1. can you tell us about your long life as a first generation college student in the UC system: first at UCLA and then at UCI, where you earned both your Bachelor's in English and your MFA in poetry before going on to teach writing for 24 years?!
As a seventeen-year-old at UCLA, I lived in Rieber Hall with my college roommate, Silvia Mendoza. She was a junior transfer student and a kinesiology major; I was a freshman who hoped my major in English would help me write the "great American novel." My parents, although proud of my academic achievements in high school, did not support my goal to earn a college degree. My parents were high school graduates from working-class families where no one had attained a college education. After high school, my mother aspired to be an opera singer; she had a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice, but her parents were too poor to pay for singing lessons. My mid-western father didn't know what to do after high school graduation. With the Korean War on the horizon, he joined the Navy to avoid being drafted by the Army.
When my parents married in the mid-1950s, they held onto their traditional values about women even though I grew up during the second wave of the women's movement (1960s-1970s). My parents taught me that women were homemakers and mothers, not college professors. Despite receiving an acceptance letter to attend UCLA, my parents couldn't afford to send their only daughter to college, especially since my older brother was beginning his junior year at UC Davis. My parents believed sons attended college and daughters got married. Still, I was determined to further my education, so I paid for my first year at UCLA with the money I'd saved from working at Swensen's Ice Cream Factory and applied for a grant and a loan.
During my first year as a UCLA Bruin, I felt overwhelmed by the number of students who attended the university, the number of hours I needed to study to earn a "C" grade, and living in a dorm room away from home. I didn't own a car—the only way home was to hitch a ride with another student who lived in Orange County. Because my parents weren't familiar with the "college experience," they didn't understand the stress and joy I felt. What helped ease the transition into college life was my roomie, Silvia.
Many life events interrupted my college career: an early marriage at nineteen, two children, relocating out of state, and divorce by the age of twenty-five. As a single mother, I couldn't return to college for several years after my first year at UCLA. I worked low-paying administrative jobs to support my children and eventually spent many nights in classes at a local community college. I finally transferred to UC Irvine and graduated with my bachelor's degree in English in 1996. I spent ten years earning my college degree, but twenty years had elapsed. A few years later, I returned to earn my MFA in poetry at UC Irvine's Graduate Program in Writing. I have taught composition at UC Irvine for the past twenty-four years.
2. what do you teach and why do you teach it?
For the last few years, I have taught the theme "Memoir: A Slice of Life - Home, Family, and Self," emphasizing identity, language, and ethnicity. This theme asks students to consider the idea of the American family within a social, cultural, economic, and political context. The central questions of the course are: What does the concept of home mean to you? How do we define "family" and "home"? How do we define the "self"? The rhetoric of "family values" is embedded in our national consciousness, and the course endeavors to explore new forms of families—same-sex marriages, blended families, civil unions, single-parent families, etc., in contrast to the traditional American family.
To explore the above questions, we read excerpts from memoirs and personal essays by noted authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Joyce Carol Oates, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Reyna Grande, Bich Minh Nguyen, Trevor Noah, Ocean Vuong, and Michelle Zauner. Through reading, writing, and analysis, students learn the importance and subtleties of narrative writing in a genre often unfamiliar to them. The authors mentioned above have written memoirs or personal essays that are primarily hybrid or suggest a genre fluidity. For example, Oates's essay "The Lost Sister: An Elegy" combines poetry and memoir with a few expository paragraphs. Anzaldua's essay "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" is part memoir, an academic essay, a literacy narrative, and more. Vuong's essay "A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read" deftly shifts between an open letter, a personal essay, and a literacy narrative. For the genre analysis essay, students write on one of the assigned texts, identify two genres/sub-genres present in the text, and analyze how the two work together or in contrast to communicate a specific purpose or message. The above memoir and personal essays also serve as examples students utilize for their own memoir or personal essays.
In their personal writing, they compose stories based on a "significant moment or event that has profoundly influenced their life." In past classes, student topics ranged from homelessness and the death of a beloved grandmother in the Philippines to learning to accept the love of a stepfather and reconciling with one's familial religious fervor. Students support each other through several iterations of peer review, trusting each other and me with their stories that often reveal their most vulnerable and heartbreaking moments.
As a memoirist and instructor, I am interested in authentic narratives and how life writing engages the reader in the personal stakes of the writer through their voice, language, idioms, and vernacular to communicate the complexities of a life different from mine. The conversational tone of memoir writing gives students an opportunity to experiment with their voices and write in their own voice, which differs from an academic persona traditionally required by the university.
On the first day of class, my students watch novelist Chimamanda Adichie's Ted Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story." Adichie explains how "single stories flatten experience" and encourage stereotypes. She ends her talk by saying, "Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign. But stories can also be used to empower and humanize." I teach the memoir essay because we all have many stories to tell, each revealing a part of ourselves to the world. And, in shaping our memories through storytelling, our stories help us relate to and understand each other.
