Mentor Text: Chasing Ricky Lake by Richard Wagamese
Techniques:
- Memoir – focusing on reflection and nostalgia
Background –
I’m a month into my 24th year of teaching full time.
I’m not sure why I feel I’m managing it the worst. It may be the demands of parenting, coupled with my goals and the needs of my students, but I feel like I’m leaning on the benefit of experience a lot a month in.
Which ties into my choice of mentor text this time around. I have a list in my phone, and one in my notebook of potential texts, but I didn’t have time for a fresh one. I’m going to the well here folks, pulling out a classroom tested one.
I’m also doing double duty, and prepping the next short memoir text we’ll be looking at in my Grade 12 class. (Triple duty if you consider that dropping in a Wagamese piece fulfills my personal mission to pepper in naturally as many pieces of Indigenous literature in every course as I can.)
The heart in Wagamese’s work, especially the essays culled from One Native Life, is something that we should expose students to.
How we might use this text:
Memoir – focusing on reflection and nostalgia– I really love pieces like this, that can achieve a couple of goals. In Grade 12, we discuss memoir, and do a fair bit of memoir writing. I love finding pieces, like this one, that connect to the conversations we wind up naturally having. As students move through their last year of school, there’s a lot of reminiscing about their past as students.
‘Chasing Ricky Lake’ is a prefect mentor text in this regard because that’s basically what Wagamese is doing. “…and for a time he was my best friend…” is likely a sentence all of our writers could write. And then, with further reflection and writing, turn into a solid memoir piece.
And Wagamese shows us a great structure for it. He writes about their friendship, and why it mattered to him then. He writes about why they drifted apart, and how that felt. He writes about seeing Ricky again, and how it was different. Finally, he closes with the lessons he now sees he can draw from that relationship. This structure allows us, as teachers, or our writers, a guide to crafting a memoir piece, focused on a single topic, but digging deeply into it at the same time.
Much as I said last time that there can be downsides to relying too heavily on past lessons and memoir texts, there are also reasons that they become the things we rely on. They’re strong, guiding not only our writers, but us as teachers as well. When it feels overwhelming, it’s comforting to have that reliable piece at your disposal.
What mentor texts do you fall back on when you’re tired? What texts do you have that help you meet not only the goals you have for writers, but help you include different voices and perspectives?
Leave a comment below or find me on X/Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
moving writers 