to your own work (journals, essays, class discussions, etc) and the reading that you have chosen from the folder. Quote yourself directly when appropriate and quote your chosen reading when it makes sense to do so. Your job is to synthesize your own words about writing and someone else's words about writing to generate an understanding of how writing works and how you yourself write. Assignment Requirements For this essay you must do the following: . Read at least one essay in the readings folder for Module 8 from Course Resource List; Read through your own writing from the course; Develop a thesis that encompasses your thoughts about how writing works; Write a 500-word essay that supports your thesis; . Include in-text citations and a works cited page in MLA formatting.MY BOOK, MY SELF On memoir and the construction of identity RONALD L GRIMES At fifty I wrote Marrying & Burying, Death is already dead; nevertheless, he I recall old memories shaking loose a memoir. Today, twenty-seven is smelling the flowers. when I was working on a troubled sec- years later, in the middle of a pandemic, After making myself an open book in tion of the manuscript. I exited without I have time for a backward glance. Or Marrying & Burying, I found it hard to saving, necessitating (after wailing and a forward glance. Who can say? I'm write again. You only have one thing to swearing), an attempt at reconstruction. scrubbing my hands routinely and say in life, and I'd already said it. The The stuff was too emotionally fraught to building a coffin in the basement, hop- memoir-writer's choices seem to be postpone re-writing. So I began again, ing to ward off death. self-parody, becoming a variation on a and within a couple of hours I had fin- Writing a memoir is a construct theme in a book you yourself wrote. ished building a new second self. tion project. You convert yourself into a book. It starts out as a cabin in the woods. Then you break out in the dead of night, having lost track of who and where you are. Be-booked, you are both more and less than this self, held together between covers. My family adorns the cover of the book. I'm the groom in the tuxedo. In real life I wouldn't be caught dead wear- ing a bow tie, but weddings are wed- dings-even among the dead. Funerals too are for dress up, only you don't get to dress yourself. Susan, my wife now of decades, is veiled and bedecked for marrying. Her hair cascades, as it does in life. The Stranger, between Bryn with the rabbit pajamas and Cailleah in long braids, makes me nervous. The woman who made these Day of the Dead figures of our family said, "He's smelling the flow- ers before it's too late." Not long after it was published in 1995, the kids and I were visiting a bookstore and saw Marrying & Burying on the shelf. "There I am," Cailleah blurted, point- ing to the skeleton with braids. "That's me!" shouted Bryn. The woman at the till looked befuddled. The opportunity to see yourself on the cover of a book is rare. "Macabre," one reader said of " tighe year all." Marrying & Burying's cover. True. FHETE VIA RENALD L OTIMES 39The next day, after retrieving the rst draft, I had in hand two versions of the same event. Same author; same intention. One life, two life stories. The difference shocked me. I could no longer believe in myself. The second book was shorter; the writing, ghter. I admired the sec- ond self; it didn't amble. But the rst book-self was vulnerable. Second self told the truthif not absolutely, at least directly. The rst book-self was less certain what the truth was. He hadn't written himself before, so how could he know what he was going to say? Authors, especially of memoirs, speak with authority, or so we like to imagine. You can hear the kinship of the words: authors speak with authority. Dne's authority doubles when he is his own subject matter. touched up did you? I mean, you didn't have the spiders added later, just for effect?" I confessed I hadn't noticed the webs,' otherwise, I'd have pumped them for all their symbolic worth. \"What dollmow?'lasked the bewil- dered student, \"I am just the author of this book. I am the last person you should eicpect to speak authoritatively about it.\" That's the thing about writing a memoir: afterward, you become merely another reader. Though you have privileged access in certain respects, in others you are espe- cially blind. One of the reasons autobiographers write is to discover themselves. Often, they claim to be revealing themselves, but they have to discover themselves rst. And whatever book-self an author reveals is surely a smokescreen hid- For all the things readers imagine you said, or think you ought to have said, they do see things we hide from ourselves. You think you're going to make your life an open book, and maybe you do, but your life is also a boa rdedup window. 1itlho could know more about my book than I do, since I am myself and therefore an authority on it?I And what greater sign of authority could there be than a book that authorizes my self? In a phone interview, a college student asked about the photograph on page 130, the one captioned, \"Grandma, the only patriarch I ever knew.\" \"How,\" said the voice at the other end of the phone, \"did your Christian grandmother justify wearing that black dress with spiderwebs on it? I can't believe she'd wear something like that. Or that they even made such dresses back in those days. I mean, spiders are pagan, you know. tPauseJ You didn't have that photo ing another self, who is even more [or less] interesting. The intention to blow away all the smoke generates a counter-intention driven by a need to add more wet wood to the re. For all the things readers imagine you said, or think you ought to have said, they do see things we hide from ourselves. You think you're going to make your life an open book, and maybe you do, but your life is also a boarded-up window. You think you know yourself well enough to be aware that there is more than one of you. In my case, [hear professor-speak and father-speak, son-mode, lover-mode, kid-mode. The list is long, but at least, as author, you think. you know what the list consists of. To contain it, you can play god, an 'I-D' omniscient narrator who can frame the wholeI contain the multiplicity of actors. Let the omniscient narra- tor have a pleasing, well-balancedI not-too-academic-but-still-scholarly, quotable voice. I made the other choice, not of an omniscient narra- tocr, but of I myself, playing narrator. Tom Driver's book blurb describes that voice as 'wry, sardonic, pas- sionate, utterly unsentimental, witty, self-mocking, deeply moral, unconventionally land uncommonly] religious.\" Memoir-selves are idiosyncratic. If they aren't also familiar, no one will be able to make sense of them. I made myself into a book with four parts: initiating, marrying, bury- ingI and birthing. It allowed me to track myself, using a standard map of passage rites. \"Get through these four stages,\" I said to myself, \"and you will be a wholealbeit ctive person.