Muse & the Marketplace 2018

You want to write about yourself and you think you have no material. Or you want to, and you think you have a great deal of material. Whether you identify with the first or second statement, you're a bit right and a bit wrong. Your memories are unreliable guides to offer anyone else on their own, without context, research, and background. When writing about the self in memoir and personal essays, it is important to construct a persona in relationship to the topic, but then you must remember to treat yourself as your own subject. This course will teach a variety of ways to do this. We will begin with the traditional methods of reporting, and then move on to the unprecedented amount of data about our history and interactions we all have now, and learn to conduct a forensic review of the self much like we might if we were a private investigator, investigating ourselves--from our internet histories and Google histories, to our emails, to our social media likes, our chat and text records, our photo streams, and much more. You will find the ways you lie to yourself and others about who you are, and study the real footprint of your life for clues as to how to write about it.