BAE 2012 Read by Thomas Mira y Lopez

My first familiarity with David Brooks, the guest editor of Best American Essays’ 2012 Edition, came not through The New York Times, where he is an op-ed columnist, or NPR’s All Things Considered, where he’s a frequent analyst, but through the blog Gawker, where David Brooks is known, in one of the site’s kinder epithets, as “the sad but harmless sweater-wearing guy who likes to give your kids advice gleaned from inspirational office posters.”

I love reading the BAE series; each year’s edition sits wrapped under my Christmas tree, each essay within, its own nested gift. But I also love reading Gawker. The site brews my cynicism and outrage (the instant coffees of emotions) and inspires my inclinations towards social activism, while allowing me to remain entirely passive and procrastinatory. It seduces me and so this is my problem: Gawker really, really doesn’t like David Brooks. And so I’ve found, neither do I.

Let's backtrack a minute. If you’re familiar with the site, you know there are a great many things Gawker loves to dislike—Tao Lin, Roger Goodell, reddit, journalistic standards—and Brooks is only part of a vast and varied constellation. And if you’re someone who agrees with the notion that reading and writing theoretically are empathic, expansive exercises in which a mind reaches out and tries to mold itself to another’s, then you also know that Gawker usually provides the reverse experience. So the specifics of why Brooks provokes the website’s ire (recent titles: “What is this David Brooks Column About?” and “It is Shocking that David Brooks Stays Employed as a Writer Somehow”) seem beside the point. But it also seems worth noting that the attributes on which the website most frequently wants to skewer Brooks—that he’s a bit of a gasbag who populates his writing with truisms and frames his social science with off-the-cuff stories instead of actual data—are the very qualities which we praise the essayist for possessing: the anecdotal, the digressive, the carefree lack of expertise.

This question of expertise—and how it manifests in the essay—runs throughout BAE 2012. In his nuanced foreword, Robert Atwan remarks on the rise of the expert in nonfiction, positing that the “centuries-old relationship of writer to topic [has] reversed itself, with the writer now becoming subservient to the topic.” “The modern essayist,” he continues, is “obligated to include findings and research from the latest journals of psychology and psychoanalysis, along with interview quotations from mental health professionals.”

In short, Atwan—an expert evaluating his expertise—proposes that modern essayists are beholden to their subjects in a new way, perhaps because the essayist has become conflated with the journalist or because changes in communication and technology mean it’s easier these days to get a hold of a mental health professional for a question or two.

These journalistic requirements, Atwan suggests, subsequently constrict the literary essayist’s freedom of movement. If a premium’s placed on expertise, it follows that one’s expertise might turn to oneself. Hence the rise of memoir. Yet “the personal narrative…too often invites authors to embellish their life story so that it sounds more novelistic and dramatic than it acutally is.” The downside of the staunchly personal is that, through staging a narrative, it risks losing “the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods” that’s an “essential characteristic of the essay” and its “qualifications to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature.”

In his introduction, Brooks too seems to favor the armchair’s knowledge over the specialist’s. He praises the 19^th century British essayist Walter Bagehot for his ability to expound “on everything from Gibbons to Islam to banking procedures” and to “summarize entire policy disputes in one sentence.” He celebrates Evelyn Waugh for a droll essay in which he “bluff[s] [his] way through a dinner conversation filled with poseurs.” And in his analysis of the halcyon years of the mid-20th century American essay, Brooks notes “the best essays…had lost the pomposity while retaining some grandeur and scope. They were rigorous without being narrow and academic. They were polemical without being partisan. They were countercultural without being sloppy. They were reckless but also learned.” Try aligning that—“countercultural without being sloppy”—with Gawker’s content, and you can score a point for Brooks.

Instead of expertise, we have expedience. The bumblebee alights on many flowers instead of gorging itself on just one. But by praising an essay’s ability to summarize policy disputes in a single sentence or its bons mots on faking your way through cocktail hour, I suspect Brooks is providing us with the stuffy essayist’s version of clickbait. What then is he sacrificing on the altar of practicality? In making his selections, he writes: “I tried to pick ones with new or daring ideas that will alter how you look at the world. I tried, in short, to pick ones that will be useful to you. That, I’m afraid, is a middlebrow activity. But I plead guilty. I want to be improved by things I read.” Don’t tell Eric LeMay, but score another point against Gawker.

What kind of collection then does blending “grandeur and scope” with a wide-ranging “middlebrow” and a dash of “new and daring ideas” produce?

In short, a contradictory but often exemplary one. The year’s contributors cover a great degree of topics, yet seem pooled from a narrow set. Given the reticence towards expertise, it’s surprising to find that at least three essays in the collection are written, arguably, by specialists in their field. Of the twenty-four essays in the book, eight of their original publications start with the same first three syllables: The New York. And that eight is two more than the count of women featured in the book. The essays’ subjects are also mostly male: a number of profiles remember Steve Jobs, David Foster Wallace, a rural Coloradan pharmacist named Dr. Don, Edward Hopper, and Charles Newman, the founding editor of TriQuarterly, so beautiful a masculine specimen that his indiscretions went overlooked. Emerson ghosts through the issue as well, periodically invoked as either a scourge or a balm (Brooks finds him “pseudo-macho”).

The two essays that conclude the edition—Jose Antonio Vargas’ Outlaw and Wesley Yang’s Paper Tigers—open up issues of diversity and broadens the world of the anthology to some of that grandeur and scope Brooks touts. But one should note that these questions take place in the same currency—journalism and innovative entrepreneurship centered in New York City and Washington D.C.—that’s been foregrounded throughout the selections. When Brooks mentions “new and daring ideas at how you look at the world,” we might do well to reexamine if he actually means the whole world. One begins to wonder if for his “new and daring ideas” to be labeled as such, they must first be accepted into a societal framework accessible to “you” the “middlebrow” reader.

In his introduction, Brooks describes the golden age of the essay: “Back in those days, you couldn’t be an educated person unless you knew what they were reading in London, Paris, and Berlin. It was harder to communicate across oceans, but taste was less parochial than it is now.” I have zero idea whether taste was more or less parochial then than now, but I’d say that if anything contributes to contemporary parochiality, it’s a hook suggesting the world is more expansive when it might be known via the reading habits of Western Europe’s three best known capitals.

Personal or not, the essays in the 2012 edition that resonated with me the most were ones that showed a mind forced to adapt to a new world and thus reveal or conceal its desires—Mark Doty’s “Insatiable” (did you know Bram Stoker based Dracula on Walt Whitman?), Sandra Tsing Loh’s “The Bitch is Back” (an essay on menopause, in which the author lays out the irreconcilable difficulties that accompany the time period, only to stage a gloriously ‘fuck-it’ ending: “In the end, the real wisdom of menopause may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is. And if what works is black cohosh tea with a vodka chaser…then bottoms up!”), and (I write this begrudgingly) Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away” (where the author wrestles with his late friend Foster Wallace’s legacy and where he speculates, using Robinson Crusoe as backdrop, that if the self once turned itself into an island, now that island maps itself onto the world). These do not so much provide new and daring ideas as they provide interesting and shifting minds, and that perhaps is always new and daring.

They also seemed, refreshingly, a bit uneasy with the idea of the essayist expounding from his or her armchair. These were essays that went out into the world, rather than ask that the world come to them (Franzen actually flies to the Pacific island from which Robinson Crusoe took its inspiration; one is a little saddened that he too was not marooned). Doty writes: “How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?” Hear, hear. I love the idea of the essayist as friend and conversationalist dispensing anecdotal knowledge, and I love the essayist writing for a we, because after all a you is just trying to reach an I and we’re in this together. But sometimes I wonder what friendly conversationalists might hide. For the world also contains false friends and I grow suspicious of essays that pat me paternally on the shoulders and tell me they know what’s good for me. Maybe, to bounce off Doty, we need a different kind of touch. 

