Life Writing in Crisis: Memoir as Presence

Catalog description

In this course, we will pause and craft into words our recollections of how we thrived during this period and how writing might act as a means to process what we have experienced and learned. Normally, we accumulate memories over long periods of time—the drips and draughts of life moments fade . . . or, sometimes, remain indelible in our minds. Those memories help us learn how to cope in the world; they help form our identities; they, sometime, remind us of our resilience. “Survivance,” a portmanteau of survival/endurance or survival/resistance, will compel us in this course to compose our sense of resilience over the past two years, to put into words how we have kept our composure (or maybe not).