First-Year Essay Assignment: "Mr. Gatsby's Neighbourhood"

Pretend you are 100 years old, still sharp of mind, living in a wintry prairie city in the present day. Write a memoir of the summer of 1922, when as a 12-year-old you lived near the Jay Gatsby mansion and encountered the characters and events in The Great Gatsby. Your memoir will share what you remember of that summer and will reflect who and where you are right now, perhaps looking out the window of your room or turning the pages of a photo album.


You will have to invent the circumstances of your family’s life near New York in the 1920s. Perhaps they ran a flower shop, or a catering business hired for Gatsby’s parties, or a stable for Tom Buchanan’s horses. Perhaps your parents worked on the trains or as tradespeople. As that 12-year-old, you hung around the shop or area, observing the goings-on and listening to the stories. Your memoir will report on what you remember of those goings-on and stories.

What I’m looking for:
• writing that is deeply coloured by the world of The Great Gatsby,
• the details (details, details) of behaviour and personality an observant 12-year-old notices,
• personality in your speaker (who will be at least partly based, of course, on yourself) who passes judgement, speculates and interprets, expresses things in his/her own way,
• carefully formatted dialogue between yourself and at least one of the characters in the novel,
• the present-tense frame, which can be relatively brief,
• fresh language, varied sentences, paragraphs, and precise punctuation choices,
• about 4 pages, give or take a page—if you’re tempted to write more, don’t! If you can’t “do” the whole summer of ’22 in 4 pages, focus on a single scene.