Cheryl Pappas: Learning To See Again, with Annie Dillard

If you are like me and you check your smartphone about 80 times a day, then you, too, might need a gentle reminder that there is an unseen universe in the woods down the street from your house. Annie Dillard’s 1974 essay “Seeing” has much to teach us, not only about looking up from your phone and noticing the natural world but also about how we as writers can use language that keeps the reader’s attention.

In the beginning of her essay, Dillard writes of the wisdom of cultivating a “healthy poverty”—of finding treasure in small things, whether it be a found penny or the sighting of “a tremulous ripple thrill on the water” or a “muskrat kit paddling from its den.” This sets up the discourse for the rest of the essay, in which we learn how she stalks for such treasures in nature and how she values different ways of seeing.

For Dillard, there are two ways to see. The first is to stay alert and hungry for a thrilling sight, such as “antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves.” “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open,” she writes. The goal is to appreciate every detail and to name what she sees. The second way is to unfocus her eyes—to deliberately relax her vision—in the hopes of seeing something deeper. She does this one summer night when she’s at Tinker Creek, trying to catch a glimpse of at least one shiner fish as it pops out of the water, its silvery skin flashing with light. She notices that this rarely seen display was “always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared.” But when she blurred her eyes, she “saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.” This kind of seeing is spiritual, poetic. As her vision is elevated, the language she uses to describe the experience is elevated to poetry. “Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed in air like light . . . I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.” The sentences and then the phrases become progressively shorter, as if her language were breaking up into pieces. It’s as if she’d been transformed into a particle.

I have always wondered—or, more honestly, I used to wonder—what it is like for people who were once blind to gain sight. Is it a shock to the system? Dillard, it turns out, is also fascinated by how the newly sighted experience the world, and she greedily wants to see it through their eyes—just to try it. She recounts the reactions of the formerly blind, as recorded in Marius von Senden’s book Space and Sight: “[T]he newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches.” In other words, every form is flat and has the same value, whether near or far. She speaks of a little girl who is astonished by the world, and when the girl visits a garden, she “‘stands speechless” in front of a tree, which she “only names on taking hold of it,” describing it as “‘the tree with the lights in it.'” After Dillard finishes the book, she sees the color-patches, too, and treasures this new vision. But she cannot keep looking this way: “I couldn’t unpeach the peaches.”

Seeing is not easy. Dillard writes that seeing is an effort that is “really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order.” Here, toward the end of the essay, she has emphasized the “vision” in “visionary.” She is a spiritual seeker, who knows that “although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought,” and “although [illumination] . . . comes to those who wait for it, it is always . . . a gift and a total surprise.” Dillard ends her essay with such an ecstatic, surprising vision: she sees a tree “with lights in it” at her own Tinker Creek: “I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.” After its lights die out and normal vision returns, she tells us that “the vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

What a gift, indeed! Dillard’s essay sheds light on how sheltered my sight has become. My poverty, it seems, is the unhealthy kind. When my vision gets unfocused, it’s because I’ve been looking at the screen too long, not because I’m making a mystical connection to the universe. As a child, I remember, I would often wander alone in the woods behind our house to look for a clearing in the forest, to feel the scaly bark of a birch tree, to touch the silky skin of the forbidden ladyslipper. I was, like Dillard, looking for—and waiting for—treasure and surprise, but with a childlike wonder. Which is why her essay strikes such a deep chord with me, a chord that is mournful, too, because I’m not sure how often I’ll take such walks anymore. It’s been years. But now, at least, if I do, I have her visionary words to accompany me.

What can Dillard teach us about writing? To start, as every great writer does, Dillard gives us intricate details: “Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh.” It’s not just a log, but a sycamore log; not just an island, but a tear-shaped one. And when lying on her bed after a long walk, she notes that she’s “spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis.” As political discourse by this country’s leaders becomes sodden with vagueness, writers would do well to name everything, with accuracy and specificity. Dillard’s writing is flush with facts, and that is why it is intellectually so satisfying to read her work, especially now.

But facts alone are ultimately unsatisfying; we could all learn so much from her poetic voice. In his incomparable anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate notes in his introduction to “Seeing” that Diallard first trained as a poet before turning to essays. Her use of imagery makes this clear: she describes water turtles as “smooth as beans,” two words that make smooth sounds. We see it in her startling phrases, such as the one mentioned above, “I couldn’t unpeach the peaches” and in such sentences as “Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.” Her sentences have a rhythm that beautifully go beyond the declarative structure, like this one, in which she describes repeatedly watching groups of red-tipped blackbirds rush from an Osage orange tree: “Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished.” She could have set off the phrase “the real diehards” by em-dashes, but that would have been too emphatic; instead, she knows that the commas alone are enough to give us a landing to rest on before the precipitous “appeared, spread, and vanished.”

Her sentences move like a stream and then, all of a sudden, the water hits a rock. Like this: “It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small.” The line “But I can’t see” is one of those rocks in the stream. We teach the reader to pay attention by always keeping the language awake.

Conversely, but equally moving, is how much repetition there is in the essay. Within the span of two pages, she writes “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open”; “I still try to keep my eyes open”; and “One more reason to keep my eyes open.” What is she doing here? She is underscoring her repetitive process of looking by repeating the idea.

We could also steal Dillard’s technique of moving from micro to macro. In the same paragraph in which she writes of seeing two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy, she tells us of how she took in some amoebae from the creek as pets, which look like “chips of sky in the bowl.” The effect of such a range is that it awakens our imagination. It follows William Blake’s directive: “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.”

Dillard could not have known when she wrote this essay how many of us would need a vivid reminder of the value of looking for this kind of treasure in the world. For me, my smartphone has become a talisman; I am none the richer. It will not help me become a better writer. Dillard offers me a map to go by, starting with my own backyard.

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Cheryl Pappas’s work has most recently appeared in Tin House and Mulberry Fork Review. She lives in Boston and is an editor at the Harvard Art Museums. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. Her website is cherylpappas.net.

