CAPSTONE FINISHED

Truth Be Told
A Young Writer’s Guide
to Creative Nonfiction

MEREDITH E. FOX

Copyright © 2017 Meredith E. Fox
All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1542747147
ISBN-13: 978-1542747141

DEDICATION

To my mentor and my friend, Ms. Free—
Thank you for introducing me to the world of
creative nonfiction, for inspiring me to write this

book, and for believing I could do it.



CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Pg 3
Pg 8
Preface
Introduction

PART ONE Pg 13

1 What is the Reflective Pg 17
Narrative? Pg 32
Pg 47
2 Zoomed-In
3 Zoomed-Out Pg 75
4 On the Matter of Telling Pg 109

the Truth Pg 131
5 Character Building Pg 134
6 About the Place
Pg 154
PART TWO Pg 181

7 Immersion Writing
8 Voice, Authenticity, and

Self
9 Stakes
10 Finding a New Truth



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Zoe Lis, Eun Yung Park, Olivia
Sherman, Monica Smolinski, Katrina Carolyn
Soyangco, Jessica Todsen, Lauren Weiss, and

Nicholas Yoo for allowing me to use their
exceptional writing in this book.

Writing is a gift— this book will be sold at
production cost.

WRITING MANTRAS OF MY PAST
TEACHERS

“Writing like art. Start with a passionate topic
or a life lesson, and then use your writing tools
to mold and shape the piece until the message

is ready to serve its purpose.”
-Mrs. Cesar (Eighth Grade Language Arts,

Kinawa Middle School)

“Writing narratives allows us to make sense of
our experiences. It is this understanding of self
that allows us to grow as human beings. When
we understand ourselves, we can then make a

positive impact on others.”
–Ms. Freeman-Baldwin (The Impact of

Nonfiction, Okemos High School)

“writing is a process. writing is a practice. write
to discover. writers write.”

-T Hetzel (Minor in Writing Gateway, University
of Michigan)

“You will only get to the base of the mountain
by following someone else's writing

expectations. Creating your own expectations
and holding yourself accountable to those
standards is what gets you to the top.”
-Julie Babcock (Minor in Writing Capstone,
University of Michigan)

2

PREFACE

I never planned to like writing. My
parents liked to read and they encouraged
my brothers and me to like reading, too. The
living room was lined with glass cabinets full
of books, but it never occurred to me there
were people behind the lines of black and
white texts. Nearly all two-hundred or so of
the meticulously organized books were
nonfiction. My dad said we needed to read
them to educate ourselves, but he worried
that wasn’t enough motivation for his
children who preferred exploring the
neighborhood on bikes and fishing at the
neighborhood pond.

One summer, when I was around
eight years old, he offered us five dollars per
nonfiction book we picked off the shelf, read,
and summarized for him. I made a lot of
money that summer. I buzzed through the
books, remembering the minimal amount of
detail necessary to produce a convincing
summary and collect my cash prize.

3

I learned a wide variety of
questionably useful information. I learned
about Bob Dylan’s journey from being born
Jewish to becoming a born-again Christian. I
learned of my dad’s role in the first televised
gubernatorial debate for the state of
Michigan in 2006. I learned that George
Washington did not have a middle name. I
never paused and took a moment to think
about who was telling these stories. I
accepted them all as true—biographical or
autobiographical—because my dad said they
were nonfiction and I understood that to
mean the truth.
My dad always thought he would write a
book in his lifetime. I figured he meant a
nonfiction one, because that was all he read.
Since I read the stories of people like
Abraham Lincoln, Muhammed Ali, and Elie
Weisel, I didn’t know nonfiction could be
written by or about someone who wasn’t
famous.

I was ten years old the first time I ever
wrote a story about myself. I was two days
away from undergoing my first of many
surgeries on my legs and feet to correct
congenital deformities. My mom gave me a
notebook with a green cover—the kind that
reflected light and made it look like a three-
dimensional optical illusion. She insisted that
I write in it every day. She told me that,

4

someday, I would want to remember these
stories and be able to tell them. I didn’t write
in the journal every day, but over a period of
three years, I added many little stories to it.
If you were to read my journal, you would
probably laugh and then feel bad about
laughing at a kid in a wheelchair. The girl in
those stories that I barely remember to be me
grows more and more spiteful at each
comical frustration of getting stuck in a
bathroom or ejecting herself from her
wheelchair. She watches other kids play in
the snow and uses every bad word known to
a seventh grader to describe how she is
feeling. I don’t even remember writing those
words, nor do I remember many of the
detailed stories. I am sure that they actually
happened, because they just seem too
laughably tragic to be fabricated.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was,
in essence, writing creative nonfiction. It was
at a very surface level, but, nonetheless,
creative nonfiction. I was explaining things
that had happened to me and how I felt
about them.

During my senior year of high school,
I took an elective called “The Impact of
Nonfiction.” Sometime within the first few
weeks of class, my teacher, Ms. Freeman-
Baldwin, told us to get out a piece of paper
and make a list of ten moments that defined

5

our lives. I had only been alive seventeen
years and I felt like I didn’t have ten stories
worth writing.

