Personal Essays

Personal essays are writings that are an intimate experience between the writer and the reader. The experiences shared are of many different emotions, happiness, pain, reflection, misspent time, or any other number of ideas. The reader is brought into the writer’s feelings.
Two writers who are adept at bringing the reader into their emotions of past experience are Alice Walker and N. Scott Momaday. Both writers use the power of past experience to build emotions felt in the readers today. Walker is reflective of how she felt growing up after a tragic accident that took the sight of one of her eyes. Momaday is reflective of the past of his ancestors and how their traditional lives were stripped away by others. Both writers write of a tragedy of losing some part of their identity by the actions of another person.
In Momaday’s essay The Way to Rainy Mountain, the reflection of a grandmother’s experience as a Kiowa Indian when the U.S. Calvary took over her peopleâ€...