My Memoir

First I want to start out by saying how I absolutely can not believe that the semester is over. I am overjoyed because this semester has been one of the most stressful in my Kutztown experience so far. I wanted to reflect on how much I enjoyed this class. I enjoyed how much of a laid back atmosphere that it was. It was nice to come to class everyday and know that we would not be lectured at and shown a PowerPoint that the professor had been using for the last ten years. That is always a boring class, which advanced comp never was.

We talked a little bit this semester about memoir and how sometimes memory isn’t the most reliable thing. I actually was assigned to work on a first person essay in my magazine writing class. I was inspired by one of the articles that we read to write a form of memoir. We read an article titled “A Sudden Illness,” and it was all about this author’s experience of a sickness. When I was twelve years old I went away for a weekend with my best friend. We spent the weekend snowboarding at Killington, Vermont. On our final day I fell thirty feet out of a ski lift. I ended up chipping 2 of my vertebrae. So, after reading this article I decided that I would write my memoire-type article about that fall and how it has impacted my life since. I was twelve years old when that happened, and now I am twenty (soon to be 21 J!!!!) it has been close to ten years since I fell. Even though I have told the story more times than I can ever count, some of the details are becoming hazing. As I was writing I kind of questioned myself. Did that actually happen? Was that really the way that it looked? Did I really say that? That’s where we were talking about memoirs sometimes getting tricky. When we talked about it in class I kind of thought to myself that if it happened to me I would definitely remember, but clearly I was wrong. I kept thinking about the people that I included in my story. I was with two of my friends, one was actually holding onto me on the lift and I told her to let me go. I was thinking about them as I wrote, thinking about how much this accident effected them just as much as it affected me. I thought about sending my article to them, but I was nervous. Did they remember it exactly how I did? Did I get the descriptions right? Did I get the quotes right? It is more intimidating than I would have anticipated to write a memoir. I haven’t decided yet if I want to send them my memoir or not. I think it is something that they would enjoy, but I think it would have to be sent at a time that they’d enjoy and appreciate it. I put a lot into my memoir, just like all of my writing, and it would disappoint me for it to be just sitting in someone’s email inbox.