I added the big things to my list first;
that was easy. The day my dad died and
spending my middle school years in a
wheelchair were surely life defining. To fill
the rest of the list, I had to think smaller. I
had to think about moments that wouldn’t
seem life changing at face, but that made me
realize something about myself and about
the world. I remember listing things like the
first time I went on a Ferris wheel,
volunteering as a mentor, and getting a
trampoline. They seem very ordinary, but
when I started writing, I realized a story can
be found in the most ordinary of things.

For example, the story about my first
time on a Ferris wheel seems simple at first; a
scared four-year-old overcomes her fear to
go on a Ferris wheel by herself. The story has
a deeper meaning about a learned sense of
independence, subtlety hinted at throughout
the story and tied together by the ending.
From a young age, I clung onto my older
brother and wanted to do everything he did.
When I decided to go on the Ferris wheel
that he refused to ride, I realized that I didn’t
have to miss out on the things my brother
didn’t want to do. A simple story about a
little girl riding a Ferris wheel turned out to

6

have both a surface truth and a deeper truth.
The deeper truth was discovered through the
process of writing the creative nonfiction
essay.

There is always a level of truth yet to be
discovered.

Creative nonfiction has offered me a
better way to understand my life and the
world around me. I want to share my
experience, my struggles, and my victories
with you, because this is a genre that is
worth your time. Creative nonfiction can
open a door into parts of your life you didn’t
even know existed. It can heighten your
curiosity about yourself and the world
around you and maybe even offer some
tentative answers to questions that you have.
It is my hope that creative nonfiction will
have the positive impact on you that it has
had on me.

7

INTRODUCTION

There are a lot of textbook definitions
of creative nonfiction, but, most of them, I
find to be more confusing than helpful. To
me, creative nonfiction is an exploration to
find the truth— the whole truth. The surface
truth is the story— the way you would tell it
sitting around a dinner table—but the whole
truth is the context, the meaning, and the
implications for your future. To write
creative nonfiction, all you have to start with
is something you are curious about. Whether
you want to better understand what the birth
of your younger brother meant for you or
whether you are curious what it would be
like to ditch your cell phone for a week,
writing creative nonfiction helps you
navigate these feelings and experiences. It
helps you find deeper levels of truth and
meaning.

This thing that you are curious about
is known as the driving question. Every good
piece of creative nonfiction is rooted in a
driving question, something you are looking

8

to answer. The caveat, however, is that your
driving question can and should change
throughout the writing process. Maybe you
are writing about your first day of college
and it was a rough first day. Initially, you
think that your driving question is how did
this disastrous first day of college shape your
college experience: As you begin writing,
maybe you find out your story isn’t actually
even about that first day. You realize your
writing is centering around the difficulty of
making friends in a freshman dorm and your
driving question changes to be about how
your introvertedness has affected you, your
college experience, and those around you.
Through writing, you were able to recognize
that the story wasn’t ever really about the
first day of college.

It is important to keep in mind that
the word “creative” is not a license to invent
or alter what you know to be the truth, but
rather a challenge to take what might
typically be reporting nonfiction style, and
pay careful attention to literary style and
specific craft elements. For example, if you’re
writing that essay about college and you
lived in a dorm, you can’t write that you
lived in a house. The “creative” in creative
nonfiction invites you to use your voice and
paint yourself and those around you as
characters in a story that is almost written

9

like fiction, even though t it is grounded in
real events that you witnessed or took part
in.

This book will not give you a template
or a set of rigid rules about writing creative
nonfiction. What it can offer you, though, is a
way to critically reconsider how to tell a
story. It will challenge you to look past
surface truths and to explore deeper
meanings. It will ask you to look for the truth
by examining past events, but it will also ask
you to get up, go out, and find the truth. The
way I see it, there are two ways to find a
deeper level of truth than what is on the
surface, which this book will highlight. There
is the truth that can be found in what has
already happened, and there is the truth that
can be found in what you have to go make
happen. The book is divided into sections
based on these two principles.

Part I is “Finding the Truth in What
Has Already Happened.” This is typically
the starting point for young writers and is
commonly known as the reflective narrative,
the personal narrative, or the memoir. Part II
is “Finding the Truth in What You Have to
Make Happen.” This is usually learned after
the reflective narrative. This involves going
out and doing something in order to find the
truth. Some common forms are the

10

investigation, the quest, the experiment, and
the reenactment.

Where this book continues to deviate
from the available literature on learning the
art of creative nonfiction, is that the example
essays in this book are not from renowned
authors. None of these essays have ever been
published before.

The book should be read in
chronological order, because it progresses in
stages from a beginner level to an advanced
level of writing.

My time as a student opened me up to
the exemplary work of my peers. I reached
out to my peers, mainly other University of
Michigan students, and asked if they had
any pieces of creative nonfiction that they
thought would help young writers learn the
art of creative nonfiction. In my experience,
reading examples from famous, established
writers as a way of learning is
overwhelming. Such a prestigious level of
writing seems out of reach to a beginner.
During my time in college, I found there are
worthy creative nonfiction essays that come
out of young, yet to be discovered writers.
When young writers read high quality work
from their peers, it is my hope that they will
feel that this quality of writing is something
they can accomplish for themselves.

