Mentor Text: Fall From Grace by Mitchell Toews
Techniques:
- Memoir
- Establishing Setting
Background –
I mentioned last time how a combination of some chaotic work days and my insomnia had me on a real reading tear. You had to know that the sharing I do here would be impacted by that.
I pulled Mitchell Toews’ Pinching Zwieback off the shelf at my local library. It’s a collection of connected stories set in a fictional southern Manitoba town. I loved the way that it captured the unique culture of those communities, how tradition and culture reign supreme in small towns.
And since I can’t seem to get through any text without finding some element of mentor text in it, let’s get into it.
How we might use this text:
Memoir – Although the stories in Pinching Zwieback are fictional, they read like memoir. As Toews takes us through the stories of the various characters, the stories are told in their voices, and feel like anecdotes. There’s a very strong sense of voice in these pieces, and there has to be, with a series of narrators throughout the text. I feel like our writers would benefit from this model of establishing that voice.
The other thing about this piece is that it is a reminiscence, an anecdote. When I think about storytelling in the sense of memoir, I like to think that each of us has at least one great story we can tell. This piece feels like that.
And finally, on the memoir side of things, there’s the sense that there is a moral to this story, that we see the narrator learn a lesson. We also see that this is a lesson those before him have learned, that that idea of one great story, and the universality of some stories that we tell.
Establishing Setting – Even if you only give your writers the first two paragraphs of this story, you’re giving them a great mentor text for establishing a setting. Those paragraphs do more than establish the sense of place, but they give a very visceral sense of what it means for the narrator to be in that place. Using the imagery of the first paragraph, and the rules and conditions of the second, we are placed in the youth of the narrator. Imagine the writing we could get using this mentor texts to have our writers explore their own story, and context for that story.
I find that my favourite things I teach really influence the things that I wind up saving for mentor text purposes. That means that anything that’s memoir adjacent gets attention. With that being said, I feel like that actually strengthens our memoir work, because I’m always looking for, and finding new mentor text voices for our work.
What memoir mentor texts do you have that aren’t really memoir pieces? What are some strong voices that you put in front of your writers to get them to write their own personal stories?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
moving writers 
1 Comment