paired with “Skin Feeling”

This pre-writing activity is designed to be used as in-class writing to gather and create pieces that can be combined into and/or inspire a collage-based essay.

Introduction

ET: Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling” pieces together overlapping moments, histories, people, and texts that converge at her place of employment – California State University Channel Islands – and the associations she makes with that place and places like it. Some of those associations are musical, historical, personal memory, or literary. Collecting these stories through a collage-like association creates a richness in the combination and juxtaposition that each individual story couldn’t bring on its own.

Students habituated to thesis-driven writing that disciplines paragraphs to an overarching point often have little experience playing with building an essay without such a strong, unifying point. Building through association and collage can let an implied point develop over time. This makes for a playful process of creating depth through resonances where one might revisit a topic like Charlie Parker’s incarceration through a range of retellings: Ralph Ellison’s writing on jazz, Walter Page’s lyrics, his wife Doris Parker’s testimony, Dr. W.’s story, Sofia Samatar’s own work and educational experience, and Alamin Mazrui’s poetry.

Because this associative structure of writing is often rather new to students, having a discrete set of writing activities that lay the groundwork for unexpected connections helps jump-start writing an essay that meanders through unique, can we say improvised, writing performances?

Guide

Collect: Found Stories

1. Go to Atlas of Transformation and Humans of New York and print or copy and paste four entries. You can choose them at random or choose those that resonate with you either from the image of the person or the content of the writing.
2. For each of those four entries, read them, marking interesting words or phrases. After reading each entry, set a timer for two minutes and write what comes to mind on an index card, one for each entry.
3. Take those four short reflections on your associations with the entries and circle words that resonate with you or that seem like points of convergence.

Write: Collage Pieces

1. Choose one of the words you circled that you feel most drawn to now. Write on five separate index cards paragraph-long scenes, moments, memories, or events that feel somewhat related to that word. Write out those paragraphs with all the details and feelings you can recall. Paint a fleshed-out picture.
2. On another index card, describe one object that came up in one of those five paragraphs.
3. On another index card, describe a place that came up in one of those five paragraphs.
4. On another index card, rewrite one of those five paragraphs from another perspective.
5. Choose one interesting noun from your five paragraphs and on three separate index cards, write out an associated thought or reflection you have of that new term.
6. Choose a different interesting noun from your five paragraphs and on three separate index cards, write out three different facts about that noun. Do some research to find facts you didn’t already know about.
7. On three separate index cards, write a declarative sentence you feel is true.
8. On three separate index cards, write out a question you don’t know the answer to, but you’re curious enough to eventually research.

At this point, you should have 21 index cards and the four original entries from Atlas of Transformation and Humans of New York. Arrange them (all or just a selection) in a way that interests you and spend some time thinking about what it collectively implies about the topic that seems to emerge.