Brooks curates a collection that delivers its ideas through mostly one form—occasionally dense, but precise, stately prose, referencing a variety of Western thinkers, that moves along at least one but never more than three narratives in linear progression—and that’s fine if you want what he believes is a “grandeur and scope” of topics, but less so if you push for a “grandeur and scope” of aesthetics. Many of the essays in here are wonderful. But I wonder if in assigning practicality to a book, it becomes impractical in another regard. I wonder if in trumping up the social importance of what the author’s writing about, one in turn diminishes the full range of style, syntax, and language that gives form to Atwan's "ever-shifting processes of our minds." Here's Doty again: “When you have a lot of sex, sex becomes increasingly less narrative.” If that’s true, why can’t it also be the case for when we have a lot of essays? I wonder if in pursuing the goal that we should be improved by what we read, Brooks has paradoxically limited the ways in which that can happen.

But who knows? Maybe I’m just the sad but harmless sweater wearing guy who gives your kids advice gleaned from inspirational office posters. Maybe (Franzen might say) Gawker's ruined me: I just can’t think for myself while hunched over my laptop, reading a glorified tabloid. Either way, I'll say this: I’m no expert.

…

Thomas Mira y Lopez is from New York. He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University. He’s at work on a book about resting places, cemeteries, and burial grounds.

Best American Essays 2005 read by Michael Martone: A Bread Crumb Memoir

1979

“What’s an ‘MLA?’” I asked. The person I was asking was William Baer, a graduate student poet in The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. He stood in my office doorway. I was nearing the end of the first semester of my year as a lecturer there. Bill, who was older than I though a year behind me in the program, had asked me, “Going to the MLA?” In 2013, Bill retired from the Creative Writing Department of the University of Evansville where he had taught for nearly 25 years. “The MLA,” he said, “is where you go to interview for creative writing jobs.” I did not know then what an MLA was. I had no idea, then, that there was a way to get a job teaching creative writing. My teachers at The Writing Seminars had not mentioned it. The one piece of vocational advice had been from John Barth who suggested I teach remedial English as he had done when starting out at Penn State. In the fall of 1979, I hadn’t given the future much thought at all, had barely thought of 1980. Grammar, I thought, would be the end of the road.

*

 

2001

The airliner is nearly empty. I am flying from Alabama to Indianapolis for this year’s Great Lakes Bookseller’s Association meeting on one of the first flights once they resumed after the attacks a week before. There must be four of us scattered around the main cabin. The grim attendants sit down with us, chat about anything but. We all had been searched—cars, luggage, self—three or four times before boarding. The only joke had been how the joke was on those not flying as this flight would be safest trip ever now that… The attendance at the conference would be down, everyone expected. The demographics already skewed by the disappearance of independent bookstores, the consolidations of the chains and distributors, Amazon. There were many more vendors now—exhibitors and authors with new books—than curious customers. I had a new book to peddle, The Blue Guide to Indiana, a fake travel guide, the joke being that no one, not even folks from Indiana, toured the state. Jonathan Franzen was there too. The Corrections had just been released. We sat together with a dozen other authors making a show of it in the signing room, signing copies of our books for the few buyers that did appear for the promotion but mainly for each other. The hit of the conference however was Lynn Sherr’s America the Beautiful, about the song. Returning home, I waited at the hastily constructed checkpoints at the airport while the new security agents looked through all my signed complimentary books.

*

 

1992

I am having my first and only coffee ever—it is an espresso—at an outdoor café in Asheville, North Carolina, with Angela Barrett. My heart instantly chatters within its chassis behind the breastbone. She is amused and attends fully to the data emerging from this experimental trial. She is more of a scientist than a writer though we are here in town to teach writing not science at Warren Wilson College’s low residency MFA program. We had been wondering how a writer, me, had survived this long without the elixir of coffee. What was a writer anyway? The greater culture seemed to be moving to clearly define the role through certification, an MFA degree and course of study, though neither one of us had the papers our students would soon possess. As I idle and thrum at high, pidgins circle the obelisk, dive bomb the crumbs scattered on the adjoining plaza. We conclude that we are the last or maybe the first of an old order or a new phylum, the schooled writer, the writing school. We contemplate visiting the nearby Riverside Cemetery and searching for the grave of the writer O. Henry, his stone we hear covered with pennies. But I am wound so tight I am unable to move.
 

*

1986

I gave up tenure at Iowa State and moved to Boston to teach undergraduate creative writing at Harvard for five years. The position is not tenure-track, which means I will travel through the next several years never really able to settle into Cambridge, walking dead. Theresa and I do strike up a friendship with David Rivard and his wife Michaela Sullivan, an in-house graphic designer for Houghton Mifflin. She shows us the new powerful Apple computer in her office and the tools onboard that allow her to create the covers and page layouts. She shows me the cover of a new annual series—Best American Essays—published under the Ticknor and Fields imprint in a boxed set with the established series of Best American Stories. She manipulates the mouse to fan an array of Pantone colors, saying that in subsequent years the publisher will run the spectrum.

*

1980

Though the Apple computer was invented in 1976, Apple the company goes public this year. The share price is $22.00. At the same time Steve Jobs is convinced, after seeing it first at Xerox, that a graphical user interface would be the design of all future computing. I am typing this now, in 2015, on a 2012 iMac running OS X 10.8.5 with graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M S12 MB. The machine creates the illusion on the screen in front of me that I am mechanically typing this “this” on a white, eight and a half by eleven piece of paper. I am still using the hobbled QWERTY keyboard designed purposely to slow my typing on the typewriter so as not to jam the keys.

*

1979

The bulletin boards of the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, bulletin boards of most campuses, are scalloped with neatly typed sheets of paper, the lower edge fringed with tear-away tongues printed with contact phone numbers, advertising typing. Theses, dissertations once accepted, are bound by the university and stored in the library. Their pages must be perfect. Correction fluids or tapes cannot be used, so if a mistake is found, it often means the retyping of the entire page and sometimes subsequent pages as the correction spills letters or words forward, confounding the previous spacing. I tell my students today about this arrangement, mention that I received my degree in one year or really in nine months of the two semesters, but really really in six months because the book of stories I wrote for my thesis had to be completed by February in time for it to be typed perfectly, its format reviewed and accepted by the graduate school. I want to include pictures too—two color reproductions of postcards depicting Fort Wayne. Color xerography was brand new, and, I thought, lovely with its melted wax crayon colors. After much discussion, a special dispensation is granted and the thesis was received with pictures.

*

1979

Elizabeth Spires, a poet in my class at Johns Hopkins, receives an IBM Correcting Selectric II for her birthday. The machine was and still is the paragon of electric typewriters and serves as the transition to the “word processor” and computer-based platforms of the future what with its binary programming and minute data storage that allows the machine to remember the mistake and type back over it with correction tape. I am using, and I still have, a Smith Corona typewriter to create the worksheets for my fiction seminar, the basket of keys (not the spinning ball element of the Selectric) striking the stencil of the mimeograph sheet hard enough to record its negative in wax on the reverse. There is always the razor blade to correct. Rolling the page out, separating the stencil from the waxed backing and shaving off the offending adhered type. Even then, I swear I could tell the difference of writing produced by one machine over that of another. The electric machines hum as you think. Their “touch” too is all different even as the arrangement of the letters remained the same.

*

1995

The day before pick-up in Syracuse, I poke through the discarded trash piled on the curb of the streets in my neighborhood. I find many Smith-Corona typewriter cases, portables mostly, but some standard desktops nestle in the grass. Smith-Corona’s last American factory in the Cortland suburb has just closed, the works shifting down to Mexico. I am using then a Macintosh LC with a page display I opted for instead of a new color horizontal screen. I have just hooked the machine up to the university’s electronic mail and have begun receiving messages and memos at home by means of a dial-up modem. I can only access the World Wide Web from a machine in my office at school. Every house in Syracuse, it seems, had a typewriter, and everyone seems, overnight, not to need them anymore. What to do with the old machines? Take them to the curb. Over time, I bring a few of the carcasses home with me. Walking the streets looking through the heaps for a new model, a different color, a better box, I see a few others scavenging. I tell myself the surplus would be for parts if nothing else, unable to image writing without a typewriter in the uncertain future.

