VOICES & VISIONS OF CHILDHOOD

Childhood, in some sense, is a universally shared area of expertise: everyone alive was once a kid. At the same time, childhood remains a profound mystery. There’s so much we don’t remember! And the experiences we do retain—did we really understand them, then or now? Even the most ordinary moments of early life can acquire extraordinary significance: they are the touchstones and talismans that we use to make sense of the world, and our place within it. But why? And how?

As we read and write about childhood in this class, we will be asking questions fundamental to the art of fiction: where does a story begin? How is a character formed? Youth, like literature, is filled with symbols. Kids, like writers, are imaginative, metaphorical thinkers, prone to both flights of fancy and glimpses of the truth. The stories of our youth often follow a predictable, prescribed narrative—we are, after all, rarely the authors of our own upbringing—and yet there are a few phases of life with as many plot twists, climactic and often traumatic events that shape who we are. In this way, our line of inquiry in this course will be at once literary and personal. We will be reading and writing about a subject that is nothing short of profound: the origins of life.