Unit One: Changing Your Skin: A Narrative Essay

Changed Skin: The Kwakiutl, a native people on the Northwest coast of North America, hold a myth about a salmon who, tired of swimming, climbed onto the river bank and became a man. A flood came threatening the land, so he put his salmon skin back on and swam happily. Once the flood subsided, he took his salmon skin back off and built himself a house. However, after he set the corner posts, he discovered a problem; the roof beams were too large for him to put in place himself. At that moment, he heard thunder. Turning, he saw a gigantic bird standing on a rock. He said, “Thunderbird, it’s too bad you’re not a man, or you could help me.” The bird lifted its beak, and there was a human face underneath. He was a man and helped gladly.

Option One: Write a Narrative in which you discuss a time you had to change your skin, either willingly or through necessity. What event necessitated this change? What did you lack that necessitated this change? What did changing skins involve? Were others accepting of your changed skin? Did the new skin accomplish what you hoped it would? Did you revert back to your original skin or keep the new one? Is changing skins a shortcut or a natural part of life? You might compare the skins into which you've changed or even describe coming to college as a way to discover new skins. As you engage in the process of writing this project, the project will change and that's okay. You have to give yourself enough flexibility to allow your project to grow and change based on peer review responses, my comments and things you will learn as you reflect on the project.

Option Two: Write about tattoos and/or body modification. You can write about the history of tattoos or body modification. You could write about your personal history with tattoos or body modification. How and why you participate in the culture. Why you got the tattoos or piercing, how they've changed the way you see your body or how others see your body. This might be a way for you to argue against society's view of people with tattoos or body modification, listing misconceptions and refuting them. Or a way to discuss the history of body art, bringing in other cultures' views versus American views.

The narrative should be detailed and should be told in the form of a personal essay. As a form, the personal essay places the writer at center stage. This doesn't mean that once there the writer's resonsibility is pour out her secrets, share her pain or confess her sins. Some essays might have confessional qualities but most often they do not. Yet, a personal essay, is still exposed. There is no hiding behind the pronoun "one" as in "one might think" or "one often feels," no lurking in the shadows of the passive voice: "This paper will argue..." The personal essay is first person territory.

In this sense, the personal essay is much like a photographic self-portrait. Like a picture, a good personal essay tells the truth, or it tells a truth about the writer/subject, and it often captures the writer at a particular moment of time. Therefore, the experience of taking a self-portrait, or confronting an old picture of oneself taken by someone else, can create the feeling of exposure that writing a personal essay often does. it does more. When we gaze at ourselves in a photograph we often see it as yanked from a larger story about ourselves, stories that thread their way through our lives and give us ideas about who we were and who we are. This is what the personal essay demands of us: We must somehow present ourselves truthfully and measure our past against the present. In other words, when we hold a photograph of ourselves we know more than the person we see there knew, and as writers of the personal essay, we must share that knowledge and understanding with readers.