My Personal Essay

For my personal essay i am going to focus on switching back and fourth from the present tense and the past tense. The structure of my essay will be parallelism which is alternating or interwining one contiuous strand with another. My two strands are going to be past and present. I decided to make my essay very similiar to the story,"Biography of a Dress". My essay is about my Grandfather telling me a story about my father. The story takes place when i was about five or six and has a lot to do with my parents divorce. Although at the time i did not know all the deatils i know now. This is very similiar to "Biography of a Dress"because she speaks about a time when she was about one and a half and then speaks when she is older. I am going to do something very similiar to that story. In speaking about my parents divorce when i was six and then my grandfather telling me a story when i was about twenty. And my father told me the same story about five months ago but from his point of view.

Alive and Westbury Court

Alive by, Laurie Lynn Drummond and "Westbury Court" by, Edwidge Daticat are both stories that involve personal experience about being alive. "Westbury Court" is about a fourteen year old boy who experiences a fire in his apartment building right across the hall from where he lives. In this story he explains how he watched over his siblings everyday as well as watched his favorite television show, General Hospital, everyday too. One day a fire started across the hall in his apartment building,which he did not realize till two firemen knocked on his door and evacuated him and his brothers out of the building. In this story the boy questions that he was to involved in his show that he did not hear the fire. He also questions that the fire could have happened to him and his brothers. Later on throughout the story the boy speaks about a cabdriver who lived down the hall , who was killed on his night shift and a Nigerian immigrant who was shot right in front of the building of which he lived in too. By the end of the story we realize as does the boy that he is living in a violent area and he questions that he never thought it was violent because to him that was his home. The boy questions what happened to the two children that lived across the hall and questions if they died or if they're still alive. He adds, "Or maybe i am struggling to phase them out of my memory altogether.Not just them, but the fear that their destiny could have so easily been mine and my brothers". Here we can see that the boy questions his destiny as well as his brothers and feels scared but fortunate to be alive. The structure of this story had many realistic events that happened around the boy's apartment which made the boy continue to question his destiny about being alive.Therefore all the dramatic events he saw or heard about put an impact on the way the boy thought about life.
Alive , is a story about a women who used to be a police officer and who now is very cautious because there is a serial killer at work in Baton Rouge, who has murdered three women and attempted four abductions in the past two weeks. Here the women speaks about being at a newspaper stand and noticing a bald man in the store who is watching her. She tries to ignore it and calls herself paranoid until her gut instinct tells her "he is stalking you". At this point she becomes very frantic because she does not own a gun anymore and is simply a "female civilian". Throughout the rest of the story we notice her paranoia because of what she has seen and heard of that has happened to many victims near the area. This is very similar to the boy in Westbury Court, who also hears about many incidents near his neighborhood, which makes him question his destiny. The structure of this story is suspenseful in the details that lead up to the end of the story. At the end the women questions her paranoia and realizes she is only paranoid because she is alive and needs to be. In both stories the characters question there destiny because what they have seen or heard and need to be cautious because they are alive and there is crime and violence everywhere.

"My Father always said"

The overall focus of this essay is about a girl who speaks about her previous generations that were treated very poorly, because she is a Rindheim Jewish girl. The gaps between each part of the essay seem to be the gaps along her journey of learning about the background of her culture. She begins with speaking of her father then there is a gap and she begins with their journey passed her father's old house.She then goes on to explain about how her father did not want her family to speak "the language of those who drove them out of Germany". Her father continues to show his family his old neighborhood and speak about how things were when he was a child.By the end of the story the girl seems to have learned a lot about her fathers childhood as well as her cultural background.

Montaigne and Orwell

Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Montaigne, That Men Should Not Judge of Our Happiness Till After Our Death was similar to the contemporary example, Out There, by Jo Ann. These stories all have to do with the value of life. In Montaigne's story they say that you cannot judge a man's happiness until he has lived his life.In Orwell's story a man undergoes a challenge that seems easy until he is face to face with the situation, which is whether or not to shoot an elephant. And in the story, Out There , a lady is almost run off the road by a man trying to kill her but she survives. All three stories are very different but similar because all three of the stories have to do with the value of life. Whether it be deciding to take an animal's life, watching someone attempt to take your life, or judging a mans life right before he dies, they all intertwine with the value of life.
I thought it was very interesting that Orwell and Alexie's stories consisted of racism. The boy speaks about his life as a Spokane Indian living on a reservation in eastern Washington. Where he was expected to be stupid. "They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help.We were Indian children who expected to be stupid"(Alexie.129). Orwell's story also consisted of racism. "The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.The older men said i was right , the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie,because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie."(Orwell.5) In both stories a certain race was discriminated whether it be the Indian boy who was expected to be stupid, or the man's life that meant less than an animals.

Kinkaid's Essay

Kinkaid's essay was very helpful to me in understanding what creative non fiction is. I really enjoyed his example of learning to ride a bicycle in comparison to creative non fiction. "Any definition of true worth to you as a writer will and must come to you experentially". He explained that when you look at what creative non fiction is you have an idea of what you may think it is but it's not until you have written creative non fiction that you will truely understand the word. CNF isn't just writing about yourself either, CNF is connecting the subject to yourself.

Lott's story, "The Biography of a Dress" was very similiar to the story, "Out There" because they both were telling a story. Lott's story was very intresting because she wrote about a time that I can barely even remeber she was about one and half years old.My earliest childhood memory is about four or five. And she can recal every detail and moment until she turned two years old and wore that dress her mother made. I thought it was unique that during the story she kept saying "but i did not know then what i know now" or " I do not know then and i do not know now". This specific piece added an idea that while your writing about a time in your past you can think about the present like she did and add onto your writing. Especially when you are writing about childhood memories because we are very naive and innocent as children and if we knew what we did now when we were children , everything would be quite different so i liked how she went back and fourth to what she knew as a child and what she knows as an adult.

My definition of CNF

Creative nonfiction- writing narratives that are factual about personal experience

My first post

Hi class it's Jaimesue, this is my first post.