Jon Krakauer. Into the Wild. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Paper. 207 pages. $12.95. ISBN: 0-385-48680-4.

I've spent a few years now incorporating book-length non-fiction texts into my studio designs. In past courses I've used as a shared text Darcy Frey's The Last Shot, Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. I really like the challenge of finding a text that will appeal to a wide range of readers and a wide range of reading interests (or just appeal to students who claim that they don't read at all). And I especially like the idea of spending significant class time on a text that has a distinct identity, shape, and entrance and exit points (as opposed to the headless, legless texts we often cull from various sources and cobble together in a class reader bound in paper and distinguished from hundreds of other readers by nothing more than the–often sickeningly bright–color scheme of its cover). I want students, if they're at all willing, to experience the thrill, the frisson, that comes when they allow a text to enter their heads, their bloodstreams, their imaginations. I want them to heft the book every day, to appreciate its weight and shape, to notice the design details. I want them to watch the book conform to their annotations and page foldings and spine bendings, so that the text they grabbed off the shelf at the beginning of the semester ultimately resembles their favorite t-shirt or baseball cap: grubby, bent, stained, wrinkled–obviously well used and well loved.

Chris McCandless's story, as narrated by Jon Krakauer, made its first entrance in my studio classroom in the fall of 1996. I was teaching a 105 I had co-designed with Steve Feikes called Behind the Mask of Writing, in which every student was responsible for selecting a book-length, non-fiction text to read during the first half of the semester. Libby Chisolm, a remarkably self possessed freshman in the school of Fashion Design, chose Into the Wild off the lengthy list Steve and I had provided. In some respects it seemed an unlikely match. Libby is the antithesis of an outdoors woman (she reminds me in many ways of the actress Kristen Scott Thomas of The English Patient fame, and more recently of, ulp, The Horse Whisperer. Libby is beautiful and composed in that same cool, classic way), and she also seemed as if she would be rather intolerant of a story that was so intensely and at times obsessively focused on a young man's selfish and self involved rite of passage. But Libby loved the book, and was particularly interested in applying two of the course questions–"how do writers create knowledge?" and "how do writers use the knowledge of others?"–to her reading.

I remembered Libby's reaction to Into the Wild when I designed a new 105 for the fall of 1997, having been inspired by a review of Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education. I appropriated Bruner's claim that we learn about ourselves and about the world through writing and listening to narratives, rewrote my course, and began tracking a book-length text that could serve as a model of narrative, but that would also allow students to inquire into the purpose(s), shape, and function of narrative.

In Into the Wild, Krakauer simultaneously weaves together several narrative strands: he tells the story of Chris McCandless, whose cause of death remains a mystery for much of the story; he tells his own story of disenfranchised, reckless, rebellious youth; he researches and refers to the stories of a number of historical figures whose young lives were similar to McCandless's; and he challenges the prevailing narratives about McCandless and searches for a better, more accurate or more truthful story.

We don't read Into the Wild until after my students have submitted their mid-term portfolio. It's a bridging text; it connects the two halves of the course. For the first five or six weeks of the semester we write short narratives, compile them in a class magazine, and then test some theories about what narratives "do," what features they commonly exhibit, and what effects they commonly have on readers. We also read, annotate, analyze and respond to three longer narratives in the class reader (Richard Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire, " Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay"). In their portfolios students make claims based on two inquiries: "what is my character as a writer and a thinker?" and "what have I discovered about narratives?"

Our reading of Into the Wild coincides with the preliminary work of the major writing assignment of the semester. Students' inquiry as readers, then, mirrors their inquiry as researchers and writers. That's my goal for the course, anyway. For their major writing project, students name a category, a genre of story that they would like to research ("cautionary tales parents tell daughters/sons," "hard bargain" stories, "tales of noble deeds/self sacrifice," etc). They gather stories through interviews, analyze and annotate their notes, and try to draw some conclusions about the form, function and purpose(s) of the stories. The project borrows loosely from ethnographic methodology, but rather than making claims about a group or community, my students try to make sense of the way narratives frame experience, gloss over tension and inconsistency, create community or, as Jerome Bruner argues, make meaning out of experience.

