A Bit of Anecdotal Evidence About One Cause of the Reading Crisis

you're either overscheduled by poverty or you're overscheduled by affluence

For several years now, I have had my students write informal reading-and-writing autobiographies in the first week of the semester. I first hit upon this assignment idea during the pandemic — it was a way for me to learn a bit about the students’ backgrounds and previous experiences in the absence of the classroom meetings, conferences, and other in-person conversation that would normally be taking place. (People don’t talk as much during a 75-minute Zoom, and I wasn’t doing those anyway, at least not with my first-years — I divided them into groups of three and met with each group for fifteen minutes every week.)

I also think I was partly influenced by an assignment that Carol Bly used to give her short-fiction students. (She talks about it in The Passionate, Accurate Story, a very helpful book.) After teaching for a while, Bly noticed that developing fiction writers would tend to write a lot of stories that were overdetermined by extraneous autobiographical material — the plots were contrived around the students’ need to use up a stock of existing anecdotes, to process traumatic events, to rewrite history so that the perfect comeback that occurred to them ten minutes after it would have been useful was delivered in time, etc. The characters couldn’t breathe; the story couldn’t develop a life of its own because the students kept turning it into memoir.