My name is Oona Obaditch and for my senior project I will be reading memoirs and writing personal essays. One of my favorite classes that I’ve taken at LREI was Memoir taught by Ileana Jiménez. In this class I found my love for personal writing and have continued that passion ever since. I took up an interest in exploring how my mind worked and finding ways I could turn that into words structured in a beautiful and poetic way. I wouldn’t consider myself a closed off person at all, but it’s hard to express how your experiences have shaped you as a person, especially with things that scratch below the surface. With writing I’m able to do that in a thoughtful, artful, and intentional way. Writing has become therapeutic, but fun, rewarding, yet challenging. Evoking beauty in not-so-beautiful topics and relaying stories in a way that resonates with a reader no matter how personal and specific is what I think is so wonderful about great writing and is something I strive to accomplish. I believe there is so much valuable information to learn about the core of great writing, and I want to explore that in depth. I also want to build my writing skills so I can have a strong foundation to easily continue this passion in my future. 

For the first part of my senior project I am going to be reading various memoirs and personal essays to become familiar with different authors’ writing styles and the literary styles they use to tell their stories. This will serve as an academic tool to help me with my own writing and allow me to draw inspiration from different writers. I’m going to be reading three memoirs: Lit by Mary Karr, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and Hold Still by Sally Mann. Lit is about a woman’s journey through alcohol addiction, learning to let go of her family’s past and working to move into a future where she can create her own family. This memoir has been on the top ten memoirs list, and Mary Karr has been referred to as the master of memoir writing. This book has a lot of beautiful imagery and dense writing that will help push me to incorporate some of that in my own work. Wild is about a 26-year-old woman who hiked more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone. She talks about how the recent death of her mother and the failing of her marriage pushed her to take this adventure on. She takes us on this hike with her while reflecting about her life, the person she was, and the struggles she needs to overcome. I think this book will be useful because it is very self reflective but rooted in a story which will help me to write my own essays with themes of self reflection. Lastly, Hold Still is a memoir that is not only told through rich writing but photographs as well, both of which reflect some of the unique challenges the author faced while growing up. The series of essays I’ll be reading are by notable authors including George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and James Balwin. I choose to read their essays rather than books so that I would be sure to have time to read all of them.  These authors are some of the greats of their time, and I haven’t had much exposure to them in the past. 

For the second part of my senior project I’ll be writing my own collection of personal essays, drawing inspiration from the different texts I’ve read.  My goal is to write seven different essays ranging from five to fifteen pages long about the different areas of my life and how they’ve affected me as a person. The topics might include friends, family, camp, feminism, religion, and self exploration. I plan to bind all of my written essays into the form of a book with a designed cover as well. As my service component I’ll be volunteering at Our Lady of Sorrows Food Pantry. I’m super excited to undergo this project and work to explore my own writing!