Ori Fienberg: Prolegomena to Any Future Five-Paragraph Essays

One of the first published mentions of a “five paragraph essay” occurs in Charles Sears Baldwin’s Composition, Oral and Written, published in 1909. Through the 60s and 70s it gained momentum, and over the last thirty years it achieved a stranglehold on high school English and college Composition classes, which has resulted in an inevitable backlash against this seemingly new form. But this new form has ancient roots in the classical argument. It’s a throwback to a time before the scientific method, when logic was a humanistic pursuit, rather than a mathematical function. Aristotle’s A Natural History of Animals functions in this way: Aristotle attempts a rudimentary taxonomy, wherein he calls on his powers of deduction to infer, for instance, that fish must sleep, though they can’t close their eyes. In some cases he’s observed the animal in question, but he also includes unlikely animals that he only knows of by report, such as an animal that never eats, and a species of immortal crabs “that slough off their old-age”. For these, logic falls apart and instead we experience the animal kingdom as Aristotle wants it. By displaying his yearning for deviant animals that make for a stranger world than the one he has seen, his dubious inclusions show another side of Aristotle the man. But we’re far removed from the time of the classical argument, and as a pedagogical tool the modern five-paragraph essay strains out these deviations to reflect industrialized, standardized realities. Still, while it serves a rigidly utilitarian role in high school English and college composition classes, and thus is spurned by the literary set, with nuanced deviation the five-paragraph essay becomes an intriguing personal essay form to explore the permeable nature of arguments, experience, and stories.

It’s easy to see why the five-paragraph essay is resented: it plays a vital role in bureaucratic educational indoctrination. Reproducing the rules of the form results in the reward. There are required components: an introduction that hooks the reader’s attention; a thesis, perhaps containing a concession; then concession, evidence and arguments; finally a conclusion must restate the thesis, but not exactly, while also offering opportunities for further thought. Beyond the required components lies a formidable set of rules and conventions. First-person narration is frowned upon; personal experience may make an appearance in the introduction, but rarely beyond it. Unambiguous language preferred and digression, strongly discouraged. Avoid clichés. Present an unbiased argument, but convince the reader—when written within the arena of standardized testing, not only are forms and convention rewarded, but also puffery: the more multi-syllabic words the better. It’s no wonder that many students resent having to write them, and many instructors, often technical and/or creative writers themselves, dislike teaching it, and opt for other forms in their own writing. Whether mastered or not, the form is soon discarded by the majority of writers, but I’ve always been conflicted. In many ways, I enjoy the rules and feel they have merit; the bevy of restraints calls up a relationship to set forms of poetry, like a sonnet or a sestina, and I even have a fondness for some of its inevitabilities.

Not only are these rules utilitarian, they’re patterned, combining organic and planned elements. Early in high school, when I was struggling to make a thesis statement, my Dad once told me “it takes three trees to make a row”. Two trees do not invoke a pattern, but three trees indicate planning for a well-landscaped essay. Aristotle raises a variant when he reminds his readers of Musaeus’ observation about eagles and birds that lay three eggs: “That lays three, hatches two, and cares for one”. It’s a naturalist observation in a proverbial presentation, and it can be seen at the root of a five-paragraph argument: we must present three points to make a pattern of evidence, and despite our best intentions to love and take care of them equally, often one is weak, included to meet the form, while another is dear, perhaps the impetus for the argument, the central tree, or the story we want the reader to remember. We must always start with laying our eggs, or the planting of our trees, and by the time we finish they should be hatched/grown, and the form ensures proper mulching, or a good nest. For a class, to learn a form, perhaps the rules are best. When we reach beyond that, when we mix metaphor, or deviate from a pattern we risk failure, but risk is necessary to push the five-paragraph essay past its utilitarian roots.

The five-paragraph essay can be fertile ground for more personal and creative writing. Deviation is also logical. It’s part of our nature. In the pedagogical five-paragraph essay all restless metaphor must be rounded up and domesticated. In the personal five-paragraph essay they can be allowed to roam. Instead of a canned introduction, three pieces of evidence, and a conclusion-paragraph, it’s the form of all stories: a prologue, beginning, middle, and an end, with denouement. A wedding, three stories, and a funeral; trauma, three therapists, and an epiphany; parents, three girlfriends, and a wife; a job, three investments, and retirement: each is a five-paragraph personal essay. In many ways it’s a more honest, a guileless form: the epiphany is brought to the fore, in the first paragraph, the intrinsic argument offered immediately for consideration, rather than buried later in the essay. The real argument is in life, and it’s too hard to live without some structure. There’s too much evidence, too many contradicting stories.

It’s a delicate balance. There are the weaknesses and trauma that are really our strengths. The exceptions that are the rule, and the endless concessions we make and remake to ourselves, to those we love, and to those with whom we disagree simply so we can keep going. In a braided essay, we must hope that the braids unite, but it’s impossible to do justice to all the strands without tangling. The expository essay brazenly assumes its expertise. Dear Lord, save us from the epistolary. How heavy the crown if life were told in sonnets? What use a couplet when describing an extended period of bachelorhood? There’s nothing to stop a personal essay from going on indefinitely, but a five-paragraph essay must stop eventually. And whether narrative, descriptive, persuasive, or expository, all it takes is a more whimsical landscaper to combine pattern, personhood, and poetics to bring new purpose to the five-paragraph essay.

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Since graduating from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Ori Fienberg's poetry has appeared in dozens of journals including 2Riverview, Entropy Magazine, Flyway, Mid American Review, Pank, and Subtropics—but he has never had an essay published, till now. This writing was made possible through support from the Lava Step Collective at www.lavastep.com. You can find more of his writing online at www.orifienberg.com.

Digesting Texas, And Other Pursuits of a Fusion Medievalist: A Conversation with Irina Dumitrescu

I describe books with food metaphors. The reading experience is sweet, sometimes too sweet. It can be bitter or too bitter. Sensations of taste are my go-to vocabulary for describing the sensations of literature. In her essay “Tasting Texas,” Irina Dumitrescu writes, “The early medieval monks whose scribbles I spend my days studying imagined reading to be like eating. Books were to be tasted, slowly savored in the mouth.” “Tasting Texas” was an essay of many flavors, full of savory language from a writer who seems to regard cooking and literature as expressions of the same human impulse. My excitement about this connection between taste and words hasn’t waned, even after I asked Irina if she ever mentally pairs flavors and books, and she looked amused. “Oh, interesting,” she said. “I don’t really think of books as things I eat.” Fair enough. In “Tasting Texas”: “…We live in base and literal times, and so I read new places by eating my way through their strip mall sushi, their street tacos and dumplings, their hole-in-the-wall falafel joints.” Literal food always wins.

When I spoke with her, Irina described “Tasting Texas” as her first official foray into creative writing and the personal essay:

I certainly didn’t think of myself as a literary person, because I wasn’t a writer of fiction. I was working my first job at Southern Methodist University when I heard about a sausage festival that happens every year in New Braunfels, Texas. It’s the annual Salute to Sausage, the Wurstfest. I heard about this and I thought: I have to go. Because I was living in Dallas, I wanted to explore Texas and find out about its culture. My colleague Willard Spiegelman, who was editor of the Southwest Review for a long time, stood in my office door and said, “If you write about it, I’ll publish it in the Southwest Review.” I had no idea what the Southwest Review was. I just thought okay, I’ll go on Ebay, buy a dirndl, have it fitted. Two friends jumped in the car with me and we drove for four hours to New Braunfels.

And then I wrote about it, and I wrote about it in a very satirical way. Willard was just brilliant, because he gave me a two-sentence response. He said something like, “This is nice, but who is this person? How has she changed?” It was this really laconic, economical response. I rewrote the whole essay and made it much more personal. It became about ways of adapting to places through food, and the feeling of being at home or not being at home in different geographic places. And about the mixture of cultures in Texas, and the difference in food at these odd festivals. I think it was a much better essay and it was no longer as much about making fun of this strange event as it was about discovering the quirkiness of the place.

Irina is an active medieval scholar, and a significant portion of her writing is published in places like The Chaucer Review. But since “Tasting Texas,” her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, and subsequently Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. She’ll be judging the 2017 Spring Essay Contest, at my request, for the literary journal Sonora Review. I asked Irina how her personal essays fit into the larger body of her work.

There are some creative writer-scholars who do the scholarship here, and then they do the creative writing there, and they remain two very separate activities. For me it became very important to blend them, to dissolve the borders between them. 

One thing I noticed was that even when I wrote creatively, I always wrote as a medievalist. I had all kinds of metaphors and ways of looking at the world that came from medieval literature. I didn’t leave the scholar behind when I was writing. I’m very interested in culture, and I’m interested in food not only as something that is delicious and that we eat but as a key to culture. I found that the powers of analysis I honed in my academic career could be turned to other aspects of culture.

I also realized that I really enjoy thinking of my academic, scholarly writing as creative writing, which is in fact something my dissertation advisor has always done. She writes very beautifully-crafted scholarly essays. They’re gorgeous pieces of literature as well as scholarship. Now I’ve started experimenting with that too. In ineffable ways I’m influenced by my other writing and my other reading. It helps me see different things in medieval literature, perhaps to think a little more poetically about it. But it’s hard to pin down exactly how my creative work influences my scholarship.

Even visiting Wurstfest, Irina didn’t leave her medieval sensibilities behind:

New Braunfels had all these strange mixtures of Pagan and Christian, like the Church of Peter and Paul, which had an oak tree in the yard. This oak tree was mentioned in the visitors’ guide to New Braunfels. I think a lot of non-medievalists would not notice how strange that is, because the oak tree was often dedicated to Thor. It was a place of pagan worship in early medieval Germany. There’s a story about Boniface, who was an English missionary to the area of Germany where I now live, felling a big oak tree that had been a favorite place of worship for pagan Germans. This was a miraculous event that convinced a lot of the pagans to believe in Christ. In this town you had the church, and that they advertised its oak tree, so you could see them combining two very old religious symbols in one place, probably without even knowing what they meant. But I knew…I mean, it’s pagan! It’s a pagan oak tree! 

One question for me has always been how cultures are fused. Or how people who go from one culture to another dominant culture bring some part of their older identity, whether it be language or cooking or a style of dance. I’m very interested in these moments of translation. It’s behind a lot of my academic work, and it’s also true of my interest in fusion foods. I’ll never be the person who writes about the proper way to make soufflé or an authentic pho. It’s not going to be me who writes a piece on the true and only way to make some dish. That to me is the least interesting question in the world. I’m always interested in the inauthentic, the improvised, the mish-mashed, the not-very-elite version of whatever it is.

Even though I was formed in English—I had most of my education in English, most of my communication was done in English—English is my third language. Romanian is my first language. And I suspect that there is some kind of a Romanian accent at the sentence level in my writing. I try very much to Anglicize it, to cut up those sentences and make them nice and Anglo Saxon and short. But inside, there is this East European sentence that just wants to go on forever! So that’s a central question for me, how you get mixes and infusions and accents in all kinds of creative work.

Irina’s emigration experience count is up to four now, and she writes poignantly about the experience of shifting geographies. “Show me what you import, and I’ll show you who you are,” Irina writes in “The Things We Take, The Things We Leave Behind,” thinking of the small, personal, inexpensive products she and other ex-pats wanted most from distant places. “You do not miss the luxuries of home but the ordinary accompaniments of your former everyday life, the things you used to take for granted, the things it feels most unjust to have to go without.”

When we leave someplace, especially under duress, what we take is mostly the weightless contents of our minds. In “Terpsichore,” Irina recounts the story of a young man who, at age 17, learned to ballroom dance from his fellows in a Romanian prison. It’s a gesture that could be interpreted as hope, to garner this knowledge with some faith in its usefulness: “He dreams of existence beyond space or prisons or politics.”

“I was thinking about transportable culture,” I told Irina. “If you learn to dance, that plays out so differently if it’s happening in a prison or in a classroom or on a different continent. What you bring with you is in your mind, because you could not bring most of everything else.”

On the one hand, there is a lot of culture you can transport, as you pointed out. That’s what you can take with you. On the other hand, when you move, you’re always confronted by the fact that you can’t take it with you perfectly, because you always need some ingredients. You know, I’ll never have tomatoes the way tomatoes were in Romania when I was a child. They’re very hard to get, even in Romania today. Most tomatoes don’t have tomato taste anymore. This is one of those things that drives me nuts. You can make the tomato salad, but most tomato salads won’t taste like anything. You might have a distant memory of what you want to achieve and you might know how to achieve it, but if you don’t have the ingredients, you can’t have it.

And the same is true for dance, for example. You might need musicians. Your dancing is going to be limited to some extent by the quality of the music and the engagement of your audience. In literature it’s similar. I think it’s the great tragedy of ex-pat writers that, if they’re interested in writing for someone, they now have a very limited someone to write for. That’s also true for imprisoned writers, of course, people who are writing to survive or writing without the knowledge that there will be an audience for their work. But I like to communicate. I like to imagine someone reading my work, so I think it would be difficult to write and know that people won’t get your little allusions, or your jokes, or even the rhythm of your language.

In “My Father and the Wine,” Irina writes about her parent’s quest to recreate Eastern European alcohols through home wine-making and distilling. Canadian counterparts simply would not do. The craving seemed so specific, but the methods so inexact. I recounted to Irina the story of a friend who has a small business selling hot sauce. He wanted to avoid the artificial stabilizers and colors that normally go into the commercial product, but nuanced flavors are hard to mass produce. “Now I understand why they use those things in hot sauce,” he told me. “Every batch is different. Good, but all different.” Even with the knowledge, even with the ingredients, there are still no guarantees.

That’s actually one of the wonderful things about thinking about culture as performance rather than as product. This is more the academic me speaking, but I think it works for cooking and for dance and for literature too. I like to think about recipes or choreographies or even literary texts as scripts for performance. The performance might be carried out in different ways at different times, depending on who is performing, who is there (or not there) to watch the performance. More and more, I look at literature that way too, as something that can be played out in different ways at different times rather than something that’s read and interpreted.

Writing creatively really helps, because people write to me and tell me their reactions to my work. I can tell that they have different reactions and they connect to different things. One of the beautiful parts of doing this kind of writing is it teaches you that you don’t necessarily know what the reader will get from it. You put it out into the world, but the reader will then take parts they connect with, or the parts they have a very negative reaction to, or they’ll misread your work in some way that suits their purposes. That’s all legitimate, I think. As long as they don’t take you to court! Once it’s out there, it’s theirs. It’s not yours any more. That helps me a bit with my scholarly work as well, to think of texts as possibilities rather than as enclosed, complete, gem-like creations. 

The cool thing about technology today is that if you publish something online, you can see what people quote. People take little pictures of the text and put them on Twitter, and I find it so fascinating to see what they respond to. I had an essay in Zócalo Public Square in which I talked about prison writing, and I had a line in there which I googled so many times while writing because I was sure I had stolen it from somewhere. Anthony Carnevale had written, “You can’t be a lifelong learner if you’re not a lifelong earner,” and I wrote in response, “Things often sound true when they rhyme.” That line was quoted on Twitter a lot. It was funny to me because when that line came to my head, one of these tiny little bon mots, I was sure I had stolen it. It was too good to come from my head! But then it was really interesting to see that’s what people latched onto as well. My natural, organic style is to pile on, but I think there’s a real power to short things. I found that an interesting exercise in reader response.

Irina tells the story of her creative writing experience as quite a winding path. “I had a Romanian immigrant’s relentless pragmatism,” she writes in the Zócalo essay (entitled “‘Frivolous’ Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania”). “At the University of Toronto I fell in love, against my better judgment, with English literature, and switched majors.” Time and experience opened up the world of creative nonfiction.

The one class I quit in undergrad was my Creative Writing class. I had to find my own way to it, I think. I did take a creative writing class in Berlin at one point when I was really blocked in my scholarly writing. It was offered by Clare Wigfall, a British short story writer who lives in Berlin. She did it beautifully. She would assign us these very creative prompts to do in class. I wasn’t used to writing any kind of fiction, but stories came out that I couldn’t even imagine, just because of the creative structure of the course. 

I remember that after one of those classes, I was having lunch in a Thai restaurant and I just started writing. I wrote in a fury for several days, and that was “My Father and the Wine.” It didn’t come out of a prompt, and it had no relationship to any of the prompts we were doing, but somehow doing them just opened a floodgate in me and this entire essay came out in one piece. 

I find it much harder to force creative work to suit deadlines or a particular kind of timeline. I’m finding it necessary to be protective of my very slow process. Usually that means a lot of thinking about things, and when I’m ready to write, the essay comes out super-fast. It also comes out in very close to final form. I edit on a line level, but I don’t change a lot. Up until that point, it often just takes me time. And sometimes I’ve found I can’t do it according to somebody else’s timeline. I can with academic work. At this point, even if it takes a couple of days to get into a scholarly article, I can sit down and start to slam it out on schedule, or write a draft and revise it later. But creative work needs to be fermented properly. You don’t want the pickle or the kimchi before they’re ready!

I asked Irina to talk more about the concept of reading with which we began, the monastic idea of reading as savoring.

The metaphor of rumination was used widely in medieval monastic culture. The good reader would spend a lot of time on one book. They would not have the internet, and they would not get a new book every day from Amazon the way I do. Monks would spend a lot of time with a book of scripture, or the church fathers, or the Psalms, which they would sing. The ideal was that they would engage with those texts at a very deep level. It was a kind of reading that most of us probably can’t even imagine, because we tend to read fast, we tend to read once, and we tend to read a lot of different things. They would really ruminate over the text. They would also read aloud or subvocalize it. You would actually have the words in your mouth. And the process was compared to the digestive processes of cows, which digest and re-digest the food several times. I’m not an expert on bovine digestive processes, but this was a major metaphor for reading that medieval writers played with—that you would chew over the writing, over the food, over the text, a long time.

And then you would incorporate it. It would become part of you, because when you read very slowly and very intensely and often out loud, you remember a lot, and it no longer becomes a text you cite. It becomes a text that’s just part of you. You might even use words or little snippets that sound like that text without necessarily thinking, “I’m making a reference to that text.” This happens a lot with the Psalms, because monks were singing the Psalms on a regular basis. It got to the point when the Psalms were part of their vocabulary. It no longer was a separate text in the way we might think. Maybe this is like the difference between someone who’s acted a lot of Shakespeare and someone who just reads him in school.

Maybe thinking of literature as something to be tasted is too superficial, at least by monk standards. Tasting, after all, is only the first and easiest step in a complex process. Digestion is more subconscious, as words and stories become part of an individual. Irina traces these influences through both art and scholarship with her most persistent questions:

How art shapes us, and how art makes us into who we are, and how art forms our inner lives. How we learn to have certain emotions through art. I’m interested less in how we express ourselves through art than in how we learn to be who we are through creative work, whether it be writing or dance or music. Or food, of course.

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Irina Dumitrescu teaches medieval literature at the University of Bonn. She is the editor of Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum Books, 2016), a collection of essays and poems on humanities in times of crisis. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Petits Propos Culinaires, the Washington Post, and Zócalo Public Square. Irina’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, has received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction, and been reprinted in Best American Essays 2016.

Abby Dockter is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction. Her writing appears in The OWL literary journal, the University of Arizona's Institute of the Environment news feed, and deep in the Mesa Verde National Park website. She enjoys long, dry archaeological reports, and usually hikes with poetry.

Trish Salah interview

Below is the next entry in a series on trans writers and the essay, this time with Trish Salah. The author of Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, she is also a critic and editor, focusing on trans literature and writing. I was thrilled to chat with her about form, genre, and memory, and of course about her own writing.

Check out some of the earlier conversations in this series, too, with Torrey Peters, manuel arturo abreu, and Ching-In Chen. 

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T Clutch Fleischmann: I begin these interviews by asking everyone about their relation to genre as a writer and to gender as a writer, and specifically how you respond to your work being labeled as "trans," as "poetry," as whatever categories it might intentionally or unintentionally run into. I wonder if you could speak to such categorization to get us started. Your statement in Troubling the Line, for instance, that "the writing is singular, and eclipses particular modalities of thinking about," suggests one way of resisting such categorization.

Trish Salah: Thanks for asking, Clutch. Such a loaded question for me. When I was a kid I liked genre writing, as in “low writing,” best: science fiction, fantasy, horror, porn, comics. Sometimes I still do. My first attempt at a book length work was a collection of interconnected short stories—I wanted it to be both grittily realist and baroquely fantastic, à la Angela Carter’s Love and The Bloody Chamber, and also to pay homage to the Halifax goth/punk scene I fell in love with in my late teens. But while I was writing it I was also reading more intergenre works, like Borderlands/La Fronteras, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and so the thing morphed and I ended up writing poems as intertexts to weave the stories together. Oddly those poems are what, from that project, ended up being published some years later, as the core of the Language Becoming a Girl section of my first poetry book.

In the time between writing that short story cycle, and publishing Wanting in Arabic, I’d begun my transition, and perhaps as importantly, had read the following line from Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Writes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto”: “…I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender,” but rather as a genre-a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored” (Camera Obscura, 165).

And while I’ve persistently quarreled with what I’ve understood to be the material and psycho-social implications of Stone’s argument for forgoing passing—implications she is well aware of, and allows for within the manifesto— I’ve also been profoundly enabled in my thinking and writing by Stone’s suggestion that trans people actively seize and redeploy the genres through which we have been written. In a certain way I’ve been pointedly literalist in my reading of that suggestion, focusing on the literary and political potential of taking archives of sexological-psychoanalytic, anthropological, feminist/queer, and literary representations of “transgender,” as critical objects for my doctoral dissertation, and as found material for the Lyric Sexology project.

Relatedly when we—Casey Plett, Owen Campbell, Shelagh Pizey-Allen and I—were planning our trans literature and criticism conference at the University of Winnipeg, we titled it Writing Trans Genres. That was not just to add to the long list of bad trans puns, but in order to surface the way in which, as Namaste, Prosser and others’ have pointed out, trans subjects have been rendered, as textual figures, and to recentre the question of literary genre around trans authorship and audience. To do that was effectively to ask the question of minor literature. That is, beyond articulating a minority discourse—self-representation, which is still an important goal— to ask how might trans writers, critics, audiences intervene in and revise how and what we mean with and by genre, figure, literature, writing?

I'm excited by that process, in which similar archival material is rendered from critical object to academic dissertation and from found material to poetic text. Your work often seems like it is engaged in these multiplicities, of form or genre, discipline or writing practice. Could you speak more to how that might offer us some of those trans revisions to genre, to writing? I'm also thinking of what comes before the text I read. 

The presence of the archival also makes me think of the question of documentation, of self and information. In Wanting, in the surgical diary, you say "The question is how I can here try to rewrite this body which is less truth than occasion…" The turn to occasion seems to allow for these archives to speak on the present moment (the event) in an important way, maybe even insists upon it. Does truth in some way need to be turned away from, or decentered, for occasion to come?

Within "Surgical Diary" there is as you say a documentary impulse, and it seems to sometimes be read as a key to other poems in Wanting in Arabic. As you know documentary is often received or interpreted as somehow mimetic, as if it were less evidently writing than is obvious with other forms. Certainly there are truth claims evoked by the genre... and on the other hand, the Foucauldian and feminist discourses on truth claims vis a vis sex and the body, have been, by and large, deployed in ways that are anti-transsexual.  So, in terms of occasion, in a minimal way I was troubling truth as something either arising from or written on the body, but also allowing for something more modest, local, and active to be done with/as a body.

Regarding your first question, I think for me the important thing is that the palimpsest of "trans representation" we encounter as if it were what was knowable be made available for recollecting and reworking, or for analysis or deconstruction, rather than that it exist as a foundation for our being. Poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres. My own preference is obviously for showing the trace, its violence and the ambiguity of it.

When you say "poetry and critique both offer ways in, as do other genres," are there trends we could align between those particular genres/ways-in? Poetry might be particularly adept at showing the traces, for instance. If that's the case, what might the essay, or the memoir, lend themselves to, as ways in? 

I'm wondering especially about the utility of memoir, how its attention to personal memory seems to offer some ripe potentials for trans writers, while in reality trans memoirs tend to default to that "foundation for our being," rather than the reworking or analysis (that is, there are exceptions, but trans memoirs seem often to write themselves into the memoir genre, rather than rewriting that genre).

At the same time, we find memory dealt with across other forms of art making-- the domestic, home movie of Gender Troublemakers: Transsexuals in the Gay Community, or memory in a Ching-In Chen zuihitsu, etc.

What might memoir, as a genre, offer you? Anything?

I think that is what I was trying to get at, a little, not a solid correlation, but perhaps a tendency, an associative drift or drags within any given generic repertoire. So sure, poetry or any work of erasure or fragmentation might stage or disclose traces, whether of "the body is the inscribed surface of events" or the mystic writing pad variety. Where is the common ground between Kate Eichorn's Fond and Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin? There are really different orders of traces. For instance,  "phrases in dispute," and the question of what might be a trace of a violence that conceals (or cancels out) the evidence of violence having taken place. But again if we think of ecriture feminine as that which is a writing of the incommensurable of the feminine and the libidinal with a syntax that precludes feminine subjectivity and embodiment, there is a doubling of the liminal with what’s excessive.

As for the essay, Stein famously asked us to experience writing as a way of holding time, and for her composition practices duration and extension. What would a Steinien attention to duration look like in terms of trans memoir? Her sense of composition does resonate for me with zuihitsu, in fact, although maybe there is the deployment of genre breaks internal to that form to mark changes in thought's tempo and topos within a long duration? I've thought more than once that a book like The Heart's Traffic looks like a novel from one perspective and like an essay from another.

I wonder about erasure as it features within the conventions that guide both the writing and reading of trans memoirs. Xanthra Phillipa and Mirha-Soleil Ross’Gender Troublemakers is a self portraiture, but certainly not memoir; more like kitchen table theory and a love letter and a call to accounts, each with different points of address, and in places its polemic and its satire are indistinguishable.

But I've always felt that trans memoir, even within its conventions, was a hybrid form, and some of this is from Prosser. But if you look carefully at the memoirs and at bildungsroman like the Well of Loneliness or Stone Butch Blues, you can see within those forms, others: the medical case study with its sexological introduction, the social protest novel, as well as elements of the how to guide and the erotic reverie in the stylized narrations of self discovery, etc. 

That said, I look forward to memoirs that look nothing like what I've read so far.

Lastly, could you speak a bit about the differences between writing and publishing in, say, 2002, when Wanting in Arabic came out, and writing now? What have the efforts and shifts in trans representation, in focused trans publishing, in trans scholarship meant for you, putting words on the page?

In 2002 there wasn’t a broader trans literary context that I was aware of, but in Toronto there was a community context, thanks to zines like gendertrash and the Counting Past 2 film festival, which had in previous years brought to town writers like Aiyyana Maracle, Viviane Namaste and Max Valerio. Xanthra Mackay, who edited and published gendertrash, and Mirha-Soleil Ross, who curated the festival, were also both writers, performers and film makers, and very actively thinking about the politics of trans representation. Counting Past 2 included a performance cabaret, and panels on transsexual cultural production, and transsexuality in cross cultural contexts, and Wanting in Arabic was launched as part of CP2 in 2002. South of the border, kari edwards had two books out that year, and had published post/(pink) back in 2000, but I didn’t know of her work until she invited me to submit something to Transgender Tapestry a couple of years later.

Anyway I had been unsuccessfully trying to place my poetry manuscript  for several years before approaching TSAR in 2001. They specialized in diasporic and postcolonial literatures, and had recently started publishing queer of colour work and that along with Counting Past 2, and the left, were my contexts. There were early and generous reviews of the book by queer writers like Margaret Christakos, Rachel Zolf and RM Vaughan.

The launch for Wanting in Arabic was organized by Anju Gogia and May Lui at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, which was an important site of qtpoc feminist organizing at that time. As was the feminist literary periodical, Fireweed, which had a trans guest collective in to edit a special issue called “Trans/ Scribes: Writing from Trans Communities” in 2000—that was one of my first times being published by other trans people. There was also Jason Barsic’s zine, Willyboy, out of Portland, which Xanthra and I had work in and which Mirha organized a virtual launch for in 98 or 99….

Of course since that time, or rather since around 2007, we’ve seen countless trans special issues of journals, the rise of an academic subfield, trans owned presses and literary journals, anthologies, novels, short story and poetry collections, as well as blogs, reviews, panels and conferences on the subject of trans literature. There is a much larger discourse, and there is a lot more opportunity to be in conversation with other writers who want to think about as well as make trans literature. In many many ways that has been wonderful, making our thinking and writing more complex, more attentive to differences among us, and to the great variety of possible literatures we might make. On the other hand, I do sometime think that this exciting proliferation of newness might inadvertently function to eclipse or erase what has come before it.

Lia Purpura on Imagination

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Rebecca McClanahan, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Well, everything’s changed, hasn’t it. At this very moment, I feel a sense of terrific urgency and a sharpening of alertness; I’m scouring, as never before, the worth, intention, purpose, and role of my work and my teaching. This is a necessary and constant task of course, but one that requires a new kind of attention to the forces bent on decimating the commonwealth. Today I’m going to speak as a writer who teaches and I’m going to talk about imagination, and the cultivating of it in the context of this historical moment, wherein language is being dangerously and concertedly macerated, and where the truth is being perverted, and for good measure, shredded. How to teach in such a climate?
     We are accustomed to calling up good content—the poem, story or essay as anti-toxin approach. This is important. More important than what to teach our students, though, may be how we teach them—specifically, how we communicate what they’re being trained for. I’m proposing that we consciously discuss with our students not just the value of Poetry or the Essay or Fiction, but that we discuss the values students are upholding by practicing as writers and readers. So this goes out to all of you who are teaching and working to articulate what you do in broader, more public ways. (I’m slanting towards undergrads but you can extrapolate.) Let’s be unabashed about the term “values” and haul it back from those forces that have profoundly narrowed its meaning, appropriated it, and politicized it. The values of art-making are among the most humane I know, and I want my students to understand exactly what it is they’re upholding and building and creating by being involved in art creation.
     In general, I make it a point to teach my students to live like writers, which includes teaching them practices that openly resist the forces of noncommital irony, unchecked consumerism, passive perception, and inherited assumptions about who’s stance and subjects “matter.”
     At the beginning of each semester, I ask them to assent to a practice for those 14 weeks—not in order to make professional writers out of them, but to confirm that there exist ways of being and habits of mind that will feed them for the rest of their lives in ways they can’t even imagine right now, and so they undestand that the act of creation is open to them, and is not some rarified realm for experts. I am direct about this and I make these claims openly: I say these practices will feed you for the rest of your lives in ways you can’t even imagine right now, and the act of creation is open to you. It is free, it is yours and it is powerful. So here are some of the practices I teach, and the values I associate with them and openly discuss with my students—3 points.


