CRW281Homepage

Write your heart out. Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

--Joyce Carol Oates

Welcome to Barbara Jordan's CRW 281 Topics in Writing: Non-Fiction (Memoir) Homepage.

These are not official pages or publications of Mesa Community College;

The college does not maintain the information contained on this site and is not responsible for its content; and

The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent official positions or policies of Mesa Community College.

This page includes a brief introduction to the course. Once enrolled, students will have access to the Web CT course materials.

Since the prerequisites to this course list CRW150 (Intro. to Creative Writing) or permission of instructor, you won't be able to enroll online without CRW150 or permission from me or the English department chair.

If you wish to enroll in this course, contact me via email at <bjordan@mesacc.edu>. I'll send you a "permission number" which you may use to enroll online.

The special non-fiction topic this semester is memoir; therefore, we will be reading and writing pieces based on personal experience. Submissions in the past have ranged from very intimate self-discovery stories to less personal topic-based narratives.

In order to pass the course, you must meet certain online attendance requirements as well as the minimum writing requirements in terms of length and quality.

Online attendance requires logging in to the Web CT class site (which will be available on the first day of class, August 24) and making some kind of contribution a minimum of three times a week (which could be submitting a draft, participating in a discussion topic, responding to a required reading, or commenting on another person's writing submission, and often a mixture of these activities).

My goal when teaching this course is to help you develop your individual voice by providing a structure (deadlines and suggestions) as well as a preliminary audience for the creation of one (20 - 30 page) polished piece of writing (or three shorter pieces that are related in some way). Although I am happy to provide grammar explanations and sentence level editing for individuals upon request, the purpose of this course is primarily to give you encouragement and professional feedback so that you will finish a memoir writing sample of which you are proud.

If you wish to purchase the text before it is available in the bookstore, here is the information you will need. You can purchase it at the campus bookstore for $16 new or $12 used.

By the way, memoir is a genre I love, read, and write, so I am looking forward greatly to teaching this course.

Everybody is original if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not the self he thinks he should be. --Brenda Ueland