11

PART ONE

FINDING THE TRUTH IN
WHAT HAS ALREADY
HAPPENED

12

Chapter 1: What is the
Reflective Narrative?

Finding the truth in what has already
happened is most commonly called the
reflective narrative. You start with an event
or series of related events that happened in
the past, and you write about them. Simple
enough. You are not merely reporting on the
event or events. That may be how you start
out the writing process, but the goal of this
type of writing is to put the past in
conversation with the present. This allows
you to unravel a deeper level of truth past
and find where the true center of the story
lies.

Readers might not be so interested in
the time your family took a trip to Disney
World, but they might be more interested to
know that you were too young to realize at
the time that your parents fought the whole
time and it was the framework for their
subsequent. You use what you know now to

13

reflect on what happened then. When your
parents fought on that Disney trip you didn’t
know they would get divorced two months
later. Now, since you know that is what
happened, a reflective narrative allows you
to introduce a new perspective based on
what you know now. Now that you’re not
actually so focused on your day at Magic
Kingdom, you’re able to include subtle
undertones about your parents’ relationship
and interactions. Their snippy comments and
impatience with each other might have
seemed irrelevant as you boarded Space
Mountain for the fourth time in a row, but
knowing what you know now, those
moments meant everything.

Reflective narratives can span from
very narrow to very wide. Your story can
zoom in on one specific moment and focus
on everything that went on and the
implications of that moment based on the
knowledge you have now. On the other
hand, your story can be quite zoomed-out
and focus on related events that span over a
series of years, so long as all those events
happened prior to beginning of your writing
process. This is why I call it “Finding the
Truth in What Has Already Happened,”
because you are not purposely going out and
experiencing anything for the purpose of the
essay or exploring your curiosity. You are

14

reflecting on past experiences to see what
meaning you might have missed when those
events were taking place.

These types of essays are where you
should start your writing journey with
creative nonfiction. They are generally
simpler essays to write, because you are
taking something that already happened
instead of having to come up with something
to go out and do, like an experiment or
investigation, in order to explore the truth. I
recommend using the technique that my
twelfth-grade nonfiction teacher used; make
a list of ten important life events or defining
moments. Take your list and see if a driving
question jumps out of anything on your list.
Is there anything on there that you are still
curious about or want to understand better?
Once you find what sparks your curiosity,
start writing. Get the story out there and the
reflection will come naturally. There is this
tendency to know what the bigger picture is,
to know how the story should end before
you start writing, but don’t fall victim to that
trap. As you write, the truth will come out in
the details that you write, which may have
been forgotten until you began writing.

Don’t feel constrained by the notion
that the event you are writing about has to be
something huge. Sometimes the smallest
moments are what define our lives without

15

us even realizing it. All of your experiences
have the potential to turn into a creative
nonfiction story, because they all contain a
surface truth and a deeper level of truth that
you can only find through writing.

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Chapter 2: Zoomed-In

The zoomed-in reflective narrative
typically focuses on one event or a small
window of time, and goes in chronological
order. This is a great starting point for those
who are beginners when it comes to creative
nonfiction. The structure is simple, but there
is still room for digging into deeper levels of
truth.

Below is an example of an essay that
came out of a twelfth-grade student’s ten
defining moments list. In her essay, “Not So
Special Friendship,” Olivia Sherman used
her defining moment as a volunteer on a
special education field trip. When you read
Sherman’s essay, go beyond thinking about
the sequence of events, and ask yourself,
what is the real story here? How is Sherman
changing the way we see a simple moment?

Not So Special Friendship
Olivia Sherman

I bit down on a honey crisp apple as I
sat at the round table in the Okemos High

17

School cafeteria, same as every Monday
afternoon. My friend Hannah sat across from
me and, in between bites of her chocolate chip
bagel, she asked if I wanted to come along
with her to go on a fieldtrip to the movies with
the special education class at my school. My
teeth crunched down once more on my juicy,
red apple as a wave of apprehension almost
caused me to choke. Hannah was in charge of
organizing volunteers for the special
education class, and I secretly wished my
nervousness hadn’t gotten in the way of me
holding that position. I wanted to jump out
the uncomfortable plastic cafeteria chair and
tell her I’d love to go on the fieldtrip, but my
butt seemed glued to the chair and my lips
sewn shut. What if I say the wrong thing? What
if I upset one of the kids? I couldn’t bear the
thought of messing up. Come on Olivia, I said
to myself. Quit being so afraid to make a mistake,
it will be fine. I heard Hannah’s voice repeat
the question, as she stared at me blankly
wondering how it was possible I didn’t hear
her the first time since she was sitting only
inches away from me. I opened my mouth to
say yes, but no sound came out. I nodded my
head slowly and, with that, Hannah reached
across the table and handed me a permission
slip.

When we got on the bus to the movie
theater I sat in the last seat, avoiding eye

18

contact at all costs. I was embarrassed that I
felt uncomfortable and was trying to hide my
uneasiness. Right as the bus was about to
depart, my eyes met a tall, stocky boy with
glasses. He smiled at me with his big, white,
slightly crooked teeth. I looked up at him
making his way toward me, took a deep
breath, and gave myself a pep talk. He
stopped cold in front of my seat, and I
scooched across the torn leather bench to
make room for him.