*

1984

I return to Johns Hopkins in 1984. I visit the current seminar class, gave a reading. I ask my former teacher, John Barth, how things are going. In four short years the number of creative writing programs has grown from two dozen to over one hundred. I have been teaching at Iowa State University those four years, growing a graduate program, an MA, so as not to conflict with Iowa’s MFA program down the road. In the last four years, Iowa State has hired four new writers—Steve Pett, Jane Smiley, David Milofsky, and Mary Swander—adding to a staff of five already there. “It is more and more difficult to attract students,” Jack tells me. I ask him where they are going. “To Syracuse,” he says, “to work with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.”

*

1984

I live in Story County, Iowa, teaching at Iowa State University. Theresa Pappas and I start a small press, Story County Books and bring out our first edition, a one-story chapbook by Michael Wilkerson titled “Can This Story Be Saved?” We want to take advantage of this new technology, the Macintosh computer’s desktop publishing. We do not want to do something finely printed like Allen Kornblum’s Toothpaste Press over in Iowa City but discover what the new machine could do. It would be several years before I owned a Mac. There are only a few on campus. We rent one from at an early print store, that has several, on Lincoln Way across from the university.

*

1989

I start work on a book called Townships, an anthology of essays attempting to define the Midwest. I have this crazy idea that the geography of the American Midwest is characterized by the telltale checkerboard pattern of its landscape generated by the township grid. I ask twenty-five Midwestern writers to write an essay about the township—the 6x6 square mile jurisdiction Thomas Jefferson dreamed up to grid the entire country—in which the writer grew up. I had just read David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair, curious about the homage to John Barth and the story, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way. He was living in Boston too, and I ask him if he would like to contribute. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” his essay, comes with graphic depictions of the geometry of the subject—empty boxes, blacked in squares, and elongated rectangles. In the essay, he takes my abstract idea of very concrete grid and literally literalizes it.

*

2001

In Maine, we are playing Mafia. Jonathan Lethem leads us in this party game, teams of insiders and outsiders, the Mafia and the Innocents, and through sustained periods of deception and discussion. The teams are made up of writers and participants of the Stonecoast Writers Conference, an evening’s entertainment after the nightly reading. I met Jonathan the year before. He visited the University of Alabama to do a reading. Afterwards, we played Mafia. This was at Andy and Sydney Duncan’s house, writers, who had met Jonathan years before at an independent workshop in North Carolina, interested in transgressive forms, bending genre.

There is a great unease with the complicated communities the great sorting engine of the university tolerates. Writers, I think, think of themselves sometimes as individual agents, unique, original but at the same time long for inclusion, connection. Jonathan moves in circles that occasionally touch or intersect the interlocking rings of the university, the maturing genre of a writing program. In the game, there is “night” and “day.”

*

2000

I am invited to be a visiting professor at The Ohio State University. It is called a “sprint semester,” a week of classes on any subject and I choose “collage.” I choose collage, a non-narrative form, just to push back a bit against the bias of realistic narrative that has dominated prose workshops in the 20 years I have been teaching. John Gardner’s [1] The Art of Fiction, published in 1983 had been wired into workshops and emphasized transparency and unselfconscious storytelling. This aesthetic insists that a text not call attention to itself, that it create a sustained dream. Its conventions are clear and teachable as craft, and its message coincides with the rapid and vast expansion of writing programs. Ironically, the principle of transparency becomes enforced at the very moment that the machine writers use to compose their writing becomes expansive and expressive. Writers in workshops are encouraged to rig their powerful typesetting machines, now connected to the Internet, to produce finished copy that looks exactly like the product of an early 20th Century typewriter. E. J. Levy is in the class, composing prose from prompts of paint sample strips, photo booth photos, and other graphic interruptions. The time is ripe. The writers in that sprint semester class have all grown up with the computer, with cable TV and remote controls. They are comfortable with the lyric and the non-narrative, with comic books and video games.

*

2005

The Best American Essays of 2005 is an anniversary issue, the 20th, and the series editor, Robert Atwan, looks backward to the book’s inception in 1986. I consider my contribution, “Contributor’s Note,” the only time I have ever appeared, to be a fictive essay. I was surprised that it was considered. The piece, in the form of a contributor’s note, traces the biography of a “Michael Martone” and his life performing public readings of his own work or attending similar literary readings by others in the vast network of creative writing programs and conferences that have emerged in the preceding twenty years. As the piece of writing attempts to defamiliarize the author’s note, the whole volume makes me re-see the history of creative writing program culture. My whole life turns strange for me. In order for a life to have meaning, one must get outside of that life to see what matters in all the stuff that happened. The memoirist, I think, often draws a closed parenthesis, simulates a death, so that the time before can begin making a sense. Think my junior year abroad. Think my childhood. The book for me draws such a parenthesis. I can look back over the cultural shifts and aesthetic arguments I lived through and survived. The 2005 edition also balances on an edge of another era, marking, perhaps, the moment the essay was changing. In what way would the essay and its practitioners enter into an academic setting as the new discipline there—“creative nonfiction.” The inclusion of my “essay” makes me look back in another way. It was originally published in Flyway, a journal still published at Iowa State University and one I edited in the early 80’s when it was known as Poet & Critic. It was my first job right after graduate school. I inherited a format from an even earlier time. Poets who had pieces accepted for the magazine were given other poems also to be published there. They were then to write a round robin of critiques that would be printed on the pages facing the poems, a workshop in print. But even by 1980 this device had no novelty left in it, and almost every contributing poet had already done time in a workshop for real. I changed the format. I thought then, and think now, that 1980 marked the complete naturalization of “the workshop” for American poets. Fiction writers would not be that far behind. Twenty-five years later, I find the essays in this volume poised on a similar threshold of the schoolhouse door and the workshop seat at the very same moment that academic programs begin once more to entertain other forms of prose besides that of the narrative and the realistic.


[1]  John Gardner is diagnosed with cancer in December of 1977 and enters The Johns Hopkins Hospital where he remains for nearly two months. His future wife, Liz Rosenberg, is a student in John Barth’s Seminar. Barth invites the convalescing Gardner to visit his class and there, before Barth’s students, Gardner insists that the experiments of the past twenty years were “morally” wrong and that writers should now embrace and promote a non-ironic realistic narrative. Present that day were writers Fredrick Barthelme, Mary Robison, and Moira Crone who soon afterward began teaching in programs at Southern Mississippi, Houston, and Louisiana State and writing in a raw minimalist and realistic style, turning away from the formalistic and fabulistic experiments of the 60s and 70s.

*

Michael Martone's new books are Winesburg, Indiana, and Memoranda. He is the series editor for Break Away Books at Indiana University Press.

BAE 2008: Los Mejores Ensayos Americanos by Michele Morano

You’ll find number 51 Calle de Fernán Gonzalez between a shoe repair shop and a fishmonger who opens only in the morning. By noon he’ll have sold out of bass and trout and bacalao and will have rolled down the bright blue overhead door painted with a cartoon flounder. By the middle of the day, which in Madrid means 2 PM, the fish scent will have grown faint, overpowered by sautéed garlic and fried chorizo from the Asturian restaurant around the corner, and it’s this latter smell that will greet you on the fourth floor, after you’ve taken the narrow elevator and entered through the mahogany door and walked down a long hall into a sunflower-yellow living room. In that room, just after the midday meal, you’ll find a man and a woman each stretched out on a couch, not because it’s siesta time but because this is where they land whenever the baby goes down for a nap. There is no sitting in this living room, only reclining, only breathing in through the open French doors the aromas of a traditional meal and the sounds of people greeting each other on the street and the pull of a day so bright and lively, so ripe with possibilities that the woman and the man lie flattened by longing.

