Invitations
What conversation do you need to have with your loved ones? You know the kind of awkward, important conversation that we tend to avoid to reduce conflict. How would you frame the invitation? What rules would you set down? What food could you serve to ease the conflict? What slant should your invitation take to better reach your intended audience?
For weeks my first year college writers and the members of the Just Write Virtual Writing Group have been writing about their American Creeds while focused on the question: How could America be a more perfect union if more Americans lived up to one specific personal value? This work has been part of a “What If” exploration of our personal values as part of the Morehead Writing Project‘s Building A More Perfect Union grant, Root Deep, Grow Tall.
This week our writing began with Chen Chen’s I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party (Thanks Kentucky Teacher of the Year Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. for the recommendation). We discussed the many levels of rhetorical situations at work in this poem as my students explored their specific audience and purpose. As part of our passion-based learning work, I suggested that audience be people who loved them and were loved by them.
While our goal for this unit is to write This I Believe essays, I am more interested in writers following the spirit of the This I Believe essay form rather than the letter and so we also discussed slanting our essay forms to include prose poems, ballads, monologues, letters, social media posts, and picture books. What slant should your invitation take to better reach your intended audience?
Our writing sessions wrapped up with a reflection about work throughout the American Creed This I Believe unit drawing inspiration from Something You Should Know by Clint Smith.
Both poems and an exploration of the concept of “slant” offer rich writing inspiration.
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
