In Week Seven we covered a chapter each from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother. We watched Alison discuss her work with Hillary Chute whilst we were coloring (a great way to help us pay attention.)
I then did a short presentation on Mattering Maps, and how they can be useful tools in making memoir visual. The students worked on Mattering Maps in class and several perfected them as their homework. They are fantastic! (The students and their work.)
We then did another Lynda Berry “walking around in an image” exercise with the class-generated word, “vacation.” For this exercise we let Lynda herself be our guide.
Students could choose which homework to do – making a comic of the writing exercise or a Mattering Map – several of them realized the connections between these two exercises and combined them, doing both. I told you they were awesome.