Here are some potential questions you could answer in a mid-term analyzing David Stuart MacLean's use of creative nonfiction techniques: - Analyze MacLean's use of scene and sensory details in his descriptions of the landscape and environment. Find specific examples. - Discuss how MacLean uses dialogue and interactions with other characters to reveal aspects of himself and advance the narrative. - Examine how MacLean employs narrative structure and shifts in chronology to explore the theme of memory and his relationship to place over time. - Consider how MacLean combines personal reflection and outsider research/reportage to enrich the reader's understanding of the history and culture of a location. - Assess how MacLean's use

1. Historical Selves, Larger World
 In Tell It Slant, the authors discuss “gathering the
threads of history” or using an historical frame for a
personal story
 In “Fourth State of Matter” Jo Ann Beard does just this.
 What events are happening in the essay?

2. Fourth State of Matter
 Dog is dying
 Husband is gone
 Squirrels have taken over a room in her house
 Narrator has a job editing a physics journal
 Coworkers are murdered in a killing spree
 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/us/gunman-in-
iowa-wrote-of-plans-in-five-letters.html

3. Elements of CNF
 • What structure does Beard use in this essay? Is there a “visual” shape
to it? Think about the Tim Bascom essay we read for class.
 • Identify the author’s use of the elements of Creative Nonfiction, and
bring examples of: scene, dialogue, description. How are these
elements used?
 • “Sourcing” is an important aspect of the reported essay. Sourcing just
means research: finding people and documents that help strengthen
the writer and readers’ understanding of the topic. Where do we see
reportage in this piece?
 • Point of view: What is the point of view and the tone of this piece?
What makes this a personal essay, not a memoir and not journalism?
 • Theme: What is the underlying message of these piece? What
unifying metaphor doe the author use to convey the theme? What does
it say beyond what it says?

4. Group Activity
 Group 1: Analyze the structure of this piece
 Group 2: Find examples of where the author uses
reportage and research to amplify the personal
narrative
 Group 3:Discuss the POV and voice in this piece. Does
POV shift in any spots? If so how and in what way does
it change the story?
 Group 4: Discuss metaphor and theme. Is there a
unifying metaphor? How would you describe the
theme—what is the message of this story?

5. Set-up
 The collie wakes me up about three
times a night, summoning me from a
great distance as I row my boat through a
dim, complicated dream. She’s on the
shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s
staring at me with her head slightly
tipped to the side, long nose, gazing
eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase
on the wood floor. We used to call her
the face of love.
 She totters on her broomstick legs into
the hallway and over the doorsill into the
kitchen, makes a sharp left at the
refrigerator—careful, almost went
down—then a straightaway to the door. I
sleep on my feet in the cold of the
doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift
her down the two steps. She pees and
then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing
out at the yard.
 In the porch light the trees shiver, the
squirrels turn over in their sleep. The
Milky Way is a long smear on the sky,
like something erased on a blackboard.
Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes
white, then red, then white again. Jupiter
is hidden among the anonymous blinks
and glitterings. It has a moon with
sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful
name: Io. I learned it at work, from the
group of men who surround me there.
Space physicists, guys who spend days on
end with their heads poked through the
fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds
of the universe. Guys whose own lives
are ticking like alarm clocks getting
ready to go off, although none of us are
aware of it yet.

6. Foreshadowing & POV
 It’s Gang Lu, the doctoral student. Everyone
lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking
to Chris, while Bob holds a match to his pipe
and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and
out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary
smile and he gives me one back.
Unimaginable, really, that less than two
months from now one of his colleagues from
abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike
features, will appear at the door to my office
and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When
she asks, I take her down the hall to the room
with the long table and then to his empty
office. I do this without saying anything,
because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it
all in with small, serious nods until the
moment she sees his blackboard covered with
scribbles and arrows and equations. At that
point her face loosens and she starts to cry in
long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and
the office is empty. When I erase the
blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her
hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly
and blurred.
 Gang Lu looks around the room with
expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and
sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall
glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to
do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if
he is a dog; the student Shan, whose ideas
about plasma physics are treated with
reverence and praised at every meeting. The
woman who puts her feet on the desk and
dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no
longer spends his evenings in the computer lab
down the hall, running simulations and
thinking about magnetic forces and invisible
particles; he now spends them at the firing
range, learning to hit a moving target with the
gun he purchased last spring. He pictures
himself holding the gun with both hands,
arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood,
only smarter.

7. Time slows down/ stories merge
 The collie fell down the basement stairs.
I don’t know if she was disoriented and
was looking for me, or what. But when I
was at work she used her long nose like a
lever and got the door open and tried to
go down there, except her legs wouldn’t
do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on
the concrete floor in an unnatural
position, one leg still awkwardly resting
on the last step. I repositioned the leg
and sat down and petted her. We used to
play a game called Maserati, where I’d
grab her long nose like a gearshift and
put her through all the gears—first
second third fourth—until we were
going a hundred miles an hour through
town. She thought it was funny.
 Before I leave the building I pass Gang
Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a
letter in his hand and he’s wearing his
coat. He doesn’t answer, and I don’t
expect him to. At the end of the hallway
are the double doors leading to the rest
of my life. I push them open and walk
through.

8. Reportage
 One room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister
in China. The study of physics is more and more disappointing,
he tells her. Modern physics is self-delusion, and All my life I
have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all
detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest
bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything.
Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and
gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill
himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I
have found a few traveling companions to accompany me to the
grave. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-calibre
handgun and a .22-calibre revolver. They’re heavier than they
look and weigh the pockets down. My beloved second elder
sister, I take my eternal leave of you.

9. Metaphor & Theme
 How are these threads connected? Fourth State of
Matter described in the piece?
“Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of
Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter.
You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then
your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere
and the plasmapause.”
What is the unifying theme in this piece?

10. One-on-One peer review
 Working in pairs, each of you read one
another’s pieces.
 Then use the critique sheets to provide each
other with feedback on your personal essay
drafts:
 Beginning: Does the beginning of this piece
draw in the reader? Does it fit with the piece
itself? Do you see any other place in the story
that could also be a beginning?
 Structure: What observations can you offer
about the structure of the essay? Is it
chronological? What shape does it take? Do
you observe other pathways the author might
take for constructing the piece?
 Metaphor: Remember the metaphors of
plasma in “Fourth State of Matter” and fibers
in “Devil's Bait.” Does the piece have any
imagery that can be tightened or heightened
to serve the writing metaphorically?
 Reportage: How is the information serving
the piece? Are there unanswered questions the
reader needs? Is the reporting
complete/satisfying for the reader?

11. Metaphor Exercise
 As discussed in Tell It Slant (p. 74), fact in personal essay
can serve multiple purposes. Factual information can
educate/ interest/ explore and contextualize.
 Fact can also function as metaphor, connecting to the less
tangible and thematic aspects of the piece.
 In Devil’s Bait, the essay is concerned with the actual fibers
at the root of Morgellon’s syndrome, but also as a metaphor
for the unknown and unknowable that lies underneath of
every human existence.
 In “Fourth State of Matter,” the scientists Beard works with
literally study the fourth state of matter—plasma, but
plasma also functions as a metaphor for the connectivity
and vastness of the universe.

12. Metaphor exercise
 Think of an object with significance to you—preferably one that
already appears in your piece or that could play a role in your
piece. Think: security blanket, talisman, treasured gift, hated
item. Something with value (good or bad) that is a concrete item.
 Describe the object with as much sensory detail as possible so
that anyone reading this would recognize the item.
 Write a scene (a short one) that shows the item’s importance.
Maybe it’s when you first got the item, maybe it’s when you first
realized how important it was.
 Write a short reflection on its value. Try to be subtle. Don’t say
“this item matters to me because...”
—adapted from
http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/handouts/six%20exercises.htm

13. Next steps for personal essay
 These will be due later in the semester
 In the meantime, you should work on the reporting aspect:
 Interview, document research, place research. In other
words, gather information
 In this assignment, pay close attention to working on the
structure; consider a non-chronological approach
 Also play close attention to metaphor and imagery; work to
make the story work beyond the confines of information.
 We will return to this assignment after our arts writing
segment, which will happen right after spring break.

14. The Answer to the Mid-term is...
 In your mid-term, you will be analyzing two examples of
David Stuart MacLean’s use of techniques of creative
nonfiction.
 What is an example of what this might entail?
 Overall, what would you say the theme of the book is?
 What is the effect of the short chapters in the beginning?
 How does MacLean use characterization in his memoir?
 How does MacLean use reportage in his memoir?
 Other observations?