10 Things We Learned About Writing Nonfiction from Alissa Quart, a Journalist "Outsider"

Last year at AWP’s annual conference in Boston, Alissa Quart, Lisa Dierbeck, and Pagan Kennedy offered a panel on the art of the nonfiction idea, which included a clinic called the “Idea Hospital.” Audience members had a handful of minutes to pitch their nonfiction manuscripts to the panelists, who in turn gave them off-the-cuff advice on proceeding with their projects and finding publishers. A great idea! And damn if we at Iron Horse Literary Review didn’t miss it. Didn’t even catch our eye when we scanned the novel-length conference program.

Then, by chance, we found Alissa’s project with Maisie Crow on Atavist.com: The Last Clinic, a piece of long-form journalism about the only remaining abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, a story that uses, in tandem, a documentary film, graphs, maps, photographs, and Alissa’s written essay (an extraction of which originally appeared in The Atlantic). We were enthralled!

So we invited Alissa to come to Texas Tech and read from her latest book, Republic of Outsiders, which introduces readers to people who think outside the box: Occupy Wall Street’s alternative bankers, members of Mad Pride, transgender activists, amateur filmmakers (like the producers of Beasts of the Southern Wild), Etsy entrepreneurs, and even Kickstarter phenom musician Amanda Palmer.

And even though West Texas harbors few such “outside” thinkers, Alissa came! All smiles and generous and energetic and feisty. She even taught a Master Class, which four of our graduate students were lucky enough to take. In it, Alissa workshopped an essay written by each of them and parceled out some amazing advice. In particular, we loved the way her “journalist’s” mind—what some in creative writing programs might call the “outsider” mind—refreshed our understanding of writing literary nonfiction. She gifted us with new ways of thinking about our usual problems when writing:

1. Think of the title as part of your manuscript’s “packaging.” We all know that you better have a good title that conveys what’s inside the essay and makes people want to open the box, but contemplating it as wrapping paper was new for us. The visual metaphor in our heads now, it’s impossible for us to be complacent about titling, sending hideous gifts into the world, wrapped in newspaper or topped with some crumpled bow because we think no one will notice. One effective type of title Alissa discussed: “Verb” titles such as Branded, Hooked, or Breaking. And as if Alissa had some sort of generating software in her head, titles whizzed from her mouth seconds—I mean, milliseconds—after each of us pitched ideas to her. And her titles were stunning—layered with meaning, symbolism, and word-play, all of them multitasking in the way that good titles do.
2. Sure, open with a scene or introduction to an intriguing character, but then position your “nut graph” by the third paragraph. Yes, yes, creative writers that we are (and journalists that we’re not), we thought at first that Alissa said nut grab. Which as a metaphor makes some sense. Here’s where you grab your readers by the nuts. In a more professional vein—those journalists are such straight-arrow types—the nut graph is the paragraph in which you broadcast the “news value” or “informative merit” of your story in a nutshell. If you open an essay with a scene or character, you get to enter the essay in a more dramatic moment, stalling the facts or information that might serve as a more traditional, perhaps stodgy, lead. Even so, you still need to ante up somewhere in the opening paragraphs.
3. Imagine the nut graph in other terms—cinematic terms, to be exact. Since Alissa’s parents were film critics, she has a firm hold on visual storytelling as well. A good film may open with a close-up of a main character or someone’s car or a dead body lying on the living room floor, but the camera eventually pans backward and gives what is known in the movie industry as an “establishing shot”—a view that shows us where and when the story takes place and how the key figures fit into the context of the storyline.
4. When writing a memoir, find the “source of entry.” What are the personal stakes in your manuscript? One of the students in Alissa’s master class, for example, had written about his experiences teaching English in Kazakhstan—an essay chockfull of interesting encounters with his students and their manipulations of the English language. But so what? What did all of these interesting encounters mean? In the course of discussion, Alissa turned on her interviewing skills and ferreted out some answers. The writer, fresh out of a master’s program, couldn’t find a job in America (one of the richest countries in the world) and so had to seek employment in Kazakhstan (ironically, one of the poorer countries in the world.). Too, the writer grew up in the Mormon faith and is a practicing Mormon today. In the year prior to his departure for Kazakhstan, before he married, he had struggled with the Mormon church-structure, which requires single people over the age of thirty-one to leave the “Single Ward” and advance into the “Single Ward II” or “Mid-Singles Ward”—which could seem to ostracize the “old maid” types, both male and female, who wouldn’t get married already. But once newly married and living his foreign adventure, how did this particular writer fit in with the Kazakhs? What happens when everything you know—the traditions of your faith, your belief in the American dream, and even the rules governing your native language—break down? That’s the source of entry.
5. Keep a good novel with you at all times so the language of storytelling remains in your head. Because, Alissa warned, the language of journalism, of conveying facts, often sounds depleted. Find a good novel on the nonfiction subject you’re tackling. For the student writing a nostalgic retrospective of his hockey days, Alissa recommended Rabbit, Run, John Updike’s narrative about a former high school basketball star. For the student writing about a coup in Honduras, which she experienced as an American tourist and addressed in an manuscript that occasionally slipped into the first-person plural, Alissa suggested Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a dystopian science fiction novel told in the first-person plural. This novel fluctuates between the grim reality of the protagonist clones and their encounters with the world of “real people,” whom they long to join—a perfect mirror for our student writer who found herself caught between the safety of her known American world and the intensity of her new experiences in Honduras.
6. Even with that resonant language of fiction in your head, don’t lose sight of the essay’s purpose. After a moment of grandiloquence, pan back and land on your main subject again. For example, in the Honduras essay, the writer included this lovely paragraph: “In the distance on a road leading out of town, what seems like a mirage at first morphs into a line of soldiers, seemingly weightless as they float in our direction. The sweat of their cheeks reflects the sun; their eyes hide under hats of silver and gray fatigue.” Magnificent, Alissa said, then added that before moving on with the story, the writer should give us another look at Honduras, something about its politics, something factual, something like hard evidence, to remind us why we were there.
7. For those of us writing nonfiction with a literary bent (particularly personal essays or memoir): extract a 1,500- to 2,000-word version from your manuscripts. Shorter articles sell well to mainstream outlets. For example, a thumbnail version of the English in Kazakhstan piece would be a perfect fit with Instructor, Educational Leadership, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. Note that Alissa’s shorter version of “The Last Clinic” originally appeared in The Atlantic before it’s “larger” glory at The Atavist.
8. Experiment. Create multimedia long-form essays—a hot new breed that online platforms are particularly interested in. Read some at Guernica or The Atavist. In fact, Alissa’s long-form multimedia essay, accompanied by Maisie Crow’s documentary, is available for only $3.99 at Atavist.com. And you can join Creatavist.com for free. On this site, writers can build and publish their multimedia stories. At the very least, writers who are savvy enough to know how to illustrate or package their essays are more likely to snag the attention of editors by including these suggestions with their submissions to online platforms.
9. Read. Of course. Two books we heard Alissa recommend over and over again: Fairyland by Alysia Abbott and Stoner by John Williams.
10. Finally, tap into your own “outsider” voice. When she asked our West Texas audience who among them felt like outsiders, not a single person raised a hand. Shocked, she said that had never happened to her before. Usually, everyone raises their hands—which is a different type of irony. But Alissa was in Lubbock, Texas, after all, where outsiders are strung up in trees on a regular basis. Few people take the outsider’s side here. “You better hurry and tap into rebellion,” Alissa said. The best nonfiction writing comes from that part of ourselves in conflict with the “insider” world. Look for places where you resist mainstream society, where you don’t fit in, and strike out bravely from there.

Alissa Quart is the author of Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreams and Rebels; Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers; and Hothouse Kids. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Quart has written for The New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, The Nation, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, and The Columbia Journalism Review. Her poetry has appeared in The London Review of Books and in many other publications. With filmmaker and photographer Maisie Crow, Quart has also completed a short documentary based on her long-form journalism. She has also served as editor for Atavist.com and has taught at Columbia University’s Journalism School.

