English 111
D. Maxwell
Fall, 2001
Favorite Place

Before we go any further, Please try to think up one word that best pins down what you'd like us to understand from reading the story you told about your memorable experience. Take a minute right now, and write that word at the top of your essay for that assignment. If you can't settle on one single word, try for a short phrase.
 

A PEDAGOGICAL NOTE
I thought you might like to know what you've been doing so far in this course.

During our very first class, you tried to capture and communicate your feelings at the time you were writing. That's called "expressive" writing, because you were expressing yourself. And in your Memorable Experience writing you told a story--"narration"--about an experience that had some relation to school.  In "The Nacirema"--well, I had in mind that maybe you'd see something about seeing and about how our prior experience can often make us blind to what's obvious.  The first thing in writing and science (and probably every other endeavor) is seeing--observation.

Phil Jackson's hat...  (How many ways can you read it?)
If you think about the invitations to write in this course (the "assignments"), you may see that each draws on the experience you gained from the previous ones. But they don't ask you to repeat exactly the same thing; instead, each successive invitation expands upon the others. The idea is that your previous experiences enable you to think and write more profoundly in the later ones. And it really works, too--almost like magic. (If you'd like a heavy-duty academic-type label for it, it's "a profoundly recursive spiraled sequence of writing assignments.") In general, that's the way this course will proceed, right through to the end.

You might also like to know that this method is radically different from the way writing has been "taught" in the past. It's also somewhat more complicated underneath than I've let on. (What magician would give away all of his tricks?) It's not experimental, however; it's based upon solid research into cognitive development and into how professional, average, and naive writers write.
 

ON PLACE--AND A PLACE TO WRITE
Before I get to the next invitation to write, I'd like to mention a few things about place--because, it seems to me, that places often affect us in ways that we might not be consciously aware of. (This kind of observation is especially difficult--and, therefore, essential.)

For example, when I write, the place affects me, usually. It may even affect what I put onto paper. But most of the places I write have some things in common, so I think I can say that "writing place," for me, means "type of place," or "conditions for writing." One condition that affects me is music. Ordinarily, I can't do any serious writing at all if there's music. It just takes over my head.  But voices talking don't usually bother me.  Now that I've taken to writing with a word processor, I most often do it where the computer is, and I find that the computer seems to focus my attention somewhat, making the "place" somewhat less critical.

A friend of mine in college used to write in the bathroom. He said it was private and well-lit. After a while he turned the bathroom into a darkroom and became a photographer, so maybe the place affected him in some way that he hadn't anticipated.

For several years the American novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote in sidewalk cafes, in Paris. In winter he rented a one-room apartment only for writing and lived a few kilometers away with his wife and kid. He wrote in the morning, read in the afternoon, and talked with people in the evening. Later in his life he composed in pencil and typed standing at the mantle. Virginia Woolf, an English novelist, wrote standing up at a tall table placed smack in the center of her workroom. George Orwell used to write at night and slept all morning. Another friend of mine likes to find a study carrel in a far corner of the library. One summer I wrote on the flat roof of a house on a hill in central Mexico, with farms on one side and the village on the other, and a mountain beyond. Finally, I had to go and climb the mountain.

I mentioned "writing place" partly to encourage you to think about where you do your writing for this course--and for other courses, as well. But we're affected by place all the time. We're always someplace, and wherever it is, it has an effect on us. (How does our classroom affect you?)

Carlos Castaneda, an American anthropologist and writer, claimed to have as a friend a Mexican Yaqui Indian mystic called Don Juan. In one of Castaneda's books, Don Juan has Castaneda locate what he calls a "place of power" on Don Juan's front porch. It is the one spot on the porch where Castaneda feels most safe, least vulnerable, most tranquil, most--well, most powerful. He feels sort of in tune with the place, as if it shelters and reinforces him. Sort of. The story gets pretty complicated and unrealistic after that; but the idea of place affecting a person in that way comes up in many cultures, all over the world. And it's fundamental in architecture.

THE NEXT WRITING ASSIGNMENT (at last!)
Write about your favorite place around here, the one place where you usually feel good. It might be in your home, or it might by up a tree or in some public place. What's important is that you feel good there. If you have trouble identifying a single place, make a list of several and go try them out. Write about the one that feels best to you at the time.

(Note: This does not have to be the place where you write.  The writing  place section above is there mainly to encourage you to think about where you write for this course and where you study for other courses.)

Go get yourself into the place and feel it out for a few minutes. How does it affect you? Try to identify what it is about the place that causes you to feel good. How does the place differ from other places almost, but not quite, like it? In what ways do you feel different in that place than you feel just a little distance away from it? How big is the place for you? How far can you move from the center of it and still feel the same way? Is there any way to predict where you're likely to feel good?

I have one caution for you. This is not a memory exploration like the Memorable Experience story. Instead, it's an exercise in direct observation, so YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST BE IN YOUR PLACE WHILE YOU WRITE THE FIRST DRAFT OR TAKE NOTES. Otherwise, you'll never know how it affects you directly, and you'll write only what you THINK is true and not what IS. Therefore, please do not try to write about your favorite place at the beach or in Guatemala unless you're going to be there between now and our next class! Also, what I have in mind is more like a spot than something relatively large, like "house" or "city" or anything like that.
 

P.S. This sequence of Invitations is designed to help you with certain types of analytical writing. In them you'll need to observe certain things, analyze them in certain ways, and communicate to the rest of us what you observed and analyzed. You can think of the invitations as being both independent of each other and interconnected. If you want to get another perspective on this sort of writing practice, look up the word "synergy" in a good dictionary.
 

P.P.S.  If you're curious about seeingand about what appears to be true and what is true, this web page might amuse you:  http://www.abstractconcreteworks.com/essays/beauty-truth.html