Initially my students don't understand why I've asked them to read a book about "some guy dying in Alaska." So I pose to them a series of questions on the first day they bring the text to class: how does the book connect to our work in the first unit? as emerging writers, as critically aware writers, what might we pay attention to in Krakauer's book? why might reading a book-length text be an important stage in our development as writers? But even after I tell my students that I want them to read as inquirers, to ask questions of the text, to test our previous claims about narrative, they still want to read as if in preparation for a quiz. We negotiate this reading process through annotations, which I ask them to share with me and with each other fairly regularly (students page through their books and actually show me what they have written, highlighted, underlined and otherwise marked up). We spend as much time discussing their annotation as we do discussing the text itself.

The work of reading and discussing Into the Wild is painstaking, just as annotating itself is a painstaking endeavor. I challenge students' reading more than I facilitate it by continuously asking them questions that, based on the way they have read so far, they are unable to engage with. They wrinkle their little foreheads, they grow confused, they stutter and stall as they attempt to respond. They are forced to go back to the text, and as they do so I hear them mumbling to themselves, "I didn't know I was supposed to pay attention to that." "That" could be any number of things, including signs of primary and secondary research, structural features, stylistic features, multiple story lines, claims. What students initially tend to keep track of instead are things like dates (the date McCandless abandons his car, the date McCandless' body is found), plot line, "characters'" names, and other details that they long ago learned were evidence of close and careful reading. But that kind of reading, as some students learn, rather than bridging the gap between writing subject and text, widens it.

Our 105 project is to imagine and to enact a method of reading that illuminates the process of writing and allows for greater intimacy between students and texts. I want students to recognize that even texts that exhibit a high degree of polish and skill and stylistic flair arise from a process of writing, rethinking, reshaping, and reflecting. I want them to understand that what they are learning to do as academic writers is reflected in the texts they read–even if the signs are not immediately apparent. So we read to uncover, to unmask, to demythologize, to demystify writing. As students ask questions of the "story" project (how do we organize our ideas? how much of ourselves can we include? should we retell each story in its entirety? ) we turn to Krakauer for some clues. In some respects Krakauer's book is a model for the analytic essay my 105 students will write. But it's also more than that. If (when) students read the text closely and carefully, they empower themselves to challenge Krakauer's claims about McCandless and his claims about other related issues. They also empower themselves to question Krakauer as a model for research, analysis and narration. When students read closely and carefully they see the seams of a text; they understand that a writer–Krakauer–must make decisions about how to connect ideas, themes, details, sources, much like a tailor makes decisions about how to piece together an article of clothing. Though from the outside the shirt looks as if it has arisen whole from the fabric, from the inside out it's apparent just how many stitches and adjustments the tailor eventually made. Rather than believing that their own essays will emerge intact from the first stint of writing, then, students gradually realize that their ideas will need patching, stitching, mending, and shaping.

In the meantime their relationship to Into the Wild changes. When students return to the text and to their earlier annotation (which I ask them to do in their final portfolio) they tend to evaluate the book differently, to say different things about their understanding or appreciation of it. Having completed a rather substantial writing and research project, having made writerly decisions and having come to writerly insights, having reflected on and assessed their work, they see that they, as did Krakauer, created knowledge through writing. They can look at Into the Wild as something more than just a report of an event with predetermined conclusions. They can see why Krakauer began each chapter with lengthy quotes from the journals and published works of other seekers and scholars. And they can imagine themselves exploring a topic, subject or issue by writing along it, or into it, or around it. Which is actually the subversive part of the studio experience, because students come to recognize that those are the very types of writing or uses of writing that their disciplines don't value. In 205 my students and I pursue an inquiry into disciplinarity that addresses those very contradictions and conflicts.

Into the Wild has many potential uses in Studio I. Though I chose not to take it up in this way, it's certainly an example of a writer drawing powerfully on personal experience to fuel a broader inquiry–a focus quite appropriate for 105. In his "Author's Note" Krakauer says that, "in trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons." 105 students could devote productive time to unraveling the various strands that Krakauer weaves in his effort to answer the question of one young man's tragic end, and to weaving their own texts from the threads of personal experience, research, and broad knowledge. On the more local level, Krakauer's prose creates many wonderful opportunities for 105 students to discuss issues of style, character, and authority, and to grow familiar with some of the rhetorical concepts fundamental to 205. Both of those Studio I moves might be possible with shorter texts–excerpts, chapters, articles–but students then miss the experience of reading a book, of participating in a sustained reading project. It's like the difference between visiting your grandparents once a year and having them live in your house: the greater contact students have with a text, the more closely they attend to its features, the more profoundly they come to know the text and to recognize their own identities as writers in relation to it.