Here are the guidelines for your end-of-unit reflection:
- In your Reflection, I want you to discuss the following:
- What did you learn in this unit? Be sure to provide specific examples and page numbers.
- What did you find interesting/uninteresting in this unit?
- What challenged you in this unit? What came easy?
- After experiencing this unit, what do you look forward to trying out in your creative nonfiction assignment?
- Reflections must be AT LEAST 200 words.
- Include your full name at the end of your reflection. Unnamed comments will be deleted.
- From the "Comment As" drop-down menu, choose Anonymous, then click "Publish."
- This Reflection is due by midnight on Thursday, 9/13, no exceptions.
In this unit I learned how Creative non-fiction works. Not just as a reader and audience, but as a writer myself. I felt like I learned how to open my mind more and really pay attention to details. Providing details and being very descriptive in an imagery way are really what you need to write something in this genre. For example, in the essay “In Bed” by Joan Didion (220), she was describing how her migraines get. She was describing her own personal emotions to medical medications, and it was very informative. I, as the reader was very compelled and entertained the whole time reading the essay. These essays being so detailed is what I found very interesting in this unit. Its also something that I loved. Something that I wasn’t interested in was the essay “In the Dark”, by Pico Iyer because it was very confusing to me. Even when I went back to read it over again, I still had trouble understanding it. With that being said; one thing that was a challenge for me in this unit was not catching certain events, descriptions, or quotes and understanding the true meaning of what they meant and why they added them in the text. Imagining the essays as I was reading them is what came easy to me. I have such a big imagination that I just imagined a movie playing in my head from all the detailed writing. In my creative writing assignment, I’m looking forward to describing my experiences very well and I hope to capture my reader’s attention. Just as these previous authors did to mine. I want my audience to become emotionally attached to my work.
ReplyDeleteVictoria A. Gonzalez
Personally, I never liked nonfiction, wouldn’t read it wouldn’t write it. I could never understand the appeal of nonfiction, there were no wizards or sword fights. Coming into this unit was a whole new experience for me. While reading the essays it showed me what I could do with nonfiction as a writer. I could write an informative paper on cheese or some of my memories. I could write about what I felt during an important moment in my life. In “El Torro Rojo” a bull fight is being described in detail, the way the matador and bandilleros would move around the bull “Lopez...guides the bull, as if El Torro Rojo were the most beautiful woman at the dance” (page226). With “In Bed” it gives vivid details about migraines and the pain it comes with. “I feel the sudden irrational and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries” (page 220). Seeing these essays gave me a better understanding of nonfiction. It still wouldn’t be my first-choice nor will it ever be, but I’m glad I have a better grasp of the genre. This unit will help me in our nonfiction assignment by giving me an inside look on nonfiction writings.
ReplyDeleteKendra Lara
I would say that my niche is in hyperbole and dramatizing in writing, as creative fiction and humor are my points of interest. However, I have valued the immersion of creative nonfiction to be superior than most any other genre. The 6 essays I studied were all careful in capturing a feeling in their work, where as creative fiction may focus on world building or character traits. Save for “Dreads”, all of the works capture a location that brings rich emotions in me. Most of these feelings I gloss over or do not experience in their fullest, as in “Late July, 4:40 am”. The essence of motion on the road, and the stops and sights all felt so much more real and wholesome in the words of the author. I believe that is one main goal of creative nonfiction, and in my own work I will do my best to reproduce those emotions with my own experiences. There was not much challenge in this section for me, I had studied the essay’s and came to understand their meaning well, the quickest to comprehend for me were “Dreads”, “In Bed”, “Late July 4:40 am” and “The Witching Hour.” The harder were “In the Dark” and “El Toro Rojo”, as they were more subtle about the meaning of the essay. “You count to one.” (226) was the only single line that was difficult to interpret, but the authors direction might have been to let the reader come to their own understanding. “You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you’ll never really make it back into the light.” (225) The line from “In the Dark” is trying to say that people go to strange places to get away from normal, boring life, but come out changed. I did not feel this line represented the story as a whole well and struggled to piece together what the story really wanted to say. From the unit I have also learned that my experiences do not have to be limited to the most dynamic, interesting portion of my life. It can be about an event I saw, a constraint in my life, a vital part of me, or even something as simple as an everyday activity. Given connotation, immersive description and well augmented themes, creative nonfiction appears as a much bigger scope than I initially thought I would be.