He sat down next to me and
introduced himself as Michael. I struggled to
initiate a conversation, so he took the reins
and told me all about himself and asked me
questions about what I liked. He told me he
loved sports, so we talked about the Michigan
State football game from the past Saturday.
Then we talked about the Detroit Tigers and I
laughed because that was my favorite
baseball team too. We wondered if they’d
ever win the World Series again. This boy
who I had been so afraid to talk to, turned out
to be just like me.

We missed half the movie as we sat in
the back talking the whole time. Nobody
seemed to mind, because we had the theater
to ourselves and everyone around me
periodically erupted into conversation with
their new friends. We talked about everything
from our favorite celebrities, to how our

19

moms always nagged us to clean our rooms.
This was the most fun I had ever had at a
movie.

The following Monday afternoon, I
found myself back in the Okemos High
School cafeteria, only this time I wasn’t
focused on my honey crisp apple. I was
focused on Michael sitting alone across the
room. If Michael had been brave enough to
initiate a conversation with me, I knew I could
do the same with him. I marched over with
unfamiliar confidence, and I asked him to
come sit with me, and he hesitated before
picking up his plastic lunch tray and
following behind me. As he sat among my
friends, I sensed the same kind of
apprehension I had felt the week before when
I first met him.

“Did you see the State game
Saturday?” I asked.

His shoulders relaxed from the tense
position they had been resting in up by his
neck and he adjusted himself in his chair. He
smiled at me. “I thought they we’re going to
lose, but I am so glad they won. Oh, and I
ordered pizza. My brother watched too. Oh,
and my mom…” His voice drifted on and on,
as his face brightened with excitement at each
detail of his seemingly perfect Saturday
afternoon that he remembered.

20

On the surface, this essay is about the
writer realizing Michael isn’t so different
from her even though he is in the special
education classroom. In essence, making a
new friend is something small, maybe even
mundane, but this writer reflected on the
experience and found a deeper level of truth.
Many other themes also emerge on the
writer’s quest for deeper meaning. At first, it
seems the story is only about Sherman’s
apprehension to interact with someone
different than her, but, in the end, we see it is
really about the author and her new friend’s
mutual struggle to be confident in unfamiliar
environments. On the fieldtrip, she learns
that they have a lot in common in terms of
interest, but, as she reflects back and writes
this essay, she is also able to see their
commonalities span beyond liking the same
sports teams, in that they both share this
innate human characteristic of feeling uneasy
in unfamiliar environments.

This is the type of essay that you
should start out trying to write. It has a clear
beginning, middle, and end. There is a story,
but also some deeper emerging truths that
become evident. There are literary elements
like the writer’s use of description with lines
such as: “My teeth crunched down once
more on my juicy, red apple as a wave of
apprehension almost caused me to choke.”

21

She is not simply reporting on the events.
She is also stopping to reflect on how she felt
in those moments.

One of the biggest mistakes young
writers make is well avoided in this essay. It
is a natural tendency to wrap up an essay by
stating the character evolution. These wrap-
up lines often begin with things like “In the
end, I learned…” “From then on, I knew…”
or “Overall, I learned my lesson.” These
types of endings take away from your essay,
by summing up the whole story and making
the reader feel like there wasn’t a point in
reading it. Sherman could have ended her
essay, “Not So Special Friendship” with a
line like “In the end, I realized Michael and I
were not so different after all,” but this
would have really taken away from her
story. Instead, the readers begin to draw this
conclusion on their own, as they see that they
have similar hobbies, but also similar
apprehension in each other’s unfamiliar
environments. If you take a creative
nonfiction class, you’ll probably hear the
phrase “show not tell” over and over until
your ears bleed, and this is exactly what your
teacher means.

Moving on from the beginner level
reflective narrative based on a single event
with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and

22

emerging deeper truths, we come to an essay
like “Tongue Twisted at All Times” by
Katrina Carolyn Soyangco. In her essay,
Soyangco is exploring how language relates
to a feeling of belonging within a culture. She
chooses to structure her essay based on this
concept of language that she is exploring. As
you read Soyangco’s essay, pay careful
attention to the structure and how it serves
to move the essay along. Also, start looking
for what deeper level of truth she is trying to
reveal.

Tongue Twisted at All Times
By Katrina Carolyn Soyangco

We had to buy rain boots to get to the
house. My mother crossed the street, which
was already flooded, and bought pairs for
her and me. This was Navotas, a fishing city
in the Philippines, and we were on our way
to see my first cousins. Finally, we made it to
the house, kicked our boots off, and dried
off. It had been about five years since I have
seen my cousins, and even then, I was only
four years old. I could barely remember
them. Immediately, I sought them out and
found them in the upstairs hallway.

“Hello, it’s great to see you again!” I
chirped happily. But instead of greeting me,
the three of them backed away. The two

23

sisters hid behind the older brother. My
excitement deflated and I concluded that
they hated me. They spoke to each other in
rapid Tagalog, still eyeing me curiously.

“Oh, don’t worry,” my aunt told me,
approaching me from behind, “They’re just a
little shy. They can speak English, but they
aren’t comfortable doing so.”