\" I was enjoying imagining the books parts as the limbs of my body, when a fth part emerged and ruined the symmetry. I hadn't known anything was missing until near the end of the revisions. [Think of the possibilities and weep: self-revision = self-editing] It took me a long time to gure out the obvious: If you build your life story around the big moments, you miss most of your life. How many times do you birth, bury, marryI and initiate?I Susan complained she hardly recognised me in the man.- uscript. My marrying-and-burying book- self was not my usual self; the one who xes bikes, takes out trash, earns a living. Where were those other parts of my life? So I added section ve, practicing, to the canonical four. The practicing part isn't about the big passages, but about small rituals, sometimes very tiny: inhaling, exhaling, inhal- ing; getting up, going to work, com- ing home. Sometimes, medium-sired rituals that last for weeks, months, seasons, and other mundane turns in time. I had invented a book-self out of a series of climactic turns with no space for ordinary time. However much writers wish to discover their selves by making them into books, they are eventually forced to dramatize and convention- alize in order to be read. Book-selves need drama if they hope to sell, and conventions if they expect readers to believe they have real lives. Then there are texts and images. And so arose the question of photo- graphs, semblances of bodies. I dis- cussed their inclusion with editors and family. In one picture, my hair is freshly curled. I have on a dress and lip- stick. I stand astride my tricycle as if expecting a horse to rescue me from mother-imposed girldom. In another picture I'm a knee-patched cowboy. The list goes on: Eagle Scout with pimples, family man, scholar looking too young in cap and gown. Some advised against photos. \"Let readers imagine,\" they counselled. In the nal analysis, Iwas unwilling to trust myself to mere words. When you write as many words about yourself as I did in Marrying ii: Burying, you can start to sound slick. 1r'ou learn to mistrust this glib self. It talks back to you from the page, and, god help you, you almost fall for your own lines. 1i'ou have to resist becoming a true believer in any book about yourself, especially one you've written. Still, it was tempting to believe that this book I'd made of myself was more myself than I am, that I should imitate it rather than it, me. After Marrying 3: Burying rolled off the press in Colorado, a student in Canada got a copy before I did. \"Now," I said, \"youll know more about me than I'll ever lcnow about you.\" In fact, it was not he who knew more about me; it was his girlfriend. Ibegan to appear in her dreams. Make yourself into a fetishized object with pages and a cover, and you end up haunting your students, their girlfriends, your relatives. Eventually, you haunt yourself. And the haunting continues. You write a book and someone in the New York Times reviews not your crafted story but your \"feckless life.\" How the hell would he know whether my life was feckless? There's a di'er- ence between lives and life stories. A student asks, \"Does your wife feel exposed by your book?\" When I ask Susan, she says, \"Tell that student I=d be embarrassed by her embarrassment, not by anything I do and say in your book. And please remind her that it"s your book. And life. Not mine.\" When I'm feeling low and unable to write, I sni' books. I pull one off the shelf and fan the pages. When Marrying d: Burying rst came in the mail, I fondled and thumbed and smelled italmost as good as a new car. Even though Marrying r55 Burying's pages have yellowed and the cover is splitting, I can still be caught reading my own book to myself. I then put the defaced icon back on the shelf with my scholarly booksthe ones no one reads but which Mom kept copies of in the bookcase, alongside her home medi- cal encyclopedia. The year after the book was pub- lished, I was invited to the Sundance Institute as a resource person for playwrights working on plays involv- ing ritual. The artistic director had read the demeaning New York Times review and thought I'd be good to work with. How he reached that con- clusion after reading the review is beyond me. Workshop participants (play- wrights, actors, directors] insisted that I perform too, so I did a read- ing. I tried to draft some Sundance actors into reading, but they objected, \"You, not we, are the author of the memoir.\" So I had to perform myself, using Marrying & Burying as a script. Performing my ancestorsa dead son from my rst marriage, my mother, my father, my grandmotherl choked up. The tears dried quickly as soon as I remembered that I had written the words. Self-consciousness, however much it apes self-knowledge, is not the same as knowing yourself. The one freezes you up; the other one frees you to attend to the world. Be careful writing yourself into a book. The act may reduce you to self-pity then steal your tears before you have a chance to enj oy them. Memoir, for the man who would narrate his own ending, presents a problem. Originally, I said Marrying r3: Buryingwas not a book, just stray notes the Eds would nd after I dieda lot rambling stories about love and death, fun and failure. Maybe the ironies would make the family Laugh and cry. After I decided the notes were to become a book, the act of making myself into pages became a passage. When I would get cold feet, I'd think, \"Damn it all, ['m fty. I'll write what I please.\" Rejected fteen times, the book was nally published by 'Westview Press. The opening line of the acceptance letter says, \"I am very pleased, and somewhat relieved...\" I was relieved because now the odds were in my favour. The reception of the book was similarly polarized. Some reviewers really didn't like the book: too per- sonal, dirty laundry. If you're not famous, who cares? Even so, I have a huge binder of personal letters written by readers who responded, often effusively, to the book. In 1995 Body Mind ir'ii Magazine presented an award of excellence to Marrying & Burying. Turning fty, I made myself into paper, a saleable object. Most days the object was only a book, but on some days, it was a trophy, an urn, a last will and testament, a ritual object. I wrote M653 to have conversations about births, weddings, initiations, and funerals. Some of those con- versations have happened; others became impossible. However much a book is a resurrection into another kind of body, it is also a tombstone, a visit with the Stranger-sniffing- the-ower. If you think you have the last word, think again. or Copyright of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries is the property of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use