First Year Courses & Programs

Basic Writing (ENGLWRIT 111)

Unit 1:
Composing a Story, Constructing a Self

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Unit 1, "Composing a Story, Constructing a Self," is, in a variety of ways, an introduction. The essay you will write for this unit will be an introduction of yourself to your fellow writers in the class. But before composing your introductory essay, you will be introduced to four other writers -- Astrea Young, John Edgar Wideman, Gianni Harris, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Bernard Cooper -- and you will have the opportunity to experience the ways in which these writers have chosen to introduce themselves. As you prepare to introduce yourself, psychologist Maureen O'Hara and writer Walter Truett Anderson will also introduce you to new, "postmodern" ways of writing and even thinking about the self and what we mean when we speak of our "selves," our "identities."

Maureen O'Hara and Walter Truett Anderson welcome us to "the Postmodern World," a world in which "people do not so much believe as have beliefs," in much the same way we have possessions--clothes, cars, books--that we use, store away, or discard at will. Ours they say is a world that has lost its faith in absolute truth and regards all beliefs -- religious, moral, political and even scientific -- as equally valid "social constructions of reality," that is, "stories constructed out of the human need . . . to provide order to what otherwise would be the chaos of our lives." This does not mean we can ever stop constructing such stories. For "the stories are all we have," O'Hara and Anderson tell us, and "in a sense, they are all we are."

Astrea Young , author of "Generations," is an alumna of the University of Massachusetts and a former member of our writing class. Her story--really two stories--is drawn from her childhood on Martha's Vineyard, a small island off the Massachusetts coast where her family, of old "Yankee stock," has lived for generations." As you read Young’s story, you might think about the ways in which this particular writer transforms everyday artifacts into symbols, and uses those symbols to give coherence to her narrative and a sense of continuity, even constancy, to her life.

John Edgar Wideman teaches fiction writing here at UMass. "Brother Tate," an excerpt from Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday, tells the story of a loving relationship made all the fuller by the loss it represents. Just that sort of paradox, in fact, stands at the heart of this tale. Brother Tate, the story's main character, is an albino black man: "But he wasn't white, not white like snow or paper, not even white like the people who called us black." Brother, the narrator tells us, had no color. He was the absence of color--by usual definition, the characteristic of black. And Brother, known in the neighborhood for his strange color and peculiar silence, had not spoken a word for nearly sixteen years, since the death of his young son. Yet as Brother's whiteness wasn't really white, his silence wasn't really silent: "Brother made noises all the time . . . . cracking his knuckles, patting his feet, boogeying so outrageously in the middle of the floor you'd hear the silent music making him wiggle his narrow hips and pop his fingers and wag his head like the sanctified sisters moaning their way to heaven." It is this paradoxical man to whom the narrator finds himself linked, "by stories, by his memories of a dead son, by my own memories of a silent, scat-singing albino man who was my uncle's best friend."

Gianni Harris provides the third work you will read. Like Young, Harris, too, was once a student in our course. His "Dragonflies" represents another story about stories: stories that link this young narrator to the people and countryside of New Orleans, where he was born, and memories that both bind him to and separate him from the self of his childhood. Also an artist, Harris paints for us two landscapes in words. One is from his boyhood recollections; the other is the same setting revisited by a nearly grown man. There's a change, no doubt, but whether the change is in the scene itself or in the writer's varying constructions of it we can't be sure. The surest evidence Harris can give is in the elusive dragonflies of his story's title.

Judith Ortiz Cofer, born in Puerto Rico, moved with her family to New Jersey in 1955 when she was "not quite three." Her "Silent Dancing" is in many ways a story of conflicts arising in a family as its members struggle to become--and not to become--assimilated into the new culture that surrounds them. It is also, however, about a writer’s struggle to fill the gaps of silence in her family narrative and, hence, in her own life. Therefore, as you’ll see, while all these writers are of different generations and cultures, Cofer has much in common with the others, perhaps most especially Astrea Young.

Bernard Cooper relates an experience that lasted barely a minute or two but the memory of which would last a lifetime. Sent by his father to purchase a newspaper, the eight year old boy encounters two high-fashion women, with Adam’s apples. Without the words to express it, he understands they are transvestites, "drag queens." He understands something else, too: "Everything I had taken for granted up to that moment -- the curve of the earth, the heat of the sun, the reliability of my own eyes -- had been squeezed out of me." He had visited the postmodern world, and his own universe would be changed forever.