Memoir Writing Prompt: Your Life as a Museum Exhibit

From Poets & Writers

Envision how your own life and work might be presented in an art museum, and write a few paragraphs (or pages!) about this hypothetical exhibit.

• What objects would be on display?

• Which emails or photographs would help tell your stories?

• Consider using different forms and conventions, such as lists and fragments.

“One Life: Sylvia Plath,” an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., features a selection of the poet’s manuscripts, journals, clothing, and other personal objects, including a typewriter and even a lock of her hair, as well as numerous pieces of Plath’s artwork: collages, drawings, self-portraits, and photographs.

The museum also incorporates other types of art and interdisciplinary projects into its Plath programming, such as “I Am Vertical,” a dance performed in December in the museum’s courtyard, created by choreographer-in-residence Dana Tai Soon Burgess and named after one of Plath’s poems.

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