Now It's Your Turn
Tell a short story about how you came to be exactly whoever it is that you are. Did you come from a Hispanic, French, Nebraskan, South American, Asian, Polish, Native American culture? Or did you come from somewhere else? Are you here as a product of a culture of love? Of Sunday morning pancakes? Of Rock n’ Roll? Is there a line of advice you heard over and over again throughout your years from your wise elderly grandmother, that has carried you into your young adult years, ready and eager to face the world? Or do you come from a much quieter culture of fantasy stories by the fireplace on Tuesday afternoons?
Whatever your culture, you have a story to tell. Try to focus on one small story that really highlights your personal culture; maybe it’s a memory of sitting around a dinner table, or maybe it’s a series of short clips cataloging baseball games with your friends or family. Maybe your culture is best told through a few very short clips detailing examples of words relevant to your childhood.
With the examples you’ve seen in mind, write an interesting and unique cultural vignette, specific to one aspect of the culture you understand yourself to be from. Include language from that culture, strong imagery and appealing sentences by means of adding brush strokes to your work, and feel free to play with punctuation and sentence structure in order to make your piece your own.
Your final project will be due just 1 week after your rough draft, so make sure your draft is something you’re proud of and have dedicated significant effort to. We’ll be working with the drafts through peer editing in class the day that they’re due. Your final draft should be between 1 and 2 pages, no fewer than 200 and no more than 500 words. You should focus on the details of your vignette rather than the length- draw your audience into your moment, and make the audience feel like they're in the moment with you and the characters.
Attached to your final project, please include a written, 1 page metacognition (i.e. an awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes) about your writing experience. You should include what culture you wanted your audience to understand, and how you went about conveying that culture, the steps your writing process took along the way, things you thought you wanted to include that didn’t work out, or things that came to you in a burst of genies mid- assignment! This is a time for you to think about your thinking, and to reflect on how this experience, writing in the vignette genre, went for you.