Hybrid Experiment

•Write down a specific memory of your life.

•Try to write it in memoir form using a good amount of adjectives and vivid detail.•Find a piece of found text that you feel relates to an element of your memory – emotionally or physically.•The found text could loosely/abstractly relate to the memory or relate in an obvious manner.•Write the piece of found text after your memoir sentence.•Your outcome could be funny or serious or a combo!!!!!!!!

Admire Andrea: Surviving Savagery to Saving Lives by Andrea Herrera

Admire Andrea: Surviving Savagery to Saving Lives is a book by Andrea Herrera who is better known by the name Kat Stacks. Kat Stacks came to the surface of internet media in the mid 2000s after creating a series of controversial videos for World Star Hip Hop, a video blogging website about hip hop music. In these videos, Kat Stacks name dropped various famous rappers stating that she had sex with them. I remember seeing these videos are a young pre-teen, becoming intrigued with who this woman was, and keeping up with her internet presence ever since.

Her book is considered within the genre of autobiography but I have been examining it through the lens of a memoir. It was written while she was in jail and retells her life stories of migrating to America from Venezuela at a young age, falling into a horrifying life of prostitution, and fighting deportation after her arrest.

I have not read the entire book but I read the sample pages included on the Amazon page for its sale. What I find so interesting about this text is that it was left unedited. It was published with her typos and grammatical errors. What is interesting about this is, to me, is that while reading it, I can hear it being retold in her voice. Not only do the typos and slang words help develop who the narrator is as a person for the reader, it also makes the book more of a memoir and less of an autobiography. This may just be my opinion, but I feel as if memoir has more room to be experimental with the text and content in how it tells the story of the author and autobiography sticks more to a formal or more dry format and tone. This book may be difficult to read for an older audience who is not aware of slang speech. I think another beauty of the way Kat Stacks wrote this book is how, through her typos, she disregards her audience. Her struggle through prostitution and having to cater to the likes of her pimps and clients makes her decision to write an unedited book that gives no regard to how "good" it sounds to the audience bad ass in my opinion.


Sources I used:
https://www.amazon.com/Admire-Andrea-Surviving-Savagery-Saving-ebook/dp/B00MXH22OK/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_11?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=YM7RSXV0PFYW7C63X9VY

How to Write a Memoir

I was interested in reading a "how to" article about memoirs so, through my research, I found an article written by Shannon Hernandez on TheWriteLife.com, which seemed to fit just that description.  The article is titled How to Write a Memoir: 6 Creative Ways to Tell a Powerful Story. In the introduction, she pinpoints that a powerful memoir can make an audience feel compelled and moved by the authors recounts.

She then breaks it down into six numbered tips where she lends her opinions and advice on six different things to keep in mind while writing a memoir of your own:

1)Narrow Your Focus:

The first tip is about how in order to write a successful memoir, the writer should not think of it as their autobiography and keep a narrowed focus on snapshots of their life that revolve around one theme. In this first tip, she uses the helpful metaphor of your life being a pie and your memoir focuses on one sliver of that pie.

2)Include More Than Just Your Story:

Here, Shannon Hernandez states that a successful memoir is full of specific details about the memory you are writing about. She advises not to just tell the story in its basic form but include details about the larger picture of that event in your life. For example, if I was writing about my mother's overdose, I would include specific details on how it made me feel or what the environment of the hospital was like (such as the nurses and the other patients) and not just tell the story in a linear narrative manner that recounted step by step what happened.

3)Tell the Truth

This one is pretty straight forward. She advises to be honest and genuine while writing your memoir. This will make for a more powerful memoir by allowing for more specific detail as she mentioned in step 2. Although this might make for a more difficult writing process for the author due to the power of raw honest emotions of memories, it will make for a genuine memoir that will captivate the audience and allow them to empathize or sympathize with your story.

4)Put your Reader in your Shoes

This step is all about considering your audience. "Powerful writers show, not tell," Shannon says here. This involves inviting the reader into your perspective so she can draw her own conclusions and so she can have a fulfilling reading experience.

5)Employ Elements of Fiction to Bring your Story to Life

Here she advises to think of the characters in your memoir as characters in fiction in order to focus in on them and allow for deep character development. This way the reader can get to know the characters in your memoir. Another way to do this is to focus in on setting the scene and plot for your reader.

6) Create an Emotional Journey

I think this step might be the most important as I believe it takes all of the prior steps and combines them into one point of advice. Through allowing your honest and raw emotion to come out in your writing, your memoir will be all the more genuine and captivating for your audience. This sense of emotional awareness will also allow for more specific details in your content. As far as form goes, many adjectives as well as diverse sentences that vary in length and stamina will be crucial to make your emotions evident to your audience. This will create tension that will form the themes and readability of your memoir.

Sources I used:
http://thewritelife.com/how-to-write-a-memoir/

M Train - Patti Smith

I wanted to post about Patti Smith's other/more recent memoir M Train because, like Just Kids, it has impacted my love for memoir as a genre. M Train was published in 2015 and has been described by Patti Smith as "a roadmap to my life". This memoir follows her everywhere from her routine of sitting in New York City coffee shops to traveling the world.

