Thursday, June 12, 2025

Handout: Quoting Essays in Your Paper, MLA Style

NOTE: This is not an assignment, but a reference handout for your Paper #1 assignment. 

Quoting Essays in Your Paper, MLA Style

From My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas, page 55

“Yet it is the experience of eating food from restaurants that serve gas that really elucidates our American, or our deeply Southern American, conundrum. Our practices are literally poisonous. Mississippi charges me a tax for driving a hybrid car. It literally charges me for not wanting to fuck up our environment more. And. But. The friendships we make while experimenting and/or surviving the poisonous parts of Mississippi are what make our lives and definitely our childhoods—if we are willing to mine them—heavier, and actually most wonderfully Southern.”

INTRODUCE & CITE

In Kiese Laymon’s essay, “My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas,” he writes about his childhood memories surrounding a gas station in his hometown of Forrest, Mississippi, which also served some of his favorite food. However, later in life he reflects that, “Yet it is the experience of eating food from restaurants that serve gas that really elucidates our American, or our deeply Southern American, conundrum. Our practices are literally poisonous” (55). OR (Laymon 55).

ALWAYS RESPOND AFTERWARDS

In Kiese Laymon’s essay, “My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas,” he writes about his childhood memories surrounding a gas station in his hometown of Forrest, Mississippi, which also served some of his favorite food. However, later in life he reflects that, “Yet it is the experience of eating food from restaurants that serve gas that really elucidates our American, or our deeply Southern American, conundrum. Our practices are literally poisonous” (55). In other words, he realizes that his favorite childhood memories were bound up things he has learned to look down on: fossil fuels, pollution, and fast-food culture. Can he still love and appreciate a childhood based in things he can no longer respect?

WORKS CITED PAGE

Laymon, Kiese. “My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas.” The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. ed. Lakshmi. New York: Mariner Books, 2024.

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