Dec 19: Melissa Matthewson's On Disruption: Notes on Evening Over Sussex, Self, and Nature as Disorder

1. She’s thinking of disruption, of a particular kind: as force of change. For example, when she clips down the hyssop in the garden—it’s November, nearly to the last month, and she’s just returned from the ocean, a few days only (where signs warned her of toxic razor clams and auklets shored on the sand)—as a storm will arrive soon and in her own defense, she’s “putting the garden to bed,” which as her husband urges, “Do it now or the spring garden becomes unruly in a tangle of weeds.” As she takes apart the garden, she thinks disruption occurs as an interruption, as breaking asunder, like selves or rocks or mountains, as trouble and disorder. Also, she likes the essayist who is disruptive, both in temperament and content.

2. Say, she’s assigned Virginia Woolf’s essay “Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car” to her first year seminar students—theater kids and digital media artists, some poets, a few of whom she calls “the hair crew” for the curls that cover their eyes, they like their video games—and she hoped they would recognize the extraordinary nature of the essay, in particular, the details proffered of the setting (“The cliffs stand out to sea, one behind another…The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed over by a thin lucid lake of brown air…the fields are mottled, marbled…red feathered skies; all that”), and the recording of an experience through the construct and breaking of the many selves we inhabit as we encounter a particular event (disruption), in this case as witness to the evening. She reads aloud to the students standing in the corner of the room—(the night was black out the window, the students had wanted to photograph the deciduous trees, alder or elm, she didn’t know, but they’d been waiting for the right light. She looked out the window with them, and said, “Better soon, the storm is coming,” and so they did)—with emphasis in tone, “…nature has given you six little pocket knives with which to cut up the body of a whale.” They stared at her in their fishbowl circles weighing the metaphor against their hungry stomachs and pulsing hormones. “I’ve never been able to identify here and not here, in terms of self,” or “This is not an original idea,” they posit, “It’s like the Marvel character Jamie Madrox, who splits into halves when traumatized.” You never know what you’re going to get.

3. Evening is fine here in Applegate, not Sussex, with the ridge banded with second growth firs, her view here—marbled fields—as in Woolf’s Sussex, though what is a marbled field? Colors as a suggestion, perhaps patterned with structure and swellings. There is no urban street where she looks out across this narrow sweep: no bank or mercantile, the towns nearby—Jacksonville, Ruch, and Williams—their consignment shops and beer gardens are all shut and distanced from here, miles in either direction. What remains is this remaining light and just a shadow of what the first people might have encountered: larger trees and bear, salmon, thimbleberry—this landscape disrupted from its original, so she has no occasion to pretend it’s anything but changed. As Woolf has written at this time of day: “It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars.” Woolf chose to write of irritation in response to one of her selves witnessing beauty—“when all seems blown to its fullest and tautest, with beauty and beauty and beauty, a pin pricks; it collapses.” She wonders, how to record or witness the experience of beauty? Another type of disruption occurs in this moment for Woolf: the pin upsets the awareness of aesthetics. Of beauty and beauty and beauty. She admits, “I cannot hold this—I cannot express this—I am overcome by it—I am mastered.” (Notice interference of em dash).

4. This narrator, not Woolf, the other one writing this essay, is also reading at the same time, Carolyn Merchant, academic essayist, scholar, and environmental historian who theorizes many ideas, but one is of the history of colonization of nature and the resultant patriarchy and oppression of women, the alignment of the two. She wanted to have a conversation with Carolyn Merchant, so she reads the essay “Nature as Disorder: Women and Witches.” Merchant writes, “The disorder symbolized in the macrocosm by the dissolution of the frame of nature and the uncivilized wilderness of the new world, in society by the witch who controlled the forces of nature and the women who overturned its order, and in the self…the sexual lust of the female, and the animal passions of all humans heralded the death of the old order of nature.” She supposes that she wants to embrace the alignment between the chaos of woman and self, the disruption of the essay form, and the wildness of nature—all functioning as subversion. Can she make the claims? Yes, maybe, to try. She thinks the wild woman, at the time of the 16th century, became a disrupter: passion and tempest created the disturbance that brought in a new command of nature. What of the woman now as upsetting the natural order—or perhaps, the erasure of gender as new disturbance and relationship to nature, one as sinuous and graceful.

5. In Sussex, Woolf creates first, a self of eagerness and dissatisfaction, a second as stern and philosophical, both “noticing everything: a hay stack; a rust red roof; a pond; an old man coming home with his sack on his back; there they sat, matching every colour in the sky and earth from their colour box, rigging up little models of Sussex barns and farmhouses in the red light that would serve in the January gloom,” as then a third “I”, emerges, aloof and melancholy, expressing lament over forgetting and loss: “Gone, gone; over, over; past and done with, past and done with.” A fourth self becomes aware as an ambush, abrupt, “Look at that” and here is the totality of disruption. Woolf, in her fourth “erratic and impulsive self,” reflects that the star is a future and begins her suppositions of Sussex in five centuries to come.

6. She’s thinking of multiple selves when she finds a rat in the cupboard. On the same day, her son is suspended from school for being disruptive. She also converses with students on the following subjects: human rights and suffering; Madagascar and starving children, drought; moral responsibility and ethics; the erasure of gender; and the use of color in landscape painting. The husband kills the rat with a large trap. What happened to the self in this moment? Did she split in twos, or fours, or sixes? What did each part think: of the rat, of the ethics, of the trap? One self: disgusted by the rat. Second self: simultaneously proud of her son for breaking rules, but also interested in adolescence. Third self: empathetic and curious. Fourth: relieved at death of rat.

7. Of the art in Merchant’s chapter the one this narrator most fascinates over is the woodcut from 1513 of Phyllis (her husband was Alexander the Great) sitting on Aristotle’s back, riding him like a horse, Phyllis holding a rein tight in Aristotle’s mouth. According to Merchant’s caption, Phyllis had sought revenge for Aristotle after he accused Alexander the Great of devoting too much attention to her. In the landscape, Phyllis dominates, as subversive here at the time, becomes a radical self, and while the buildings behind create linear structure for understanding the context of the picture, the wildness of the trees and fruit, grass too, present the interruption of such a symbolic image.

8. Carolyn Merchant says that painters created landscapes with women as passive, as nature as passive, less disruptive in nature, ready for conquer. Is she making a case for disruption? She supposes so. Merchant recalls of history that the “Disorderly woman, like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled.” She’s writing one evening in the common room, when her daughter in pizza pajamas too small for an eight-year-old marches in circles over the bamboo floor—“Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,” which grows in volume with every moment and the narrator continues to ignore her because she’s writing about her dream of a man and also of a dream in which a student smears her name, and soon, the daughter, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,” calls out “I want to make a duplicate of my illustration,” of which the mother relents as though this duplicate says something of both disorder and repetition. She copies the illustration, finds scissors, cuts, writes, finishes, tucks into her backpack to take to her teacher the next day.

9. A fox has taken a chicken, maybe a weasel, because the head had been ripped off and a large gash troubled the hen’s side, so she sits outside the coop at the evening hour and waits. She holds a shovel in her hand. She sits there for a long time considering the chicken coop, the rusted buckets and wheelbarrow, the ash tree’s skeleton of branches, the commotion of a fox. In nature, this is what she finds disruptive: wind pressing down on historic trees, road runners on a dirt wash, salvage logging up the road from her farm, the dissolution of leaves from the maple, volcanic rock and eras of earthquakes, some combination of beauty and violence, the disruption of the two.

10. In another woodcut from 1510 in Merchant’s essay, three women brew potions at a sabbath meeting, and a fourth arrives on a goat. They have spears, buckets, hats, skulls, wild hair, naked. What will they do?

11. What’s interesting about disruption, both in essay form and in nature too, should this be an apt comparison, which in her view, it is, is the disruption of the hierarchical order, pushing back against rationality and linear thinking. As disruption makes itself known in essay or literature, a particular rambunctious way of thinking emerges.

12. Back to the beach, where she had been in number #1, she was thinking of a face hanging from a fir tree outside her vacation rental, cut with what you might say “feminine” features though without a body, only a face of clay, molded by hand with high cheekbones in a setting of ferns and azalea. The face, if you were to walk by it, comes to eye level, depending on your height, looking down with some measure of comfort and solitude, but also as spectator, an observer, or witness to some passing beauty.

13. She wants to stop the momentum forward, which is why she’s thinking of disruption, put a stop on the movement of tomorrow, as pause, to linger in a moment, in a record, as Woolf in her deliberation and musing: “None of my selves could see anything beyond the tapering light of our headlamps on the hedge. I summoned them together…What we have made then to-day, I said, is this: that beauty; death of the individual; and the future…we cried out together; ‘Yes, yes,’ as if affirming something, in a moment of recognition.”

14. It is the tension between nature and culture, Merchant claims, that presents a problem in the established hierarchy. Disorder in nature is/was equated with women, which disrupts the functions of power and the established order. Means we must reclaim a certain level of disturbance.

15. Disruptions, as a list of questions, from class, finals week:
     a. Can you access my library assignment?
     b. I can’t register for my classes.
     c. Can you read my thesis about Obama?
     d. How do I put in a hanging indent?
     e. What is ethos?
     f. How do I insert a picture on the site?
     g. Where is my journal?
     h. When is the final?
     i. Do we answer just one prompt?
     j. Why haven’t you graded my reading response?
     k. What is a good hook?
     l. Do you think penguins are anarchists and should they be offered personhood?

