Reflection: Writing and Personal Essays

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In reading Alexie, Douglas and Tan, under “Personal Writing – Exploring Our Own Lives”

several same common themes have emerged, simply, the ‘human condition”. The self-doubt,

the challenge to learn, the commitment to succeed, as well as to share that with others, to lift

them out as well, through reading and writing. Under incredible circumstances, and against all

odds, from which one would not envision a successful writer, came three wonderful personal

short stories.

The writers were discouraged and deemed, by others – as “non-writers” and all the writers,

especially, Alexie and Douglas did not even know how to read, let alone write, in any language

and yet they taught themselves how to read through the most amazing and creative ways.

Alexie, by envisioning everything as a “paragraph”. Himself, his family, a comic strip

“Superman and me”. Moreover, incredibly Douglas, by identifying what a “letter” was and

“where” it belonged, and what it even meant, by use of ship building construction, under the

most oppressive of conditions.

All three writers struggled as well with ‘language” or ‘how’ to articulate information and

ideas into words, a barrier, or as Tan writes ”using all the English’s” with the most important

language, being the “language of intimacy”, in which all three writers were able to “connect”

with, in their own personal stories of experience, obstacles and triumph.

The personal essays were inspiring to ‘nontraditional’ writers such as myself, where

wisdom and experience are plenty, but the words and ‘framing’ of the ’content’ elude me. Thirty

years ago, the most I learned in school or

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