ReplyDeleteKedrick Wyatt
For starter I don’t like reading non-fiction because I find it hard to relate or get invested with the person telling the story. Sometimes I feel like the author is giving or just throwing information at us. But, the last book I read is actually non fiction which is “You are making me hate you” by Corey Taylor which you guys should check, I highly recommend it. But these short essay that we had to read were actually fun and a quick read which I feel is the best way to read non-fiction, short and to the point. Like the short essay “The Witching Hour” which shows a student do what want the teacher wants but in the end gets the last laugh or “Late July 4:40am” which makes me think of home with driving in the open fields. But would I go back to read non-fiction? Maybe, if I find short essays that are no longer than 3 or 4 pages than I will give it a shot. Also writing non-fiction is hard. Trying to remember things from the past is not that easy to be honest. It’s a lot easier to just make up some characters that maybe influenced that real life but you have total creative control.
ReplyDeleteJuan Carlos Guerra
Looking back on this unit, I didn’t think much of non-fiction or gave it high praise. This was mostly because I have never really been immersed into the world that it describes as much as fiction does, where the mind is free to make whatever it pleases. But after reading these short essays, that seem to hold a theme in common, I must admit that creative non-fiction is a genre I intended to explore further into as the semester continues. It all depends on how it is written, not the genre, that makes a story relatable and immersive. The perfect example to me is “In Bed” by Joan Didlon (Page 220-223), where the author writes from her personal experience with her migraines that she suffers from. What makes this essay stand out is that taking out the word migraine and switching it with depression or PTSD, make it universal and more relatable to potential readers. What interested me was how important details really are in writing and it’s something people notice about my storytelling, that I have to have every detail down to the molecular structure of the red wall in the room. That was a common thing I noticed in these essays; they all gave much detail and that it relies on memory, which can be hard for a non-fiction writer. “El Toro Rojo” by Dinty W. Monroe was another interesting read for me, I felt immersed into the arena where the bull fight was happening and hear the toros and the actions being described by the writer. What did not interest me was Pico Iyer’s “In the Dark” because even through multiple reads, I still had no clear idea what was going on or what I was supposed to feel. It just sounded like a very descriptive Yelp review of where the writer went on vacation. The challenging thing for me was trying to describe how I felt after reading the short essays. I don’t know if it’s just the lingering effect of what I was taught in middle school and high school English or maybe I don’t have that much of a descriptive vocabulary, but I would have some trouble coming up with the right words. The easiest thing for me was to notice the common theme of writing through reliance on memory, which was what made each essay as immersive and relatable as they were. I look forward to see how descriptive I will be in my nonfiction assignment and if I can make my work relatable to my peers.
ReplyDelete-Michael Lucio
In this unit I’ve learned that you can make a fantastic piece of non-fiction with a subject as miniscule as a childhood memory like the essay ‘The Witching Hour ' by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (p. 227) or something informative about a health condition like the essay, ‘In Bed’ by Joan Didion (p. 220). The essays varied in style as well as length and it was enlightening to be exposed to each author in this unit. It really taught me that there is no excuse to be in a creative funk when there are loads of experiences one goes through in life that it is impossible to run out of material. In the essay, ‘In Bed’, (p.21-22) Joan states information on Migraine headaches which I thought was extremely interesting because most of us have had or still do have a medical condition that will be good content to create from. I felt it was extremely relatable since I do suffer from a couple of health issues and It had never really dawned on me that this could potentially be content for me to write. This unit has challenged me as a writer by being able to broaden my perspective. I was able to channel my own experiences and sort of mold them into a piece worth reading. I’m excited for our non-fiction assignment because I know for a fact I will not be stuck on not knowing what to write.
