Students
will do both creative and “uncreative” writing in this course,
reading widely from contemporary documentary literature, and
learning how to combine personal and political/cultural histories.
We will talk about birth certificates, immigration papers, health forms, job
applications, and meaningful objects. Our readings will range from
work on being a Pidgin speaker in Hawai`i to becoming a baseball
fan in Philadelphia. Along the way we will learn about how a native
American woman learned American history, and how history was
suppressed for survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. Anyone
interested in creative writing, memoir, history, and in the ways
we are marked by the documents we fill out and sign, will find this
course of interest. There will be frequent blog posts on the readings, as well as writing experiments to do, along with an essay and a final project.