It was times like these when I wished
my parents had taught my brother and me
Tagalog. We weren’t born in the Philippines
but the United States. My brother Dan has
autism, and while we were growing up, my
parents didn’t want to speak to us in both
English and Tagalog for fear of confusing
him. When I speak with other children of
immigrants, a lot of them say that they didn't
know certain things about their culture, like
the language, for the sake of assimilation. For
my brother and me, it didn't feel that way.
Being dropped into the Philippines feels
more like visiting a foreign land than
returning home. We have always felt
American.

Magandang umaga – Good morning

We stuffed our luggage into the back
of one of my grandma’s cars while my
brother, Dad, Mom, and I boarded into it. It
was the summer after my freshmen year of

24

college, and my family decided to visit
relatives in the Philippines once again. That
day, we were heading to the mountain city of
Baguio. One of my cousins, Carmello, and
his sleepy six-year-old daughter Martha
joined us in the car. The others followed in
another. For two hours, it remained dark,
and Martha stayed asleep. I held up a pillow
so that her head wouldn’t hit the window.
When the sun came out, Martha woke up,
energetic as ever. She and Dan counted the
carabao outside, and she taught me how to
play a dress-up game on her iPad for an
hour.

“KC, can you speak Tagalog?” she
asked, bouncing in her seat.

“Oh. Uh…no. I’m afraid I can’t,” I
admitted.

“Lesson time then!”
“Okay.”
“Okay, say ‘Magandang umaga’” And
so the lessons for my brother and me began.
We recited each phrase. After each time, she
and my parents would patronize us. Martha
even reached up and patted me on the head
a few times. I smiled and laughed nervously.

Pitong puting tupa – Seven white sheep
We were in a car again, this time

making our way through the traffic of
Manila at snail’s pace.

25

“Let’s do tongue twisters!” Martha
said, “Okay, say ‘Pitong puting tupa.’” I tried
and failed. Dan didn't even try. Martha let
him off easy.

“I’ll try,” my mom announced from
the front seat, “Pitong puting puta.” They all
laughed, and for once I understand enough
to laugh with them. My brother Dan
furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. Four
years of high school Spanish served me well.
For a brief moment, I got a small glimpse of
what it is like to be like them, to understand.
Finally, Martha collapsed and hugged the
headrest of the driver’s seat. The driver
didn’t seem to mind. She mumbled
something to my parents in Tagalog and
they laughed.

“She says she’s tired of speaking
English,” my mom automatically translated.

Tito/a – uncle/aunt (These terms apply to
blood relatives as well as close family
friends)

“You’re giving me a nosebleed,” my
tita waved her fan at me, “I’m speaking
English too much!”

My mother wrapped an arm around
me. “She’s only joking, KC.

“Yes, yes I know.”

26

At some point of every party and
gathering, a tita or tito would nudge me with
their elbow and say “Next time you come
back, you’ll be able to speak Tagalog with all
of us, right?”

“Haha, yes,” I’d hesitantly reply.
For the past two times I’ve gone to the
Philippines, I would arrive back home with a
newly found determination to learn the
language. I would ask my mom to teach me a
word a day and flip through the Tagalog-
English Dictionary. This last time, I even
downloaded some beginner’s level podcasts.
However, in a few short weeks, the
motivation would always die down. My
mother would forget to teach me a word a
day, the dictionary would wind up under a
stack of books, and the podcasts would just
be forgotten. Summer would come to an end,
and I would turn my attention on the
textbooks for school.

Pagkatapos - afterward

In a group chat back at college, my
friends in Filipino American Student
Association discussed meeting up for a
conference call.

“I can’t come. I have work.”
“I can join. What time?”
“Five o’clock.”

27

“I don’t get off work until six but can I
meet with you guys pagkatapos?”

Pagkatapos? What does that mean? I
thought as I pulled up a Tagalog dictionary
on my computer. Already people were
responding to the message. A lot of them
already knew what this meant. Some of
them were fortunate enough to have learned
the language at home. Others decided to
learn Tagalog through the Asian Language
department at our university. And still some,
like me, hadn’t bothered to do either.

Estados Unidos ng Amerika – The United
States of America

“Oh! By the way, Martha and her
family are moving to Skokie,” my mom
announced to me on the phone.

“What? Oh wow. I didn't think they
would be coming to the States, at least not
this soon...”

“Yes, pretty soon she’ll be at an
English-speaking school. Your cousin
Carmina is thinking about moving here too.

“Incredible, huh?”
“Sure is.”
After I had hung up the phone, I
thought about Martha for a bit. Is she going to
need help with some of her English? Maybe.
Maybe not. She’s still young so she could get

28

comfortable with English pretty easily. I thought
about how my parents would ask me to
proofread their letters. There would be
sentence fragments, some spelling errors,
inconsistent tense issues, more than I
thought I would find. I don't notice their
Filipino accents, albeit faint ones, unless my
mom tells me, “You sound like such an
American,” as she sometimes does to
complement me. I don't think she believes I
need to learn Tagalog.

Is this enough? I ask myself. Is it enough
just to learn about culture from books? Is it
enough to learn about my culture from talking to
my family? Is it enough to learn from the Filipino
organization here? I don't think need to learn
Tagalog. With more and more relatives
making their way to the States and me
having no plans to move to the Philippines,
there don't seem to be any times where I
would need to speak it. I think I am Filipino
and American. Maybe it is enough to consider
myself as both.