ReplyDeleteValerie Valentin
In this unit I learned how creative non-fiction can be used to connect with readers with still detailing experiences that are clearly very personal to the writer. For example, while Joan Didion’s essay “In Bed” details her struggle with migraines it was still very relatable for us sufferers of other ailments, be it depression or PTSD or otherwise, who I think all “have learned now to live with it” (223). Many of us were also able to relate to the embarrassment suffered at a teacher’s hand, like in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “The Witching Hour,” so I think I’ve also learned that the “non-fiction” aspect of creative non-fiction is perhaps its greatest strenth. Because creative non-fiction, is, as Starkey says, “reliably factual” and “firmly anchored in real experience,” I think there is always one way or another in which we can relate to whatever experience we are reading about (171). Sometimes the essays were difficult for me to follow and relate to however, like Pico Iyer’s “In the Dark” and Reg Saner’s “Late July, 4:40 a.m..” Other times they were just too ambiguous for my taste. I still don’t understand what Dinty W. Moore meant in “El Toro Rojo” when he says “You count to one,” either, so sometimes my biggest challenge was establishing that connection or understanding (226). Without that connection or understanding, it was harder for me to appreciate the essays. On the other hand, I found writing creative non-fiction to be much easier than reading it at times. It’s easy to just focus on yourself and get lost in recalling your own experiences and emotions, and I found that I quite enjoyed toying with my own experiences to see how I could transform them into some entertaining semi-story. I’m looking forward to writing about especially significant moments in my life so that I can see how I can extend them past a personal level and make them resonate with a broader audience.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth Garza
From this unit, I learned that creative nonfiction is a type of essay writing that consists your “personal presence” (171) as well that it “demands self-discovery and self-exploration” (171) to writing such a narrative. Additionally, this kind of writing can be about a person’s “real life”, “reflection”, “research”, “reading”, and “riting” (172 & 173). However, I didn’t like how creative nonfiction is organized and gives the impression that it’s a short short story rather than a essay.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting that an essay like this can written on the topic that I listed before and that it’s actually more popular among the people, even more than fiction. Among the readings for creative nonfiction, I found that some subjects from these readings were quite intriguing and thought-provoking. However, the others had negative topics for their short essays which unmotivated me to either stop reading and it deprives my interest in reading more. To be honest, creative nonfiction isn’t my field of interest and expertise. In other words, I wanted to learn more what I wanted to learn about, which is fiction, specially fantasy, flash fiction, and science fiction.
Ideas came easy to me however, putting thoughts to papers is what is difficult for me.
Even though what I said before about what came with ease and difficulty, I look forward to trying out on writing a creative nonfiction essay since I, in all my years in school, never wrote a creative nonfiction essay.
Jose Contreras | 242 Words
From this unit I learned about the different aspects of Creative Non-fiction particularly on how broad the topics you can write about are. For example, in "In Bed" by Joan Didion she writes about something as mundane as a migraine and is able to go in depth and actually make an entertaining and interesting essay. Also how detailed you could be in an essay as Didion writes in page 221 "Migraine is something more than the fancy of neurotic imagination. It is an essentially hereditary complex of symptoms...which is a vascular headache of blinding severity". As for what I thought was interesting, like i stated previously, was how detail oriented the essays were and how that led to me being more immersed into them. What was challenging for me was sometimes having trouble understanding some of the essays due to their complexity. In "Late July, 4:40 a.m." I completely lost the message behind the essay. Maybe I didn't read it closely enough but I didn't understand what Reg Saner was trying to convey. I look forward to attempting to be as descriptive as the essays i read were. Hopefully, I am also able to convey my story as clear as possible too.
