Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir

APPENDIX THREE: For Your Reading Pleasure: Four Full-Length Essays

Appendix Three --------------------------------------------------------------For Your Reading Pleasure Four Full-Length Essays As you read the following essays, consider how these authors implement the various craft elements discussed in Fearless Confessions. For example, list some of the sensory descriptions that most bring you into any given scene. Which images are particularly potent? Why? What is the theme of each essay? Can you state, in one sentence, what that essay means to you? In“IndependenceDay,ManleyHotSprings,Alaska,”what’sthemotivationforLisaD .Chavez’slove/haterelationshipwithAlaska?What’s the motivation, in Harrison Candelaria Fletcher’s “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” that causes the family to adopt stray animals? In “After the Dash,” why does Michael Hemery have conflicted feelings about the feather-button?Whatdoyouthinkthelastsentenceoftheessaymeans, and how does the title reflect the theme? In Chavez’s essay, the State of Alaska itself is a metaphor. For what? In“AftertheDash,”thefeather-buttonrepresentssomething.What?In “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” what larger issues does the owl evoke? How is Pat Boone himself a metaphor in “The Pat Boone Fan Club”? Why is he more than just a singer? Ineachessay,underlineplaceswheretheauthorseguesfromstraightforwardactionintotheverticalplotline .Likewise,underlinesentences where the author deepens the essay with the Voice of Experience. In each essay, what do you think the author comes to understand abouthim-orherselfattheend?Inwhatway(s)doyouthinktheauthor isdifferentattheendoftheessayfromthebeginning?Whatnewinsight has each achieved either about him- or herself, or about the world? four full-length essays 175 Perhaps most important, what parts of these essays most move you? Why? For this question, especially, there are no wrong answers! Independence Day, Manley Hot Springs, Alaska Lisa D. Chavez Independence Day, 1975. I was twelve. A little more than a month before , my mother had withdrawn me from school early, loaded up our car—a flashy but impractical Camaro with dual side-pipes—and headed north for Alaska. She brought with her everything she thought essential: daughter; dog; photos of the family she was leaving behind; a haphazard scattering of household goods; and two army surplus sleeping bags, purchased especially for the trip. What she was traveling towards was uncertain but full of promise—a mysterious box, beguilingly wrapped. What she was leaving behind was certain; perhaps that is why she was so eager to go. A narrow rented house in Southern California; a steady, if boring, secretarial job; a marriage proposal from a man she didn’t love. What she was leaving behind were her everyday fears: her routetoworkthroughWatts,aplaceblightedanddangerouseventhen. The muggings in the company parking lot. The fear of being a young woman alone with her child in a decaying neighborhood, a derelict factory looming across the street. The fear, perhaps, of succumbing to a loveless marriage for the security it offered. I was too young to really understand my mother’s concerns, but I felt her tension. My mother and her women friends wore their fears like perfume, like the lingering scent of smoke from the erupting fires ofthoseviolentdays.Irememberthethingsmymother’sfriendstalked about: the Manson murders; the serial killer who left body parts scatteredonthefreewayintrashbags ;themaninourowntownwhokilled five people in a movie theater. And the more personal terrors, the ones they alluded to less directly: fear of the arm slipping around the neck from behind, fear of the window breaking in the house in the middle of the night. Fear for their children in a place gone crazy. Or just the fear of being alone. And while my world was a child’s world, full of long imaginative games in the park near our house, or afternoons watching 176 appendix thr ee Disney movies at the mall, I also heard my mother and her friends talking about getting out, moving to someplace safe. My mother was looking for sanctuary, and for a new start. She picked Alaska, as far north as she could drive. Independence Day, 1975. We’ve been in Alaska less than a month and are still exploring. Now we have driven as far north as the road will take us, landed here, on the banks of the Tanana River. Manley Hot Springs.Atownwithnofunctionreally,exceptfortherawsprings:two poolsofhotwaterbubblingupoutoftheground. There’salodgewitha few desultory cabins ringing it. A combination gas station/store. That is all. Down the river a half a dozen miles lies Minto, an Athabascan Indian village. Fairbanks, the biggest city in the interior, swollen to a population of 60,000 by pipeline construction, lies less than a hundred milessouth,farenoughaway—alongtheseroughgravelroads—tobe totally insignificant. And I am twelve. Everything new astounds me, and everything is new...