Leslie Jill Patterson has recently published nonfiction in Texas Monthly, Grist, Baltimore Review, meatpaper​, Earth’s Daughters, and Bring the Noise: the best pop culture essays from Barrelhouse. Her recent awards include a 2012 Embrey Human Rights Fellowship and the 2013 Everett Southwest Literary Award, judged by Lee K. Abbott. In 1999, she founded Iron Horse Literary Review, and she serves as copy editor for the journal Creative Nonfiction. Today, she has a growing interest in social justice literature and serves as the case storyteller for the Texas Regional Public Defenders Office for Capital Cases, where she assists a terrific team of attorneys who fight the death penalty at both the state and federal levels.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. On Dostoevsky as essayist, traveller and hedgehog

I wonder if Fyodor Dostoevsky had read Thoreau's Walking before writing his famous 1880 “Pushkin Speech”, delivered in Moscow at the first public commemoration of the poet in Russia since his suspicious death in 1837. In this discourse, referring to Alexander Pushkin and the characters of his works, Dostoevsky coined the term Russian wanderer, a metaphoric personification of the contradictory nature of Russian national identity. As Ingrid Kleespies explains, “the perception of Russia as a figuratively nomadic nation and of Russians themselves as nomadic wanderers excluded from, or confined to the margins of, European civilization and history came to be a central topos of nineteenth-century Russian national thought”.[i]

This idea nourished a fertile tradition of literary wanderlust that encompasses the works of authors such as Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Herzen or Fyodor Dostoevsky himself. However, it probably was the symbolist poet Alexander Blok who summarized this conception more accurately and radically: “Yes, we are Scythians!”.[ii] His verses, as Henry D. Thoreau's essay, suggest the innate character of the wandering temperament. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.[iii] And yet I feel, quite incongruously, that the coiner of the expression Russian wanderer, who was also the author of a hallmark in Russian travel writing, was not such an enthusiastic traveller. He was a hedgehog.

In the preserved fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus, we can read: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Isaiah Berlin transformed this taxonomy into literary theory: Herodotus, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Pushkin and Joyce are foxes; Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Dostoevsky and Proust are, to a greater or lesser extent, hedgehogs.[iv] As a matter of fact, Lucretius had enough with De rerum natura, Proust more than enough with going In Search of Lost Time and his madeleine, and Dostoevsky with his literature of the underground and gambling.

This remark on Dostoevsky's addiction might seem pointless and tasteless, were it not for the fact that casinos (and not a medical consultation to do with his epilepsy, as he assured his brother) probably constituted one of the main goals and lures of the two and a half months' journey he made to Western Europe in June 1862. After spending only one day in Berlin, he lost a substantial sum of money during his stay in Wiesbaden, a city which some years later would see how he dilapidated his already exiguous fortune. However, Fyodor Dostoevsky did not mention this detail in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the depiction of his trip for the readers of the periodical Vremya (Time), published in its February 1863 issue.

“But, my friends, I have warned you as far as the first chapter of these notes, you know, that I may tell dreadful lies. So don't stand in the way. You surely know too, that if I tell lies I shall tell them in the conviction that I am not telling them. Personally, I think this should amply suffice you, and you had better give me full freedom”, Fyodor argues. I suppose full freedom is part of the agreement that you are forced to make when reading a hedgehog. As one of Fyodor Dostoevsky's literary grandsons, Saul Bellow, points out, it is characteristic of this writer that he does not conceal his bias or limitations, his unreliability: “For him this revelation of bias is a step toward the truth”.[v] Once the readers have accepted that unavoidable premise, they can take a seat next to Dostoevsky in the railway carriage, converse with him and hear the truth, his truth, about the journey that took him to Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden (of course), Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice and Vienna.

