BP #2 Thoughts on research project topics …
I heard a radio interview recently that made me think of
this class. The author, Philip Lopate,
was describing his process for writing personal essays. What caught my attention was how he described
the necessity of turning yourself into a character on the page and putting some
distance between yourself and that person on the page. He also talked about how his persona changes
slightly according to what he is writing.
I connected this to the discussions we’ve been having in class about how
individuals have different processes for writing in different genres. In addition to having different processes, do
we actually use, or access, different parts of our “selves” when writing in
different genres? Of course this is
closely related to voice, but I wonder if there is something else worth
exploring here.
This interview also made me think of my teaching. I teach my students to consider audience in
their writing. We know that different
readers will understand the same piece of writing differently, according to
what they bring to that writing. My
students usually enjoy writing a piece about music, for example, for a friend
and then writing about it for an older relative. We know that our writing changes according to
who is going to consume it. Does our
writing change according to which self is writing it as well? As writers, do we bring different selves to
our writing? My students sometimes have
trouble committing their ideas to paper because they may change, or they’re
not sure what they think. I tell them
that’s okay, they can always change their minds later. Would they understand this better if they
understood that it’s okay to write with different parts of yourself? To return to Yancey, would it help for them to reflect on how they were feeling at the time they wrote specific pieces?
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