1. Keeping a Journal and The Problems of Perception

The practice of keeping a journal helps students recognize, take seriously, and make use of shades of perception. These back of the head thoughts, flashes of image and insight, unworded emotion are the first to be compromised by a “goal oriented” society—or currently, by a totalitarian leaning one. The culture at large generally devalues roaming and dreaming and conjuring. Much that isn’t quickly identified as potentially “useful” gets jettisoned. The first step is to teach how to recognize worthy inklings and then confirm that it takes work to keep these thought-realms alive. Keeping a writer’s journal shows how to protect a young, green idea from critical pruning too early on. I give explicit and daily assignments in how to perceive or what to think on, look at, look for, remember, and then how to notate quickly and unselfconsiously and how to keep it all organized in once spot. We read aloud from these assignments in class to show our different angles of entry, we listen for both exciting subjects and language moments, and I spin out for them how an image or perception might work itself into further complexity or depth—in other words, I make up stuff in front of them. I imagine ways in to a poem or essay—I “what if” my way through on the black board with them. I remind students that work spins out from the smallest moments. I confirm that pressure to set forth “big ideas” stifles and tanks the free imaginiation in search of idea.
     But in addition to imagining into their words, I talk about the ways that contemporary life makes perceiving and imagining really hard. I’ve always know this was important but an impromptu moment last semester illustrated this very clearly. There was an amusing, triggering event for this but I won’t go into it here….I asked my class to put their phones on the desk and empty their pockets, and instructed them to go outside and walk, look, just notice stuff, pay attention for 20 minutes, by themselves, without stopping to talk to anyone, then come back to class. What they had to say was pretty shocking. One woman said walking over dry leaves startled her terribly because she always had earbuds in and was totally unaccustomed to other sounds. Another said it was so unexpectedly bright out because she was looking up and not down at her phone; similarly another said she couldn’t even get herself into an upright position because she was usually bent over texting which she realized looked in others like the “posture of depression”. One guy reported a “quiet screaming in his head” because “I always mange to distract my mind with music because I’m too afraid to hear my own thoughts”. One said she felt as she hadn’t in years, like a child, and “she remembered how green the grass was and everything felt new upon inspection.” Yet another said “I was suddenly able to look at things around me and see how small I was in this world which I know should be terrifying but for me was calming. I enjoyed the peace so much that I’m actually craving it now as I’m talking about it.” And “I felt completely naked without my phone but it was an unexpected great feeling to find out I had my thoughts to accompany me.”
     So, while we as teachers and writers know we’re up against the forces of techno-distraction in many forms, I want to show my students how those forces actually manifest, and it’s a whole lot more potent if they themselves see how distraction and mediation manifest, than if you harp on them about it. (Show them exactly what they’re up against and exactly how to notice and counter that.)


2. How to Think About Time in Revision and Reading

I've talked about teaching students how to perceive, and how to recognize the impediments to perceiving. Now, about how to work with Art time. Art-making reframes time in profound ways. Art comes into being over a kind of time that’s mighty different than the urgencies students are accustomed to, and have to adapt themselves to (production, efficiency, evaluatives). I want them to understand revision as the practice of “working with time”. I lay out the different kinds of time they might encounter. There’s the rare gift piece that just descends whole, say in the shower—though I confirm that the daily practice of sitting down to it lays the ground for the gift’s arrival. I talk about the whittle and build methods of incorporating others’ comments. I have them write something on the first day and I hold it till the end of the semester and ask them to revisit it and what can happen when you let something sit for a long time—how you either lose total contact with it or it snaps quickly into place. I bring in 20 drafts of a totally failed piece of mine that just had to be let go. Or that got utterly rerouted. In other words, I want to make explicit for them the many things that can happen with time. Why is this important? This shows a way of imagining creation and collaboration which runs contrary to a reliance on singular, immediate fixes. You might also use this sort of discussion to teach a wariness about any one singular solution, any one claiming that he “alone has the power to fix our problems.” Similarly, as we know, poems, essays, stories need to be read very differently than other words on the page: repeatedly, slowly, for seepage. Not for informational gist or fact gathering. So many students sort of sheepishly admit “they had to read a thing 3 times before it really sank in”—I let them know this is exactly right according to Art values and art time and that art asks exactly this of you, and this kind of time is worthwhile and lets you be a slow grower, not a quick gulper. Take any opportunity available to point out occasions for depth over gist.


3. Workshop as a Way of Thinking and Being

Give explicit instructions for workshop that accord with the values of the free imagination and the drive to maintain that freedom for all. So you might say in your instructions that “the goal of a workshop is to see what a piece itself wants to be and help it grow into its best self. Not make the piece what you want it to be.” Once that language is posted, and persistent reminders laid in, it can be used and referred to by students and it becomes a ground of shared reasoning. Workshops are complicated - -so many “issues” roiling around. I’m sidelong addressing the “self-assigned gatekeeper issue,” those students bent on adjudicating what’s “proper art” tonally and subject wise—and this is done either overtly or it’s unwittingly coded and maintained by the consent of a majority aesthetic. You can read in depth about one form of this in Claudia Rankine’s profound article in last fall’s AWP Chronicle “In Our Way: Racism in Creative Writing." Some of my language directions include not using the phrase “I want” as in “I want the father here to do x or y”or “I want more of...”—not only is this the language of unfettered//grabby consumerism, a kind of personal pan pizza approach, but it’s language that short changes critical thought. It’s really not about what you want (and who are you anyway?) There are things other than “wanting” at stake here. I say. We teach forms of imaginative entering –empathy—by way of the very language and stances and roles we ask students to use or avoid—but these need to be well defined and our reasoning behind them made clear. So yes, I know “I want” is shorthand, but again I’m emphasizing the issue of time, and the importance of confirming how long it takes to fully articulate thought on behalf of the work.


Conclusion

I mean to encourage you to articulate the values at the heart of the practices you’re already likely teaching and present those values as central to the health of imaginative behavior. I hope to give my students a language for this subtler register of perception, and confirm what they already suspect: that those realms and registers, the ones that come on hazy and grow slowly are not only worthwhile, but are in fact where the deepest roots of civically important values like empathy, curiosity, tenacity, surprise, justice, historical contextualizing, and so on, are planted. And it’s the realm where spirit lives, and where the ineffable finds its body. Though students may have a sense of why their work matters to them, I’m trying to help them sustain a sense of the practice of art as a way to uphold a humane, creative society—one that we are all in danger of losing if we do not actively tend to its best and most powerful features.

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Lia Purpura is the author of 8 collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her awards include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and four Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD and is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. It Shouldn’t Have been Beautiful, her new collection of poems, has recently been published by Viking/Penguin.

Rebecca McClanahan: The Essay as a Warm and Shifting Presence

(This essay, like the others published this week, was originally presented as part of the AWP 2017 panel “Imagining the Essay” with Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, and Lauret Savoy.) 