While listening, we must take into account that this was his first trip after returning from the journey that changed everything: his sentence to four years of hard labour in Siberia and his subsequent conscription to the army in Kazakhstan. After that odyssey, every journey should have seemed dull and meaningless. We must also take into account the hedgehog point of view, which explains his initial reluctance to talk. “What shall I tell you? What shall I depict? A panorama? A perspective? A bird's-eye view of something? But you will probably be the first to tell me that I have flown too high”. A fox like Tolstoy would not have hesitated one minute to try to imagine the bird's viewpoint; the hedgehog, quite the contrary, is aware of his shortcomings, and thus he will resign to report his version, which is an interpretation of the details noticed by a creature stuck to the ground (or even to the underground).

Nevertheless, as Fyodor assumes, we have not chosen precisely this seat in the train to hear accurate information; not in vain, the title of the travelogue already hints at its fragmentary, incomplete, and subjective nature, at the spatial and temporal confusion, at the role of memory as a filter, which is not always the most trustworthy one. “Ah! say I, so what you want is just gossip, light sketches, fleeting personal impressions. That certainly suits me, and I shall immediately consult my diary. And I shall try to be as simple and frank as possible. I only ask you to bear in mind that I shall often be wrong in the things I write about. Not wrong about everything, of course...”

And so he starts off with his digressions, “often intemperate, worse than unfair and even frivolous”, as Bellow notes, which ramble from past to present, from Russia to Europe, from Pushkin and Turgenev to Voltaire and Rousseau, from flogging to French coats, from tradition to social modernization, from the Orthodox Church to Catholicism and Protestantism, from capitalism to socialism, from utopia to the real implementation of liberté, égalité, fraternité... “But anyway, where did I stop? Discussing a French coat! That is what it all started with. […] As a matter of fact, these were not thoughts, but a sort of contemplation, arbitrary notions, daydreams even, ‘of this and that, and nothing else’. To begin with, I made a mental journey back into olden times and let my thoughts wander […]”. Nothing is as convenient for the creation of literary hybrids as the transient condition of the traveller: Dostoevsky's Winter Notes transgress the boundaries between travelogue and fiction, between essay and polemical journalism, both in terms of their conception and their form. And nothing is as fruitful for the ruminative mind as travelling: the tempo of thoughts accommodates fast and eagerly to the banging and rattling of the train in an effort to populate the plains of boredom.

“Thus did all these thoughts assail me in my railway carriage on the way to Europe, partly in spite of myself and partly because I was bored and had nothing to do. To be frank, only those of us who have nothing to do have hitherto given thought to this sort of thing. Oh, how boring it is to sit idly in a railway carriage! In fact, just as boring as it is to live in Russia without having anything specific to do”. In fact, just as tedious and overwhelming as it seems at times for a hedgehog to travel through the land of holy miracles, as the Slavophile poet Khomiakov baptized Europe. Berlin was so similar to St. Peterburg that Dostoevsky could not help wondering if it was worthwhile spending forty-eight back-breaking hours in a train only to see a replica of what he had just left behind. Paris was the most moral and the most virtuous town in the whole world, so perfect that it had fossilized in stillness and order. London, on the contrary, was immense, and chaotic, and polluted, and crowded: an apocalyptic view bustling night and day. Englishmen, on the one hand, looked solemn, serious, not to say sullen. Frenchmen, on the other, turned out to be irrational, fussy, eloquent just for the sake of eloquence. Frenchwomen, the cherry on top, proved to be superficial, affected, devious intrigants. “Oh, but for Heaven's sake, don't run away with the idea that to love one's country means to revile the foreigner or that I think it does. I don't think so at all and have no intention of thinking so, on the contrary even... Only it is a pity I have no time to explain myself somewhat more clearly...”