ReplyDeleteAdrian Martinez
I’ll start off by saying that going into this unit I wasn’t familiar at all with what creative-nonfiction. The only thing that came to mind when I read that over was that it had to deal with non-fiction, which has always been one of my least favorite writing-style to do. However, upon reading the chapter on creative-nonfiction and the essays provided, I did find them interesting to read the different ways in which the authors were able to write about an experience and draw me in. Essays such as Rebecca McClanahan’s “Liferower,” Diane Ackerman’s “The Mute Sense,” and Joan Didion’s “In Bed” are heavily filled with details that I almost forget I’m reading a personal narrative, while Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “The Witching Hour” and Reg Saner’s “Late July, 4:40 a.m.” are able to bring back nostalgia to their readers and connect on some level as them through their own similar experiences. I’m sure I’m not the only one who probably has said or mentions they don’t like nonfiction, on a level I still feel the same in regards to having to write nonfiction since I’ve always found it difficult to write about myself or an experience I’ve gone through. Yet, reading these essays has made me want to overcome that and see with this creative nonfiction assignment what I can write. I am a little wary about how it’ll come out since I do find it awkward to write about myself and especially with choosing with what part of myself I should reveal and hope in some way others are able to understand or find some connection.
ReplyDeleteSavannah Lopez
After reading the short essays I found that reading nonfiction is easy to read and relate but hard to write it. I really like the short essay of David Starkey book. I was able to relate with Dreads on page 22 where Alice walker as how do wash your dreads. I used to have dreads so that question was coming more often and some people will even grab your hair without permission. In the Wishing Hour, I was wondering how the author came out with the title. It was confusing for me because I was thinking about a hunting party or a horror scenario. I found the short essay of Joan Didion “In Bed” was very challenging for me the way the author describe her pain du migraine. It makes want to keep read it because I related myself to her story. In page 221 she said, it took her sometimes to accept and know that she will be living. I don’t really know how I will do my short story of non-fiction, once I start writing maybe I will know which style to follow. I really respect all writer for the time and effort they put into their work.
ReplyDeleteFatimata Traore
This unit is nearly over?? I first thought ‘creative’ non-fiction would be the exact opposite being about boring self descriptions, but I was surprisingly happy to read our class essays and methods for presenting our moments to readers. Reading Liferower awakened my spirit. There was so much beauty in McClanahan’s essay. It’s easy to forget that we all go through separate journeys in life but while reading someone’s emotions/experiences, it can bring a sense of exposure, connection to the meaningful things in life we tend to forget about. Brian Doyle vividly expresses the things the heart endures from something as petite of a hummingbird to as grand as a whale. The essence of the method to writing these works is spilling our personal perception as a draft and then go back to find the reason why we wrote it in the first place. “Discover the unique connections these elements posses and what that connection means”(pg.186) I just paraphrased it better. Kidding. Anyways, the MOST interesting thing to me was the suspenseful mysterious essay’s that were non-fiction! Blew my mind knowing we could push the edge of our realities to the unexplained yet still be truthful with our experiences. I am inspired to write my own unique non-fictions because I’ve had many quirky occurrences that I wish people would read and say “Holy crap, I’ve been feeling this for so long and she put it in words!” I want to be that kind of writer. I want to venture into the deepest questions, & conflictions that no one dares to really talk about out loud when we self explore, and I hope I will show that in my future written works.
ReplyDelete-Naissa Janeth Acosta
This unit is nearly over?? I first thought ‘creative’ non-fiction would be the exact opposite being about boring self descriptions, but I was surprisingly happy to read our class essays and methods for presenting our moments to readers. Reading Liferower awakened my spirit. There was so much beauty in McClanahan’s essay. It’s easy to forget that we all go through separate journeys in life but while reading someone’s emotions/experiences, it can bring a sense of exposure, connection to the meaningful things in life we tend to forget about. Brian Doyle vividly expresses the things the heart endures from something as petite of a hummingbird to as grand as a whale. The essence of the method to writing these works is spilling our personal perception as a draft and then go back to find the reason why we wrote it in the first place. “Discover the unique connections these elements posses and what that connection means”(pg.186) I just paraphrased it better. Kidding. Anyways, the MOST interesting thing to me was the suspenseful mysterious essay’s that were non-fiction! Blew my mind knowing we could push the edge of our realities to the unexplained yet still be truthful with our experiences. I am inspired to write my own unique non-fictions because I’ve had many quirky occurrences that I wish people would read and say “Holy crap, I’ve been feeling this for so long and she put it in words!” I want to be that kind of writer. I want to venture into the deepest questions, & conflictions that no one dares to really talk about out loud when we self explore, and I hope I will show that in my future written works.
