Writing "Life Writing" into existence

What's Life Writing they keep asking, and I keep telling them It's writing...about life. The course hasn't been offered for a few years so I guess it's not too surprising that our students don't have a clue what might distinguish Life Writing from other types of writing, but next semester I'll be guiding a dozen or more students through a class I've never taught before so it's about time to figure out what it might be.

I ought to know: I designed and proposed the course more than a decade ago, but then we hired a writing specialist who needed some upper-level classes to fill out his schedule so he took over the class before I ever had a chance to teach it. We were in a different place as an institution back then and I had some different interests, so the sample syllabus I had to create for the course proposal isn't proving too helpful in our current context. But in the lead-up to this bizarre election season I needed to distract my mind with a compelling project, so instead of doom-scrolling I've been finding readings and constructing writing assignments and developing a structure for the Life Writing course I'll teach next semester.

The course will begin with at the center--the individual self--and move slowly outward. Students will read short memoirs and write their own, and then they will read and write about how the self gets entangled (with activities, fields of study, or other people). Then we'll move to reading and writing the life of another person, focusing on unsung heroes or hidden figures. Then we'll bring together the perspectives of several people in an oral history project that I hope will illuminate pivotal points in the students' understanding of the wider world.

We'll read short works by some fabulous authors--Leslie Jamison! Susan Orlean! Drew Lanham!--and one book, Salman Rushdie's Knife, which illustrates the stages of writing about lives from the individual self to the entangled self to the wider world. 

And then I have to tackle the Honors element. Just under half of the students will be taking the course as part of the Honors program, which means they'll do all the work the other students do plus an activity that presents an extra challenge. I'm thinking of asking them to transform one of their pieces into a multimedia essay incorporating visuals, music, or video to enhance the words, or maybe I'll ask them to work in small groups to produce a podcast. I would love to give them a group project: setting up a storytelling booth on campus to collect oral histories of our own part of the world. What kinds of permissions would I have to get to make that happen? Would the Mass Media department share their recording equipment and expertise with my students? Looks like I've got some work to do to determine feasibility.

But hey: having a challenging project is just the ticket for maintaining sanity when the world seems to be careening toward catastrophe, so let's put words on the page and write some lives.