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Writing Our Story
How Can I Tell You…
In a key moment of Stephen Chbosky’s 2012 film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (based on his novel), a girl named Sam gives a boy named Charlie a manual typewriter for his Christmas gift. Included is a typewritten note from Sam suggesting, pushing, imploring Charlie to
“write about us.”
Sam’s request is central to the plot in more ways than I can name here, because if you haven’t seen the film, I don’t want to spoil that party. Nevertheless, it’s a line I thought about again yesterday as I was conceiving the final cold prompt for my Creative Nonfiction class. Truthfully, I think about this line often, as I LOVE the film in ways beyond its moving soundtrack (including David Bowie’s mystery tunnel song, “Heroes”) and its understanding that in adolescence, living and dying and loving are often the same emotion, felt in the same instant.
So it’s no wonder it appears now as a prompt I’ll ask my ten students to consider this afternoon at 3:00. I wonder what they’ll do with it; I wonder who they’ll send it to, because along with the prompt, they have to choose one person in the class to share their story with. I also wonder what they’ll think of this — my attempt to respond to the prompt about them.
On Monday night, my class gave its formal campus reading. I’d say that sixty to…