Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 2013 Approaches to Life Narrative: A Scholarly and Creative Thesis Tanya Bomsta bomsta@marshall.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.edu/etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons, Rhetoric Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bomsta, Tanya, "Approaches to Life Narrative: A Scholarly and Creative Thesis" (2013). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar.
For more information, please contact zhangj@marshall. APPROACHES TO LIFE NARRATIVE: A SCHOLARLY AND CREATIVE THESIS A thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Tanya Bomsta Approved by Dr. Kelli Prejean, Committee Chairperson Dr. Jane Hill Dr.
Rachael Peckham Marshall University May 2013 ©2013 Tanya Bomsta ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere appreciation to my portfolio committee: Dr. Kelli Prejean, Dr. Jane Hill, and Dr. Peckham has been a tireless advocate for me and my work, motivating and encouraging me at every turn.
Hill has been endlessly compassionate and kind, and I’m especially grateful for her excitement for and appreciation of the work I have done during graduate school. Prejean has mentored me since my first semester at Marshall, helping me hone my skills as a scholar and writer; she has helped me discover my love for rhetoric and composition, encouraged me in my writing, and has become both an excellent advisor and a valued friend. I know that without these three women, I would not have accomplished nearly as much as I have during my Master’s program; they will always be an inspiration to me. I also wish to thank my friends and fellow graduate students Whitney Naylor-Smith, Stephanie Walker, Shannon DeWitt, and Christie Linger for their continued friendship, moral support, and especially for the many times they reviewed my work.
I also want to thank my mother, without whom I would not be not be getting a Master’s degree. Her constant willingness to stay with my children while I spent countless hours studying and in class have not only contributed to my ability to complete my degree, but have also taught me that a mother’s support and love for her child are constant and unwavering. Most of all, I wish to thank my children, Evelyn, Brielle, and Clark. They have proudly displayed my A-papers along with theirs on the refrigerator and patiently listened to me read my work aloud to them.
I am profoundly grateful for their sacrifices. They have sacrificed an always-there mother so that I could pursue my educational goals. Their lives are often disrupted by my work, but they have cheered me on endlessly and are my greatest supporters. I am indebted to them, and I hope that I can do as much for them as they have for me.
iii CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Part I: Scholarly Work…………………………………………………………………… 4 “Harmonizing Lives: Life Narrative and Rhetorical Theory in Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice”………………………………………………………………. 5 Part II: Creative Work……………………………………………………………………. 32 “Death Rites of a Journal”……………………………………………………….
42 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………… 48 iv ABSTRACT This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.
The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the author’s own relationship to journaling, writing, nature, and relationships. v INTRODUCTION When I began graduate school two years ago, I knew very little about English’s subdisciplines of composition, rhetoric, and creative writing. I had specialized in literature at my undergraduate institution, so when I came to Marshall and one of my first courses was in composition theory, much of it was new territory for me.
It was in that class that I was first introduced to rhetorical theory. As I researched and studied, I quickly came to love rhetoric and wanted to continue learning more about it. I was able to do so when I took an independent study course on feminist rhetorics. The readings and concepts in that course were the most influential ideas that I have encountered at graduate school, and I have been dedicated to studying and practicing feminist principles ever since.
During a course in expository writing, I was introduced to creative nonfiction and wrote two profile essays: one on Portsmouth, Ohio, and another on feminism in Huntington, West Virginia. This course was pivotal for me because it reminded me how much I love to write creatively. It seems a strange thing to forget, but I hadn’t written much besides my journals for the seven years preceding graduate school. I began writing more, and the following semester I took a writing workshop and began work on my first personal essay.
I have always been interested in life narrative (although I haven’t always known it by this term), but most of my experience with it up to that point had been keeping a journal. As I worked on personal essays and studied others’ works of creative nonfiction, I decided to research women’s life narrative on a scholarly level for my graduate portfolio. This portfolio includes both scholarly and creative approaches to life narrative and rhetoric. In my paper, “Harmonizing Lives: Life Narrative and Rhetorical Theory in Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice,” I examine Williams’ recent nonfiction book through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory.
I was first 1 introduced to Williams during my course in feminist rhetorics and wanted to read more of her work. Williams’ writing speaks to me on several personal levels. She was once Mormon, as was I; many of her reasons for leaving the Church that she alludes to in her books coincide with my own. She writes, in When Women Were Birds, about journals, a form of life narrative that I have engaged in since I was eight years old.
