Session Ten · Unit Four — The Roof Garden
The Roof Garden — Revision and the Collective Memoir
The Genre: Revision & the Anthology
Main Points of the Lesson
- Revision is re-vision. Not correction but seeing again: asking what the piece is really about and letting the draft become that.
- “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.” Montaigne, in “Of Repentance,” describes the essayist’s subject as a self in motion. Memoir is always revised by the life that continues.
- The collective memoir. An anthology of a building is a new form: many voices, one roof. Its order is an argument — arrivals, neighbors, the building, the view from the top.
- The ethics of publication. Before anything is shared beyond this room: consent from every named living person, the right to withdraw, and changed names wherever asked.
- A green roof. In 2020 the building planted a green roof. Something living, on top of an old structure: a fair image for what we have made.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance,” trans. Charles Cotton, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt — read on Project Gutenberg
The essay in which Montaigne explains what it means to write the self. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 13, “The Writing Process and Revision”; Chapter 14, “The Power of Writing Communities”; Chapter 15, “Publishing Your Creative Nonfiction” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- Montaigne’s Essays — composition and revision (Wikipedia) — Montaigne revised his essays for the rest of his life, adding rather than erasing.
- Memoir — ethics and truth claims (Wikipedia) — The debates about accuracy, memory, and fabrication in the genre.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Take the piece you brought. Write its true subject in one sentence at the top of the page. Then cut its first paragraph and read what is left. Finally, write a new last sentence — one that looks out, the way the view does from the roof.
Afterward, we read aloud — volunteers only — and decide together the order of the anthology.
What happens with this: nothing is collected. It is yours, written on paper, in your notebook. No one is asked to read aloud who does not wish to.
Discussion Questions
- Montaigne says he paints not the self’s being but its “passage.” How has your own piece changed since the first draft? What changed in you?
- What makes a collection of many voices feel like one book?
- What does a reader outside 2601 gain from our stories? What should they never be asked to believe?
- What is the story of this building that none of us has written yet?
Homework
- Submit your revised anthology piece and signed permissions by the date we agree on together.
- Plan the closing reading for residents, family, and friends.
- Keep writing. See Tell It Slant, Chapter 15, “Publishing Your Creative Nonfiction,” for next steps.
For the 2601 Anthology
Under One Roof: Lives at 2601 — four sections (Arrivals, Neighbors, The Building, The View from the Roof), assembled by the class, shared only with every contributor’s consent.
After the Course
The anthology is assembled, the reading is planned, and the writing continues. Thank you for opening your doors.