3. Can you describe any particularly challenging experience you've had while teaching personal writing–inside or outside the classroom?
In most quarters, one or two students consider writing about their past experiences with domestic violence, sexual assault, or abuse. As a responsible employee, I know these are reportable events, even if these traumatic incidents occurred before the beginning of the course. At the launch of the IP memoir essay assignment, I advise my students that if they want to write about their experiences related to discrimination or harassment, California law mandates me to report the information to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (OEOD) and UCI Care. I invite students to talk with me before deciding on the topic of their memoir essay. Once a student identifies that they want to write about their experience as a victim of domestic violence or sexual harassment, I meet with them to discuss the process. First, I must report the incident(s) to the OEOD, and the OEOD will contact them to offer resources and aid. Secondly, I explain how writing about a traumatic event such as discrimination or harassment will likely be difficult or even painful. And thirdly, I provide the following advisory to all my students, in both writing and verbally in class:
Please make sure you can weather the writing—if it makes you too sad, angry, or anxious, then stop, and you'll need to think of an alternative approach to the memoir assignment. Sometimes, memoir writing brings up issues or emotions you may not have dealt with or processed. While writing about our sadness, loneliness, grief, and anger is often cathartic or a way to purge or discharge some of our emotions, I cannot guarantee that this result will happen for you.
After the three-draft writing process, many students feel that writing the memoir essay was a cathartic experience. Memoir writing encourages self-awareness as students explore the emotional depths of their experiences and strengthen their observation, description, and narrative skills. Often, the writing process reconnects them with friends and family about whom they have written. Most importantly, they share their stories with their peers and me, giving us a different perspective beyond their student lives in the classroom.
From a writing perspective, one of the most challenging parts of the memoir essay is writing in the reflective or "experienced voice." Memoirist Sue William Silverman provides a helpful definition: "The experienced voice…plunges us deeper into the story by employing metaphor, irony, and reflection to reveal the author's progression of thought and emotion. It reveals what the facts mean, both intellectually and emotionally. Reflection is not just looking back, recollecting, or remembering the past. It's a search to see past events or relationships in a new light." As a memoirist, I understand the struggle to write with perspective and insight when reflecting on a life-defining event. In my writing life, workshop peers have repeatedly advised me to include more retrospection. Reflective analysis is challenging. As storytellers, we can often recount the influential events of our lives, yet analyzing these events and the feelings related to these events is arduous yet critical work. In his book The Memoir and the Memoirist, author Thomas Larson asks the potential memoirist to consider, "How do I understand the person I was then in light of the person I am now?" Answering this question is a necessary step in memoir writing—without reflection, perspective, or insight into the past, the events are merely the scaffolding of a story, as in this happened, then this happened, rather than a fully realized memoir with a vulnerability and humanity an audience will connect with.
4. Can you describe how teaching personal writing has impacted the way you perceive, relate to, teach and/or evaluate the students in your course?
Because memoir writing is personal, a more intimate relationship develops between writer and reader, student-peer reviewers, and students and the instructor. The enactment of this relationship is most visible on the last day of class when I ask my students to read for 2-3 minutes from their memoir essays. Students uncomfortable reading their essays can read an excerpt from another author's memoir. Or, instead of an in-class reading, I also provide an option to video record themselves reading an excerpt, and I am their audience in the privacy of my office. Most students choose to read during class time. In a safe and supportive space, they share their stories, reassured by their peers and me that their stories, their voices are important—we listen intently—our engagement to the reader, to their story, is palpable in the room.
As the last reader of the class, I share an excerpt from my manuscript, Sweet Spot: my life as minor league wife. My reading gives students a vastly different perspective from their instructor, one they typically do not expect. It seems fitting to read from my work since my students have shared and risked the kind of vulnerability that memoir writing requires. In The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate remarks, "At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience." Through the diversity of stories read in class, I believe Lopate's "supposition" to be true. I hope my students do, too.
5. Any additional thoughts on the value of teaching personal writing?
Though some students may struggle with thinking they don't have a significant life experience that warrants telling, I refer to Thomas Larson (again): "We can write memoirs from time to time throughout a long life, and each one will be the most complete expression of who we are and how we understand our lives up to that point." Our stories matter—at every age.
Suggested sources for reading and teaching
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. "The danger of a single story," TedGlobal 2009.
Couser, C. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading & Writing Personal Narrative. Ohio University Press, 2007.
Silverman, Sue William. "The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction" Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Sept. 2008.
Yagoda, Ben. Memoir: A History. Riverhead Books, 2009.
