Juli Kendall - Reading/Writing Workshop Journal

Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.

This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here. Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.

If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals, find out how here.

Writing Workshop
Week #8:

Writing and Teaching Memoir

Quick: name five books that are memoirs. Now, name five more. If you can't think of one, let alone a handful, don't be too hard on yourself. Memoir can be a hard-to-define genre often waffling between personal narrative, autobiographical incident, and "the stories of our lives." But memoir, in whatever guise, is an important part of who we are.

"Stories create our first memories. From the stories we hear as children we inherit the way we talk about how we feel, the values which we hold to be important, and what we regard as the truth."

From On being literate by Margaret Meek, 1992, Heinemann.

That's part of the reason we'll be studying memoir. In our Writing Workshop, Unit 2 on the curricular calendar is a Memoir Genre Study. Good thing it doesn't come first, since I need to sort out my own confusions and take a turn reading, writing and talking about memoir to understand it better.

As I begin my exploration of memoir, the first five books that come to my mind are: 13 Days: a Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Vernon Can Read: A Memoir by Vernon Jordan; Rocket Boys: A Memoir by Homer Hickman; Growing Up Poor by Robert Coles, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

As I ponder my second set of five memoirs, I find myself confused about the definition of memoir. Of course, there's Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. But are Sandra Cisneros' books, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, memoir or fiction? What's the difference between personal narrative and memoir? Can a memoir be a poem or must it only be narrative writing?

So, I turn to the experts for help.

Katie Wood Ray thinks we should try writing a genre before we start teaching it. Here's what she says:

"I believe that to set the best tone in our writing workshops, then, our students need to see us as people who write, just as we see them in that same way. Now take heart. It is not at all necessary that they see us as great writers. It is fine for them to see us struggle as writers, to see us write things that make us (and them) say, 'Oh my, that's awful!' What is so much more important than that we be great writers is that our students see us as people who think writing is a worthwhile thing to do, as people who believe in the effort it takes to write things that really matter."

From The Writing Workshop: Working Through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts) by Katie Wood Ray, NCTE, 2001.

So I'm giving it a try-writing memoir. I'm writing about the piano lessons I had growing up, the Tiger skin that I remember hanging on the wall in my grandparents' lower level family room where we slept as kids, and my wonderful cat, Sandy McTavish, who was named after a character on the TV show, "Howdy Doody." It's not great but it's a start, and I'm gaining an appreciation for the challenges our kids will face.

When I get stuck for ideas I turn to Judith Barrington who approaches it this way in Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art.

"What things do you think about over and over? What stories haunt you? Which people from the past do you dream about? What makes you passionate when you think about it or talk about it? What do you argue about?" (p. 40)

Lucy Calkins in Chapter 24, "Making Memoir Out of the Pieces of Our Lives," The Art of Teaching Writing, also gives me lots of help.

I used to think that we write memoir when our lives are done and we want to give one last, loving look back, but now I know that it is by looking back that we create our lives, our selves. The instinct for memoir is there whenever we return to a remembered place, catch a whiff of a childhood smell, feel nostalgic over a photograph. The seeds of memoir are there when we listen to stories and say, "That reminds me of when." The seeds of memoir are there in notebooks, in entries that begin, "I remember" or "Once, when I was little" or "One time, a long time ago" or "In my family, we usually,,," p. 40

Because of surgery, I won't be around for our unit of study about memoir. But by reading and writing memoir myself, I can have a parallel experience that allows me to "keep up" with what the kids are learning and doing.

Although it's tough for me not to be there, it's like Yogi Berra says:

"If I wasn't hitting, I'd figure that I just wasn't hitting, not that I couldn't hit."

Other resources for writing and teaching memoir:

1. "A Study of Memoir," Primary Voices, August 1999, Volume 8, Number 1, NTCE
http://www.ncte.org/pdfs/members-only/pv/0081-aug99/PV0081Memoir.PDF

2. Chapter 12, "Memoir: Reading and Writing the Story of Our Lives," Writing Between the Lines by Lucy Calkins

3. Lessons That Change Writers by Nancie Atwell has two lessons that deal with writing a memoir, "Questions for Memoirists" and "Ineffective and Effective Memoirs."

4. Inventing the Truth by William Zinzer, a book about the writing of memoir

Download Juli's Curricular Calendar #2 (memoir genre study) for Writing Workshop

Download a comparison of Juli's Reading and Writing Workshop plans

Juli Kendall's Weekly Writing Workshop Journal

Writing Workshop Week #8: Writing and Teaching Memoir

Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal

Writing Workshop
Week #8:

Writing and Teaching Memoir