*

2008. Dark-grey cover with a light grey band at the top. A wrinkled spine and pen marks on every page. How is that possible, I wonder now. Who reads an anthology cover to cover?
     Albert Goldbarth must have made me laugh out loud. Early on there are puzzling comments – “really?” and “finally” and “hmmm” – but these give way to asterisks and then to one “ha!” after another, interrupted by a “very pleasing” and “oh my god!” “Everybody’s Nickname” contains two photographs, full-page, black-and-white reproductions of the covers of the pulp sci-fi novels Goldbarth loved as a teen, and it’s their existence, if not the images they contain, that stirs my memory. Some flicker of curiosity pulses at the bottom of my brain, drawing me to the final sentence, a fragment. “Whoever the ‘aliens’ were by then – and, of course, whoever ‘we’ were.” The back of my neck constricts, just below the hairline, and I feel I’ve been here before, with this same response to these same words. But is that true? Am I remembering reading them, remembering being moved, or am I simply moved anew in a familiar, pleasing way?

*

Evenings you’ll find them walking, the baby suspended in a front pack. He’s ready for bed at 7:00 PM, but at this hour the Spanish workday is just winding down. Dinnertime begins after 10 PM, and tomorrow won’t be tomorrow until daylight floods the streets near 9 AM. So they walk through the neighborhood, jiggling the baby to keep him awake, past the shops along Calle Narvaez, past the wine bar tucked into a narrow street a block off Retiro Park. They pause there, pretending to look at a menu posted in the window but really gazing at the stylish patrons in their slim pants and tailored jackets, people who drink and smoke cigarettes and have conversations punctuated with bursts of laughter, with belonging.
     Back in the apartment, after the final feeding and the bath and the lotion and powder, after stuffing the five-month-old sausage legs into cotton pajamas that zip to the chin, they dance. The baby loves Lori McKenna’s “Bible Song,” the up-tempo and slight twang of her crooning about the urge to flee a small-town world. The man holds the baby in one arm and the woman in the other and they sway, dipping their knees, the baby smiling as he looks from face to face. When they get to the verse about the cousin who killed himself, leaving two kids behind, tears fill the woman’s eyes. But she doesn’t stop singing and they don’t stop dancing and she thinks that this is what it means to be a family: anything can happen. The future has thin edges that, if handled the wrong way, can cut to the bone. 

*

“Salamanca” by Jamal Mahjoub, is a puzzle. “Where are we?” asks the shaky script beside the opening paragraph. It’s my handwriting, or a version of it anyway. Two pages later it notes a “return to opening moment” before a burst of laughter (ha!) beside the underlined phrase, “naked but for an enormous pair of sad gray underpants.”
     The title must have put me in mind then, as it does now, of a long-ago winter afternoon spent navigating up through the region of Extremadura in a tiny rental car. We both liked it when I drove and he rode shotgun, hands in his coat pockets, enjoying the landscape. We made Salamanca by noon and walked through the cobblestone streets, not bothering with umbrellas in the damp breeze. The cathedral was busy with a crew setting up klieg lights and a camera dolly, and someone said it was a film about Columbus starring Gerard Depardieu. The man I was with commented on how slow and dull it was to shoot a movie. I loved that he knew about such things. I loved that we had woken that morning down the street from a Roman amphitheater and that now we were walking through a medieval university town, and that we’d sleep in my apartment in Oviedo that night, just thirty minutes from the north coast of Asturias.
     But “Salamanca,” the literary version, the lovely essay about history and displacement and a community of true-blue characters? How is it that I have no memory of reading it the first time?

*

Mornings you’ll find one of them wheeling the baby to a café while the other goes off to teach. The woman loves Mondays and Wednesdays best, which begin with a long walk through Retiro Park, to the Instituto on the east side. “What a commute,” she thinks each time, passing the rectangular lake beside which a trumpeter plays “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World.” The park is lush and green and mostly empty at that hour, except for young men in blue coveralls who sweep the paths, and she enjoys the feeling of being alone.
     The walk back is a different story. She wants to sit down at the outdoor café, linger over coffee with hot milk, have nowhere at all to be. She imagines a parallel life in which she did not become pregnant for the first time at forty-three, just after agreeing to lead her university’s fall study abroad program, in which she came to Madrid alone, as had been the plan. How would she have spent her days? Wandering, sight-seeing, traveling each weekend the way her students do? And yet, she isn’t lonely now, as she would surely have been in that other reality. The days are full. The baby will one day turn into a big boy.
     By the time she reaches the rose gardens, she feels equal parts excited to walk through the door, to see his fat cheeks broaden when she says hello, and full of dread. Having a baby is wonderful, she thinks, for about forty-five minutes each day. And not consecutive minutes at that.

*

In “Cracking Open,” Patricia Brieschke recounts the birth of her son, who entered the world atop a kitchen table, a scrawny baby with misshapen legs. This story comes back to me quickly because of the pain, the baby’s pain after each operation and through a period of traction so brutal that he cried constantly, even in his sleep, and the mother’s pain at the limited visiting hours, at not being able to hold or comfort the boy who doctors did not expect to live. But he did live. And recover. And learn to run.
     All of this is conjured from the marginal comments, as is the emotion I felt that first time, before I realized that Brieschke had lived in Chicago, that her son had spent months in the same hospital where my newborn briefly stayed. But here’s the part that never left: the delight of a new mother, just out of high school, riding a city bus with her chicken-like newborn zipped into her coat. The ease with which she became a mom.

*

Weekends you’ll find them milling about, unsure what to do with themselves. They had expected to explore, to strap the baby on and go. They’d been told that babies are portable, they’ll sleep anywhere (although in retrospect, it seems to have been mostly older men who said this, men who had traveled with wives who took care of the kids). But it isn’t true. Their baby won’t sleep at all in the stroller, and although he dozes in the front pack, he needs to be swaddled in his crib in order to rest fully. After a disastrous Sunday morning trip to the Rastro, Madrid’s overcrowded flea market, where the baby cried nonstop and the Spaniards frowned and cooed, they stick mostly to their neighborhood. This isn’t so bad during the week, when they trade shifts, including a few hours of teaching prep each afternoon, but on weekends time stretches in a menacing way.
     At least there’s news. John McCain and Sarah Palin, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The beginning of a recession in the U.S., and a worsening recession in Spain. At night, after the baby goes to bed, they open their laptops and read the headlines aloud. The world is crazy, they say, feeling crazy themselves.

*

What I remember most clearly is Atul Gawande’s “The Way We Age Now.” I remember his interview with a geriatrician who examined the feet of an eighty-five-year-old woman complaining of back pain, looking not for the source of the pain but for evidence that she might be at risk of falling. And a scene in which Gawande visits a former geriatrician in the retirement community where he lives. The man talks astutely about the changes in his own body, including his propensity to have food go down the wrong pipe because the aging spine tips the head forward. In a moment of quiet, Gawande hears people all over the dining room choking on their food, the antidote to which is to eat looking down.
     Remember that, I thought.
     And I absolutely remember the feeling this line provoked: “the average sixty-five-year-old can expect to live another nineteen years.” I was forty-four years old when I read that and doing the math every day. Forty more years, I thought, is not nearly enough.

*

In the present, days feel so long, so slow that the woman thinks they’ll never end. But the accordion of time folds those slow days into weeks and months that appear to have taken no time at all.
     One night you’ll find her rebelling against the schedule dictated by the baby’s needs, by his hunger, fatigue, desire for stimulation, and she'll continue to write past midnight. By 2AM she’ll have reached a point of diminishing returns, the sentences fat and lazy, the ideas unfocused. She turns to reading instead. To the lifeline of creative nonfiction, of the essay, of writers offering what Scott Russell Sanders calls “a record of the mind at work and play.”
     3AM passes, 4AM, and somewhere in this new life of rocking and wiping and the utter depletion of being responsible for another being day and night without end, she begins to recognize herself. She gets up every hour or so to open the French doors and inhale the chilly, sweet air and listen to the voices rising up from the restaurant below, and then she returns to the book as if her life depends on it. When the baby cries at 5:20AM, she goes to him, happy for the break, happy for his warm body and the power of his sucking mouth and his fat thighs that she kisses again and again.

*

“Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.” On and on, twenty-five columns across and twenty-three lines down. It made me feel a little sick, all that focus on the self, even though the essay, “Solipsism” by Ander Monson, is really about typography, about beauty and design, about the nonlinear way that memory and experience collaborate. The essay is set sideways in the book to accommodate its digital format, exhilarating hyperlink bubbles poking at the text. I marvel at the brilliance, even as I remember feeling choked by the opening, as if my subconscious had been given voice and might never shut up.
     A faded yellow post-it marks that page.
     Seven years later, I’m reading through the book, appreciating the heartbreaking hilarity of David Sedaris, the raw complexity of Lauren Slater. Ariel Levy trying to find the right dress for her lesbian wedding ceremony, conducted before gay marriage was legal in the United States. Louis Menand playfully exploring quotable (and often wildly inaccurate) quotes. But I can’t focus entirely on the essays because of the other voice calling out. Check marks, a scratchy “Great similes” in Anthony Lane’s “Candid Camera,” a statement of the obvious—“Not his”—beside an underlined sentence in Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”
     “Remember,” she urges.

*

One afternoon in mid-October you’ll find the woman calling the man with whom she traveled to Salamanca. It’s her afternoon with the baby, whose nap goes long, so she opens her computer and uses Skype to call his cell phone. They’ve talked every month or two for more than fifteen years now, the most recent conversation on her birthday last month. Of all her friends, all of them excited about this new phase of late-life parenting, he has been the most exuberant. Two days after the baby came home from the hospital, he called to ask, “What’s it like? What’s hard? What’s your favorite part so far?”
     Now, he sounds morose. John McCain is sure to win, he says, and then what? He’s lost a lot of money in the stock market crash, so much he’ll have to rethink the future. She listens and commiserates and eventually changes the subject, telling him what failed parents she and the man are in Spain, how the babies here look like little dolls, dressed in pink or blue and sleeping peacefully in Cadillac strollers, while her baby wears hand-me-down cargo pants and bumps along in a travel stroller. “He looks like a skateboard punk,” she groans, trying to make him laugh.
     And he does laugh, weakly, just as the baby wakes up.
     A few days later, unable to get the sound of his voice out of her mind, its sharp edges and unsettling lows, she calls again, but the phone has been disconnected. She fears the worst, as she always has.
     On election night, the man she lives with, the man who is solid and steady and never causes her to worry, stays up until 3AM watching the coverage. At 5AM, she gets up and holds the baby on her lap in front of the computer, live-streaming President-Elect Obama’s acceptance speech from Grant Park, six miles from their home. “Look,” she tells the baby, tears streaming down her face. “Look at what has happened for you, my sweet boy.”
     Later she will think of these months in Madrid as very happy and, at the same time, very sad, a period when the future was daunting and, at the same time, filled with hope. In the face of all that contradiction, what else could she have done but continue to call that disconnected number, continue to rock and wipe and walk and dance, to wait and withstand, to take notes and to read, above all to read, as if every word on every page were a tiny yawp of prayer.

*

Michele Morano is the author of Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, and her essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Best American Essays 2006. She directs the MA in Writing and Publishing program at DePaul University in Chicago.

BAE 1988 as read by Amy Leach

Recently I learned that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are no longer cool. Excoriated for being solitary, for not thinking in tandem, for not riding on the bicycle built for a thousand, Ralph and Henry have been blacklisted by the Coalition of Cool. How distressed are they by the censure? Probably not very; I haven’t noticed people getting more interested in status after they die, and these two were reckless and refractory to begin with. Burros rarely compromise and the ghosts of burros, never.

For fun, here’s a little solidarity with the solitaries, with Emerson and Thoreau who still dazzle me to smithereens, and with Charles Simic, in his essay “Reading Philosophy at Night,” insisting on the authority of his own experience: “All my experiences make a kind of untaught ontology which precedes all my readings.” I like to read about the solitary reader reading about solitary readers—“My own solitude doubled, tripled…” I like to read about the man bedeviled not by status but by memory—why can he remember pebbles but not faces?—and by dreams—why can he dream his old house but cannot dream his grandmother looking out of the window?—bedeviled by Wittgenstein and bedeviled by why, Parmenides’ why, Simic’s why, my why: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Best or not best, American or not American, essay or not essay, 1988 or 1841—I don’t really care, I just want to read someone like Simic who dreams, reads, thinks, remembers, and speaks for himself, especially if that self is refractory and drawn to the impossible.

*

Amy Leach is the author of Things That Are. Her work has been published in A Public Space, Tin House, Orion, the Los Angeles Review, and many others. She has been recognized with the Whiting Writers’ Award, Best American Essays selections, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She plays bluegrass, teaches English, and lives in Montana. 

BAE 1987 as read by Ned Stuckey-French

In 1987, Ronald Reagan was President, Raymond Carver was still alive, “Walk Like an Egyptian” was the number one song, and Elizabeth and I had been married for a year. Like our marriage, the Best American Essays series was in its second year. At the time it wasn’t clear either project would last. So far so good.

BAE was something essay lovers had been wanting for a long time. In 1976, Edward Hoagland remarked, “it’s strange that though two fine anthologies [Best American Short Stories and the O’Henry Prize Stories] remain that publish the year’s best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays.” Ten years later Houghton Mifflin rolled the dice and launched BAE, publishing it as a Ticknor & Fields book. The imprint dated from the early 19th century. It was the house that published Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry David Thoreau, essayists who, as one wag put it, parted their names in the middle. Ticknor & Fields also published Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as The Atlantic Monthly and North American Review—print-heavy, Brahmin literary magazines that are America’s oldest.

James Fields, the publisher of Ticknor and Fields, and his wife Annie were scions of the Boston literary scene. As long ago as 1936, Willa Cather, in an essay titled “148 Charles Street,” had reminisced about pre-World War I visits she’d made to the Beacon Hill home of the now-widowed Annie, who lived there in a Boston marriage with Sarah Orne Jewett. She recalled stories Annie told her about dinners with Henry James and visits by the Brownings. Visiting the house again in 1936, Cather remarked wistfully that “the lighting has changed, and the guests seem hundreds of years away from us.” When BAE was launched in 1986 as a Ticknor & Fields book, there was an air of lavender still hanging about the essay. Perhaps this is why, in his preface the next year, Atwan felt compelled to address the death of the essay, arguing that what had died was not the essay, but a particular kind of essay:

The personal essay for some time has been thought of as a dead form, permanently flattened by the one-two punch of news journalism and New Journalism. Yet what died was only the old-fashioned familiar essay, that genteel and whimsical item—whose writers always sounded vaguely British—which used to be the staple of highbrow magazines and sleepy freshman English courses.

To our ears even Atwan’s invocation of New Journalism sounds antique, and given what the Digital Revolution has done to “news journalism,” that reference also rings differently than it did in 1987.