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Several years ago, during an AWP panel similar to this, I was sitting in the audience, and as the panelists began their talks about forgotten essayists, I caught in my peripheral vision a sudden movement, and something animal moved in me, for being at the time a NY apartment dweller, I was accustomed to that form of furtive skittering. Some of you were there, too, and know where this is heading, so I’ll cut to the chase: When in the course of human events a mouse appears, all bets are off. For mice are all about movement, digression being their foremost power. They live and breathe their grammar of prepositions, all those outs and ins. And this particular mouse—Mus Musculus, as I would later name him—was something to behold. His digressions included among the boots, between the aisles, along the extension cord, beneath the tablecloth spread for our panelists’ modesty, and now here he was skittering across the room and onto the partition, lifting his head in a literary pause as if to acknowledge his audience, and then he was out of sight.
     Later, as I thought back on the event, Cynthia Ozick’s essay came to mind—“She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” which meanders through quotations and arguments and suppositions, coming to rest on this: the essay is not an abstraction; “She is too fluid, too elusive, to be a category.” She has contours, a body, is “a presence in the doorway.”
     Which brought me back to Mus Musculus. A warm body, yes, and a presence—in the doorway and elsewhere—but beyond that, an active, moving presence. He was, the more I thought about it, the Essay Mouse. For one of the primary elements of the imaginative essay is its movement. Ozick describes this as “the movement of a free mind at play.” Phillip Lopate notes the movement of the personal essay as “wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of a matter.” And Deborah Tall and John D'Agata, in their editors’ notes in Seneca Review, write, of the lyric essay, “It elucidates through the dance of its own delving.”
     Drawing on these ideas, I began to examine some of my favorite essays not for the elegance and surprise of their language or for the voiceprint rising from the page—the two characteristics that usually seduce me as a reader—but rather for the moves the writers make.
     I started with short essays, like Barbara Hurd’s “Moon Snail,” which moves swiftly from its title, to an epigraph from Aristotle, to her first sentence—three words that begin an argument with Aristotle—followed by an “if” supposition, and then a description of a shell. And we’re only into the third sentence. As with most essays, as Alfred Kazin once observed, “… it is not the thought that counts but the experience we get of the writer’s thought.” And reading an essay rooted in imagination, we sometimes hang on for dear life because we are on a moving track. The more essays I studied, the more I saw, until my list of moves grew to more than seventy, including sidewinding, colliding, weaving, reversing, echoing, shifting tense, shifting point of view, employing negative space, as well as numerous camera and editing moves—flip image, splice, stop action, split screen, zoom in for closeup, and on and on.
     One of the most gear-shifting, wide-ranging essays was Reg Saner’s “Pliny and the Mountain Mouse,” which (speaking of the essay as a warm body) opens from the point of view of a marmot, who after months of hibernation wakes in what we now know as Colorado, though it is not yet named Colorado, for it is August 24, AD 79, and, as Saner moves on to say, “You and I aren’t here yet.” In this essay, Saner not only inhabits other minds than his own and moves backward in time, way back, he also imagines his way across wide expanses, sometimes straddling two continents at once, thus employing what I think of as the classic “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” move. We’re now seven thousand miles to the east, in Herculaneum, with science writer Pliny the Elder, who is sweating over his voluminous Natural History to insert facts about marmots. Then Saner moves on to the eruption of Vesuvius, which results in the death of the Elder, and then (here comes that wonderful “meanwhile” again) it is “evening in another country,” and we are back with the marmot, but in our own time. For, as Saner writes, “We can be here now. It’s our turn—to be, and be curious.” Finally, the “I” of the essay enters, an “I” who has seen hundreds of marmots, and, recalling one particular marmot, remarks that “to remember what sheer courage looks like, my mind’s eye often invokes him.”
     The mind’s eye, of course, is the eye of imagination. For some essayists, the eye of imagination does not leap like Saner’s across expanses of time and space but rather looks inward, finding the rocky, constantly changing terrain of the mind more than sufficient landscape to traverse. This kind of essayist might appear at first glance to be single-minded, but upon closer reading is shown to contain any number of multiple identities, including past and imagined selves as well as the present-tense self, a self that changes even as the words appear on the page. I’m reminded of Lewis Thomas’s “My Magical Metronome,” an ode to his pacemaker. At one point, he admits that in the past, writing as a physician, he had been critical of such technologies. Now, as the patient, he writes, “And here I am, enjoying precisely this sort of technology, eating my words.”
     Imaginative essayists are constantly eating their words, like Pac-Man ingesting dots so he can move to the next level, even while the ghosts pursue him. Reading their work, we can witness this process on the page; we can witness them eating their words. For they not only digress, they retract, reconsider, go forward one step, backward two, take another forward step, sidestep, and reconsider, because the act of writing moves that self more deeply into its most deeply divided thought. While in real life—whatever that is—we are often instructed, “No ifs, ands, or buts,” in an essay of imagination, these conjunctions are sometimes the main characters, and should be invited in as often as possible, like guests who disagree with our opinions. Here’s Montaigne in “On the Art of Conversation”: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move toward the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me.”
     Let’s take Montaigne’s idea a step further and imagine that “the man” (or woman) “who contradicts me” is myself. The first time I read C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, decades ago, I didn’t notice that he was doing exactly that. At the time, I was too hungry for answers. Or, if not answers, at least consolation. Wisdom. Guidance. A pathway through the forest of grief I was lost in. If you know the book, which I consider an extended essay, you know that I got more than I bargained for. Forget comfort and consolation. This writer is on fire, arguing with his culture, his God, established notions of grief, and, most startlingly, with himself, writing his way through the grief of losing his wife, yet refusing to solve the dilemma. “I will not, if I can help it,” he writes, “shin up either the feathery or the prickly tree. Two widely different convictions press more and more on my mind.” Paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, Lewis employs ifs, ands, and buts freely, contradicting himself, eating his words. Here are three brief examples:

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me . . . I mean my own body. 

What does it matter how I remember her or whether I remember her at all? None of these alternatives will either ease or aggravate her past anguish. Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past?

I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness . . .The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her. An admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again;

It is a commonplace that “essay” is rooted in “attempt” or “try,” as in trying an experiment. But let’s enlarge and re-imagine “to try” to include “to put something on trial,” to argue both sides of the case. Because sometimes an essayist argues both sides of the case. She is both defender and prosecutor. She is, literally, beside herself.  Not out of her mind, but rather out of her single mind, making room as she writes for two or more aspects of herself to exist in the same moment on the page. She begins writing and finds that, say, the mother inside her is arguing with the daughter. The doctor with the patient. The ex-Catholic with the Buddhist. Through the process of imagining, of allowing—no, encouraging—collisions, she creates her own personal call-and-response choir. Turns out Ozick was right, or partly right. The movement of the essay is the movement of a free mind at play, yes, but is also the movement of a free mind conversing with all the other free minds living beside, and above, and beneath it.
     Which leads me to imagine that the most important questions an essayist can ask herself are, “At what place am I most deeply divided? Where am I of two minds? Or three, or four? And how can I bring those minds into the essay?” As Whitman suggests, we contain multitudes. Why not put them together and let them talk (or sing) it out?

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Rebecca McClanahan has published ten books of nonfiction, essays, poetry, and writing instruction, most recently The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change and a new edition of Word Painting: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, and numerous journals and anthologies. McClanahan has received the Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Glasgow Award in nonfiction for her suite of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, and literary fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop.