Superpowers and Place
Holly Spencer
This is what I love about all braided things: bread, hair, essays, rivers, our own circulatory systems pumping blood to our brains and our hearts. I love the fact of their separate parts intersecting, creating the illusion of wholeness, but with the oh-so-pleasurable texture of separation.
–Brenda Miller, author of Tell it Slant
Think food. Think bland food. Long brown rice. Green lentils. Quinoa. By themselves, they don’t make the mouth water. Now, sauté some garlic cloves and diced red onion in the olive oil in your skillet. After they reach a texture and sizzle you can live with, add some celery and carrots to the mixture and bring these ingredients to a boil in vegetable broth along with those otherwise bland grains.
Bay leaves. Dried herbs. Salt and pepper.
Boom. Bland meets flavor.
Like food, some stories taste flat when told alone. Details, nuances, conflicts, place and space, context, and emotion may read as bland if not seasoned with adventurous structures.
Braided narratives weave separate and complete story lines, stand-alone strands, to tell a fuller, more distinct story by finding the reflective surfaces within each strand that allows the reader to see something that might not be visible without the juxtaposition. In this way, the use of the braided form unclusters the chunks of separate, but interlocking, threads that might get missed for their importance and connection if told in a merely linear or lyric way.
Superpowers and Place introduces students to the form of the braided essay, which will encourage students to combine their personal life experience with greater cultural research. In weaving together these separate strands of interest, the students will gain a deeper understanding of self while finding more connections to the world around them, connections that circle back around and inspire critical thinking, mirror multiple concepts, convey emotion, and reveal hidden truths that become evident in the reflective moments.
This assignment consists of braiding together three separate strands of writing to make a more nuanced personal narrative within a deeper worldly context. Sarah Minor suggests that creative writers are too comforted by the straight line of progression and theorizes that by “forcing our stories into a linear, sequential form, we risk oversimplifying the richness of human experience.” By breaking up a narrative in sections, and by breaking the sections themselves into strands that culminate in a larger plait of insight, the writer and the reader become invested in a more nuanced story, a more gradated narrative.
This exercise simultaneously solves conflicting challenges students face when writing memoir and personal essay; namely, the twin risks of navel-gazing and its opposite problem, remaining only superficially vulnerable on the page. Students are required to expose significant personal information (regret) while also reaching outside themselves via historical research an