ReplyDelete-Naissa Janeth Acosta
In this unit, I learnt that creative nonfiction is the umbrella term used to categorize personal essays and memoirs. With the use of verisimilitude (that is, the realistic portrayal of people and their environments; pg.191) as well as setting the scene, choosing the right dialogue, and remaining loyal to characterization, the works speak for themselves and paint a memorable picture. I also learnt that truth is a convoluted concept in nonfiction creative writing and for good reason. What we may remember is not always clear or precise but rather distorted and molded to fit our needs. We can see this in effect in James Brown’s My Papa’s Waltz: “when my father gets drunk he...asks me to dance. I'm six maybe seven years old at the time” and then later “when I try to remember exactly what happens the night that my father asks me to dance, I get confused...That's fiction. But, in fact, it doesn't matter.” That's why a key requirement for creative nonfiction is written off as precision: language, structure, and most important, research. I've learnt that it takes much more than simply recalling a moment in our history to turn it into literature. It requires focus, strategy, truth, precision, and reflection. It's how essayists like Joan Didion and Aimee Nezhukumatathil are able to conjure up their traumas and fears and turn it into a beautiful and profound journey that I find interesting. How deep tethers of raw emotion are laid out bare and calculated in rows and rows of words and metaphors. “And then it's over, it's done. But your legs are still trembling and your tongue is bleeding from where you bit down and missed” (pg.179). It's more than vocabulary and sentence structure, though those do have a lot to do with it. In fact, I've always had a hard time writing about myself and true events. Just the pronoun I is enough to make me feel exposed. And though I do have experience with painting a pretty picture and eliciting emotional responses, I wouldn't say they come easy. Not after what I've read and learned from the essayists of this unit. As a progressing writer, I'd have to say it's the prospect of doing something I'm not used to, with this level of impact, that fills me with anticipation.
ReplyDeleteSandra Martinez
As a journalism major, I have never really been given the opportunity to write creative non-fiction. I write the truth and nothing but the truth but I keep it simple and straightforward. In this area of writing I believe I will learn how to expand my mind and learn how to be intensely detailed. I really enjoyed the essay “In bed” by Joan Didion because it gave me and idea of what creative non-fiction looks like. Didion wrote in the essay “Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries…” (Starkey, 2008). That sentence is so detailed I can picture and can imagine how intense the pain is. I think it is interesting that it is the most popular genre to read. As I got older, I distanced away from reading but I remember as a child reading mostly fiction. Now, at 22 years old it is amazing and interesting to see where my interests now lie. I look forwards to challenging myself because I know it will not come easy for me. Every time I think my story or essay is done I will have to revise over and over adding more detail after every time I revise because I know that’s where I could improve my skills. Another challenge for me will be what to write about. As an aspiring journalist, I tend to go out and find these stories to tell but it is more news than anything else. Finding things to write about that I can relate to or writing about things that’s have happened to me will be difficult but I cannot wait to try my hand at it.
ReplyDeleteMerary De La Fuente
I learned that creative nonfiction can be as interesting if not more than fiction. Some good examples from this section would be Jesus shaves on pages 182-185 the author description of the characters and the last paragraph on page 185 was a great the perfect ending, the eerie feel of in the Dark on pages 223-225 and great intro, from the teacher ripping up the child’s pitcher, to the sweet ending of the witching hour on pages 227-229. What I found fascinating was that essays can be fun to write given that it’s not the strict way I’ve been told my whole life. El Toro Rojo was frustrating to read just for the fact it is so short and still considered an essay, where I’ve been told my papers are too short, too descriptive or wordy so I’m interested to write and have fun.Writing doesn’t come easy to me; maybe it’s because I have a hard time remembering the rules of writing.I’m looking forward to try out adding some dialogue, and try to make a mundane essay about my life to an interesting and entertaining one. Over all I’m really excited to learn to write for to entertain and decently.
ReplyDeleteKristopher R. Price
I think this unit was very interesting for several reasons. One that immediately comes to mind is how creative non-fiction is different from what I had previously thought it to be. Creative non-fiction has shown itself to be much more personal and intimate than I would have imagined. For example, in Joan Didion's "In Bed," Didion is able to describe the pain of having migraines and explain just how misunderstood they are. In order to do so, she shares the vivid details of what it feels like to experience such agony. Such as on page 222, Didion describes some of the characteristics of a migraine to be "an abrupt overpowering fatigue, a strokelike aphasia, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine connections." Her descriptions give the reader a closer understanding of what it must feel like to endure severe migraines, especially if the reader is unable to imagine or relate to what it is like because they do not experience this specific pain themselves. This leads me into something else that I found interesting about this unit, which is how while I was reading these short essays, it felt as if I were reading short stories rather than essays because of how moving they were and the emotion that could be felt in the authors' writing. However, something that I found a bit confusing from one essay to another, was trying to find the overall message or the purpose of some of the short essays. Although, I have to say our class discussions have helped with my understanding that an overall message might not be made clear purposely by the author, possibly because the author is describing an experience according to their perspective rather than trying to create an obvious message for the reader. With what I have learned from this unit, I hope to try and give readers something that they can feel or picture when they read my writing.
ReplyDeleteKimberly Cervantes
In this unit, I learned to be informative in playful and truthful description. This means that not all nonfiction essays need to hold a thesis by the throat and stretch a single sentence of spiffy jargon for three pages. An essay, according to Starkey et al., can be fun.
ReplyDeleteFun can be a scary word. It can be insulting. It can be diagnostic. A writer who finds the act of writing essays fun is a very scary person to be around; probably a psychopath. However, a creative nonfiction essay is at a pace set by the writer. In Starkey’s introduction (found on page 182 in his 3rd edition), we learn that Veracity is not only a name given to a doomed character in Laura Bynum’s novel, but something to stick to: even if the facts of an essay blurr, the creative nonfiction essay must hold its story with veracity.
What’s interesting in this unit is that men (symbolizing mankind) once held poetry closer than the novel. That rotted away. But, now, poetry has morphed into a fourth genre where nothing is as important or articulated as the essence of truth.
What challenged me in this unit, besides finding out that the 3rd edition is not the same as the second, was reading the bullets (pages 220-225, for example) and each essay. Some of the essays were fun (that offensive word!), or informative. Others held such a mundane lack of hope that I wanted the writer to stop mumbling and apologize mid-sentence. … But maybe that’s because the shortness of the essays made some of the writing blend together like scattered puzzle pieces.
For this unit, I look forward to attempting to finding such unabashed truth in every word of my essay that my reader looks away with emotions more raw than they ever had exposed for themselves. Life is bigger than life.
Raquel Williams
My favorite of the three is ‘An Angel’. I have always loved reading about the different types of angels. The way she describes the fallen angel is both inspiring and captivating. It captured my interest right away. She doesn’t generally give a direction on who she is writing this for, herself or her audience? I guess that was for the reader to decide. I think she was pointing it in the direction of the outcasts in this world. Maybe the essence of what she really wanted to state that those who decide to rebel against society are still good people (angels) at heart.
ReplyDeleteLoser happened to be my second favorite. There was a somber ending that makes you feel sorry for the main character. There was also a conclusion in the end that was up to the reader to decide. What I got from the context was that his special gift of being able to find lost items was a coping mechanism for losing his parents because they are forever gone. However, being able to find items gives a short reward from micro focusing on his anxiety for lost items.
The Hit Man, was my least favorite out of the bunch. It was written in a very different style that I can appreciate.
-Valerie Valentin