Patti Smith's memoir style is romantic yet sporadic. Parts of M Train really focus in and set romantic scenes of the environment she is in and what she was thinking at the time such as this excerpt about a coffee shop:

"A few years later I would sit by a low window that looked out into a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach Café. A young fish-seller named Driss meets a reclusive, uncongenial codger who has a café with only one table and one chair on a rocky stretch of shore near Tangier. The slow-moving atmosphere surrounding the café captivated me. Like Driss, I dreamed of opening a place of my own: the Café Nerval, a small haven where poets and travelers might find the simplicity of asylum."

Her use of romanticism here exists through the use of detail she includes to describe the furniture contents of the cafe as well as her elaboration on her dream to open up her own coffee shop for "poets" and "travelers". 

Additionally, her memoirs always skip around to moments in her life separated by time sometimes as distant as years. This is a way in which the content/form of memoir differs from autobiography. Using this type of writing in autobiography would potentially be considered as unorganized and confusing but I think it functions as a necessary characteristic of Patti Smiths memoirs. Her life, being so full of varied experiences, can best be described through rapid switches in time and place, which suggests the type of character she is- adventurous and poetic. 

I think the audience of Patti's work can be that of a few different types of people. I think that her writing can appeal to any New Yorker but at the same time can also appeal to those who are not New Yorkers but are aware of the "mythos" of New York and its population of eccentrics, artists, and musicians. Furthermore, Patti's writing I think really resonates with a female or artist audience- through herself being a female artist going through life, dreaming, and traveling as a female artist.


Sources I used:

M Train, Patti Smith, 2015


http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/249083/m-train-by-patti-smith/9781101910160/

Tina Fey's Bossypants

Although I have not read Bossypants by Tina Fey in its entirety, I found a pdf of it only and have read the first chapter out of curiosity. Although the book is categorized as Autobiographical, I see it more as having aspects of memoir due to its sectionalized nature. Fey retells snippets of her life and then relates them to the larger idea of being a woman in a "man's world". In the first chapter, she recalls what it was like for her mother to give birth to her at 40 years old and how that affected her childhood- an idea parallel to my own personal life (my mom also gave birth to me at 40).

"My mom had taken my favorite blanket and stitched my initials into it for nap time, just like she'd done for my brother eight years earlier. At the teacher conference my dad tried to give my nap time blanket to my teacher, and she just smiled and said 'Oh we don't do that anymore.' That's when I realized I had old parents. I've been worried about them ever since."

I have always been a fan of Tina Fey's sense of humor and found that through reading excerpts of Bossypants I have become inspired with my own memoir work. She writes in an incredibly relatable way for the female audience, touching on unfortunate truths while still staying true to her wit. This is the type of memoir I want to continue to explore in my own writing, capitalizing on struggles through making light of them with humor, etc. Additionally, I relate to her through growing up in a similar area to older parents. These similarities make her writing incredibly readable for me and I find myself saying "Oh my god, same!" as I make my way through Bossypants.

Here is the PDF I have been reading from:
https://vk.com/doc-73552121_344765294?dl=07459c2caf0c7ba7bc

Girl, Interrupted

Many do not know this but Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen is a memoir! Released in 1993, this memoir text retells the experiences of the author as a young woman in a psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The book was then made into a popular movie starring Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder.

I first read Girl, Interrupted in high school. I have reread it since but would like to reread parts of it once more for the sake of my research. Before writing this post I reread the chapter titled "Checkmate". Within this chapter the protagonist, Susanna, recalls sitting on the floor smoking outside the nurses station and discussing sex with other young female patients in the hospital.

"I hadn't tried it. Although my boyfriend had calmed down about my being in the hospital and come to visit me, the person on checks caught me giving him a blow job, and we'd been put on supervised visits. He wasn't visiting anymore."

Probably one of my favorite aspects of Girl, Interrupted as a memoir is the bluntness of it. Everything is retold by the author in a very matter-of-fact way. At times this can be very cold or bleak in tone. I remember breezing through this book the times I have read it because the author recounts her experiences in a down to earth way that makes it seem as if someone is casually telling you about their time spent in a psych ward. I'm interested in using this type of memoir in my writing- just recalling experiences for what they were and not romanticize them with literary devices or too much emotional expression. I'm interested in how the bluntness of retelling shocking experiences without the acknowledgment of emotion effects the tone of the piece.

Patti Smith's Just Kids

An example of a piece of memoir text I have read and enjoyed is Patti Smith's Just Kids. This book retells her relationship with photographer/artist Robert Mapplethorpe. In my opinion, Patti Smith has a strength in writing memoir. That could in part be from her super eventful and cool life, however, within the way she retells stories there is most definitely talent.

"We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark."

Memoir is beautiful because it is able to move people with the words used. Biographies can also be moving yet not in the same way- not as poetically in my opinion. I think this is because of the fact that memoirs focus on smaller bits of the authors life. This not only allows for more of a descriptive setting of the stories told but it also gives the author liberty to use devices such metaphor within the writing. I see biographical writing as a more formal version of memoir touching less on specifics and more on the larger picture. 

Memoir Definition

The dictionary definition of "memoir" is-

• a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources. (Google)
• a written account in which someone (such as a famous person or politician) describes a past experience (Merriam Webster)

To elaborate, a memoir is an account of collected memories both public or private that took place in the subjects life. Memoir has been seen as a subcategory of biography and autobiography, however, more presently it was become its own genre entirely. Unlike a biography which retells a lifetime's amount of events, a memoir usually focuses on fragments of someone's life, touching only on some events.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/memoir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoir