Corrected for spelling, punctuation, and grammar by the instructor.
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The 22nd Street Stories Project
As part of the creative writing class in the Spring of 2010, the students got a sense of the neighborhood near 22nd and Hampshire Streets in San Francisco's Mission District. Using internet resources, they took a virtual tour of the area using Google Street View, walkscore.com, and a highly detailed Craigslist posting for an apartment in the area. They also saw photographs taken by the instructor, and took a field trip to the area. Then, by focusing on descriptions of place and sensation, they generated ideas for characters, setting, and plot.
The students in the Leap Creative Writing class created this content with the assistance of instructor Claire Bain, who edits and manages this blog. Sponsored by Leap...Imagination in Learning leap4kids.org
If it hasn't already happened, it will, and many times: you will encounter talk of Proust's Madeleines. No, they are not some women or girls named Madeleine. They are small cookies "which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell." In Swann's Way* [In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1] by Marcel Proust, the narrator tells about drinking a sip of tea with a bit of madeleine in it, and the taste transporting him to childhood memories. This famous sequence is often referred to, whether someone is writing or speaking about literature, food, or life. The basic idea is that taste triggers our memory (as does smell, sound, sight, and other physical sensations). The main reason this particular writing is mentioned again and again (I just saw it in a food article in the New Yorker magazine) is because of the intensity with which it is written. Proust does not simply write, "I tasted the bit of cookie in the spoonful of tea and remembered how my aunt used to give me that same tea and cookie." He goes on for a whole page, describing in detail the way the taste awakened childhood memories. He compares the memories opening up to a type of Japanese folded papers that, when placed in water, open up into shapes of animals. He explains how the image of the buildings on his childhood street spring up in his mind's eye. Then he describes how he tries to recapture that intense sensation of a buried memory coming to life by taking more tastes of the tea-soaked crumbs, but each time the feeling is weaker. So he decides to rest for a minute and stop trying to recapture that feeling, allowing his mind to wander a bit. It works, and he remembers the sensation of that memory arising in his mind. At that point he is writing about the act of remembering, and not the memory itself.
Just this morning I read a short story about remembering a memory. Like a fractal...
*Marcel Proust finished a first draft of the seminal 3-volume materpiece, In Search of Lost Time, in the 1890's but it was published posthumously in 1952. This blog post quotes the edition of Volume 1 that was translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin: revised by D.J. Enright; New York; Modern Library 1992.
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