It is here that she would like to disrupt the self, and split, as Woolf, into the selves, not to record experience, but to take care of these minor interruptions. The narrator, she sees a replication of her body: it’s moving around the classroom and computer lab—go here, go there, behind the screen, to the back, be this, do this, need what. But instead, she listens politely to a presentation about the splitting of mice brains and mad cow disease (as disruption) and later, she returns home, at evening and shadow, and underneath her floors, in the basement, the men dig out the concrete, uproot the earth to lay a foundation for permanence and settlement (of not disorder), so she pours tea, sits next to the fire, and she recomposes herself, as Woolf, who returns to her body at the end of her reflection on Sussex, puts her four selves back together, ends with “the rest of the journey was performed in the delicious society of my own body.” She’s now, reflecting on what cannot be disrupted as in the time capsule she has composed with her family, pieces of their life crammed into a mason jar, that the men will seal in the walls, for ages, until something unsettles it (human or nature, like earthquake or tool): dried poppy and yarrow, a guitar pick, an illustration of Tina, from “Bob’s Burgers” composed by her daughter, a magic die, an illustration of the barn crafted by a friend with edges burned by a lighter, two class photos of the children, a selfie of the husband and the narrator, a copy of an essay the narrator has written about evening, like Sussex, an “Impeach the Motherfucker” button, and a note that says on 12/4, we are fortifying in this wall of the farm house, a record of the collective of people living in its structure—writers, dreamers, teachers, optimists, musicians—this jar, here, buttressed against some unknown future disruption.

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Melissa Matthewson's essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, American Literary Review, River Teeth, Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Oregon University and runs an organic vegetable farm. Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, is forthcoming in 2019.

Dec 18: Jenn Shapland's Incendio! On Zadie Smith’s “The Shadow of Ideas”

Tucked in the back section of Zadie Smith’s 450-page essay collection Feel Free you will find a previously unpublished piece of writing so strangely shaped as to be unforgettable. In fact, the whole final section of the book, also called “Feel Free,” is, for my money, its juiciest part: that’s where you’ll find the essays I keep coming back to, assigning to my students, preaching about to friends. “The Bathroom.” “Joy.” “The Shadow of Ideas.” A series of essays that take as their impetus something much more nebulous—and more site specific—than a particular book, or event, or album as much of the rest of Feel Free does. Smith writes in her introduction, “essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.” On the page, this freedom takes the shape of a roving, loose engagement with all that surrounds her, whatever is at hand and whatever comes to mind.
     “The Shadow of Ideas,” the essay I sat down at my desk this late November morning to tell you about, is about Roman piazzas. But before we get there, I feel I have to go back a bit. For starters, my partner is on the couch reading Proust. I think, but do not know for sure, that this is because of Zadie Smith. She loves Zadie Smith, and has cried at least three times in recent memory reading Zadie Smith. I tried to read Smith’s first essay collection, Changing My Mind, after it came out in 2009, but felt shut out by it. Her essays were on British novelists or Vladimir Nabokov, the things I, a graduate student in English at the time, had sought to avoid in favor of studying contemporary writers like Smith. My partner, meanwhile, devoured every word. Rather than being put off by the unmistakable display of Smith’s Cambridge degree in English lit, which to me signaled more of the ongoing appreciation of white, dominant culture I was so sick of, she felt inspired by the person who was engaging with it. Like my partner, Smith is biracial, the child of an immigrant. Her education was paid for by the state. She came to these texts not as their intended audience but with a much different perspective—lower class, female, part white and part Jamaican. For my partner, daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant, this offered much-needed permission to engage on her own terms with all sorts of canonical novels: first she read Middlemarch, then Anna Karenina, now Proust. Smith says at the outset of Feel Free that she has “no real qualifications to write as [she does],” no expertise to bring her to her subjects beyond the application of her own experience. For a genre that demands the writer use everything at hand, an erudite literary education can be a heavy burden indeed. Who wants to be the person in the room dragging Milton into everything?
     Here’s where I admit, with chagrin, that my own college education was not unlike Smith’s, consisting almost entirely of a list of “great” books for me to read on my own, beginning with the so-called ancients and ending with Joyce. Were there any women? I can’t remember one. Nor any black writers, but plenty of Greeks. Apart from the lack of women, and lack of queer authors, I was made to feel, by virtue of the list, that these works were for me. Which is why, after I graduated and started working in a bookstore, I was hell-bent on jettisoning every last one of them and the reverence that accompanied them. I remain adamant about decolonizing any syllabus I teach. At first glance, Smith’s penchant for referencing great dead white Western poets and novelists and philosophers felt like what I’ve been trying to reject for the last decade by studying and teaching contemporary writing, and by writing my own essays. But when Smith waltzes onto the page, in “The Shadow of Ideas,” with obscure Italian metaphysician Giordano Bruno in tow, it doesn’t feel to me like she’s trying to show off, or trying to hide behind something smarter than she is, or trying to prove that she knows a lot. It seems more like she’s just bringing in what she knows, what happens to pop into her head, or what she’s been reading about, embarrassingly old and dull and Western as that might be.
     Some readers and reviewers are really turned off by these references. Such a white, European, elitist trove. And others, the usually white, male ones in mainstream publications like The Guardian and The New York Times, see the recognizable big literary dude name of Phillip Roth or Franz Kafka and start slobbering all over her every word. For my part, I’m less interested in what Smith has to say about these authors and bodies of knowledge, and more interested in how her use of them reveals her mind, her thought process, the confluence of things that she brings with her to any question.
     Back to the piazzas. Smith uses them as stepping stones across the waters of her memory. In one of the piazzas, she started a fire, “which fire was at the beginning, though in memory it comes at the end, and this is inconvenient, structurally.” Right away the reader must accept a radical revision of history in order to take part in this essay. “But,” Smith writes, “my memories of our Italian squares are non-sequential, they jump from here to there, ignoring chronology. They are filed according to a variety of intimate systems—one of which involves the different intensities of light—and so there is nothing to be done.” Instead of proceeding chronologically or even logically, we hop with her from stone to stone.
     On maybe my third reading of this essay, it occurred to me that the same year Smith languished in piazza after piazza, I was also spending a year abroad in Italy, staring at statues of men who burned at the stake, hovering in piazzas, smoking cigarettes and feeling out of place. At the time I probably didn’t know who Zadie Smith was—for all I knew, literature came to a halt in 1922. But I do think I understood, in my own way, how architecture shapes memory and chronology. My year in Ferrara, a small, crumbling city in northern Italy, was a series of cobblestone alleys and large piazzas filled by day with women taking their mothers for walks and old men teetering on bikes, and by night with Euro teens chain-smoking in a new brand of clothing called H&M, which no one yet knew to call “fast fashion.” It was 2007, and like Smith I was unaware of the impending crash, the financial crises brewing. Unlike Smith I was 17. I had yet to vote, and was fairly unaware of most things besides my longing for home, which I expressed by eating whole sleeves of Ritz crackers, the only familiar snack food I could find, and my longing for my girlfriend, who lived in France that year. Smith talks about the few Italian words she has down—spremuta, integrale—and how speaking English becomes a “terrible secret” she and her husband try to keep from strangers. In Italy, I realized for the first time how arbitrary my own language was, how limited and small my ability to express myself in awkward Italian, and I never felt like I had enough words. Smith connects all of these uncertainties in the introduction to Feel Free: “Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”
     Malleable and improvised. This is the joy of the essay. It needn’t proceed logically or chronologically, and it will likely drift down alleys you’d rather not revisit—your own past obliviousnesses, say—but it will go wherever it needs to go to say what it is trying to say, something not wholly yours or the reader’s, something partial and constantly revised, recreated. It is the formation ground for a voice, an “I who is not me,” as Smith has it, an evolving consciousness on display, including whatever it happens to contain.
     So she must use Bruno, as he is the statue in front of her, and she must use the fire and her embarrassing naming of the fire (“Incendio! I cried. This is something like leaning out of a New York window and screaming Conflagration!), and the spremuta, and her poor treatment of her own dog. As I use the great books list and studying abroad and all my own embarrassing piazzas. Radical acceptance and radical revision. The fire happened at the beginning, but still we’d better end with it. Its meaning comes at the end. When the fire finally occurs in the essay, it is inflected through the incongruence of the 2008 banking collapse with her own newfound financial security. She realizes that “Everything lost can be replaced,” and it’s true for the first time in her life. Smith’s own life and the accumulation of her experiences come into sharp relief as she stares at her smoldering possessions and feels not terror, but the consumerist ease of replicability.
     How can a piece of writing that meanders through the piazzas of Rome, bored, thinking about Bruno, visiting the Venice Biennale, ending with the recession—how can this be worth reading? But that is the case with every essay, or at least every essay I like, of Smith’s or of any other writer: they don’t have to have a reason to exist. They exist because they came together, a confluence of setting, memory, what one ate for breakfast and what one has in front of them at any given moment, onto the page, what one was reading and witnessing and talking about or not talking about. And from all of that, not from some kind of plan, or intentional argument, or clearly plotted outline, comes an essay. Essays get away from you, and this is their force. Piazzas are the subject here, but they are not the subject at all. They are the adject, the powerful image that calls everything up.

