ENEX 101
Summer 2009
Writing the Bioregional Personal Essay: Where You Live and What You Live For
sketch workshop: Thursday, June 4
complete workshop draft: Monday, June 8
revised draft due: Tuesday, June 9
length: 4-6 double spaced pages
Background
In your text, Bruce Ballenger writes, “As a form, the personal essay places the writer at center
stage. […] In this sense the personal essay is much like a photographic self-portrait.” For this
assignment, you are going to expand the idea of the personal essay beyond the isolation of
yourself as a subject and explore what it means to be you right now in this place – Missoula.
In the preface to his book, LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, Robert Thayer, Jr. quotes
Wes Jackson saying that finding a life-place means “becoming native to one’s place.” Thayer
goes on to say, “Gary Snyder calls it “rehabitation”; Jerry Mander refers to it as the process of
“relocalization;” […] philosopher Albert Borgman explains it as a necessary task of communal
celebration in which we must finally settle down in the land, stop searching for a hyperreal
elsewhere, and come to terms with nature and tradition.”
Assignment
You will write an essay on the topic of your choice that attends to the conventions we create as a
class. After discussing Thayer’s introduction, we will revise Ballenger’s features of the form to
include our bioregional perspective. We will work on some research together which you can use
as you see fit in your writing, but your writing should explore your own questions of inquiry
about this place where you live – your life-place.
Your essay should:
 use specific bioregional details from either your journal, class research, or personal
research
 uses at least 2 quotes from class reading
 use descriptive language that engages the five senses
 show evidence of dialectical movement
 effectively answer so what? by the end
Required Elements
The following should be stapled together neatly when you turn in your paper to me on Tuesday,
June 9. You must include the following to receive full credit:
 invention work/drafting materials
 sketch with class comments
 workshop draft
 workshop worksheet
 clean revised draft
 cover page with title