What Is Our Story?
During the third week of the writing marathon intended to inspire both with my first year writing students and the Just Write virtual writing group, we focused on our stories of America. Just as we did in our first two sessions, see Writing Our Way Into The Journey and Exploring Our Humanity, we opened with a grounding prompt: I am a writer from…
American Creed
Our first round of writing was inspired by the American Creed documentary trailer and the five invitations for writing and/or conversations offered by the National Writing Project’s Writing Our Future project:
- What is the American Dream?
- What does America promise?
- What does American stand for?
- Who is America?
- What is a country?
- What defines us as Americans?
- How do you love a country that doesn’t love you?
- What purpose do you propose for our country?
What Is A Country?
We then spent some time thinking and writing about the dictionary definitions of country and national paired with two quotes exploring those same ideas:
Asgard isn’t a place, it’s a people.
Odin, Thor: Ragnarok
How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
We concluded our writing session by drawing inspiration from excerpts of President Biden’s inaugural address and these poems written by Inaugural Poets Richard Blanco and Amanda Gorman:
I know my own writing was particularly inspired by these ideas:
- What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans?
- it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country
- We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
I continue to hope, after years of teaching American Creed and reading student responses to the documentary that more Americans will take the time to compare their stories with that of other Americans.
Educators: See Crafting Our American Creeds and 3 Reasons To Teach With American Creed.