She lost a mother to cancer, and I lost a father to cancer; her first name is even the same as my maiden name. Although I haven’t met Terry Tempest Williams, I feel a kinship with her—and this kinship is felt through the words of her life narrative. That’s the power of life narrative—its inherent qualities of universality and connection. Phillip Lopate writes that “At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience” (xxv) 1.
Lopate specifies the personal essay here, but the same is true for all life narrative. When we read another’s life, we find parallels between ourselves and the writer’s; there are threads of ideas or experiences that connect us. When we read another’s life, we read ourselves. In my analysis of When Women Were Birds, I examine how these connections are forged through feminist rhetorical theory and how Williams practices and theorizes women’s life narrative.
My creative work in this portfolio demonstrates my own approach to the personal essay, a subgenre of life narrative. I include two essays as examples of ways that I re-create my life’s experiences on the page. The first, “Death Rites of a Journal,” is especially pertinent for this portfolio because I examine journaling as a ritual of constructing the self. The second, “Erosion,” explores memories through the lens of nature.
In its own way, this portfolio as a whole is a sample of my life in writing. The creative works are nonfiction representations of different aspects of my life told through personal essays. The scholarly work is also nonfiction, 1 Lopate, Philip.” The Art of the Personal Essay. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
2 and although it does not reference my personal experiences, it reflects my interests, beliefs, and thought processes. Along with my academic and creative interests, this portfolio also represents the critical thinking, research, and writing skills that I have developed over my two years at Marshall. I hope the scholarly and creative approaches to life narrative in this collection will contribute to the conversations about women’s rhetorics and women’s writing. 3 PART I: SCHOLARLY WORK 4 HARMONIZING LIVES: WOMEN’S LIFE NARRATIVE AND RHETORICAL THEORY IN TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS’ WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS: FIFTY-FOUR VARIATIONS ON VOICE In the beginning of When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, Terry Tempest Williams describes how her mother, a week before her death, bequeaths to Williams her many journals: “I am leaving you all my journals,” her mother tells her.
“But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone” (3). Williams promises to wait; one month later, after her mother has passed away, Williams retrieves the journals and sits down to read through her mother’s life narrative. But when she opens the journals, she discovers that every single one is blank (4). The shock and surprise Williams feels at discovering the blank journals is the occasion for writing When Women Were Birds—she writes in order to understand why her mother never wrote.
At one point in the memoir, Williams notes that her mother hung a quilt square on the wall, explaining to Williams that the square “represents how women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them” (51). For Williams, this type of piecing together is done through the autobiographical act. She creates her own work of life narrative to find meaning in her mother’s journals, and her book thus emerges as an exploration: she writes to piece together her own experiences, the meanings of her mother’s journals, and the resulting implications of voice and silence. Judy Lensink has compared women’s life narratives to the piecing of a quilt, suggesting that women writers “both tell their truth and create female design—a supersubtle design, similar to a quilt’s, made up of incremental stitches that define a pattern” (153).
As Williams encounters oppositions—including writing/not writing, journals/autobiography, and silence/voice—she must find a way to harmonize disparate ideas, which she does through writing When Women Were Birds. 5 Beginning in the late twentieth century, scholars have demonstrated a critical interest in women’s life narratives, studying a range of forms, from diaries to autobiographies to memoirs. They have examined the genderic differences between men’s and women’s life narratives, the ways women construct the self in writing, and how women have found means to write their lives even when it was not socially acceptable to do so. The studies these scholars have conducted thus far, as Martine Watson Brownley and Allison B.
Kimmich note, have served to “expand [our] ideas about identity” (xi) and helped us find “issues that are unique to women’s texts” (xiv). Interest in women’s life narratives stretches beyond the academy, of course. Coleman observes that “In the last two decades, life-writing by women, with its immediate yet complex access to everyday life, has gained a wide readership, popular and academic, female and male” (2). As women have gained access to the world of public writing, contemporary forms of life narrative are not only more available, but also sought out by readers and scholars.
The popularity of women’s life narratives, inside academia and beyond, suggests their continuing influence on and value for women’s lives. As women produce and publish more life narratives, scholarship on those texts will continue to contribute to autobiographical theory, expanding our ideas about identity and genderic writing differences. But studying women’s life narratives, especially contemporary life narratives, has other valuable possibilities for its practitioners and its readers.