When Carl Klaus and I were putting together Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (2012), we read all of Atwan’s prefaces and all of the guest editors’ introductions. It was a fascinating and instructive exercise. We were struck by Atwan’s steady, measured presence as editor and writer. His prefaces are always historically informed with each one focused on a different aspect of essay writing. We thought they would make a wonderful book if collected. The guest editors’ introductions, though consistently interesting, were, as one would expect, a bit of a mixed bag. Some are excellent and we included two in our anthology, those by Elizabeth Hardwick (1986) and Susan Sontag (1992). Some of the others were more idiosyncratic. Gay Talese’s introduction to the 1987 collection was one of these. It was largely an extended retelling of the story of writing “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” his legendary profile, which had appeared originally in the April 1966 issue of Esquire. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was itself an extended re-telling of the story of Talese trying to get an interview with Sinatra, making this introduction meta-meta. It read as a paean for a New Journalism that even in 1987 was no longer new. Atwan’s preface had labeled the New Journalism part of the one-two punch that had taken out the genteel essay, but to younger readers in 1987 (I was 37 that year—is that younger?) Talese’s introduction seemed almost hopelessly nostalgic. He talked about the generous expense account he’d had back in ’66 and how expense accounts had now dried up everywhere except at the New Yorker. He talked about how payment for articles such as his had plummeted because the money was now in books rather than magazines. He bemoaned the fact that writers had come to rely too much on their tape recorders. He bemoaned the fact that shorter, quote-heavy, quick-turnaround articles had replaced longer, more reflective, more fully researched pieces. In his introduction to a collection of the year’s best essays, Talese emphasized reporting, research, and journalism, not memory, personal voice, and essay writing.

At the end of his preface Atwan described the BAE editorial process. He and an assistant read as many pieces as they could find and forwarded about 120 finalists to the guest editor, “who may add a few personal favorites to the list and who makes the final selections.” Many of us who read BAE regularly like to suss out the shifting influence of the guest editors. The 1987 issue, guest-edited by Talese, included twenty essays, all by white writers, 18 of whom were men. The two women were Gretel Ehrlich and Phyllis Rose. Cushy expense accounts and big checks might have been a thing of the past, but mass-market magazines dominated the BAE selections in 1987. There were two from Harper’s, two from Esquire, and one each from Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. Even some of the selections Talese plucked from little magazines and highbrow journals were preoccupied with the New Yorker and its upper middle class audience. In a piece from Salmagundi titled “The Lay Intellectual (Apologia Pro Vita Sua),” William Pfaff wrote that the career of Edmund Wilson, one of America’s few public intellectuals, had been made possible by

that peculiar and unique American phenomenon, The New Yorker magazine, which by a fluke of fortune became, from its comic-paper origins, at the same time the most serious of American general publications and a highly successful vehicle of consumer advertising (of often the most grotesque and transparent snobbishness; one wonders who the advertisers think the readers really are, or alternatively, a more disturbing thought, who the readers really are that such advertisements are addressed to them).

Pfaff’s parenthetical jab is snobbery disguised as a critique of snobbery, but it does come closer to something like class analysis than does Joseph Epstein’s contribution, “They Said You Was High Class,” which had appeared originally in The American Scholar. Epstein’s essay pretends be about class but is really about status, snobbery, ethnicity, and his own odd and dubious creation—“the verbal class.” Epstein’s self-satisfied opening line reveals what he does and doesn’t know about economic class: “Karl, Friedrich, forgive me, fellas, for never having taken much interest in your class struggle, but the truth is that for the better part of my live I have been a bit unclear about what class I myself belong to.” If were to hazard a guess, Joe, I’d say “petit bourgeois intellectual.”

Epstein has done much for the essay over the years, as essayist, anthologist, and editor of The American Scholar, but he can be too clever by half. Even so, his quip got me thinking about who the audience of BAE is; indeed, who the audience of the essay is. It is you and I, Gentle Reader, and I suspect that we, like Joseph Epstein, are petit bourgeois intellectuals, or at least, kissing cousins to petit bourgeois intellectuals. To quote Hoagland again, essays “are addressed to an educated, perhaps a middle-class, reader, with certain presuppositions, a frame of reference.” This has been true from the start. Montaigne wrote about himself in French (not Latin), a project aimed at the new educated, secular middle class. Urban and urbane, they responded immediately. They got his allusions. They shared his individualism, his petit bourgeois individualism.

So that’s who we are. The problem is that we forget who we are. Cultural historians with a Marxist bent have begun to unpack this problem. Anthony Giddens, for instance, has argued that the middle class possesses class awareness, but not class-consciousness: “The difference between class awareness and class consciousness is a fundamental one, because class awareness may take the form of a denial of the existence or reality of classes [his emphasis].” Or, as Janice Radway nicely puts it, the middle class is a class “that always insists it is not a class.” The label “middle-class” itself obfuscates. Americans prefer it to more precise descriptors such as “working-class,” “petit bourgeois,” or “capitalist.” When polled, eighty percent of Americans call themselves “middle-class,” no matter whether their incomes are below the poverty level or several times the median. For us, it is disgraceful to say you’re lower class, distasteful to say you’re upper class. Such denial has long been part and parcel of American exceptionalism but it served the Reagan Era especially well. The New Yorker, for instance, had always juxtaposed celebrity profiles with hand-wringing liberalism, ads for good scotch and fur coats with cartoons that poked fun at the people who wore the furs and sipped the cocktails, but it was in the 1980s that such self-deprecation soured into self-hatred, and a novel that starred a New Yorker fact-checker on a cocaine binge became a bestseller.

The selections in the 1987 BAE reveal these same contradictions. On the most base level, New Journalism had resulted from a Midtown squabble among Esquire, The New Yorker, and the New York Magazine (formerly the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune) over the same advertising accounts. For the writers who published in those venues the stakes were higher. The upheavals of the 1960s had pushed the New Yorker to publish Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and New York to publish Wolfe’s “Radical Chic: The Party at Lenny’s,” important interventions in the debates of the day that grew into books.

Talese’s 1987 BAE picks bespeak nostalgia for Sixties New Journalism and its forms. Four of the pieces were celebrity profiles in the manner of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”—Richard Ben Cramer on baseball player Ted Williams, Daniel Mark Epstein on magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, Gary Giddins on comedian Jack Benny, and Tom Wolfe on inventor Jerome H. Lemelson. There was also a profile by Elting Morrison of his great uncle, who designed and built bridges, and “The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders’s beautiful (and now oft anthologized) remembrance of his father.

In addition to the profiles, there were other ways in which the selections harked back to the New Journalism. Joan Didion wasn’t included but her husband John Gregory Dunne was, represented by a piece titled “On Writing a Novel.” Calvin Trillin, also known for his humor writing, food reviews and satiric light verse, had a true crime piece about a murder in Kansas. The great novelist Robert Stone, who had been a character in Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, appeared here as a journalist, reporting on the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. New Journalism had always been about the cross-pollination of nonfiction by fiction so it made sense that Talese’s volume of BAE would include novelists such as Dunne and Stone. (For partisans of the fourth genre, this choice always suggests that our inferiority complex is right. Essays can be written by fiction writers, real writers, with their left hand.) Wolfe, the ringleader of New Journalism, was there at the center of the issue, though in retrospect we can see that the inclusion of Wolfe’s profile of a famous inventor actually signaled the end of an era. 1987 was the year The Bonfire of the Vanities came out, marking Wolfe’s turn from nonfiction to fiction.

There was another novelist in the mix: John Barth. The issue opened with an essay by him titled “Teacher.” It was another profile but not a celebrity profile, and it was fully as intimate as Sanders’s eulogy for his father. Barth’s piece was about wife Shelly, whom he’d known first as his student at Penn State in the early 1960s. The essay told the story of their love affair and how they both loved teaching. When he met her again at the end of the 1960s after a reading he gave in Boston, she was a high school teacher. I remember reading Barth’s essay in 1987 because it spoke so directly to me. Elizabeth and I had met in 1986 at the 60th birthday party of a mutual friend, who was—like Barth, like Elizabeth’s father, like I’d once planned to be—an English professor. We’d fallen fast and hard, deciding a week later to get married. We had each moved back to our hometown in Indiana in recent months—she after seven years in Virginia as a social worker, me after ten years as a trade union and community organizer in Boston. When I read Barth’s essay I was teaching high school English, and Elizabeth, who’d always had story drafts in a drawer, was getting her MA in fiction writing. Before I’d become an organizer I’d studied contemporary fiction, and back in Cambridge in about 1969 or 1970, I’d seen Barth give a reading. The Barths’ whirlwind romance, our re-embrace of fiction—it all felt familiar.

Though most of Talese’s picks looked back toward the Sixties with fondness, one decidedly did not—Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre.” Never a New Journalist, always an essayist, Lopate was funny and fully present in this essay. Wolfe had skewered the Sixties, but Lopate skewered the Sixties and himself. When he brazenly included it seven years later in his magisterial anthology The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, he slyly introduced it with this slide from third person to first:

Modesty forbids the editor of this anthology from assessing his prowess as an essay writer—though it did not prevent from including the following entry. About it, he has this to say: “I wrote ‘Against Joie de Vivre’ after reading a good deal of Montaigne, particularly his later essays. It was my attempt to do something in a large, quasi-philosophical vein. Of course the central proposition is nonsensical—no one can be against the joy of life, really—and I knew that at the time, but I wanted to push a prejudice, or dark impulse, of mine as far as it would go, and see where it would take me.

Perhaps Talese admired Lopate’s piece on its own terms, perhaps they knew each other (though the East Side is further from Brooklyn than one might think), or perhaps Atwan, a fellow Montaignean, pushed for it; in any case, it stands out as more essayistic, more personal, more forward-looking than much of the rest of the volume. It foreshadows the renaissance of the essay that was about to come.

There is a second way in which the 1987 BAE is more about arrival than departure. It includes two pieces from a special issue of the literary magazine Antæus, edited by Daniel Halpern, that was devoted to nature writing. Gretel Ehrlich’s “Spring” read as if it could have been a chapter in her stunning book The Solace of Open Spaces, which had appeared in 1985, announcing Ehrlich as a major voice in American nonfiction. Barry Lopez’s “The Stone Horse” describes his early morning visit to a larger-than-life intaglio of a horse made 300 years ago by Quechan Indians in the floor of the southern California desert. Lopez paints a context for his visit to the horse by sweeping across time from the earliest hunting cultures, evidenced by stone tools and broken spear tips, to the modern irrigation systems, military installations and all-terrain vehicles that now endangered the ancient artifacts.

I already knew these two pieces. I had bought and devoured the special issue of Antæus. Elizabeth and I had both returned to the Midwest to regroup in the landscape where we’d grown up—where the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers meet at the eastern edge of the Grand Prairie and the southern edge of the black dirt left 11,000 years ago by the Wisconsin glacier. It’s where the Wea, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi intersected, and before them the Oneota, Hopewell, and Mississippian people. We put a quote from Gatsby on our wedding invitations: “So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.” In the summer of 1987 we drove to the West Coast and back, hiking, camping, and looking at petroglyphs and cliff dwellings. A couple of years later, we bought a house along the Jordan Creek just up the ravine from Fort Ouiatenon, a French outpost from the 17th century. I taught high school twenty miles out on the prairie in the most rural school district in the state. Some of my students descended from those first French fur traders.

Before long, Elizabeth and I decided to go back to graduate school—she for an MFA, me for a PhD. In the fall of 1989, I drove up to South Bend, where Barry Lopez was spending a year as a visiting writer at Notre Dame, his alma mater. Bowled over by “The Stone Horse,” Of Wolves and Men, and Arctic Dreams, I’d written him a fan letter and after the reading, I introduced myself. We talked as he walked me to my car. I spilled my thoughts and uncertainty, told him I loved essays, loved nature writing, loved Elizabeth, and that we were trying to figure out where to go for graduate school. He demurred, saying he didn’t really know the academic world. Maybe he thought I was crazy. He suggested UC-Davis because of Gary Snyder, but added that I might look at Indiana University where Scott Russell Sanders taught. “Scott,” he said, “is a good man.” I thanked him, then I drove three hours home through the rain and the dark, my eyes wide open.

We ended up at the University of Iowa, precisely at the dawn of the essay renaissance the 1987 BAE foreshadowed. Carl Klaus was transforming the old expository writing program of literary criticism and composition theory into a program that focused exclusively on literary nonfiction. He brought Sanders and Lopez in for readings, and Patricia Hampl and Carol Bly for semester-long workshops. We read Montaigne and Bacon, Orwell and Baldwin, Didion and Mairs. We formed study groups and read each other’s stuff. It felt like we were riding a wave that was about to crest.

Then Lopate’s anthology came out. The Atwan and Oates anthology came out. The John D’Agata anthologies came out. Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Creative Nonfiction were launched. The Digital Revolution arrived, bringing Brevity and Assay with it. Where once Iowa was one of just a few graduate programs in nonfiction in the country; now there are almost 200. Robin Hemley introduced the NonfictioNow conference. No one longs for the good old days of New Journalism anymore, Elizabeth and I have (almost) raised our two daughters, BAE is in its thirtieth year, and the wave doesn’t seem to have crested.

*

Ned Stuckey-French teaches at Florida State University and is book review editor of Fourth Genre. He is the author of The American Essay in the American Century, co-editor (with Carl Klaus) of Essayists on the Essay: From Montaigne to Our Time. His work has appeared in journals such as The Missouri Review, The Normal School, culturefront, Guernica, and TriQuarterly, and been listed five times among the notable essays of the year in the Best American Essays series.

BAE 2010: Composing Smart by César Díaz

Two girls sat beside each other on a bench. They engaged in a conversation that went back and forth. One girl looked intently at the other, who spoke while she scanned the parking lot. Moments later, two more girls approached the bench and joined in. Behind them, the façade of the St. David’s Episcopal Church towered overhead, making all of them appear smaller from the angle of my rearview mirror. It was the summer of 2007 and I worked for nonprofit running creative writing camps throughout Austin. The girl looking out at the parking lot was my twelve-year old sister. Earlier that year, she had asked if she could spend the summer with me in order to get away from our mother. I agreed only if she’d attend writing camp, hoping that she’d fall in love with writing in the way I had so many years ago. I tried downplaying my own projected fears: here was a little Mexican-American girl from the poorest region in South Texas in a classroom full of the upper class city kids that occupied the downtown summer camp. I worried that she’d struggle making friends. She was a fish out of water, I thought. Instead, I marveled at the ease in which she made friends out of complete strangers. 

I tried playing it cool the moment she got in my car. I asked how her day went. 

“Fine,” she replied dryly, looking out the windshield at the afternoon traffic. 

“Just fine?” I asked. In my rearview, the group of girls looked on in our direction. My sister noticed.

“I’m invited to a pool party this weekend.”

"Are you going?”

“I don’t know those girls.”

“But you’re invited.”

She glared at me. I could almost see her thoughts shifting from expression into words, but she held them back, tight lipped. She sighed.

“What’s the point,” she finally said. “Mom wouldn’t let me go.”

           

*

I’m drawn to this moment for what it illustrates about a lifelong anxiety with social interactions in large crowds. Despite that I’ve been told over the years that I have this very same quality as my sister, I’ve never truly believed it or have wanted to believe it. Instead, I’m convinced that the root of this anxiety can be traced to my sister’s last comment: What’s the point? Mom wouldn’t let me go. Our mother was hundreds of miles away and somehow influencing my sister’s decision on whether to make new friends. The way my sister delivered her own verdict, she was tapping into the family pessimism that we learned mostly from our mother. But this essay is not about vilifying our mother for the ideals she learned as a migrant farm worker, but instead a way of getting at the root of the pessimism that threatens to undermine my own sense of self as a writer and an essayist. 

Growing up in farm working camps, the space our family created was insular and deliberately shunned the outside world. We were taught to stay clear of any attention, especially in the schools. This proved hardest for me as a bookish child who stood out academically. I kept crossing that line between anonymity and acknowledgment when our job was to go to school and return leaving very little trace. At home, we were exiled from that strange “American” world and told to remain within the comfort (or confines?) of our own Mexican culture. I grew up indirectly navigating between these worlds and doing so meant becoming invisible by detaching myself from social interactions and suppressing my own individuality.

           

Arthur Krystal’s essay “When Writers Speak” (as anthologized in Best American Essays 2010) has me reflecting on the ramifications of this suppression in my life. His essay is the shortest (at two pages) of all the pieces of this anthology year, yet it does in brief what I expect from literary essays: to move us towards understanding by pointing out a pattern the world (or in this case, a writer) knows well.

Krystal: “Writers don’t have to be brilliant conversationalists; it’s not their job to be smart, except of course, when they write.”

Writers are not inherently intelligent when having conversations. We appear to be merely by composing our smarts, but this takes time. As Krystal points out, “There’s something about writing, when we regard ourselves as writers, that affects how we think and, inevitably how we express ourselves.”
There are two things at play here, coming to terms: 

1. With believing you are smart and have something to say, and 
2. That you are a writer and can compose in ways that articulates your ideas.

I admit that I worry too much about coming off seeming “stupid.” My ingrained pessimism gets the best of me and prevents me from throwing myself in positions where I’m proven otherwise. Who wants to be told to shut up; we don’t want to hear what you have to say! I grew up with those exact words. My brothers threw them at me in Spanish along with this word: Sabelotodo! A “know-it-all” that over shared the things he learned from reading books.

The older I got, the less I felt I wanted to share what I knew or thought. I turned inward to the safety of my own imagination with my words and books. But a sabelotodo can only hold so much back.

I tend to think about the past in patterns. Essays stitch those patterns into something meaningful.

So, here’s one: I remember when I was seven years old, sitting on a floor and scribbling down words on an old notebook. I had the urge to make meaning but something stopped me. I’d momentarily stare at my words before crumpling them up, stuffing them in my mouth, then chewing them into a scrap of unrecognizable inky goo. I had this habit for years and aside from having pen ink permanently staining my teeth, I never took that urge beyond that point. I told myself. No one cares.

But I fought that compulsion and even ignored it, yet it was there. And so almost thirty years later, I sit here and compose my words against that old pattern of anxiety and pessimism—the inarticulate migrant boy fights back!

*

In my early twenties I struggled with the idea of mingling. I attended art shows mainly with my girlfriend who was an artist. The visual art scene in Austin in the early aughts was sleepy by today’s standards, but despite that fact, it frightened me to be at an art show surrounded by strangers. I struggled with simply having back and forth conversations because each one ended up asking me the same question—are you an artist? Back then I spent all my energy anticipating how I would answer such a question. I didn’t have the confidence to identify as a writer even though all I ever did was sit on the floor of an empty apartment reading books and writing. It irked me that people wanted to talk to me when all I wanted was to remain anonymous amongst a crowd of art goers, much to my girlfriend’s confusion.

“People like you,” she once said. “You don’t have to tell them everything about you, that’s not what mingling is always about.”

She was right. These mingling sessions with strangers were cursory and hardly as serious as I took them. But I saw having conversations as some form of contract between people talking much in the way an essay establishes connection between a writer and reader. But what struck fear in me in conversation as it does in essay writing is acknowledging that tiny uncharted space where one can be misunderstood. This lack of control for that gap in understanding has often set me off in a panic, and then I become erratic and squirrely. It took years to feel comfortable in conversations, and took coming to terms with believing in who I was and how I projected that out to others.

There are times I wish I could time travel. My thirty-five year old self confronts that sullen twenty-year old kid hunched over a velour couch drinking beer and listening to Neil Young’s “On The Beach.” I’d grip him by the shoulders with both my hands and tell him what so many people have said to me over the years—chill the fuck out dude, it’s only writing.

*

  Albert Goldbarth: “The future is always being created. (So is the past).”

*

And so anxiety has a way of rematerializing.

Recently, I visited two of my closest friends at opposite ends of the country. I noticed that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything while talking. I wasn’t distracted; I just couldn’t seem to cull my thoughts together to say exactly what I wanted to say. Instead, I uuuhhhhed and ummmmed and blanked out all together leaving my friends hanging. I was days from participating in a panel at NonfictionNOW and I couldn’t even talk! I was now too conscious of it all, that extemporaneous back and forth dialogue between people chatting, that fragile connection between an author and a reader, and that uncontrollable gap between panelist and audience. I laughed it off, thinking of what Krystal had to say about my predicament:

 “Or maybe it’s just that the flow of thought alters when we write, which, in turn releases sentences hidden along the banks of consciousness. There seems to be a rhythm to writing that catches notes that ordinarily stay out of earshot. At some point between formulating a thought and writing it down falls a nanosecond when the thought becomes a sentence that would, in all likelihood, have a different shape if we were to speak it. This rhythm, not so much heard as felt, occurs only when one is composing; it can’t be simulated in speech, since speaking takes place in real time and depends in part on the person or persons we’re speaking to. Wonderful writers might therefore turn out to be only so-so conversationalists, and people capable of telling great stories waddle like ducks out of water when they attempt to write.”

Here’s where my past returns: out of nowhere during my panel at NonfictionNOW, I obsess over what type of writer I am—that outward conversationalist of the world I didn’t grow up in or the inward writer that was born out of necessity? Then I question my own authority about speaking at a conference. Is it the publishing of a memoir or a collection of essays (two things I’ve yet to accomplish) or is simply being a practitioner of the genre enough? How do I know whether I have some incisive thing to say? Who determines all of this? 

What’s the point? No one wants to know this stuff. 

I psych myself out and later go through a panic attack in my hotel bathroom.

Earlier I said that living closed off from the external world made me “invisible” and “suppressed my individuality.” It made me impassive to the way I viewed the world, its politics, and my success within in it. I’ve learned that there’s a built in sense of self-destructiveness to that impassivity which perhaps is linked to my own upbringing or the nature of my own culture. It’s obvious I struggle with this to this day. Why else would I jot this down in my journal soon after that panic attack—Achievement makes me nervous…

*

My best friend once told me he admired my ability to be so vulnerable, to lay myself out there in ways he couldn’t. I learned this from my mother. I don’t know how to stop. Take this essay for example, I know I’ll flinch when I realize that I’m sharing too much, and that I run the risk of being misunderstood or judged. But I deal.

One last pattern: my mother used to tell us, “Dejame contarles algo.” My brothers and I were usually at our kitchen table or sitting on the couch watching television in our living room, sometimes all of us were sitting in the back seat of our van after Mass, or maybe just a few feet away from our mother as we worked harvesting whatever fruit was in season. It didn’t matter to my mother where we were, her stories began with this imperative—allow me to tell you this story.

My mother’s role was more than just that of caretaker, my mother was a storyteller, a sharer of inaccessible histories about herself and our past. Her stories were fragmented narratives, snippets she recounted over and over. As a child I understood in the most basic sense my mother’s urge to be so vulnerable and why she revisited those same histories while we rolled our eyes and whined. There was a compulsion to find meaning and each time the story was told, our mother asked new questions and sought new answers. We were merely spectators.

For our mother, the hashing out of her stories while we listened was secondary to her interrogation of the very things she said out loud. These storytime interactions weren’t necessarily a lopsided affair, but an opportunity to see our mother embark on her own interior journey by forging a way out of her own past. For her these moments were sparked by a certain longing and were mere catalysts towards discovery. For myself, the most important thing I took away from her habit for storytelling was learning that through vulnerability we have things to say.

I owe my essayistic sensibilities to my mother. It doesn’t escape me either that the origins of my anxieties stem from a past that turned me towards the essay. Yes, I fear the outside world and my own achievements and yet I anticipate them. I dislike engaging in conversation and yet I have found ways to master it. I fear rejection and yet I embrace it. I am a part of that strange outside world I was told to avoid long ago, and yet it haunts me. The past had already dictated my future, the present merely summoned me to look back, take stock of the patterns so I could to stitch together a way to fight back from disappearing right before you.

César Díaz teaches creative nonfiction at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. His essays and other think pieces have been published in Guernica and Essay Daily, where he is a featured columnist. He is currently writing a memoir about his experiences as migrant farm worker in the 1980s. He sometimes has things to say on Twitter.