Writing Your Life

I taught Writing Your Life for six years, sometimes twice a year. In the course, students explored the people, experiences and choices of their lives through reading and writing narrative texts of many kinds. The objective was to tell interesting and meaningful stories about life experiences and share them with others. While that alone is interesting and worthwhile, it can also serve as a catalyst for another objective: clarifying one's life story and perspectives, biases, priorities, values and meaning. 

Life writing allows us to see patterns and understand how the way we think about our story is one of the most important parts of the story. In the course, students were encouraged to practice the skill of paying close attention to what happens day to day, the choices they make, and the reasons why. We aimed to become good authors of the incidents and accidents of our past as well as of the choices we make in the present, as we continue to write our life story every day till the day we die.