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Creative Nonfiction: Memoirs and Dreams

(Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, De Chirico, 1914)

COLLECTED WORK
The following poetics statements and stories come from a writing workshop called Creative Nonfiction: Memoirs and Dreams. This collection represents the best work of American Studies MA students at the University of Bucharest where I had the opportunity and privilege to teach as a Fulbright Scholar 2012-2013. Gene Tanta, Editor.

July 03, 2013 Bucharest, Romania

Creative Nonfiction: Memoirs and Dreams


was a writing workshop organized around one question: how does remembering relate to imagining? Our course investigated the question of how recollection relates to daydreaming with the idea in mind that an echo is never a perfect reproduction of the original sound. Thus, mimesis does not mean copying naturemimesis means becoming nature by doing and redoing. Recognizing that one is, at least partly, the result of a series of choices is the vital first step to moving beyond the familiar comforts of remembering to the strange perils of imagining. While, indeed as we learned together, imagining has its potential dangerslike feeling judged, vulnerable, and unsure, it also has its potential pleasureslike feeling satisfaction, sharing visions, and moving readers. Memoir has a bit of a bad reputation as a self-indulgent and cloying sub-genre as Dorothy Parker points out by saying: "All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me." Friedrich Nietzsche offers a more earnest solution to wallowing in self-pity and over-familiar language: The man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life. Aleksandar Hemon offers another way to avoid the solipsism that is killing so much of contemporary confessional memoir: Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that's meaningful beyond yourself. And because it's transformed at some point, it stops being about you. Together, as I hope you will agree enthusiastically, these courageous and avidly curious students were able to transform parts of their lives into literaturewhether comic, scary, traumatic, embarrassing, lovingby paying careful attention to the language they choose to convey their memories and dreams. While primarily focused on writing and rewriting original texts based on memories and dreams, however we also read writers such as: John Ashbery, Toi Derricotte, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Michel de Montaigne, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf.

Writers:

Al-Ghawi Ranya Bunget Florina Madalina Catana Adela-Livia Contes Diana Alexandra Ene Cristina Ioana Geambasu Anca-Gabriela Mihai Alexandra-Ioana Mihailescu Cristina Alina Petrea Gregoria-Teodora Piciorus Laura-Georgiana Pirnoiu Anca Silvas Laura Maria Tatarus Ioana Andreea

Contes Diana Alexandra

Contes Diana Alexandra

Contes Diana Alexandra

Mihailescu Cristina Alina

Mihailescu Cristina Alina

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