o How does hearing the stories of Katrina survivors help you better narrate your own memoir? What strategies do they use that you can also use to make your memoir stronger?


I think that watching the videos about hurricane Katrina was helpful and easy to relate to memoir writings. Katrina was not only a devastating time for all the people in New Orleans but a very traumatic experience for everyone in America. There were so many issues of getting help to the people or how to go about handling the situation and it seemed like American citizens were really disturbed and concerned by hurricane Katrina and its victims. I think this personally helped me with the memoir because a huge portion of the video was essentially a spoken memoir. There wasn’t a whole lot of footage from the actual hurricane, the majority was interviews of people telling and describing there individual stories. So it after listening to story after story you start to develop an understanding of how these people describe what has happened to them and how they can also tie in their personal thoughts in feelings. Although my memoir was no where close to being as dramatic as a national disaster I still got a good feel of how to narrate my past experiences whether they be emotional or not. All of the interviews were surprisingly diverse too, all of these people were victims to the same storm yet they all had stories that were totally independent from every one else’s. This helped me see a proud range of stories told about one single event which thus helped me diversify my own personal memoir.