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Jenn Shapland is a nonfiction writer living in New Mexico. She teaches in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and she is the Managing Editor of The Magazine. Her first book, The Autobiographies of Carson McCullers: A Memoir, will be out in 2020 from Tin House Books. 

Dec 17: Jennie Ziegler on Nora Ephron and Indulging Old Aches

La Lune de Ephron

There’s an old ache I indulge every so often, when it’s late or early or noon—an ache that grandly I dub the greatest hiccup of my life. Journalism.
     I do not regret falling into teaching. I do not regret my students, who honor me with their patience, minds, and hope. I’ve had wonderful teachers and know their impact, and hope that I may act in a similar position for each student who enrolls into my courses. And though I was warned about the thorny path of academia: the dead-end positions of non-tenure track, the risks for women (I still get physically patted on the head in meetings), the low pay, the anger over grades—there are many wonders of this job not solely limited to watching a student excel or graduate—or finding a book they fell in love with.
     But there’s a part of me.
     A rather large part.
     That wishes I had stayed in journalism.
     When I was completing my undergrad (in English rather than journalism) at The Ohio State University, I had the pleasure of working with Lee Martin and the late author Okla Elliott. While some of my other excellent teachers cautioned me against going into graduate school immediately after college, Elliott and Martin both offered me an option of a different path than Ph.D. glory or the fiction-based MFA I once dreamed of pursuing. “Creative nonfiction” felt brand new to me—and I had only completed one or two workshops of it during my stay at OSU. I was writing it anyways, as most undergrads do, in my fiction workshops—thinly veiled essays-as-stories. When it came time to either making a return to the East Coast or start filling out applications, I was a bit desperate to keep moving further and further away from my hometown and what seemed like everyone’s (and my own) deep skepticism of a girl wanting to pursue something as cute, as desperate as writing about blue collar cities and blue collar ways.
     In the year that I enrolled into Martin’s nonfiction workshop, I was accepted into a summer Features internship at my hometown newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania, which has a daily circulation of roughly 80,000. Begun in the mid-to-late 19th century, it now ranks among the nation’s top-100 largest-circulation newspapers, though that particular fact doesn’t matter much to this essay. Nor does it matter here that the paper once had an evening edition, when it was the norm for most papers to have at one point or another. It was one of the first to run the Peanuts comics. And its current name, given to it by a child who won a local contest during a rebranding initiative, doesn’t matter much here either. But I am compelled to mark its commonplace history, even if briefly, since in 2000 it was bought out by Tribune, as so many were, and I shuffled into its machine two years later. It was the time when structural changes were being slowly rolled out throughout the company and the lay-offs began. The time before it felt like the newsroom, the newspaper, and the entire industry all changed.
     And certainly it was the summer of great change, at least personally. Not only was this my first internship, but I was also in the throes of my first heartbreak: a high school sweetheart of four years and the simultaneous loss of a friend to a maybe-maybe-not suicide. When my newspaper printed the obit, my friend’s death suddenly made real and public, I carefully clipped it and pinned it to my cubicle, dully aware of the oddity of the action, of life.
     The newsroom was thrilling and it may have been the first and last time I fell into a career not by happenstance but by a full-brimmed love. A deep, deep love that saturated itself into the years of my life, like smooth liqueur piped into cake. I’d get in early every day, trying to make it downtown in my beat plum Jetta, which I kept running on mechanical tape and Boyz II Men cassette tapes. Arriving at my desk in Features first, I’d squeak a mouse hello as reporters and copy-editors and editors and sub-editors spilled out of elevators, shoulders squared, footsteps quick, hands immediately darting towards computers, phones, papers. Each morning, when the newsroom was still quiet and relatively empty, I would walk through the cubicles, noting the reporters’ desks, the “SO WHAT?” post-its that everyone taped to their monitors, to grab a warm copy of the day’s newspaper. This was a wonder: a freshly printed newspaper. For a few blissful moments, the only sound I heard was the quiet rustling of pages. It was tradition to read it through in the newsroom—under the fluorescent lights, sitting in fabric-coated cubicles, ink scenting our fingertips.
     I completed my assignments early and quickly, and then would sit and read—which would prompt some reporters to stack more assignments on my desk, which I would also quickly complete, fearful of asking too many questions (or any at all) and overreacting in a tight, blue panic at any story that seemed imminent to our local lives, which seemed like all of them. I made mistakes. I was desperately afraid of the telephone. But it was kindling. I often watched the reporter in the next cubicle to me, a kind man who, when he had the time, took me under his wing, acted the Prometheus, and gave me suggestions for edits and story ideas. After each morning read-through, he would ask a follow-up question aloud to himself. It may have been related to what he was reading—or not. Once he asked me if I knew what the purpose of yawning was after we had succumbed to it a few times, a domino spill of breath. I looked at him blankly, desperately wishing I did, so I could offer something other than my blonde hair, my mouth open like a carp, because someone there had spoken directly to me, thinking I knew something about…well, about anything. I watched him rush onto the phone and call up a contact at the local hospital, already wearing his pencil onto white creamy sheets of paper. This was how it was done: this was how they did it, I thought then: this curiosity of and about the world. Anything could begin it. It seemed so simple! So brave. Ask questions and chase them down. It was more than hunting, stringing our bows, our fingers along keys. It was a possession.
     In “Journalism: A Love Story,” Nora Ephron summarizes and briefly examines not only her history as a journalist in the 1960s, but also the nature of what it is to be a reporter, a writer, an essayist:

It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly come to believe that you are living in the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.

Besides being surprised that it’s “tenterhooks” and not “tenderhooks,” I could have danced when I first came across Ephron’s “creative nonfiction” essays about her start in journalism. It read like the kind of love I had for that time in my life: newly single, unsure about anything in the future, but finding rhythm and importance in the news and confidence in the training of my own writing. And there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—like being in a newsroom, alight with research, lit faces in computer glows, phones buzzing, printers quacking in the background, a man named Jack yelling across City into Crime, and TVs and windows to the outside world on mute, largely ignored.

I loved the Post. Of course, it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator. The managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk. But I loved my job. In my first year there, I learned how to write, which I barely knew when I began.

In the essay, Ephron details a success story: her rise from mail girl to researcher at Newsweek, and her transition over to the New York Post. And I think often of this moment in her life when she quit Newsweek because they wouldn’t let a woman write or let a woman become a reporter. The moment she decided something momentous. To go were they would let her write. She describes this act in an earlier essay “The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less”:

I write a story. I think it’s funny. I turn it in. I hear laughter from the city desk. They think it’s funny too. I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition and I am twenty-two years old.

In classic Ephron style, she then lists the stumbling blocks of that achieving that dream, the varied roll-her-eyes consequences—but it’s as if she was divining any young writer’s dream. To be on a “30 under 30” list. To achieve a career in writing. To be thought of as funny, therefore witty, therefore educated, therefore worthy to the world in some way that is meaningful and also yours alone. These dreams shift, or they don’t. But it’s that hope: that hope of connection with an audience who can associate, in some small human way.

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As Ephron would say about the ‘60s, a sentiment which still holds true: “It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be an exception to the rule.”
     Her quitting Newsweek is an act that may seem minor to some audiences. But for many women, this is such a large risk: to start over, to jump without financial security or expectation of landing anywhere viable.
     I wish I had many things: financial security, really a trust fund, but mostly a savings account, maybe some investments—just so my hand will stop shaking every time I open bills and monthly student loan debt reminders. I wish my out-of-sync heart would stop suddenly spiking its own pulse wildly whenever I went out to the mailbox. Mostly, I wish for a backbone and gumption. And I constantly ask myself if I do have that same power over my own life as it reads that Ephron had. It never feels like it, though I’m sure that’s just reason talking.
     I wish for possession.

*

I remember asking around, early in my time at the paper, where the newspaper store was. Where did people go to buy mementos? Did we have a neon-titled shop on the first floor that I missed? Online commerce by that point was still relatively new, and my aging East Coast city, nestled snug among the eastern Appalachian mountains, would keep its local stores alive until Amazon took wide control and pruned them from their neighborhoods like the dying roots they were. Most of the people I asked—the two editors I wasn’t shy to the point of muteness with—looked at me blankly before telling me to go look for my own contact—even for this. So I e-mailed around and found someone—a slightly surprised woman who scheduled an appointment to walk in silence to a dark backroom. I dug around some faintly damp cardboard boxes for a sweatshirt and a mug. Believe me, I wanted all the gear—even the never-fits-well-polo shirt or the extra-extra-extra large t-shirts of a charity fundraiser that was dated two years prior. But I was already deeply embarrassed about my ask over how I should pay (cash that went directly into her hand) that I didn’t look back after scooting out of the room.
     I still have that mug and that sweatshirt, which has strange proportions, which may explain shoving them into a forgotten storeroom—I have long arms, which, according to my closet, is apparently rare in humans, especially in female humans, and the fabrics of my sleeves never quite hit my wrist bones, but this particular piece is on its own level. The sleeves cut off another inch or two short that my wrists—though not short enough for it to be considered ¾ of a sleeve, which would at least be a style embraced by most of society. Nope. And the body! The body ballooned out strangely like a fishbowl around my torso and began to end a little north of my waist, so that it was a touch longer than a crop top. I got the medium, too, and I am normally a small, so I have no idea what the actual size of this thing is. I keep it, though I never wear it, in my “active” pile of sweatshirts (quantity: two—turns out, you never need winter gear even in northern Florida, which was my latest move from Arizona from Ohio from Pennsylvania—more commonplace history). My mug is packed away somewhere in the garage. It would make me sad to look at it, I reason, so I never shudder through the boxes looking for the thing. But it’s there. I proudly drank from that cup every morning at home before work (too embarrassed, also, to show the newsroom that I had purchased a mug after only a week of working as an lowly intern) and used it as my pen cup during the rest of my time at college, a reminder that I could potentially pursue that trajectory. I could still make a choice.
     The internship lasted until August, though I was able to stretch it as long as I could towards September. I returned to the Midwest and fell into my major courses, which included more upper-level creative writing courses. Creative nonfiction, a rather strange title if you think about it, felt like a natural home for me, and both Elliott and Martin convinced me through their work of its bright future in academia and within the pantheon of The Great Three tracks for an MFA. Though it would take another year or so to determine I’d pursue a terminal degree in it, I was hooked—it was something new, curious, and ill defined. Largely, I thought it functioned as lyrical journalism.
     I can’t summon up a similar history to Ephron’s, I think as I reread her I Remember Nothing collection of essays, and reread and reread “Journalism: A Love Story,” sometimes aloud to my husband or sometimes to myself. I recognize the excitement she registers for her first few bylines. What it meant to see her name printed. What it meant to track down stories and research—for a living!

But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish. You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say. 

I romanticize the one summer I took this one job. A job I’d probably be better suited to, sure, but it’s a ship I got off and never sailed away into the distance on. I’m on a steady giant cruise ship of higher education now. Confined by non-tenure status, a sinking in university enrollments, and departmental quandaries endlessly debating what “English” really means. And, so, of course I miss the isolation and open curiosity the field of journalism seems to offer. The quick blood of the newsroom. But I really should know better. I remember the lay-offs, the dip in circulation counts, the growing pains of shifting to online reporting, and the anger of one particular reporter who blamed her dismissal on the act of giving the editor’s pet (me) additional (her) work. The desperation to keep your work good and relevant and important. And I’m glad to have missed out on the transition into social media.
     No, it wasn’t all rosy.
     Journalism as an industry has greatly changed—as it always does and will—in the past 15 or so years since that summer, which seemed choked by Atlantic humidity and grief and wonder. Even when I attended editorial meetings to take notes and “observe,” I was in the thick of discussions about the future of the paper, of all papers. At that time, we shifted to a “webpage” aesthetic in the physical copies of the paper—a move that horrified most, some going so far as calling it “cheap” and “the deepest shame.” Others looked impassive at the news, with a look most writers master—the “Who the fuck cares?” forehead scrunch that now I use in my own meetings.
     The 24-hour news cycle, social media, “breaking” headlines—which all headlines now seem like—cobbled-together stories with assumptions and drafted theories. I now read the news thinking I’ll just have to check back hours, days, or a month later to get the full story, with all its edits and revisions. Everything is a developing story, which seems like an impotent phrase these days. The news is prepped and prepared like an endless potluck in various stages of warmth. Ready to be consumed, readers acting as the locust, ever hungry for more copy, reading a headline, then moving on to the next, leaving the meat, the evidence, the arguments.
     This lessens my regret some.
     Despite my critiques, I mourn at the villainization of the industry under this current regime. Journalism is beyond important—it is necessary for civilization, for its people. Nora Ephron would warn us, though, that freedom of the press only belongs to the man who owns the press. We’re beginning to feel a tighter squeeze. Every reporter is cast as a tabloid con artist, the public actively debating on how we define the word “fact.” Perhaps we were getting tired of defining “theory.” It’s strange to think, sometimes, that the journalist is human—so often they are cast as our teachers, researchers, guides—or they are the great destroyers. Never curious humans who are called to translate and give us the world in our living rooms. Who go into that dark night with questions and a blaze of communication, hoping to light some sky.
     But then, essayists would reason that that job is ours.
     Ephron’s work is her life—she famously quotes her mother’s saying “everything is copy”—the sentiment of such the drumbeat of an essayist’s long walk to their own examinations. The essay is an active investigation—we are trained to weave in research like an academic and intentional language like a poet. The endless pursuit of questions feels, to me, like those days in the newsroom—follow the story to its very end.

*

To be completely honest because, well, ‘tis the season, I often sound like those people who studied for a semester abroad and then can’t stop talking about their experiences when they lived in (fill in the blank with your favorite location that you are secretly jealous they were able to visit and therefore ruin for you) and then trot out some rudimentary additional language skill that seems a requirement for those kinds of conversations. Though I consider myself a writer, an essayist, and am content for it, I find myself speaking about my one summer at one newspaper like that.
     Perhaps we all speak in similar patterns about things or people or lifestyles we not-so-unexpectedly fall in love with—especially if those experiences are short, clipped.
     We have a word, even, for that phase: “honeymoon,” in French, translates to la lune de miel. A moon full of honey. And that’s how that time follows me—this pregnant moon of memory, hanging like a soft-watt bulb above me, full of promise and weight, spectral in all its perceived beauty.

---

Jennie Ziegler currently lives and teaches in the Southeast and serves as an Associate Editor for Dying Dahlia Review. Her work has been previously published in Essay Daily, Appalachian Heritage, Luna Luna Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, Folklore Thursday, and Atlas and Alice among others. She has forthcoming work at The Normal School. Find her at jennieziegler.com or @InTheFourteenth.

Dec 16: Virginia Marshall on the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf

In 1937, Virginia Woolf was asked to be part of a broadcast for the BBC series “Words Fail Me.” She wrote an essay that was later included in her collection, The Death of the Moth. It’s a slippery text to follow, made more slippery by the fact that Virginia read the text aloud in a tremulous voice, packed with all the markings of an upper class British background. I couldn’t get past the way she said “mysterious” (misstyehrriyuss) and “literature” (lihtrrechah)—it sounded miles and miles away and centuries old.
     When I first came across the recording, I clicked on it because the headline told me that this was “the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf.” And it is, as far as we know. Virginia made three recordings with the BBC in the 1930s, but this is the only one that survives. I could imagine Virginia sitting in front of the microphone, reading her essays, gleeful that her voice would enter homes across Britain, fill a room, and then disappear. Only a memory of her voice would be left.
     Virginia often tried to capture the passing moment in her writing—something that she talked about in the surviving BBC broadcast. She was frustrated that she could not always get the glimpse of a scene or a person firmly on the page. In her poetic way, her voice wavering because of her age and because of warped and fuzzy grooves on the record, Virginia said that words are useless, that they cannot possibly capture everything about a moment. “It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that,” Virginia said stuffily, robotically, from her place eighty years in the past. “We refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.”
     I am named for Virginia, and so I have always felt connected to her beyond her words. I heard Virginia for the first time last year, on my bed in the Midwest. At the time, I was trying to write an essay about losing my way, and about institutions and structures that were never built for me. It was a mess, honestly, and as I tried to plow through the mess, what kept coming out were words about my mom. She is the most present person in my life, as mothers often are, and her character is tangled up in the work that I try to do. I love my mom in a complicated, complete way that will never fit on a page. And yet I keep coming back to her. And I keep coming back to Virginia, because my mom named me for her. She must be the key, I have often thought. The key to writing, to saying what I mean to say, to pinning things down, as it were.
     At the time, when I lost my way, I wanted Virginia’s voice inside me. Sound does that—it invades the barriers of our bodies and becomes real by rattling our ear drums, banging on nerves that zing directly to our brain cells, making a ruckus we cannot ignore. I remember how mom used to read to me in the large cushioned arm chair in the corner of her room. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember tracing the outlines of the colored roses on the chair as her voice filled me up. When I started to read and write on my own, I would show my work to my parents—first it was birthday cards, and then longer stories. My mom would draw a line through the words that weren’t right, and carefully straighten my grammar. When I got older, the big cushioned arm chair in her room became the place my mom read to my little sister, and where she picked patiently at my sister’s warts with a sterilized needle. My sister would read aloud from a book to pass the time. She would try to be patient, try to read the words carefully as her skin was excavated. I could hear them from my bedroom down the hall, where I was usually poised with a book, trying to listen and read at the same time, which never worked.
     Virginia had a mother too, of course, though her mother died when she was three. But Julia Stephen was so loud in Virginia’s memory that she would try again and again in novels and essays to capture the woman, or even to capture the space left by the woman who passed before anyone was prepared to mourn her. When she was twenty-four or twenty-five, Virginia wrote a letter addressed to her nephew, and it was later published as her “Reminiscences.” In that letter, Virginia tried to paint her mother in words. “What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. ‘Come children,’ she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, ‘Quick, quick.’”
     The thing about mothers, which Virginia knew well, is that they are too close and too far away at the same time. It’s a problem of focus. Even though Virginia spent most of her conscious life—you could even say all of it—without a mother, that does not erase the fact that her presence was once there, and Virginia would never stop trying to arrest her image on the page. “Living voices in many parts of the world still speak of her as of someone who is actually a fact in life,” Virginia wrote, when she was twenty-four or twenty-five. “Whether she came merry, wrathful or in impulsive sympathy, it does not matter; they speak of her as of a thing that happened, recalling, as though all round her grew significant, how she stood and turned and how the bird sang loudly, or a great cloud passed across the sky. Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased.”
     But how do I tell you in words who my mother is without bringing her into the picture, inviting you to open your mouth so she can peer into it, her eyes screwed in concentration, her mind running through years of medical study in order to pronounce the diagnosis. For as long as I can remember I have heard from her patients how whip-smart she is, how she saved their lives, how they love her. I love her too, I think, as I hop onto her examination table for my vaccination and the needle pinches in. She pats me on the shoulder and smiles. “All set,” she’ll say, and, later, at the dinner table before dad has finished the stir fry, she might say, “Medicine is storytelling,” and begin to arrange her words so that her day becomes a perfect refraction of clarity and brightness, a feat I have never been able to manage with my own words when I speak them aloud. Sitting there, across the table, I will wonder how her assuredness might be connected to her success, to the fact that she gave no shits about the men who doubted her aptitude, instead cut her hair short to deflect attention to her gender, put her head down and ran—first on the boys’ track team and then all on her own, around the lakes near our house again and again. I will think about the tulips she had picked up over the weekend and how she will plunge the bulbs into the earth before most of the house is awake the next morning, tending to it all, making sure everything will grow as it should. And I will watch her hand, freckled more than mine is, grasp the stem of her wine glass, watch her fix her eyes on me and I will try to imagine her at twenty-five, the age I am now, and hope that we would have been friends, and think what we would say to each other if we were.
     I replayed Virginia’s recording, last year when I was lost, on my bed. But I stopped midway through the second playing. This would be the closest I could ever get to her and she is not enough. Too far, too stuffy, not right.
     My mom called at some point after that—maybe a day or two later, or maybe it was minutes. Of course, in my mind the two—my mom and Virginia—are connected. The name, the words, my mom—it all swirls sometimes, together. My mom could tell I was anguished, on the phone, and that I was beginning to lose the thread.
     “Write about alligators eating marshmallows,” I remember her saying. She had seen alligators and their snacking habits in Louisiana, where she was with my dad for a medical conference. I picked at the comforter on my bed and I didn’t answer right away. There were several new pen markings on it because I had taken to writing at night, waking up an hour into my supposed sleep to get something down, afraid I would never have the same thought again.
     “Remember when we used to make those cathedral cookies?” she said. Still, I could not answer. I did not have the words to tell her that I could feel her care for me over the phone, and how I fear that no combination of words will convey how close she is to me, and how far. I cannot pin some things down. “You know, rolling the mini marshmallows in melted chocolate and coconut flakes? Write about that.”
     I nodded, though she could not see me. I did not, that day, in my bedroom with my laptop playing Virginia’s voice, write what I meant to write. I did not write the things that had made me lose my way, and I did not write about alligators either. Instead, I listened to my mom, and I tried to get this down—what happens when words fail, and what to write when they do.

---

Virginia Marshall is a writer and audio producer. Her work has appeared on WBUR, The Harvard Review, Atlas Obscura, Brevity, The Millions, and other publications. She tweets @vrosemarshall. 

Dec 15: Heather Wells Peterson on Brian Blanchfield's PROXIES

Brian Blanchfield uses the word illeity a few times in Proxies, his essay collection. From its Latin root, ille, a pronoun used to refer to something far away from oneself, I take illeity to mean “thatness”—the externalization of something, making it an object outside of ourselves. In How Fiction Works, James Wood writes of the estrangement that occurs when an object is removed from its context, the creepiness of seeing it separated and complete unto itself. Specifically, I believe in a footnote, he recalls from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet a scene in which an ear is discovered, and it is no longer attached to a head. To see an ear by itself, unhearing, is to relearn what an ear is. This, to me, is illeity: the act of removing something so far from its home that it becomes something else, something to be re-known in a profound way.

Proxies begins from two constraints. The first is to write each essay without returning to any books mentioned or researching any assertions made—as Blanchfield says in the note at the book’s beginning, “a total suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources.”
     In an interview for David Naimon’s radio show and podcast, Between the Covers, Blanchfield says this project began when he was having difficulty writing, the constraint a “prompt into language in the morning, to have the internet off, and to write what I knew or estimated or remembered or misremembered about a topic at a time.” Words can have a frightening fixity, and using words can feel more like lepidoptery—catching, euthanizing, pinning into permanent position—than like observation of movement, of flight. I imagine Blanchfield’s prompt allowed him out of the lab and into the field, net in hand. To let the knowledge you hold, which is more like a story you’ve told yourself than a collection of facts, to be the single source of authority in a piece of writing seems both liberating and terrifying, and both sides of that, the freedom and the fear, come through in these essays. As Blanchfield notes beneath the title of each essay, they were written, must have been, “permitting shame, error and guilt,” with himself as the single source.
     Blanchfield, raised in North Carolina, left home at seventeen years old to earn his BA from the University of North Carolina and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He’s the author of two collections of poetry, Not Even Then (2004) and A Several World (2014). Proxies, published in 2016, earned a Whiting Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Nonfiction and a PEN USA Literary Award in Nonfiction. He has worked in and out of academia, teaching creative writing at The Pratt Institute, Otis College of Art and Design, Cal Arts, University of Montana, University of Arizona, and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, while in between working in arts admin, radio, and publishing. Though he expresses much ambivalence about academia in Proxies, he has returned to it, teaching creative writing and literature at The University of Idaho and the Bennington Writing Seminars. In his interview with Naimon, he identifies one motivation behind the writing of these essays as “a psychological integrative urge… to say what I knew not only as a ‘queer intellectual poet’… but as the son of a trucker and a Primitive Baptist from central Piedmont, NC, but also as a professor who has been on the margins of and absorbed by and expelled from academia over the years, I wanted to say what I knew in a number of different subject positions which many people or some readers might perceive as unlikely.” Blanchfield lists further subject positions in his introduction: “I have been stepson, house sitter, replacement faculty, liaison, trustee, interim director, secretary, adjunct, sub, temp, warm body, and for a short while acting editor of The Prostate.” 
     This miscellany of subject positions is reflected in the miscellany of subjects approached, removed from home, and estranged anew in Proxies, each title beginning with “On” in an echo of Montaigne’s “Of,” a man often noted as the originator of the modern essay who famously both said, “I am myself the matter of my book” and asked, “Que sais-je?” or, “What do I know?” Some of these titles include, “On Owls,” “On Sardines”—he means the hiding game, “On Propositionizing,” “On Tumbleweed,” “On Minutes”—he means those taken at a meeting, “On Dossiers,” and “On Frottage.”
     In the Naimon interview, Blanchfield says there was another urge behind the constraint to suppress all authoritative sources: “in my mid-thirties, going into my late thirties then, I wanted to say what I knew.” The full title of the collection is Proxies: a Reckoning. The moment of reckoning comes at the end of the night when the bartender brings the bill; meanwhile, in Christianity, the day of reckoning comes when the dead are called to final account by God for their actions in life. One also reckons when making an estimation or relying on memory. These essays, then, are less on their stated topics, and more about what Blanchfield reckons about them and what that reckoning can reveal about himself, what is significant to him, and what he has chosen to remember—that final tally at the end of the night, that moment when he answers for his life thus far.
     Blanchfield’s second stated constraint was to “stay with the subject until it gives onto an area of personal uneasiness, a site of vulnerability.” Vulnerability comes from the Latin for wound, and wounds recur in this book, both fresh and healed, however imperfectly. Each essay explores a surface until that wound, that vulnerability, that place of entry, can be found. We know the wound from the outside, its borders, its cause, the narrative—if one exists—of its healing, and we know the wound from the inside, climbing into it, feeling its dimensions and walls, and looking newly out onto the world from its depths.
     “On Footwashing,” an early essay in the collection, takes as its subject the practice of foot washing as a sacrament in some Protestant orders, including the Primitive Baptist tradition in which Blanchfield was raised. We begin wide, with a scene in which members of Blanchfield’s church process toward a row of basins and, in twos, take turns soaping and rinsing their partner’s feet. Blanchfield, at thirteen years old, is witnessing this ritual for the last time, singing hymns and watching his mother’s face “grimace and blush” as an old woman takes her feet in her hands. “A thirteen year old,” he writes, “knows his single mother’s foot. An 8 1/2 narrow: back when a Naturalizer salesman would bring his shoehorn and ramp-stool over to straddle his customer’s fitting,” Naturalizers being affordable, professional shoes known for comfort. We follow that psychological integrative urge, the plunge from the wide surface of the subject to the vulnerable depths of Blanchfield’s experience of it.
     Vulnerability is at the center of the ancient Greek concept of xenia, which comes from xenos, a word meaning, first, guest. The secondary meanings are stranger, foreigner, or refugee, from which we get the term xenophobia, which now means a fear of people perceived as “foreign,” usually immigrants, but started out, in the late 1800s, sharing a meaning with agoraphobia, a fear of entering the strange, foreign world outside the home. The concept of xenia is the inverse—the act of welcoming a stranger, rendered vulnerable by their removal from familiar territory, into one’s home. Meaning “guest-friendship,” it refers to the ancient Greeks’ principle of hospitality, which they believed should be extended to anyone seeking it. Jesus Christ, in this tradition, washed the feet of the apostles who would soon betray him, participating in what Blanchfield calls an “economy of hospitality.” Because most wore sandals, the feet would be the most unclean part of a traveler entering a home—the greatest, most humbling act of hospitality a host could perform, then, was to wash the feet of the arriving stranger. To deny hospitality was a grave sin in ancient Greece, and in literature and myth often resulted in dire consequences, particularly if the stranger turned out to be a god in disguise.
     Blanchfield relates this act to Philoctetes, a play by Sophocles about the eponymous man who, in competing for Helen, was then conscripted to sail to Troy to help return her to her husband. On the way to war, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake, and the wound, without killing him, causes him constant agony. He complains all the time, and his foot gives off a putrid smell. Soon, Odysseus, who is sharing his ship, can’t take it anymore, and he leaves Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos.
In Philoctetes’ wound, Blanchfield finds his own. His stepfather, Frank, has a “chronic wound on the sole of his right foot,” a result of advanced Type 2 Diabetes. Though nerve loss means Frank feels no pain, he is in constant danger of life-threatening infection. The wound changes size and quality, but never closes. “I have seen it three or four inches deep,” Blanchfield writes. “Even then, it was frightfully clean, like a throat.” Why is it so frightfully clean? Blanchfield’s mother, every night after making dinner and doing the dishes, sits down with her tools to clean it: “After twenty-five years of marriage she knows this part of his body best. He hasn’t ever really seen it.”
Frank often “humiliates [Blanchfield’s mother] in the company of family or friends… relentlessly, set off by her miscomprehension of something or an oversight he has discovered.” Yet, she continues to perform the sacrament of washing his feet, continues to practice the guest-friendship of welcoming these strangers, Frank’s anger and his wound, into her life, and caring for them both.

Blanchfield explores the peculiar dynamic of housesitter and house owner in “On Housesitting,” which deals, too, with an economy of hospitality—“commensalism,” he writes, “or mutual benefit, is a constitutive premise of housesitting, or maybe an enabling fiction.” The idea being, then, that even with no pets to feed and walk, no plants to water, it is better for the home’s permanent resident that someone is there, just as it is better for that someone to have this place to stay, to have, in leaving his own home, this “new life to try on,” with an “established normalcy to play at.” However, the ultimate obligation of the housesitter is to leave everything exactly as it was found, to take off the life tried on and put it back on the hanger, unwrinkled and unstained and still smelling like the person meant to be wearing it.
     In this relationship can be found the transience of queer existence, a “tidy, socioeconomic parallel of queer desire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”—never being allowed to, perhaps never wanting to, fully own and occupy a space as one’s own, the way a heterosexual couple has (seemingly) always been able to marry, buy a house, live in it permanently together, without fear that that space might be legislated or otherwise violated or taken away. There is also the expectation that queerness will tidy up after itself when allowed to occupy that heteronormative space—the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that queerness can exist in the world as long as it isn’t immediately identifiable. Try on that life, it says, but don’t let your slip show, and certainly don’t tailor it to better fit you or leave any other sign that you’ve been inside it.
     Blanchfield recalls one friendship lost over a perceived unmet housesitting obligation. His friend’s husband came home a day earlier than he was supposed to, to find Blanchfield in bed with someone, the carpet rolled up and to the side, the table used as a desk, a plate used as an ashtray, breakfast dishes as-yet unwashed. The husband called his wife, Blanchfield’s friend, irate at what he’d seen. Later, the friend told Blanchfield she was deeply disappointed, and he had the “uneasy sense that the apology elicited and that I gave was for sleeping with a man in their bed.” We learn that the man was a friend who had recently tested positive for HIV, and that he had come all week to the house seeking Blanchfield’s support and comfort. As I read this I wondered if it would matter to Blanchfield’s friend that they hadn’t had sex in the bed, only slept. I would guess probably not.

In The Odyssey, when Odysseus first returns home after sixteen years away, presumed, by most, dead, he discovers that his wife’s suitors have taken over his home and made it unrecognizable, and that he, himself, has been rendered unrecognizable to all of them. Older, war- and sea-ravaged, dirty, his hair and beard too long, he presents himself as a beggar and his wife, son, and rivals can’t see through the disguise. In the traditional act of hospitality, Eurycleia, Odysseus’ wet nurse and, later, his son’s, bends to wash the stranger’s feet. She is the only person to recognize him without his telling her; she notices, just above his knee, a scar earned boar hunting as a young man. Because she essentially raised him, she knows the scar intimately, and through this knowledge, knows him.
     “On Containment” begins with Blanchfield’s own childhood scar. His father, a trucker who has been away a while, comes home, and nine-year-old Brian races the dog, Sam, to greet him at the backdoor. Like Odysseus’s Argos, whose skeleton waited on shore where he’d died still searching the horizon for his master’s ship, Sam was loyal first to Brian’s father, and “turned on his rival… in a single motion, prefaced by a low growl, seized and ripped the flesh off the right side of [his] face, cheek to jawbone.” As they drove to the hospital, Brian kept reaching for the visor, wanting to see the wound for himself in the mirror: “What was the damage was the question, yes, but also, What does it look like inside me? I could hardly contain myself.”
     Eventually, Blanchfield writes, “the wound became scar and for the next eight years tightened and traveled from my cheek to my chin as I grew into the face I have.” Recently, in reading work by and about Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist of the 17th century, I learned that scar tissue is created by collagen, which the body must constantly produce to keep a wound closed. I had always thought of a scar as the remainder of a wound now-gone, but if there is still a scar, the skin is actively working to stay together—the natural state of a wound, in fact, is to be open. Samuel Pepys, forty-something years after surgery to have an enormous nest of bladder stones removed, developed scurvy, which affects collagen production and, though the surgical wound had been closed for decades, without collagen, it spontaneously reopened, as deep and painful as before. A scar, then, doesn’t replace a wound—it contains it.
     Though Blanchfield’s scar has shrunk and moved, it remains on his face. “There are a lot of nerve endings gathered in it,” he writes, “and it drives me a little crazy, distributes a sort of unsettling, illocable energy within, when a lover plays with that part of my face. I feel the same about my navel.” I know the sensation he’s describing—I have a scar on the tip of my left finger that is only a few years old, and touching it has the same effect. “Illocable” is such a perfect word for it that I can’t think of a second for explication. I can only say that, usually, a triggered pain has a clear source in the body—you stub your toe, your toe hurts, even if the surrounding area hurts as well. This nerve pain, though, has no single, determinable source, and because I cannot locate it to a single point, it achieves an unsettling illeity, as though it is occupying the air around me, rather than coming from within.
     Blanchfield recalls an idea in Adam Phillips’ book of Winnicottian essays—though he admits it may be simply his own theory, and not Phillips’: “beyond any fear is a broader, circumambient fear—a  terror—that one will be insufficiently able to hold that fear… In sustained tickling we know (we learned) there exists an outer lip or membrane between the simpler immediate excitement of fear and the shameful and complete loss of bodily control and mental composure.” When, after the bite, the other dogs in the neighborhood reacted violently to Brian’s presence, a boy told him they could smell his fear. “Early on you have a secret,” Blanchfield writes. “It is almost as though the secret is there before you. You are ever in relation to it; you are its container… How you feel is the secret. Or, it is not untrue to say, the secret is how you feel.” Brian was afraid of dogs, which the dogs could sense, which then made them more worthy of his fear. But he was containing something else, something he was more afraid would escape containment: “I couldn’t have said by what extroversion, but I knew eventually I was coming out.”
     We can see in this the writer’s dilemma. In writing, the writer must pass the brink of pleasure in tickling a subject to reach its point of disintegration. They must flip the mirror to view the wound’s full damage, to ask, “What does it look like inside me?” Yet, the finished essay also acts like a scar, locating the wound and containing it, working, like the body, to keep it closed and in one place.
Reading a personal essay is also like housesitting. We try on the writer’s life, see how it feels, walk through the rooms of the writer’s mind and pull open the curtains, roll up the rug, use its plate as an ashtray. We feel as though we know what it’s like to live there, but we don’t know, not really. Eventually we leave to go live somewhere else.
     This experience of a writer’s mind is a privilege, and we are given it because the writer practices xenia, guest-friendship. This is another economy of hospitality, the commensalism in which the writer allows us into their house, and we, in turn, do them the favor of living in that house respectfully, of observing it closely, appreciating what has been so carefully placed where and why.
     Of course, too, a personal essay is a wound at the bottom of the writer’s foot. A wound on one’s extremity achieves illeity because, unlike the flesh ripped from Brian’s face, that wound cannot be easily seen, the damage not easily reckoned. Only others can truly see into that clean throat, and only if the writer chooses to prop it up on the butcher block table to let us get a look inside. This is vulnerability—the writer, prone, showing us their wound.

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CORRECTIONS

At the end of Proxies waits what Blanchfield calls a “rolling endnote,” titled “Corrections,” where he corrects much of the things in these essays that, in suppressing authoritative second sources, he gets wrong.

In Levinas, the idea of illeity circles that phrase “there is,” an impersonal manner of being. I think of what we mean when we say “it is raining”—what is that it that is? Levinas calls this there, this it, “neither nothingness nor being.” Blanchfield writes in his beginning note that a proxy, in the sciences, “expresses a kind of concession to imprecision, a failure. It’s the word for a subject you choose to study to produce data that can approximate[emphasis his] the data you’d get from the actual, desired subject, if it were not prohibitively hard to apprehend.”

In How Fiction Works, James Wood only spends a few words on the ear from Blue Velvet in a footnote. A clip of this moment from the film can be found easily on YouTube, in which Kyle MachLachlan, as Jeffrey Beaumont, pauses in a field while throwing rocks at empty bottles to part the grass and find, nestled there, an ear grown moldy, crawling with ants. This footnote elaborates on a concept Wood calls “The Awful and the Regular,” using Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education as an example. He notes that, in moments of shock or trauma, the awful details and the regular details will strike the viewer at the same time: “Frédéric felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a gray overcoat.” The estrangement occurs here when, like the ear in the field, the hand is viewed as separate from the rest of the body, but that detail—a hand is not where it belongs, it is that of a dead man, body strewn underfoot—is given equal weight to the man’s rank and the color of his overcoat. Blanchfield’s essays achieve a similar effect. In an essay on owls, he writes of a raptor center outside Charlotte, NC, the second boy he ever slept with, giving a brick as a gift, a poem about taking ecstasy and not having sex, Little Professor—the children’s game, Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” the etymology of the word sarcophagus, boredom, a text from his mother, the wingspan of an owl. These details gain equality through their association in Blanchfield’s mind, and as he removes them from their home in his mind and puts them on the page, they serve as proxies for his imagination, and in that removal they achieve illeity by being neither the thing they represent, nor nothing, but something new entirely.

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Heather Wells Peterson's fiction and essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, American Short Fiction, Subtropics, Lucky Peach, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

Dec 14: Hannah Ensor on Denise Levertov's "On the Function of the Line" (1979)

In the first few months of 2008, I was asked to read Denise Levertov’s essay “On the Function of the Line” in an undergraduate poetry class.
     I learned a lot about poetry and death in that class—a 300-level poetry workshop with Laura Kasischke, in the basement of the building where I work now. I learned how Frank O’Hara died, but not when. Vice versa for Heath Ledger [1]. At one point, Laura said that she writes poems because if a non-poet is walking down a street and a brick falls on her head, she’s just dead. Whereas if she’s walking down the street and a brick falls on her head, at least she’s written poems. I’m likely misremembering this; it’s been a decade. But I remember the death, and the camaraderie, and the excitement of liking other people’s poems, and of people liking my poems, and the time when someone asked me if I was wearing a bandana for religious reasons and I said, NO, FOR GAY REASONS, and also that Laura wore incredible boots.
     But I’m not here to talk about the brilliance that is Laura Kasischke or her boots. I’m here to talk about “On the Function of the Line” by Denise Levertov, an essay about poems (which, if you ask me, is a more appealing concept than a poem about essays).
     When I teach poetry to new or not-yet poets, I always teach “On the Function of the Line” because it’s a really good way of thinking about breaking lines. I know that I care too much about linebreaks, and it’s not because I consider myself particularly “lyric,” and/or interested in any way about sonorousness. (I’m underselling myself, but that’s in character, so I’ll keep going.) It’s because I like how weird our brains are. I think I think about the linebreak in the ways that I do because Denise Levertov’s essay HAPPENED TO ME. Look:

The most obvious function of the linebreak is rhythmic: it can record the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between word and word that are characteristic of the mind’s dance among perceptions but which are not noted by grammatical punctuation. Regular punctuation is a part of regular sentence structure, that is, of the expression of completed thoughts; and this expression is typical of prose, even though prose is not at all times bound by its logic. But in poems one has the opportunity not only, as in expressive prose, to depart from the syntactic norm, but to make manifest, by an intrinsic structural means, the interplay or counterpoint of process and completion—in other words, to present the dynamics of perception along with its arrival at full expression. The line break is a form of punctuation additional to the punctuation that forms part of the logic of completed thoughts. Linebreaks—together with intelligent use of indentation and other devices of scoring—represent a peculiarly poetic, alogical, parallel (not competitive) punctuation. [2] [Emphasis shared—bold is mine, italics are Denise’s.]

Now, let me say, first of all: I think essays can do (at least a lot of this) too. Probably fiction as well. I think it’s probably unlikely that too many essays in 1979 were doing this, and her point is a formal/structural one about how poems have a formal quality that does a thing, and that thing is poetic. But if you see footnote 2, you’ll see that I don’t think that all this talk about the linebreak is really, or only, about the linebreak. But for now, I’ll get back to the linebreak.

The linebreak is not arbitrary, but it is PERSONAL. That’s the whole thing. It’s where the POET’S BRAIN paused. Isn’t that cool?? It happens to me all the time when I’m writing poems, that the line will break where my brain paused, did a little flutter or stutter or wiggle or twist. That’s part of what makes editing poems confusing. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, we can’t fake a flutter / stutter / wiggle / twist. [3] (For more on this, see GradeSaver.com.) But still sometimes we have to move where a line breaks to make a poem better. Then again, what is better? What is a poem? Of course, I’m kidding. Poems never get better, and we’ll never know what they are.

The funniest part of “On the Function of the Line” is when she approximates how long to pause at a linebreak: “roughly a half comma in duration.” I’m gonna be honest with you: I love shit like this. She goes on: “The intonation, the ups and downs of the voice…could be recorded in graph form by some instrument, as heartbeats or brain waves are graphed.”

The linebreak, if you read Denise’s essay carefully, is why we have poet voice, and for this we are sorry. But also not that sorry.

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[1] One day I walked into the classroom to see, written in huge letters on the chalkboard, HEATH LEDGER IS DEAD—peak 2008. Last night I saw a tweet that said: “Peak 2018. This is how I found out Bush Sr died,” quoting another tweet that said “george bush really had to die tonight just to overshadow the release of the Thank U Next video? you were already president give someone else the spotlight” and that’s another great bridge across this past decade. 

[2] This is all also true for prose poems, which I look forward to telling you about in next year’s advent calendar. 

[3] Except when we’re dancers like my friend and poem life partner Audra is, Audra who I took that class with. Also, it’s not “faking,” it’s just that she can DECIDE to do it, which is maybe something we should learn from when editing poems.

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Hannah Ensor's first book of poetry, Love Dream With Television, was recently published by Noemi Press. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

Dec 13: Jill Christman on Writing Sexual Trauma Under Title IX

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter”:
Writing Sexual Trauma Under Title IX

In the spirit of advent, I want to talk about what has already begun, and what is coming, in the writing and teaching of personal essays under Title IX and in the era of #MeToo. Our contemporary #MeToo movement—the one that emerged with the hashtag in 2017 from the smoke of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of harassment and assault—is fueled by the individual and collective voices of survivors telling our own stories about rape culture and sexual violence. For the past year and a half, we’ve all been watching as men who’ve been abusing women with impunity inside the smug protection of the patriarchy have finally started to lose their jobs for their crimes. Some have even gone to prison.
     Already, of course, we see the push back in the headlines: “A Year Later, Americans Are Deeply Divided Over the #MeToo Movement” with 40 percent of surveyed Americans (aligned by party rather than gender) reporting their belief that the movement has “gone too far.” This, after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings during which we all got a good look at just what it takes to be believed—or not—and how the rape culture will rise up to punish those who tell their own stories of assault. (As of November 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her family were still hiding from harassment and death threats.) Why did she wait so long to tell? This question is leveled again and again as evidence of a false accusation, and if we look into our own corners of truth-telling in the writing classroom, I wonder if we find yet another answer to this dangerous question. Are we shutting the doors on the safe places where our students can figure out how to tell what can feel like an impossibly dangerous story?
     I’ve been writing the stories of my own childhood sexual abuse, college rape, and harassment since I submitted a collection of short stories I called Voices featuring a protagonist who looked and acted a lot like a young me as my honors thesis at the University of Oregon—where I was raped at a fraternity party in 1988 and earned my degree in 1992. As a writer who was (mostly) supported by my (feminist) teachers in the telling of my own stories at a crucial time in both my recovery and my development as a writer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the work we do as teachers of nonfiction writing on college campuses and #MeToo.
     I’ve been thinking about the women I read when I myself was a student, the writers who cracked open the door and made the telling seem possible. I’ve been thinking about what I told, when I told, how I told, and why I told. I’ve been thinking about who helped me along the way in my telling, and all this has led me to think hard about my responsibilities as a writer and teacher in a country where the needle hasn’t moved on the alarmingly high rate at which our students are being sexually assaulted on the very campuses where we’ve been privileged with the charge of helping them develop the superpower that is writing. Recent statistics put the rate for rape or attempted rape for a woman during her four years in college at right around one in five. #MeToo is trying, but statistically speaking, nothing has changed since my rape thirty years ago. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working, and we need to recognize this attack on our students as the emergency it is.
     So, as essayists and teachers of writing in higher education, what’s our part in all this? What’s unique about our position as educators specifically charged with teaching adult students how to shape stories out of the stuff of real life? We know the college years are a vulnerable time for all students, just as we know that the stakes and parameters of telling true stories can shift or rise or constrict for those students who are at a much greater risk of sexual assault—women, students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.
     I’ve been teaching the writing of personal essays and memoir for nearly two decades now, and I could tell you stories. Many of our students are arriving for the first time to a page where someone like me asks then to tell the truth about something they know; someone like me reminds them that there are no answers, not really, just better questions; someone like me helps them to sketch a frame and asks them to step in with their memories and language and fill the page:

• Draw a map of your childhood bedroom. What did the comforter feel like? Were there books on the shelves? Fish Do the Strangest Things? Was there a bedside table? Anything in the top drawer? Be specific.
• Write two pages about a time when someone wanted something that you didn’t want to give.
• Choose an animal, vegetable, and mineral. Write each one. Now find the connections. What can we learn about the young woman eating the avocado by the Costa Rican volcano in the good company of a line of leaf-cutter ants?

     Semester after semester, the stories come. Semester after semester, we listen, we offer feedback, and we hold these stories safely as they navigate, word by word, slowly at first, into the light. As a writer, I confess I’ve never trusted the sanctity of a shadowy corner. In my life, I’ve never met a secret that did more good than harm. But as a teacher, I believe that the choice to tell—the how and the why and the when of the telling—rests firmly in the hands and the heart and the gut of the writer. This environment of agency and autonomy is the safe place I’ve always tried so hard to create in my classroom, and now, because of the way in which my own university interprets and enacts Title IX, and specifically, The Clery Act—which probably isn’t that different from your university—I can no longer guarantee a confidential writing place for my students. According to the “responsible employee” policy under which I work, if a student tells me about an assault, I am obligated to report—whether or not the student consents to that report.
     The issue is fraught. The goals of the policy seem well-meaning. Of course, we all want reporting that creates an accurate picture of the number of violations; we all want safer campuses; we want to be able to track and punish repeat offenders; and we want to be able to offer appropriate services to survivors—and then, of course, there’s the issue of protecting the university from legal liability. Worried about catching a student unaware, this fall, for the first time in my teaching life, I added a note in my course policies explaining the role of “mandatory reporters,” letting my students all know that as a faculty member, I am compelled by university policy to report any knowledge I have of sexual assault, harassment, or intimate partner violence—from any time in their lives in any location (not just current or recent incidents occurring on campus)—to the Title IX office. I wanted to ask my students directly how many of them were aware of this policy, how many of them knew the difference between the confidential resources on campus (the victim advocacy office, the health center, and the counseling center) and the non-confidential resources (everybody else—including all the faculty, the residence hall assistants, the campus police, and the Title IX office).
     How many of you knew before I told you? I asked on the first day of class. One person raised a hand. That person works as a residence hall assistant and therefore belongs to the large category of “responsible employees”—or mandatory reporters. The other students seemed shocked—both that they were subject to such a policy and that they hadn’t known about the policy (administrative tip: students don’t read email any more). Then we talked.
     Since my August decision to include the policy note, the leaves have changed color and dropped, sleet and snow have fallen from the sky, and I have confirmed what I suspected: including the policy is a tiny bit like the informed consent I feel obligated to provide and a lot more like the “don’t ask/don’t tell” silencing I despise, a layer of ice freezing over any survivor’s educational access to me as a teacher of essays and memoir, a betrayal of the writer-mentor relationship, and most certainly a detriment to the emergence of stories—and thus, reports. Write your true stories, my policy note warns in translation: say anything you need to say—except that very private thing about your sexual history. Don’t say that.
     I can’t do that again.
     So what’s to be done? Begin by reviewing the policies on your own campuses, which are shifting even as I write under changes proposed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to protect those accused of sexual harassment and assault; despite all the rhetoric, remember that our college meeting rooms are not courts of law. If you haven’t attended a Title IX training within the past couple of years, this might take some digging (start by searching “Title IX” or “Clery” or “Non-confidential resources” in your school’s browser)—and then think about the implications of these specific policies in the daily work that you do with your students. Imagine a Take Back the Night rally or a conversation overheard before class or a post-workshop conference or a thesis meeting with a memoir-writing graduate student or an essay that mentions inappropriate touching from an uncle when the writer was ten. Hear yourself tell the young writer that you’re required to report the incident with the uncle (who may or may not be paying the student’s tuition or be dead or have a gun or—you just don’t know the specifics) to the non-confidential Title IX Coordinator. Hear her ask you to not report. She isn’t ready yet, she says. Hear yourself explain again about policy and compelled reporting. Now, into your imagining, splice in what you know about sexual assault being a crime of power. Know that by taking away the survivor’s agency to tell her own story on her own terms you’ve also taken away her chance to wrest back some of the control she lost in the assault. Know that under the system you are now working, you cannot respect the student’s wishes. You cannot have a conversation about writing difficult material. Instead, you must reach for the phone.
     Let’s, for a moment, move away from creative writing and into the realm of psychology and victim advocacy. Dr. Jennifer Freyd is a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and an activist in the support of survivors of sexual violence. I worked in her lab in my early twenties when I was still trying to be something other than a writer, so I will disclose here that in addition to being a leading researcher in this field, Dr. Freyd is also my friend. She was instrumental in reshaping the UO’s implementation of Title IX/The Clery Act from the most common model of “mandatory reporting” to one of “mandatory supporting”: if you have time to read only one thing about compelled reporting on our campuses, stop right now, and click over to Dr. Freyd’s 2016 Huffington Post essay “The Problem with ‘Required Reporting’ Rules for Sexual Violence on Campus.”
     Here are some vital things Dr. Freyd tells us about social science research on trauma disclosure: first, disclosure is often delayed and a bad first response from the listener—say, skepticism or betrayal—“can cause profound harm”; further, she notes that most victims tell their story first not for practical help, but for deeper emotional reasons to someone they trust, such as a mentor or faculty member, and if this initial telling is appropriately received, “the victims are much more likely to later seek help, promote action, etc.”: this was certainly my own experience, and my good fortune as a student has guided my own practices from the other side of the desk over the past twenty years as I’ve mentored students through the difficult process of putting language to trauma.
     As a survivor and a teacher, I know I hurt my students if I take control of their stories before they’ve even figured out how to tell them. As a college student in my early twenties, a trusted teacher gave me the space and permission I needed to write the first story of my childhood abuse, a story that came out of memories of six years of repeated assault, a story about a little girl who was me, but not me, moving through dreams, flashbacks, and moments of profound disassociation. How did I write my way through all the trappings of something I can now name as post-traumatic stress disorder, but that was then beyond the reach of my comprehension and vocabulary? How did I do it? I was given the gift of literary models—and then I was given time, empathy, kindness, and the power of choice.
     I can remember the striped light coming into the classroom on the day we read the first rape scene. The book was Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), and in class that day, I felt as if there was a kind of explosion in my head—not a bad explosion—but the kind that clears everything away. She said that. Are you all hearing this? She said the thing. I still own the same paperback Bantam edition, the one with the swish of green and blue across the cover, and the passage is marked vertically down the margin with the fine line of the pink highlighter I favored in college:

“Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot” (65). This was 1990. After that, I kept reading: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Alice Sebold’s Lucky, and in 2002, I published Darkroom: A Family Exposure. Knowing that other women could tell their stories gave me the permission I needed to tell my own—and so I did. And I never stopped.
     What if, when I wrote my first tentative lines about a young girl who was sexually abused on an island, my teacher had turned me in? That’s what it would have felt like—a turning in, not an assist. Would I have kept going? Would I ever have learned to tell my own story? What would have come of my report? Would I have done a service in helping to stop a man who may have been a serial offender? Doubtful. No one saw my rape. It would have been the typical he said/she said. He was a senior business major who belonged to a fraternity, came from money, drove a Porsche. I was in my first year of college by the grace of a full financial aid package. I wore flowy hippie skirts and rode a bicycle to class. How do you think that would have gone for me? Do you think I would have been aided by the system more than I was by the teachers who mentored my early work, listened without judgment, and in their patient way gave me the tools I needed to take control of my own story?
     I will never forget the moment when Dr. Blasey Ford described her specific memory of the two boys laughing during the assault. I get it. For me, after the pillow on my face, the indelible detail was the donuts my rapist offered to me from an oily bag the next morning. I suspected then as I know now that my testimony against his—even if I’d had the capacity to name the crime—would have meant nothing. Understanding the story of my rape took me years of writing, but I can see the assault clearly now, and that clarity translates into the responsibility to help my students do the same.
     Next fall, I’ll be teaching just one course: an intensive, immersive, interdisciplinary seminar that focuses on the continuing high rates of sexual violence on our campuses and the role storytelling might have to play in dismantling that culture. We’re going to assess what’s working for and against campus rape culture, produce a podcast, and take a stab at writing policy. I want justice and healing for survivors. I want freedom and opportunity for everyone else. I want the telling of our stories to lead to prevention. I want our kids to go to college full of ideas and ambition and to spend their four years pursuing wild and wonderful possibility. I want the limitless power of finding and owning our own stories to help move us toward permanent, real change.
     I welcome your stories and ideas.

“There is no greater agony than bearing the untold story inside of you.” —Maya Angelou

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Jill Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood, as well as essays in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and True Story. “Slaughterhouse Island,” an essay about her own fraternity-party assault, appears in Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. Visit her at www.jillchristman.com and @jill_christman.