Butiki – Lizard

It was my mom’s and my last night in
the Philippines. I made a last walk around
the house, touching all of the picture frames
and my grandma’s trinkets in hopes of
remembering each one. A lizard jumped

29

from one of the shelves, something I’m quite
used to already.

“Butiki,” I mumbled to myself, noting
it as one of the words my mom taught me
after the trip to Baguio and wondering if I
would bother to remember it later on. When
I enter the kitchen, I see my cousin Jean
waiting for me. We chatted for two hours,
knowing that it would be at least a year
before I can return to the Philippines. Finally,
my mom poked her sleepy eyes out from out
bedroom door.

“Oy, we need to wake up in three
hours. Sleep now,” she said.

“Thanks, KC. It’s really nice to be able
to practice my English. I’m sorry it’s so bad,”
Jean apologized. He had said that many
times since I’ve been here.

“Your English is great. You don't have
to be sorry. Talking is the best way to learn
anyway,” I assured him.

We say our goodnights. Jean almost
went into his room before I called out, “Hey,
next I see you, let’s try to have a conversation
in Tagalog. Then I can be in your shoes.”

“That sounds good to me,” he said,
smiling.

I’ll be able to come back; I’m sure
about that. But even as I smile at him too, I
wasn't sure how well I could keep that
promise. The odds are that I won’t be ready

30

to speak with him the next time I get back,
and I don't know how I feel about that.

Notice how language remains the
common theme throughout Soyangco’s
essay, but recognize that this essay is not just
about trying to learn Tagalong. A deeper
truth is present here; Soyangco feels like she
doesn’t fit in within her family and her
culture, because of her inability to speak
their language.

On another level, Soyangco is
beginning to explore assimilation into
American culture and the value of other
languages. In her essay, she writes, “…my
mom tells me, ‘You sound like such an
American,’ as she sometimes does to
complement me. I don't think she believes I
need to learn Tagalog.” She includes this
subtle line and other interactions with her
parents to show (not tell!) the juxtaposition
between her jealousy that her parents speak
Tagalong and her parents’ envy that she is a
native English speaker. Soyangco’s essay
explores many issues related to language
and culture, which adds a lot of nuance to
her essay.

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Chapter 3: Zoomed-Out

The reflective narrative can also be
quite zoomed-out. Sometimes the driving
question isn’t a curiosity about a single
event. It can be about a place or a person and
your repeated past interactions with that
place or person. This type of wide-lens essay
is a little more nuanced than the zoomed-in
reflective narrative, and is nice to try out
after you have practiced writing about a
single event. This type of essay has a lot of
the same craft elements as the zoomed-in
essay; a voice, a first person presence, and
reflection are all still important, but the
structure can be different. It doesn’t always
have to follow the rigid beginning/
middle/end structure of the single event
narrative, because there are logical ways to
flip through time by connecting each
vignette to the person, place, or thing that
you’re curious about. This makes the
zoomed-out reflective narrative a more

32

sophisticated essay for a writer ready to take
it to the next level.

Below is an example, “Life After
Skegemog,” written by a University of
Michigan Student, Nicholas Yoo. This story
spans over many years, detailing the
author’s experiences of spending every
summer at Lake Skegemog with his cousins.
Pay particular attention to how Yoo deals
with structuring an essay over such a large
time period. Some essays have more than a
couple of subtle connecting themes, but
Yoo’s essay is really centered around one
single theme; something about himself he is
most interested in. As you read, ask yourself,
what is the theme of Yoo’s essay and how
does he carry the theme throughout the
essay?

Life After Lake Skegemog
Nicholas Yoo

In July after my sophomore year of
college I sat on a boat in the middle of Lake
Skegemog and relaxed with two of my
cousins, Chris and Andrew. As usual, being
on and around Lake Skegemog brought out
my curiosity. Why is the lake bluer than it was
yesterday? I thought. Why does it seem to
change colors day to day? Why is this side of the
lake windier than that side? Chris started
talking about how he planned to make this

33

summer on the lake his best one yet since it
would probably be his last before getting a
job. This conversation brought up some other
curiosities that I had been ruminating on for
a few months. Am I doomed to hate my career?
Am I naïve for thinking that I could find an ideal
career? Am I wasting my time by going to
college?

Around 1940, my great-grandpa, Kerr
Volis, built a small fishing cabin on the west
side of Lake Skegemog, located just a few
miles inland from Lake Michigan and thirty
minutes north of Traverse City, Michigan.
Around 1960, his daughter and son-in-law,
my grandparents, expanded the fishing cabin
to a small cottage to fit their family of four
daughters. They expanded the cottage again
around 1990 so that their daughters, one of
them being my mother, could come visit
with all of their children. In other words,
three generations of Volis family
descendants spent every one of their
childhood summers on this lake.

