Session Two · Unit One — The Threshold
Moving Day — The Personal Essay
The Genre: The Personal Essay
Main Points of the Lesson
- The essay is an attempt. From Montaigne’s essai: a trial, a weighing. The personal essay thinks on the page rather than announcing conclusions.
- The essayist’s “I.” The “I” of an essay is a made thing — a persona built from the writer’s real voice, selected and sharpened for the occasion.
- Digression is structure. Morley’s “Moving” wanders among boxes and books and arrives somewhere true. A good digression always returns carrying something.
- The turn. Most personal essays pivot: a sentence where the subject we thought we were reading about gives way to the real subject.
- Identity in the particular. Hurston writes about the largest questions of race and selfhood through a porch, a road, a jazz club, a brown paper bag. The universal lives in the specific.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Christopher Morley, “Moving,” from Pipefuls (1920) — read on Project Gutenberg
The Philadelphia essayist on packing up a life. The same volume includes “Pine Street” — worth reading for its Philadelphia. - Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) — read on Project Gutenberg
A buoyant, defiant personal essay about identity and self-possession. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 8, “The Tradition of the Personal Essay”; Chapter 5, “The Body of Identity” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” — publication and reception (Wikipedia) — Background on the essay’s first appearance in The World Tomorrow and its later readings.
- Christopher Morley — background (Wikipedia) — The Haverford-educated essayist and novelist who made Philadelphia a literary subject.
- Montaigne’s Essays — the origin of the form (Wikipedia) — Where the personal essay begins.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Make a list of ten objects you carried into your apartment on moving day — or wish you had. Circle the one that embarrasses you a little. Write for ten minutes about that object, and let yourself digress wherever it leads. In the last two minutes, write the sentence that begins, But what I was really carrying was…
Handwritten, never collected. Two or three volunteers may read a single sentence aloud if they wish.
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
- Where is the turn in Morley’s “Moving”? What does the essay turn out to be about?
- How does Hurston build a persona? List three sentences where her voice is unmistakable.
- Hurston writes, in effect, about being seen. How does an essayist control the way she is seen?
- Is a digression a failure of focus or a form of focus? Defend your answer with a passage.
Homework
- Read Tell It Slant, Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” and Chapter 2, “Writing the Family.”
- Write a personal essay of 750–1,000 words: What I Brought, What I Left. Begin with a single object and let the essay turn.
- Read for Session 3: the opening of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, through his arrival in Philadelphia in 1723.
For the 2601 Anthology
Many residents arrived at 2601 at a turning point — a retirement, a loss, a new city, a new start. Your moving-day essay may belong in the anthology’s first section, Arrivals.
Before Next Time — Session 3
Memory’s Floor Plan — Memoir and Scene. We learn to build scenes from memory and to hear the two voices of memoir: the self who lived it and the self who tells it.