Blog Post #3: Text Sets: Memoir and Autobiography Project
One of the things I love about working in a high school library is that I am a partner with so many departments, and when my fellow staff invite me in to assist, I get to help them build educational opportunities from the ground up and explore student learning in many different directions. And sometimes, that's as fun and educational for me as I hope it is for our students. This text set is a recent example. As my ELA department is hard at work retooling lessons for their curriculum year, my Language 10 teachers came to me about a particular unit on personal narrative and nonfiction writing that's a staple in their teaching, but needs a little TLC to improve how students interact with the material and what they learn that can improve their grounding in it.
Language 10's unit involves a deep dive into autobiographical writing with a particular emphasis on memoir, and every student will read a book-length memoir in the course of this project. What my teachers came to me to discuss is simple: though there are a wealth of memoir formats and approaches to how memoirs are created, past instruction hasn't given students quite a strong enough understanding of what those options and approaches are, nor has it always featured current choices that speak to these teachers' diverse students. In discussing this, we all felt if students were purposefully introduced to these different flavors of memoir with some emphasis on why they were written and what that writing style could accomplish, their future analysis in their larger projects would be stronger. They needed to be introduced to memoir writing in smaller chunks before moving to the larger memoir project. We wanted texts that are current, represented a diverse set of viewpoints and life experiences, and were more experimental with memoir format than students might select on their own.
We chose to highlight concise memoir, memoir in verse, graphic memoir, memoir-in-essays, fictionalized memoir, and finally writing about memoir in the following text set:
1. SIX-WORD MEMOIRS
Six word memoirs. SixWord Memoirs. (n.d.). https://www.sixwordmemoirs.com/
Six-Word Memoirs is exactly what it says on the tin: six words that tell a story. Inspired, some say, by the classic Hemingway six-word story "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn", this website introduces the concept, shares examples, and offers themed topics, contests, and events.
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Here's part of the challenge of thinking about this site quantitatively: judging standard readability scores six words at a time is not quite the right way to think about it! It's going to wildly vary. As we want the students to also read the blog posts, I judged this on a random sampling put through StoryToolz to get an idea, and the grade level averaged out to 10th grade, which is certainly perfect for these students. Likewise, what stands out from a qualitative viewpoint is concision writing, something some students struggle with, along with how this fits with its task. We introduce Six-Word Memoirs in part to make students argue whether or not these even ARE true memoirs, and to offer this up as writing practice. Six words doesn't feel challenging, but coming up with six words that work and have the desired effect is something students can use as practice as we get into the topic. This idea can be used as ongoing freewrite exercises during the unit, as well as a conceptual starting point.
2. BROWN GIRL DREAMING (specific excerpts)
Woodson, J. (2014). A girl named Jack. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58417/a-girl-named-jack
Woodson's powerful poetry tells her own story of growing up a Black Lesbian in the Civil Rights Era and 1970s. She writes in free verse, exploring her own memories of living in both the North and the South, and experiencing the end of Jim Crow and her own coming of age.
The Newbery Honor sticker depicted on the front cover of Woodson's memoir might accurately suggest that this book is aimed a little lower in grade level than some of the other texts here; as a verse novel, it's aimed in the upper middle grades, with some reading scores suggesting it fits comfortably around 8th-9th grade and other elements suggesting it's still appropriate for even somewhat younger readers. As a topic, and for those who love verse, it's truly all-ages, a beautiful and emotional read, and a quality example of this format. We can easily excerpt some verse to use in-class, and are particularly looking at poems at the start of the novel in the links above to discuss how Woodson presents her identity. Questions of "who am I?" are necessarily raised by many memoirs, and we have discussed an identity-writing exercise to accompany introducing Woodson's work.
3. HEY, KIDDO and VIDEOS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jarrett J. Krosoczka: How A boy became an artist. YouTube. (2013, January 9). https://youtu.be/_k0ywFgMpFk?si=r0Y_xpBq1b2wlK7N
Krosoczka, J. (2019). Hey kiddo. Scholastic US.
PBS Books. (2019, August 31). Jarrett J. Krosoczka on “hey, kiddo”: 2019 National Book Festival. YouTube. https://youtu.be/hMv087H7Dxs?si=PSrxUIogUWJbTW8h
These texts go together -- not just Krosoczka's wonderful graphic memoir of his complicated childhood family situation, but these two links to interviews that explain how he was inspired to write this book. These videos include a National Book Award-adjacent interview that refers to both the book and the other video, a TED talk with a fascinating backstory. (Long story short: he might not have written his truthful story if not pushed to do TED with no time to prepare.)
