PG for Post-Grad. Obviously.
About a month ago, my mom told me that she wishes she wrote down her thoughts and feelings during her transition from college to the real world. A journal, or something, but she was not telling me that I had to do it....
One of the greatest realizations of post-graduation is that I can read. for fun. I immediately devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and needed more pages to turn. My bookshelf contains picture books, Harry Potter, Calvin and Hobbes, and a wrinkled torn copy of the anthology of 50 Essays we read selections from junior year in AP Comp. Reading these essays always felt like a chore, we never contextualized the authors (unless they were Martin Luther King Jr. or Thomas Jefferson). All I remember is that we read "A Modest Proposal" and discussed its irony every week. Or at least it felt like it. I resented this book, but I held unto it, thinking one day I would read "A Modest Proposal" again for laughs, or maybe when I was old enough to turn it into a drinking game...
This anthology caught my eye and I pulled it off my shelf I scanned the back only to find that it is contains essays of astounding relevance. I took a personal essay writing class last semester and now understand persona, self-deprecation as a means of gaining trust, and finding the objective correlative. I did not enjoy the essays as a 16-year-old but now have 6 more years of life experience to reflect on when reading about certain themes from specific authors. My 16-year-old annotations are pathetically entertaining "Ohhhh" and "YAY" and "good choice." I also identified every single simile. I circled unfamiliar words, but now reading over them again, I can check off the words that I now know the meaning of. abhor, dais, botulism, stupor.
Most of the essays I find most meaningful now are the ones we never touched in AP Comp. Not surprising that they are from minority voices. I am now trying to figure out how I would make these essays fit into the curriculum of a high school history class.
Maya Angelou "Graduation" -relevant considering the most recent event of my life, and also interesting to compare the commencement address Angelou heard to the one I heard.
Gloria Anzaldua "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" -I had gloria anzaldua in my hand at age 16. I don't know if I would have understood a queer chicana poet at that time. Fortunately, now I find her inspiring and even the cadence of her name invigorates me.
James Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son"-read it in class, got even more out of it a second time.
Linda Hogan "Dwellings" -Hogan wrote "The Woman Who Watches Over the World," my favorite book from Intro WGS about the history of suffering in her native Chickasaw tribe.
Those are my recommendations for now, but other authors included are many that I have read this past semester: Judith Ortiz Cofer, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, Scott Russel Sanders, David Sedaris, and Thoreau. Other authors that now resonate with me are N. Scott Momaday, whose autobiography I read sophomore year, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, Alice Walker and Leslie Marmon Silko, my mom's newest feminist find.
Now I know at least 28 of the 50 authors of which I probably only knew 8 when I was 16. College clearly taught me something.
About a month ago, my mom told me that she wishes she wrote down her thoughts and feelings during her transition from college to the real world. A journal, or something, but she was not telling me that I had to do it....
One of the greatest realizations of post-graduation is that I can read. for fun. I immediately devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and needed more pages to turn. My bookshelf contains picture books, Harry Potter, Calvin and Hobbes, and a wrinkled torn copy of the anthology of 50 Essays we read selections from junior year in AP Comp. Reading these essays always felt like a chore, we never contextualized the authors (unless they were Martin Luther King Jr. or Thomas Jefferson). All I remember is that we read "A Modest Proposal" and discussed its irony every week. Or at least it felt like it. I resented this book, but I held unto it, thinking one day I would read "A Modest Proposal" again for laughs, or maybe when I was old enough to turn it into a drinking game...
This anthology caught my eye and I pulled it off my shelf I scanned the back only to find that it is contains essays of astounding relevance. I took a personal essay writing class last semester and now understand persona, self-deprecation as a means of gaining trust, and finding the objective correlative. I did not enjoy the essays as a 16-year-old but now have 6 more years of life experience to reflect on when reading about certain themes from specific authors. My 16-year-old annotations are pathetically entertaining "Ohhhh" and "YAY" and "good choice." I also identified every single simile. I circled unfamiliar words, but now reading over them again, I can check off the words that I now know the meaning of. abhor, dais, botulism, stupor.
Most of the essays I find most meaningful now are the ones we never touched in AP Comp. Not surprising that they are from minority voices. I am now trying to figure out how I would make these essays fit into the curriculum of a high school history class.
Maya Angelou "Graduation" -relevant considering the most recent event of my life, and also interesting to compare the commencement address Angelou heard to the one I heard.
Gloria Anzaldua "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" -I had gloria anzaldua in my hand at age 16. I don't know if I would have understood a queer chicana poet at that time. Fortunately, now I find her inspiring and even the cadence of her name invigorates me.
James Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son"-read it in class, got even more out of it a second time.
Linda Hogan "Dwellings" -Hogan wrote "The Woman Who Watches Over the World," my favorite book from Intro WGS about the history of suffering in her native Chickasaw tribe.
Those are my recommendations for now, but other authors included are many that I have read this past semester: Judith Ortiz Cofer, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, Scott Russel Sanders, David Sedaris, and Thoreau. Other authors that now resonate with me are N. Scott Momaday, whose autobiography I read sophomore year, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, Alice Walker and Leslie Marmon Silko, my mom's newest feminist find.
Now I know at least 28 of the 50 authors of which I probably only knew 8 when I was 16. College clearly taught me something.
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