“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”

 -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Here it goes, my first blog post! I find this experience incredibly daunting yet exciting. As I mentioned in my About Me blurb over to the right, I started this blog as a way to document my journey discovering who I am and how I have been shaped by my family. It is a creative means of approaching my senior capstone requirement for my interdisciplinary major, Narrative Studies. The overall project is best explained in the description I wrote for the Independent Study Contract, which you will find below:

We, as thinking beings, are often confronted by age old questions like “who am I?”, “where do I come from?” and “how have my life experiences shaped who I have become?” As a young woman in my 20s, I have felt an increased pressure to answer these questions as I navigate undergraduate education, career paths, and professional and social relationships. I journal, but that reflects on my own personal thoughts and choices. People are an amazingly complex combination of their original experiences and the influences of their environments and genes. We are products of all of these things and more. If I want to answer these nagging questions on a deeper level and tell a good story, I need to look not just to my feelings and personal experiences, but to my history and the literature of creative nonfiction.  

For my creative project, I propose the use of memoir and personal essay in a blog format to document and examine this journey. While these writing styles will serve on an intrapersonal level, they are also a means by which to contextualize my experience and to create and understand a larger narrative. My goal is to accomplish the transformation from oral storytelling to a written account. In a way, personal essay and memoir can both create and preserve a familial oral tradition. These styles also allow for a closer study and shaping of story arcs that occur in real, everyday life.

I chose the blog format because it is an interesting and proven means of sharing life stories. It will be the physical adaptation and manifestation of the modern storytelling and sharing tradition. But on a more personally significant level, other members of my family will be able to access what I’ve shared on the blog.

This project was inspired by several sources. First and foremost, I have to credit my roommate, Selby, for changing my original project idea to something along the lines of family history and memory. I had no idea I so often went into anecdotes about visiting family in Minnesota and included such sensory details about the feeling of being out on the lake or flying over a snowing Minneapolis.

Several years ago, my Dad's sister, Gloria, put together several genealogical scrapbooks about my father's side of the family. She had extensively researched up to our German immigrant ancestors. But the books are beautiful. Not only had she included and scrapbooked her research, Aunt Gloria had collected photos and handwritten memories from all of us to also paste in the books. They are a great resource and memory bank that I always gravitate towards when I visit my Grandma Doris. I frequently wished I could pause school just so I could further my aunt's research or do the same kind of in-depth and personal project for my mom's side of the family. 

Ever since my freshman year of college when I sat in the back of my Russian Music & Literature class, waiting for the day to begin and googled my own name, I have been following a distant relative's blog. She is a writer, photographer and poet still living in Minnesota near the very small farm town where my dad's side, the Kletschers, have lived for generations upon generations. Her blog beautifully celebrates life on the prairie today, covering events, the determination of small towns, and the beauty the prairie supplies even when in the middle of one of the coldest and snowiest winters like this one. Sometimes she covers her family (relations I've never met before) and weaves their stories into the larger thematic context of her Minnesota Prairie Roots. Her intimate writing and storytelling as well as connection between present and past are things I would like to aim towards with this blog project.

Lastly, I have been inspired by the TLC show "Who Do You Think You Are?", which is based on the eponymous long-running UK show. Each episode follows a celebrity as they research a thread in their ancestry, usually leading them across the U.S. to various historical societies and sites. While the search is based on an innocent question, it always leads to an extraordinary discovery in the celeb's ancestry. Zooey Deschanel wanted to look into the strong women who came before her and found her family was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Jim Parsons was interested in artists in the family which led him all the way to France where he discovered one of the premier architects and revolutionary intellectuals of the Royal Academy. I don't expect to find anything as "grand" as Deschanel or Parsons but I do love the idea of documenting the journey and discovering more about myself from the link between past and present.