Of course, we don't take your downright opinions the wrong way and rather take into consideration your sick liver, your feverish haste to arrive at Wiesbaden, the brevity of the trip. “And so you see, my friends, you cannot look at everything in two and a half months and never make a mistake […]. I must willy-nilly be untruthful occasionally, and therefore...”. Enough, Fyodor, enough. Even though your categorical tone and dispersed ideas, every now and then, make me think of Nabokov's asseveration of you being a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian (sic).[vi] But maybe we shouldn't take his opinions too seriously, either. After all, his uncle Ivan Nabokov was part of the investigative commission that sentenced you to death and sent you to Siberia, which makes good old Vladimir suspicious of congenital ill will. Maybe we should find an explanation for your dispersion and sharpness somewhere else. What about Virginia Woolf? “[…] For nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive — the human soul”.[vii]

Patricia Gonzalo is a translator and an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Spanish Creative Writing program.

All Fyodor Dostoevsky quotes come from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008). Trans. Kyril FitzLyon.

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[i] Ingrid Kleespies, A Nation Astray : nomadism and national identity in Russian literature (DeKalb, IL: NIU Press, 2012).

[ii] Alexander Blok, The Twelve, and other poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

[iii] Henry D. Thoreau, Walking. In: Essays: a fully annotated edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013): 243-280.

[iv] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: an essay on Tolstoy's view of history (New York: Simon         & Schuster, 1953).

[v] Saul Bellow, “The French as Dostoevsky Saw Them”, New Republic 23 (May 1955): 17–20. Rpt. in slightly revised version as Foreword. In: Feodor M. Dostoevsky. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (New York: Criterion, 1955): 9–27.

[vi] Alvin Toffler: “Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov”, Playboy, 11 (1) (Jan 1964): 35-41, 44-45.

[vii] Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View”. In: The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948).

On Robert Louis Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers"

At around two a.m. I finally stop working and sit on the back steps of my home. I am exhausted from a day defined by checkmarks slashed through boxes drawn in my planner, a wearisome day of social patty-cake with hyper-intelligent students and peers. And I stayed late at the letterpress studio so I could finish printing a poster for one of the visiting writers who periodically drop into Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. The lead from metal type still blackens my hands because I forgot to scrub away the grime.

From my stoop, I study the sky. A lunar eclipse had taken place earlier that night during a Hunter’s Moon. And from my Iowan vantage point, had I been outside when it occurred, I would have seen a feint penumbral shroud smearing the lunar light.

But instead of moon or stars, I notice that the bad mitten net in my backyard has come unanchored and one end sinks to the ground. In the way that ordinary things take on meaning, those cheap plastic poles (mended with sticks and duct tape) mirror my own life: laundry spills over in the hamper, I haven’t eaten a single meal with my partner in over two weeks, I can’t recall the last time I laughed. What else has fallen without my noticing? What other beautiful thing have I missed while trudging through my overburdened schedule? A schedule taxed from my inability to say no and my desire to “become” a teacher and finish my first book.

And while I brood under the Hunter’s Moon, I think about Robert Louis Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers.” It’s an apt connection to make I suppose. Stevenson’s essay defends idle time in the face of steadfast ambition. Published in Cornhill Magazine in 1877, just before his career took off, Stevenson’s treatise on idleness scolds blind devotion to professionalism, scholarship mostly, in favor of the educative qualities of “idle” observation. To clarify, Stevenson’s idler is no slacker. His idler is not apathetic in the least. Instead, idleness, to Stevenson, demands the difficult work of appreciating one’s environment, one’s friends and family. To idle is to allow one the time to enjoy his or her own mind at work.

When I think of all the things I haven’t noticed or given time to, Stevenson’s “Apology” hits me like a reprimand. Though his tract defends the idler, his defense is constructed around what the idler is not rather than what the idler is. And though I am inspired to be more present in my day-to-day by Stevenson’s essay, the idler is not who I am at this point in my life. Throughout “An Apology,” Stevenson establishes an opposition between those who choose “Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,” and the “truant student” that rests “on some tuft of lilacs, […] smokes innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones” while birds “sing in the thicket.” Career oriented determination “to what a man calls his business,” Stevenson writes, “is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things,” and therefore demonstrates “a symptom of deficient vitality.” And it is this accusation, in part because I agree, that feels like I am being scolded. Though it is not entirely a life overburdened by obligations that Stevenson argues against, instead, it is the person who ignores friends and environment in favor of ambition.

