J11: Question One
Answer any one of these questions about Opening Up:

• Answer after reading Chapters 7 & 8 of Opening Up: How does Pennebaker feel that writing helps us sort out our difficulties?  Why are cognitive or thinking words (cause, effect, reason, understand, realize, know) particularly useful in writing about negative experiences? What are the potential dangers in sharing our traumas?
• In Chapter 9 of Opening Up, Pennebaker states “For both love and grief, people first enter a stage of intense emotional activation that lasts between 4 and six months” (Pennebaker 132). Do you agree with his theory about time in love and grief?  Do your experiences or those of the characters we have studied confirm or deny Pennebaker’s theories?
• What danger does Pennebaker think can come from having an “inhibited personality”?

J11: Question Two
How can a memoir about poverty be a comedy? How can a memoir about starvation and death make readers laugh? What’s funny about Angela’s Ashes? Discuss the elements that make the memoir comic. Which characters are comic? Which situations are comic? How does McCourt’s use of language affect the reader?
J11: Question Three
The title of the memoir is Angela’s Ashes, but is Angela the central character in this work so far?
Journal 12
One question for everyone. From your reading for today in either McCourt or Pennebaker, describe an idea or incident to which you had a strong response.
Journal 13
* From your reading for today in either McCourt or Pennebaker, describe an idea or incident to which you had a strong response.
* If you wish, instead, you may pose a question for your classmates to answer.

What is the topic of your project, and how will you do it?

Journal 14

In A Grief Obseved, C.S. Lewis states: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” What does grief feel like to you? Have your experiences with grief been similar to or different from Lewis’s?