The Four stories for 2nd essay-

http://eng256cnf.wikispaces.com/file/view/Memory+and+Imagination_Patricia+Hampl.pdf

https://books.google.com/books?id=NDbD4pYOscoC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=Mary+Clearman+Blew+%22Sow+in+the+River&source=bl&ots=sndBswRKoG&sig=ZSadapWgEJC62PFZ8y-neHB2Zm0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAWoVChMI8-T3qpHHxwIVBJeACh06YgKR - v=onepage&q=Mary%20Clearman%20Blew%20%22Sow%20in%20the%20River&f=false

http://newworldwriting.net/backissues/2006/Vol12No3-July06/1203-070806-Christman.html

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Jo-Ann-Beard-Memoir

Essay assignment and example:

The "Forthright" Genre

"The boundaries of creative nonfiction will always be as fluid as water."-- Mary Clearman Blew

Requirements:

• 6-page essay
• MLA format
• 100 points

Creative nonfiction is an important and dynamic genre that occasions serious study precisely because it operates among and across various genres, literary topoi, and critical fields. Most crucially, the study of creative nonfiction interrogates acute issues concerning the intention, function, and reception of texts. Through examination of a number of works, we have pinpointed some of the characteristics of nonfiction and addressed the genre's complicated boundaries. While all nonfiction works at telling true stories, it is the truth that is also the most complicated, as issues concerning memory, imagination, desire, and perspective always call the "truth" into question.
Using the assigned readings as your sources, define the genre of nonfiction and explain whether or not you believe it lives up to its name as being "not fiction." Be sure to include at least four of the assigned readings.

Recap of Assigned Readings and Major Ideas

Mary Blew's "Sow in the River" sand Patricia Hample's "Memory and Imagination" explain how nonfiction is truthful despite the fallibility of memory. While Blew describes an instance in which the dream world flooded into the material world and created a false memory, Hample describes the power of desire to alter her memory, allowing her to describe what she wished was true and not actually what was true. While Blew focuses on the power of story telling to connect the interior world (mind) with the exterior world (landscape), Hample puts more emphasis on the interior world and the writer task to stalk "the congruence between stored image and hidden emotion." For both Blew and Hample, making connections--between the interior and exterior or stored image and hidden emotion--is a necessity for us to make meaning of the world and our lives, but in doing so, the writer has the responsibility to question her own authority. Thus, writers of creative nonfiction are curious observers who are not simply concerned with what they see but with how they see. The memoirist evaluates what she perceives while taking into account her perspective, something that forces her to recognize her own biases, shortcomings, and contradictions.

In a more experimental style, Jill Christman and Jo Ann Beard confront the uncertainty of memory. In "Three Takes on a Jump," Christman gives two accounts of the same story, leaving the reader with but one truth--that jumping from the roof into the sand hurts. In "Maybe it Happen," Beard leaves the reader in total uncertainty, as she writes from the third person and qualifies every detail with the phrase "maybe it happen."

Yet what makes this genre complicated once more is the idea that it is not only the memory that changes but the truth that changes. Blew, Hample, and Christman discuss the power of language to create reality, and therefore create the "truth." For Blew, the Judith River was never the same after Lewis and Clark named it. For Hample, this is a scary political fact-- that whole histories can be rewritten to deny tragedies like Nazi death camps. For Christman, it is "Sharability," when the story is more about the telling and retelling than the memory itself. But this is why the personal narrative is so important--it has the power to overturn the rewritten history, as we can see in Sara Polly's documentary The Stories We Tell, as the story that gets told as the truth finally unravels and a new truth emerges.