The place means different things for
each of us. For most of the adults, it’s a place
to spend quality time with their families. For
my anxious cousin, Andrew, it’s a place of
serenity. For my restless cousin, Chris, it’s a
place of excitement. For me, it’s a place
where I can let my curiosity run free. There is
no shortage of mysteries to explore on Lake

34

Skegemog. About one hundred feet from the
shore of the cabin’s backyard is a dark spot
in the lake that my cousins and I called “the
black hole.” My great-grandpa had dug
some sand from here to make a beach for his
cabin. One summer day when we were
around eight, Chris, Andrew and I all
decided to swim out and explore the hole. I
had so many questions. What made it look so
dark? How deep was it? Are there any fish down
there? When we arrived, Chris decided to
raise the stakes.

“I dare you to touch the bottom,” he
said.

“Okay,” I said. Without hesitating, I
sank down with my eyes open. The stalks of
seaweed formed a miniature forest,
screening the sun the same way a canopy of
leaves does. This might be why the hole
appeared as dark as the middle of the lake, I
thought. As I continued to sink, I guessed
that the hole was about ten feet deep while
the sand around it was only about four feet
deep. I touched the bottom, and my foot
sank into a mush of mud instead of the usual
firm bed of sand. I wondered how far I could
make my foot would sink, but I decided not
to explore that curiosity.

I was always a curious child, but
many aspects about growing up in the
suburbs of Detroit suppressed that curiosity.

35

There were no mysterious parts of the city to
explore because the entire city was a grid of
similar-looking brick houses. There were no
surprises during the day because life was so
regimented, both during and after of school.
There were some interesting days in school,
such as a fiery science experiment or an
exciting story in history class. However, for
every one of those days it felt like there were
one hundred that were spent watching the
clock.

Predictably, growing up meant losing
some time up north. Swim team practice
started going later into the summer, and I
began to work as a lifeguard at home as well.
I was prepared to lose vacation time, but I
wasn’t prepared to lose the curiosity that
came with it, which I had been taking for
granted at this point.

During my junior year of high school
the time came to pick a career direction.
School-mandated career guidance services,
guidance counselors, and my mother were
all steering me toward engineering. I didn’t
know much about engineering, so, like any
other high-school student, I performed a
Google search. I came across a variety of
vague descriptions; most of them said some
variation of “Engineers use science and math
to solve problems.” I had good science and
math grades, and solving problems sounded

36

like something that could spark my curiosity.
Without much more thought than that, a
year and a half later I started school at the
University of Michigan’s college of
engineering.

The summer after my freshman year
of college I worked in a research lab at
Wayne State University’s medical school,
partially for the experience of working in a
lab and partially because it was the only
opportunity available that wasn’t
lifeguarding. At some point in most college
student’s career decisions, the idea of
graduate school usually comes up as a
possible career step. On paper, it seemed like
it could be a good fit for someone as curious
as I was. I enjoyed the job because I got to be
curious. Why does drug X cause these cancer
cells to die? Why doesn’t it kill these other cells?
How does that strange sounding machine work?

I also learned about how much
frustration goes into research. I learned that
the odds of finishing graduate school in a
predictable timeframe, if at all, are slim. I
observed how experiments could fail for
months at a time whether due to equipment
failure, small technique mistakes,
administrative hassles, or a lack of funds. I
also observed that my boss, the principal
investigator, spend most of his day writing
grants. I talked to one of my other

37

supervisors about this.
“How’s the grant coming?” I asked.
“It will finally be done next week. We

really need this one to get accepted,” she
said. “Science is not a great field to go into
right now.” I wasn’t sure if she was directing
that last sentence at herself or me. I came to
the conclusion that science would be a great
career for me in an ideal world, but I should
probably stick to my current engineering
path, still carrying my assumptions about
curiosity in engineering.

At the beginning of my sophomore
year it was time to look for summer
internships. This usually started with the
college of engineering’s career fair. This
meant standing in line for up to a half hour
at time in warm rooms while wearing a suit
for a chance to convince a recruiter that your
resume stands out from the rest of the
undergraduates around you. I don’t
remember the first company I talked to, but I
do remember that I waited in line for about
twenty minutes before talking to the
recruiter.

“Hi, I’m Nick,” I said.
“Hi Nick, I’m Jane. Tell me about
yourself,” she replied. I gave her what career
advisors call an elevator pitch: a thirty-
second overview of your career experiences
and goals. All I remember is that my

38

experiences were lifeguarding and
undergraduate research and my goals were
to be hired by anyone.

She scanned my resume as I talked.
“Do you have any experience with
automation?” she asked. She didn’t take her
eyes off of my resume as she talked. I didn’t
even know what automation meant.

“No, I don’t,” I replied.
“Alright, well, we’re actually looking
to hire juniors with automation experience
for most of our internship programs, but go
ahead and apply online and we’ll let you
know,” she said.
“Alright, thank you,” I said. I walked
away from that interaction feeling deflated. I
realized that I had no idea what a career in
engineering entailed, and that I had no
specific career goals. I weaved through the
crowd of people toward the exit, becoming
more frustrated with each change of
direction I had to make to avoid others. What
am I doing all of this for? I thought. What do
engineers even do?
After that experience, I listed to a few
talks from engineers who had a variety of
career paths and noticed two common
themes. One was that most engineering jobs
were a lot like other desk jobs but with more
math, mostly dominated by meetings,
workplace politics, and team-based projects.

