People are obsessed with objects: their monetary value, the memories they hold, the thoughts they inspire, the skills they showcase and what they communicate to others. This book guides creative nonfiction writers through crafting prose inspired by the material things in their lives. Combining ideas from the fields of creative writing, rhetoric and composition and qualitative inquiry, itinvestigates how authors have examined the cultural and personal significance of objects and offers new approaches for how developing writers might use personal experience and context to get the most out of object writing.
Thinking about why individuals and institutions collect things and how these collections inspire storytelling, Melissa Tombro brings her experience as a third-generation antiques dealer and Professor of English to explore a broad range of ideas including objects' cultural and monetary value; family history and nostalgia; public collections and archives; gender and race in relation to objects; inherited objects; garbage and recycled objects; objects and status; generational trends and fads in collecting; and objects in the age of social media.
Providing the foundations for writerly growth by engaging in cultural analysis, autoethnographic inquiry, narrative building, essay construction, and personal reflection, Writing About Objects calls upon assignments and prompts to extend writer's thinking outside of the self and towards the larger cultural sphere. This is not just a how-to guide but an exploration of how people collect, value and engage with the things around them.
