Response to Reading/Writing Process

It was hard to pick a story, MY story, for this assignment. The memories I have about events in my life is very, dare I say, sacred in their existence as they are in my head, in the context of my life. I knew this but I would never have described it this way before going on a little trip down memory lane for this assignment. I struggled writing about anything that seemed important enough to try simply because writing boxes the memory in, each word and sentence represents my memory and it never seems quite right, quite complete. This made me so uncomfortable. My memories include such a rush of feeling that I don't think I have the talent with words to convey and it scares me to put a beginning, middle and end to the complexity of the experience.

The reading for this week were intimidating. This is, of course, partially why I was having anxiety about writing our first piece. First of all, writing about ourselves is scary. In Arts Journalism, we wrote about an expression of culture and our opinion of that expression was in the piece but not our whole selves. The use of "I" as Phillip Lopate points out, is important but difficult. My fear was normal, Lopate pointed out, and I'm quite the coward--I need to push myself. At the same time, there is a certain boundary that can't be crossed if a writer doesn't want to be narcissistic, self-indulgent, and irrelevant. I was criticized many-a-times by my journalism-degreed mother (I just found out that was her major in college, so weird I didn't know that) for being melodramatic. I can't decide if I had such a hard time writing about myself because I was afraid of judgment or if I really struggle with self-expression. It is so HARD to put feeling into words, especially since examples don't come naturally to me. Concrete thinking is not my strength.

Also, a piece that was inspiring but I didn't use much for the writing of this first narrative was Gay Talese's, Delving into Private Lives. Her description of what journalism should be about is very romantic and I love it. It makes me renew my dream of travel-writing, of finding stories in places that are unfamiliar (even in the US) to us not just physically but because we have fallen into a pattern of reporting and writing, a pre-designated idea of what is interesting. I thought Talese was awesome and dreamy.