39

The other was that almost no engineering
graduate worked as an engineer for more
than ten years because no one liked it very
much. Some of them went to graduate
school, but most went into management.
Graduate school still felt too uncertain, and
the descriptions of engineering and
management I heard didn’t sound like the
place to be curious. By the end of my
sophomore year of college, I still had no idea
what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t sure if I
would be able to find reliable career where I
could be curious like I was on Lake
Skegemog.

While at the lake house in July after
my sophomore year, I traveled on my own
on a kayak along the shoreline. It was the
ideal summer day: clear, deep, blue skies
accompanied a soft breeze that cooled me off
from the sun but didn’t make paddling too
difficult. I took in the scene in a more somber
way this time, now fearing that I would be
losing my sense of mystery from the lake
house for a long time. I wondered about the
future, which seemed discouraging at this
point. Should I let go of this curiosity? Is this
child-like curiosity just for children? Five
hundred yards later I passed the Leyhan’s
property, and I reminisced about one of the
most thrilling curiosities of my time here.

The Leyhan’s property used to have

40

an old, abandoned shack on it. When Chris,
Andrew, and I were kids, my dad used to
joke that the ghost of Old Man Leyhan
haunted the place. We didn’t believe in
ghosts, but there was something enticing
about that eerie, abandoned shack. For Chris,
it was an exciting new adventure. For me, it
was another place to explore. Andrew wasn’t
particularly fond of the idea.

One winter when we were all around
ten, Chris led the charge to the Leyhan’s
property. We walked across the ice and then
across the Leyhan’s lawn through a foot of
snow up to the shack, slowing down with
each step closer we took. Chris led the way
up to the window and Andrew and I
followed behind. What’s in there? I thought.
Plants? Animals? Old furniture? We
approached the window, sat down
underneath it, and mentally prepared
ourselves, half-expecting something to jump
at us. The three of us peered into the window
at the same time. The shack was empty. We
laughed, relaxed, and looked through the
windows for a few minutes and confirmed
there was nothing in there. As we walked
home I wondered about what used to be in
there, who the Leyhan’s were, why they
abandoned their shack, and if there was any
chance that ghosts really did exist.

That same summer I also went back to

41

my research job. At the same time, my dad, a
doctor, suggested that I look into medicine.
For reasons I’m not sure of, I had never
considered medicine, but I was so
directionless at this point that I was open to
anything. The lab was next door to a
hospital, and some doctors worked in the
lab, so it was a fairly convenient option to
explore.

After coming home from my trip to
the lake that July, I began talking to another
doctor, Dr. B, a physician-in-training who
spent some of his time in the research lab.
Sometimes we talked about how medical
school works, sometimes we talked about
what happens after medical school, and
sometimes we talked about recent
discoveries in medicine.

“There is a procedure called a stent
that all patients with a certain heart
condition used to get,” he said. “Later on
they did a clinical trial when they discovered
the stents probably aren’t helping everyone.
Now they only give stents to patients that are
showing symptoms.” It wasn’t a particularly
exciting discovery, but it did spark my
curiosity. Why did they decide to do that trial in
the first place? What is a stent procedure?

A few weeks later one of my dad’s
colleagues invited me to watch a surgery. He
told me that this one was going to be

42

particularly interesting; they would be
removing the patient’s skull to look at his
brain. A nurse ushered me into the operating
room and I slowed down with each step I
took inside, similar to the way I approached
the Leyhan’s shack. I definitely wasn’t
thinking about that shack at the time.

I was looking at the bare skull of a live
human being. I stood frozen in shock as the
surgeon drilled holes in the skull and
removed a piece to reveal a real live human
brain. Once the shock of what I had just seen
had worn off maybe five minutes later, I
began to wonder: how did he not hurt the brain
with that drill? What did they think was wrong
with the patient’s brain? Why are they attaching
wires to the brain? And what would happen to
this patient after the surgery?

I started to think that I may have
found a career path. Of course, there was an
important question left to answer: would I
want to make a career out of spending time
with patients? I was talking to Dr. B about
his daily work on one of his previous
assignments, when he worked with my dad.

“I really like the way your dad runs
clinic,” he said. “He gets through all of the
patients so fast, but he still manages to
introduce himself and learn about the
patient’s life. He believes, and there are
studies to back this up, that patients

43

who feel personally connected to their
doctors tend to have better outcomes.”

In my search for infinite curiosity
through technical careers, I had lost sight of
how people’s experiences were another
whole world of curiosities to explore. I
realized that medicine could offer both of
those worlds, so from there I was able to find
a direction to follow.

Being more cautious about making
career decisions now, I still worried that the
thrill and enjoyment of curiosity would wear
off after four years of medical school and
several years of training after that. I thought
back to my time at the lake house. I had been
going to Lake Skegemog every summer for
my entire life, and my curiosity never
seemed to leave then. On rare days, the air
would be completely still we would take a
kayak out to the middle of the lake just to
admire the sight and the tranquility of a lake
that looks like a mirror. These days are the
most pure form of nothing that I can
remember; one would think that there is
nothing to be curious about. Yet I still
wondered: would I be able to see the bottom out
in the middle of the lake? What’s down there?
What would the surface look like if I jumped in?
And why don’t we have more of these days?

I went back up to the lake house later
that summer just before my junior year

44