When first reading A Love Letter to my Endocrinologist for Valentine’s Day by Ilene Raymond Rush, I knew immediately what I was going to do my open letter on. I saw the exigence and pathos of the letter and wanted to apply to my open letter to my therapist at the one year anniversary of our first meeting. Rush gets very personal and brutally honest about her type 2 diabetes, mentioning her gained weight and assortment of drugs taken. It’s that honesty that evokes a pathos in the reader, so we feel a sense of relief and joy when the right doctor came along. I saw that and knew it was time to open up about my mental health issues in order evoke that same pathos. I did not want to sugar coat anything the same way Rush did not with her diabetes. Showing all the warts and struggles would pull the reader in and make them crave some sort of resolution to these problems. Sharing those emotions like that was to hopefully make the reader feel something as well. Second, Rush wrote this on Valentine’s Day as her exigence. Her motivation to write this comes on a day of love, a day where we all reflect and ask ourselves “who do we love?”. Rush reflected with that question and found her exigence. You could feel the love and gratefulness because she wrote it on Valentine’s Day. It gave her more of a reason to express her love to Dr. X. For me, the exigence also came on a day of reflection: the one year anniversary of first meeting Dr. Fox. It gave me a true reason to reflect and motivation in order to show gratitude towards him. I found a special day in my life to find that motivation like Rush did on Valentine’s Day.

Malcom X’s Learning To Read has a firm grasp on how to turn a story of reading the dictionary into a universal story of freedom and the power of education. He uses vivid details, like striving to be like Bimbi or his process of improving his penmanship, to drive him the point that homemade education is a powerful tool and that knowledge gives a person boundless potential like nothing else. He also establishes the worldview that he is discovering words and knowledge that he didn’t even know existed until now. His worldview is like one of an eager young child ready to absorb any new information that comes his way. The way that Malcom was able to take his personal story and worldview and make it into a grand point is how I went about my personal essay of how the Richard Nixon musical changed my life. I wanted to establish my worldview as a depressed freshman who wasn’t ready to take on the world and take chance and how it changed into me becoming more a risk taker in life. I never knew the thrill of taking a risk would be like Malcom not even realizing how many words there are, but still excited to take on the challenge of learning them nonetheless. I turned my story into a universal message of how the risks we take guide us to places we never even imagined were possible. Malcom made the grand point of the power of knowledge through reading a dictionary in a Charlestown prison and it made me want to take my story of auditioning for a Richard Nixon musical and turning it into a message about going “all in” sometimes.

When I look at “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison, the main thing I took away when it came time to write my memoir was how to play with the “then and now”. His then was watching the death of his grandfather as he talks about his regrets of submitting to the whites and urged his family to one day rise up and ignore the status quo. The now is the narrator living a meek life and playing into his role as a black man underneath the totem pole with whites at the top. We see the progression because we get the full story of why the narrator is how he is. He moves around in time to show the progression and leans heavy on reflection in order to dissect how the then leads to the now. With my memoir, the then was the photo of me at the New York Film Festival and the stories told from that. It’s my framing device into the world of “then”, which took inspiration of the grandfather on his deathbed as the framing for the “then” in Battle Royal. I wanted to start bold to open up like Ellison did to make the “then” vivid. I then go into the now of living a healthy life in California and attending film festivals to feel a sense of being home. The section has an active voice much like Ellison when discussing in his speech about submitting to white men.

Lastly, Homophobia: An Autoethnographic Story by Shalma McLaurin dives deep into the world of homophobia while never losing of track of how he sees himself in the middle of all it. She is able to find his place in the universal idea of homophobia and grapples with all the questions that come with it in order to come to a conclusion about both himself and the universal theme at hand. She ends with his growth from his upbringing of homophobia and how we should all explore our biases. It wraps a neat bow on blending his personal experience to the universal themes he is also dealing with. For me, I wanted to blend the surfing culture of California and touching the power of liberation and what it means to truly feel at home. McLaurin leans heavy into her world view as a black female form the south and how she evolved to be more sensitive and learn exactly what she could take away from all of this. I wanted to go into my view as a east coaster in California trying to feel at home by learning the culture. I learned how surfing embodies so much of California and for me to truly grasp that made me feel more at home here. i saw the evolution McLaurin had and wanted to apply it to me feeling at home here in the west coast. And lastly, McLaurin ties it all to a universal message of acceptance through her personal stories, and I made mine a universal message of the power of culture through my experience as almost a tourist here in California.