From the Syllabus

Part 1:  Personal Connection.  After identifying a historical crisis to develop into a graphic narrative, you will write a personal essay in which you narrate your connection to the topic, explain its interest to you, and address what you hope to gain by writing about it.  (3 pages)

More Details

Now that we’ve started experiencing the content of the course, it’s time to turn our attention to making some decisions about the course-long writing project that you’ll be undertaking.  Your first step is to select a historical moment of conflict or crisis that you want to explore more deeply—and eventually use as the backdrop of your own graphic narrative. 

Each of the writers we will encounter this semester had a personal connection to the events he or she wrote about.  In Persepolis and American Widow, the authors experienced the events firsthand.  In the case of Maus, the author had a family member who was involved.  Safe Area Gorazde, as a work of comics’ journalism, required the author to travel to the affected area and conduct interviews with people who were involved.  The connection in Capote in Kansas is looser, but still significant:  the author, being from Kansas, is geographically connected to the events described. 

As you consider which historical crisis to write about, think broadly and deeply. 

• What have you lived through?  (Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Occupy Wall Street movement, school shootings)
• What have family members or close friends experienced?  (Civil Rights movement, assassination of Kennedy, Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster)
• Who do you know that you could interview?  (A Vietnam War vet, a refugee who fled a difficult situation in another country, someone who lived through a major natural disaster)
• What has happened in Kansas or anywhere else that you have lived?  (Potawatomi Trail of Death in 1838, Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, Quantrill’s Raid)

As you can see, your topic can be from a long time ago or from rather recently.  Also, you can be very intimately connected with your topic, or you may be connected to it only loosely.  Please, please, please choose something you’re interested in, as you will be spending all semester immersed in it.  

In addition to writing about a historical event to which you’re connected, your topic must be something that has enough of a public record that you will be able to conduct meaningful library research about it. 

Once you have selected your topic, you will write approximately three pages in which you explain the topic, your connection to it, and what you hope to gain from writing about it.  This paper does not require any outside research (that will come later), so it will be primarily narrative in style and reflective in tone.  However, please still structure it like an academic essay, with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Joanne Janssen, Baker University