English Question

This essay assignment builds on our readings about memory and place by asking you to craft a personal narrative that is informed by the authors you have studied and which profiles and examines a place of personal importance to you.

Pick one option and let me know which one you picked: 

Option 1:

In The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday writes:  “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe.  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.  He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.  He ought to imagine the creatures that are there and all the faintest motions in the wind.  He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk” (99). 

Use The Way to Rainy Mountain’s three-paragraph structure as a template for composing your own place-based narrative.  You may use Momaday’s mythological, historical, and personal voices as the structure for your three paragraphs, or you may use an alternative structure (that is to say a different set of voices); however, your paragraphs should be both distinct and interconnected.  Your piece should bring the place you are writing about to life, and it should offer the reader a strong sense of the importance of this place to your identity. 

The required length for this paper is 3-4 pgs.  You must use correct MLA formatting.

Option 2:

From pgs. 211 to 227 in “A Native Hill,” Wendell Berry provides a first hand account of walking along a familiar path that leads from the town of Port Royal down to the Kentucky River.  During this account we are provided with rich descriptions of the local environment, observations about historical changes that have occurred to this locale, and insights about the various human relationships to place that can be glimpsed through the details he encounters. 

Using Berry’s piece as a model, write a 3-4 page personal narrative that provides your reader with a first person account of a pathway that leads through a landscape of deep, personal importance to you.  Like Berry’s piece, your writing should bring the environment alive with carefully selected sensory details and it should examine the significance of this environment with complex analysis.

Structurally speaking, you may want to alternate between descriptive paragraphs and analytic paragraphs.  This requires that the elements you focus on in your descriptive paragraphs bear some relation to the analysis that occurs in the following paragraphs.  Effective transition sentences will also be key in crafting an essay that is coherently structured.

Key areas that your analytic paragraphs must cover include (but are not limited to):

*The ecological nature of the place

*The history of human settlement in the area

*Human values that can be glimpsed through this process of settlement and transformation

*The story of your family in relationship to this place*its significance to your understanding of personal identity