Prompt #25 Writing the Wider World

June 2022

Hi Friends,

Happy Summer! All the summer reading lists are starting to come out, and I’ve been thinking about my favorite memoirs/works of nonfiction and how they are often about the narrator + something larger. Some examples include Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True (about the narrator becoming a poet but also the dawn of the Civil War in El Salvador and the United State’s involvement in it), Camille Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers (about the narrator’s experience of mother hood but also about being a Black mother in America), and most recently, Kathryn Miles’ Trailed (which is about the double murder in Shenandoah National Park in 1996 and the ways wilderness isn’t equally safe for all humans, but it’s is also about the narrator’s quest for justice). These books are all about the narrator but are also about the wider world. For this writing exercise, we are going to try to balance our life stories with the collective stories in the wider world.