FONTENOT4 Name Nsmr Recap of Assigned Readings and Major Ideas Mary Blew's "Sow in the River" sand Patricia Hampl's "Memory and Imagination" explain how nonfiction is truthful despite the fallibility of memory. While Blew describes an instance in which the dream world flooded into the material world and created a false memory, Hample describes the power of desire to alter her memory, allowing her to describe what she wished was true and not actually what was true. While Blew focuses on the power of storytelling to connect the interior world (mind) with the exterior world (landscape), Hampl puts more emphasis on the internal world and the writer task to stalk "the congruence between stored image and hidden emotion." For both Blew and Hampl, making connections--between the interior and exterior or stored image and hidden emotion--is a necessity for us to make meaning of the world and our lives, but in doing so, the writer has the responsibility to question her authority. Thus, writers of creative nonfiction are curious observers who are not merely concerned with what they see but with how they see. The memoirist evaluates what she perceives while taking into account her perspective, something that forces her to recognize her biases, shortcomings, and contradictions. In more experimental styles, Jill Christman and Jo Ann Beard confront the uncertainty of memory. In "Three Takes on a Jump," Christman gives two accounts of the same story, leaving the reader with but one truth--that jumping from the roof into the sand hurts. In "Maybe it Happen," Beard leaves the reader in total uncertainty, as she writes from the third person and qualifies every detail with the phrase "perhaps it happen." What makes this genre complicated once more is the idea that it is not only the memory that changes but the truth that changes. Blew, Hampl, and Christman discuss the power of language to create reality, and, therefore, create the "truth." For Blew, the Judith River was never the same after Lewis and Clark named it. For Hampl, this is a scary political fact-- that whole histories can be rewritten to deny tragedies like Nazi death camps. For Christman, it is "Sharability," when the story is more about the telling and retelling than the memory itself. But this is why the personal narrative is so important--it has the power to overturn the (re)written history. At the end of the article, the author says that he loved everything about the military but now hates it. This statement shows that Sabrina puts his personality in the shoes of Rebecca and takes the objectiveness out of a journalistic process to reflect the military culture in real life. As well, Charlie impersonates himself to a voice that was present during the death of Aiyana. For instance, he reports that the seven-year-old girl was sleeping on her couch while her grandmother was watching the television when an officer shot her. The aspect of narrating a story from an impersonated voice stretches the.