This 750 is dedicated entirely to mudpit work for your upcoming essay. We’ll start digging into research soon enough, but for now I’d like you to access your existing knowledge about your subject. Lead off with a brain dump—what do you know about your subject already?
What’s your connection to it (why did you pick this subject)?
What are your feelings and opinions about this subject (it would be a good move to come back to this at the end, too, to see if your mind has changed at all)?
What stories do you have or know about this subject?
By the way, here’s the list of the list of possible genres your brains stormed up the other day.
Oh, and here’s a short clip from an interview with Daniel Nester, author of the mooning essay. What he says below might be useful to you in thinking about your own essay.
Why mooning, a short cultural history? And in the acknowledgments, you thank Operation Moon. How’d that work? How’d you choose your team? What was the editing process? Where there any close contender variations that didn’t make the final cut. Like, say, “Boon”: Somebody mooning while simultaneously booing, e.g., a referee, a local politician, that guy from Creed.
The initial impulse to write about mooning came from reading, rather randomly, an article on JSTOR, a scholarly database. I forget what I was researching, but when I came across Jeffrey S. Ravel “The Coachman’s Bare Rump: An Eighteenth-Century French Cover-up” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, Winter 2007: 279-308), an account of how, on on January 21, 1763, a coachman for a French nobleman mooned the audience after an opera performance, I just got lost in the whole mooning business. And I liked the idea of an essay being a collection of Real Knowledge, the whole notion of authorship really being that of a collector of other’s thoughts, not just personal musing yadda yadda yadda. I knew there were several nicknames for varieties of mooning — the pressed ham, for example, or the plumber’s crack — I sent out an email asking for different kinds of moons. I got a whole bunch from several corners of my life. Some passed along the email to people whom they knew would have names for different moons. Thank god for email, no matter what that John Freeman says. I wanted to give them all credit, so Team Moon it is!