Books of the outside world. Reading is “bringing ink to life in your imagination.” Full Speed to a Crash Landing, by Beth Revis, (Daw 2024). The author is thanking the reader. Full quote, “I truly appreciate your magic in bringing ink to life in your imagination.” Acknowledgements.
~~~
I signed up for a class.
First Person: Personal Narrative Writing
UAB Art, ArtPlay
Teaching Artist – Javacia Harris Bowser
six 1-&-1/2-hour weekly sessions
Description, “First Person: Personal Narrative Writing Workshop for adults will cover the basics of creative non-fiction with a focus on memoir. Participants will learn how to turn their life experiences into captivating stories and we’ll cover how to get the narratives published.” UAB: First Person
What Is Personal Narrative
Aptitude #1. Reading. I read a lot of non-fiction books written in the first person. A lot. Are these personal narrative? I tend to prefer ones that emphasize narrative over personal. People in weird or notable or exotic (to me) places doing interesting things. Either they do the thing & then write about it, example Raven Master by Skaife (Farrar 2018) [Surrounded By Stories, GWSE Logo], OR they do the thing in order to write about it, example most travel writing. But I digress.
TRAVEL
Road Fever, by Tim Cahill (Random House 1991)
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer (Villard 1997)
Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, Tim Severin (Hutchinson 1989)
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stephan Fatsis (Houghton Mifflin 2001) [Writing Rules, Which Ones?]
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle (Farrar 2013) [Have You Read This? Graphic Novel Edition]
All the Beauty in the World, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster 2023) [Fractal Alphabet S]
And so on.
Concern (limitation, opportunity, teachable moment, lack of Venn diagram intersection, whatever) #1. I don’t have a repertoire of newsworthy activities of the sort I like to read about. Quotidian experience can make for riveting stories, but not ones I want to read.
Aptitude #2. Writing, POV. I can write in the first person. Points to blog.
Concern #2. Personal narrative is probably more than rambly blog posts.
Aptitude #3 Writing, content. I know my strengths. “You come here for horses and entertainment and shared schaudenfreude and celebration and other reasons that are your own.” [Speaking Out]. “If I have a gift to give the Internet, it is to be witty and amusing.” [Awareness of the Outside World]
Concern #3. Will there be an emphasis on portraying a meaningful interior life? I’m sure I have one. Not sure where it is.
Specific Aims
What I hope to accomplish.
1) Go somewhere, do something. Get out among the three-dimensional people. Success is simply showing up. As with photography & art classes. [In Which I Make Bad Art]
2) Generate blog posts. Off to a good start.
3) Professional development. Working on one aspect of my writing should improve my professional writing, even if personal narrative is not directly involved in an assignment. No direct metric for this.
4) Write a full-blown story. Note to self. This one is way down in the order for a reason.
5) Submit same. Not a problem. If I write something, I can submit it. Marketing chops, I got. I’m not saying I can convince someone to publish it, just that I can send it out.
Coda
Those are my thoughts beforehand. We’ll see what changes over time.
Onwards!
Katherine
Virtual Brush Box 
Good plan. You will learn. Maybe not what you expected to learn but you will learn.
Louise
Whatever is learned, there will be blog posts! 🤣