The Bear Went Over the Mountain

• Main Author: Mongar, Sonja
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks@UNO 2004
• Subjects: Memoir; auto-fiction; identity; photography
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/76; http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1075&context=td

"The Bear Went Over the Mountain" is a memoir that marks the people, events, landscape, and era that shapes a women's identity as she journeys from adolescence to adulthood. The story evolves through accretion with the use of a variety of writing strategies such as third person limited omniscient narrator, auto-fiction, mosaic, and disrupted narrative. Other conventions of Creative Non-fiction are used such as dialogue, characterization and plot. Autotopography (photographs) are used to create a motif of ancestral ghosts. They haunt the lives of these characters as they act and react to plots that began long before they were born. An ancestral photograph is placed with the date of the story at the beginning of each section. The mismatching photograph and date is intended to show how these fierce personalities, long dead, have carved their presence into the lives and fates of these characters.