personal narrative

for the Personal Narrative Essay

The personal narrative essay will be a first effort at a college essay for English 1301. You will use one of these writings as a springboard to start telling a story from your own life. The first paragraph will briefly cite and summarize one of these readings, closing with a statement about the theme (main idea) you see in the reading. The second paragraph will begin to tell your own parallel story from your life. Use as many paragraphs as you need, spelling out at least four pages of essay to tell your story. The final paragraph will tie your life lesson back to the reading. The whole essay should be in the MLA format set up by the template within the ECC Library web site.

Each reading is under a theme that I have labeled, but you may read the piece differently. That is fine—as long as you can cite parts that defend the theme you find in the reading. On the other hand, your own personal narrative must be tied to one of these readings.

On Mischief (from Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand)

In the 1920s California was not the place to be for a man in a sinning frame of mind. The temperance folks had given America Prohibition, and had thrown in a ban on gambling while they were at it. A guy couldn’t cavort with women, and thanks to the ban on cabaret dancing, he couldn’t even watch women cavorting by themselves. If he was discovered in a hotel room with a woman not his wife, his name would appear in the section of the newspaper reserved for public shaming. Everything was closed on Sundays. The only place to go was church. There he could hear the usual warnings about alcohol, gambling, dancing, and cavorting. When Southern California ministers were really whipping their congregations into a froth, they would get rolling on the subject of “the Road to Hell,” a byway that ran south from San Diego. At the end of it stood the town of Tijuana. “Sin City,” a place where all those despicable things, and a whole lot more, were done right out in the open.

You can’t buy that kind of advertising. Thousands of Americans a day were sprinting for the border.

On Love (“Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims)

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,

At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,

Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,

And have no cunning at any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:

The refugee uncertain at the door

You make at home; deftly you steady

The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi driver’s terror,

Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime

Yet leaping before red apopleptic streetcars—

Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only

With words and people and love you move at ease.

In traffic of wit expertly maneuver

And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,

Your lipstick grinning on our coat,

So gaily in love’s unbreakable heaven

Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—

I will study wry music for your sake.

For should your hands drop white and empty

All the toys in the world would break.

On Thanks (“Gravy” by Raymond Carver)

No other word will do. For that is what it was. Gravy.

Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving and

being loved by a good woman. Eleven years

ago he was told he had six months to live

at the rate he was going. And he was going

nowhere but down. So he changed his ways

somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?

After that it was all gravy, every minute

of it, up to and including when he was told about,

well, some things that were breaking down and

building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”

he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.

I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone

expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

On Experience (“Experience” by Emily Dickinson)

I stepped from plank to plank

So slow and cautiously;

The stars above my head I felt,

About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch,--

This gave me that precarious gait

Some call experience.

On Honesty (“Open House” by Theodore Roethke)

My secrets cry aloud.

I have no need for tongue.

My heart keeps open house,

My doors are widely swung.

An epic of the eyes

My love, with no disguise.

My truths are all foreknown,

This anguish self-revealed.

I’m naked to the bone,

With nakedness my shield.

Myself is what I wear:

I keep the spirit spare.

The anger will endure,

The deed will speak the truth

In language strict and pure.

I stop the lying mouth:

Rage warps my clearest cry

To witless agony.

On Joy (“Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy pear tree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden,--Have, get, before it cloy,

Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

On Loss (“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop”)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss seems no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

On Imagination (“The Land of Counterpane” by Robert Louis Stevenson)

When I was sick and lay a-bed, And sometimes sent my ships in fleets

I had two pillows at my head, All up and down among the sheets;

And all my toys beside me lay Or brought my trees and houses out,

To keep me happy all the day. And planted cities all about.

And sometimes for an hour or so I was the giant great and still

I watched my leaden soldiers go, That sits upon the pillow-hill,

With different uniforms and drills, And sees before him, dale and plain,

Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; The pleasant land of counterpane.

On Alienation (“Her Kind” by Anne Sexton)

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of my mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods:

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

On Determination (from “Living like Weasels” by Annie Dillard)

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton—once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?