Over the past few days, I’ve encountered several online discussions about confessional writing. I hoped to write a blog post today in which I put some of the key ideas from these discussions into conversation with each other. But now, with only a few minutes left before my daughter gets home from school, I must concede defeat. I’ve hardly begun the post.
I’m struggling to put into words why discussions about confessional writing matter to me. I know it has something to do with all of my pre-dissertation research and writing on the importance of personal experience within feminist theory. Conversations abut confessional writing and the benefits and drawbacks of using personal experience are so central to my introduction to feminism in college that I don’t know where to begin writing about them here.
So, I’ll stop trying. Instead I will just archive the essays here in the hopes that I can return to them tomorrow…maybe after a good head-clearing walk?
- Leslie Jamison: Confessional Writing is not Self-Indulgent
- The First Person Industrial Complex
- How to Write a Personal Essay
- The first-person essay boom
- No Man’s Land
In addition to reading these carefully, I want to put them into conversation with this blog post: On Empathy.