This week in class we’ll be discussing Sarah Leavitt’s fantastic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me. Students will also be presenting their work done in the style of Lynda Barry, using her writing exercise for accessing story image.
Eager to hear my student’s reactions to Tangles as this is the first time I’ll be teaching this memoir in a non-medical environment. As with One! Hundred! Demons!, we will discuss the text in two ways – content and form. Sometimes those things are hard to separate one from the other, I’m finding. But we’ll do our best.
After our discussion of Tangles, students will do some drawing inspired by Sarah’s book. We’ll also look at some of Sarah’s suggestions for writing a graphic memoir, based on her workshop zine, “From Diary to Narrative” presented at the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference in Chicago.
We’ll also do exercises that explore putting ones life stories into a timeline/context and the tools available to an historian as a method for approaching memoir.