Another popular option for memoirs lately is the graphic memoir. Krosoczka's entry is one that I like for classwork precisely because it's what we in the library world term a Hi-Lo choice: it's a lower reading level, but its subject matter is what keeps it appropriate for a teenage audience. My students also love a graphic option, and in some cases can really use it -- because we have a large Hmong student population and many ESL learners from that community and others, it's often very important to find choices in and alongside the classroom that demonstrate this. But with the excerpts we'll use from our classroom set of the book, we also discussed adding these videos, which really highlight how the author came to so frankly yet compassionately address his mother's alcoholism, his rough-edges grandparents who took him in, and how this built him into the artist he is today. We want students to use this simpler text to think about questions of authenticity and authorial choice in nonfiction writing.
4. ASK ME WHAT I'M DOING TONIGHT!
Watsky, G. (2016, June 14). George Watsky- How to Ruin Everything Book Excerpt. YouTube. https://youtu.be/7UC3LudcCDU?si=hHFg5QpQbhWuC5JJ
Speaking of authenticity, Watsky landed as an updated version of the Sedaris and like authors' versions of the memoir in essays. This video version of his essay from his book How to Ruin Everything really speaks to our students in its depiction of setting that they know well -- the choked-off towns of the Midwest -- and his humorous rap-and-comedy roots showing through in his depiction of his life traveling through these bits of America.
If it's not clear, format has driven a great many of our choices, and in designing this set, we looked at a lot of different ways that memoir writing, in particular, can break rules. This might feel a little "edgy" for 10th grade, but that slight edge works in its favor, as does the topic matter -- and that edge is stronger in quality and more relevant than some of the essays it replaces, as some of our past examples of the same kind of writing were very dated, and this has a lot of elements that speak to our students these days. This video not only gives us a way to present the essay-style memoir format, but the video itself has a lot of valuable textual moments to discuss and analyze. One thing we want to see students do in turn-and-talk groups is talk about how those images of different-yet-the-same college promoters and different-yet-the-same little towns work together, and how the video accentuates the words without strictly replicating the content.
5. EVERYTHING SAD IS UNTRUE and AUTHOR PODCAST
Chang, A. (2020, September 2). “Everything sad is untrue” is funny and sad and (mostly) true. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908467288/everything-sad-is-untrue-is-funny-and-sad-and-mostly-true
Nayeri, D. (2023). Everything sad is untrue: (a true story). Levine Querido.
The Printz-Award winning fictionalized memoir of Daniel Nayeri is told from a unique point of view: he writes as if from his 8th grade self, desperately wanting to be liked and accepted by his Oklahoma classmates who see him as a weird foreign brown kid they don't know or understand. By using this unique memoir lens, Nayeri weaves a whole tapestry of his life and family.
There's a good reason we're incorporating the NPR podcast from Nayeri: our students love podcasts. Rarely a week goes by that I don't have a student recommending me something they have heard.
But I must digress to say that this is perhaps my favorite part of this assignment, because I think we've built on all these formats and our questioning of whether they are memoir and how to tackle this book that is all-ages perfect. Nayeri's story is also right on that 8th-9th grade bubble, but is truly for everyone; it won the Printz award on the strength of its 1001 Arabian Nights-like structure and its pitch-perfect voice. One thing we have decided to do is have a live reading of one of the climactic pieces of this book in class. If you have not read it, I will not spoil it too deeply, other than to say that most readers come away with an outsized emotional investment in Nayeri's childhood stuffy toy, Mr. Sheep Sheep. It's the voice he employs to write this as someone who is still a child that is so impressive and emotionally affecting. There are some students who might argue that this IS too much fiction and fictionalized techniques to be memoir, but it's a high-quality way to have that argument in class discussion.
6. HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR
Zinsser, W. (2019, December 12). How to write A memoir. The American Scholar. https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/
Zinsser's short prose rumination on how and why to write memoir nonfiction manages a neat trick of both analyzing and writing about memoir while incorporating memoir of his own, looking back on his parents, friends, and writing students' efforts in these lines, and how to make them valuable and meaningful.
We come full-circle with this piece from William Zinsser, notable literary critic and writer, with a longer piece that is interesting to play against the Six-Word Memoirs as it examines the qualities and value of good memoir writing. This is maybe the most quantitatively difficult pieces in our set -- its vocabulary and length place it a little above a 10th grade level -- but it's so thoughtful about the topic, and offers opportunities through that slightly elevated vocabulary (accretions and anecdote, lassitude and edifice - this will, more than the other pieces, need vocab work).
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