Writing Project 1
- First Attempt due
Monday, June 26, 2017
- Length
2-3 pages
- Paragraph Spotlight
- Polished Draft due
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
This week, we’ve started reading Ghostbread, Sonja Livingston’s memoir. In the Preface to that book, Livingston describes her experience growing up as difficult, complicated, shameful, and isolating. Writing about her experiences, she said, helped:
And as I began to share my writing, I learned that I was not so alone. While the specifics of my circumstances were certainly unusual, a child living without basic resources in 1970s America was not as uncommon as I’d once believed.
Many of us in our class weren’t around for the 1970s, but the last six years have seen the worst economy in a very, very long time. As we begin to encounter Livingston’s experience in Ghostbread, I’d like us to prepare by thinking about our own experiences of poverty.
Your Task
For this Writing Project, I’d like you to write a 2-3 page essay in which you begin to answer the following question:
What does it mean to be poor?
Explain your reasoning, and support your answer with examples from your own experience.
Note: when I say “poor” in this case, I mean in the economic sense—not as in “poor in spirit” or “rich in friends.”
Things to Think About and Do
There are a lot of different ways to interpret this question, and that’s intentional. You might try to establish a definition for “poor,” and look at statistics and the cost of living. You might talk about your own experiences, or those of family members. You might explain what it feels like to be poor—how the experience changes the way you think.
Maybe you don’t think of yourself as poor, and maybe you don’t think that you’ve ever experienced poverty. That’s okay. You definitely have experiences with poverty, and experiences that shape the way you think about poverty. Those experiences will help you answer this question, too.