And though merchants and lawyers are tossed into the mix, it is the scholar who takes the biggest lashing. Because, as Stevenson writes, “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” Thus calling the ardent scholar vain if his or her endeavors sacrifice enjoyment and reflection:

They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play.

While the idler gains intellectual nourishment from contemplative and corporeal meditation the diligent worker pushes himself into an early grave. This lack of “play” thus embitters the scholar because there is no guarantee, no definite appeasement or assured recognition.

As Stevenson argues the distinctions between idler and non-idler a very disconcerting claim emerges—no endeavor truly matters in the grand scheme of things. Stevenson proffers that bitterness stems from investing too much energy in pursuits that demand a return and he suggests that even success is a small reward if one lives his or her life too narrowly. If someone “publishes three or thirty articles a year,” or “finishes his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world.” The world, as Stevenson sees it, would not even lament the historical absence of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had been bludgeoned “some dark night […] the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss.” And this, obviously, is a claim that nags at my discontent. More than my exhaustion it is the thought that readers will not enjoy my books, students will not learn from my lessons, or that the gatekeepers will not allow me through. Stevenson writes, “The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent.” In a different mood, I might choose to read this claim in a positive light. I might see that Stevenson is simply reminding his reader that he or she has no control over the outcome of any endeavor, but that they do have control over their own happiness in addition to their work.

            For Stevenson it seems clear that one so diligently devoted to his or her goal that they are blinded to finer, calmer things “sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return.” Stevenson never suggests that hard work is bad, but he does argue that overwork apparently makes men and women anxiously “deranged.” Instead, he seems to argue for an inclusion of joy that can only come from being present and observant. “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.” Thus Stevenson calls for a balance between idleness and busyness. He demands that duty to one’s happiness is as important, if not more, as duty to one’s career and life goals.

Stevenson’s “Apology” is a dark, yet hopeful call to arms for a more attentive existence. And I feel the pressure of this contradiction as I finally trudge off to bed, too tired to shower but with just enough energy to wash my hands and brush my teeth. And Stevenson’s essay is a good reminder that downtime is as important as diligence. But I can’t shake the knowledge that hard work is the only thing I have control over, and that makes me uncertain of Stevenson’s reliability. All of the sudden his anxiety, his “nervous derangement,” throughout “Apology” is palpable. Stevenson is a narrator frightened that his own endeavors, his own art, might fail in the world. And so his argument for idleness begins to resemble a psychological escape hatch. As if he is really saying to himself: if it all fails at least I can find happiness smoking on a field of lilacs. And yet, a maybe whispers between all the lines. But Stevenson did not fail.

And so I crawl into bed, noticing that my partner put on fresh sheets, and take out my day planner. Underneath the next day’s to-do list, crowded at the bottom of the page, I write “Date Night” and draw a little box next to it. Content, at least for a moment, with the potential of sharing an idle evening with someone I love.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. "An Apology for Idlers." The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. 222-228. Print.

M. Owens is a fiction writer and essayist from Memphis Tennessee whose work appears, or is forthcoming, in The Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Redivider, and Hobart: another literary journal. He now lives in Iowa City where he is an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program. Contact him at www.randalowain.com.

Stephanie G’Schwind: An artful placement of needle against album

A dear friend I’ve known since seventh grade visited me recently, her very painful divorce having just been finalized. We spent an entire weekend on the couch in my front room as she detailed the dissolution of her marriage, all the betrayal and dysfunction—on a scale that was truly astounding. At the risk of sounding insensitive, her experience, in all its gruesome heartbreak, was fascinating. I was riveted. And then what? And what did you say? What happened after that?

Later, I couldn’t help but imagine what form this might take as an essay. If I read her experience as it was told to me, though—in its this, then this, then this sequence, even with scenes, dialogue, and poignant details—it probably would not make a good essay. It’s one thing to have an interesting story, or perhaps we should say experience. But that’s not the same thing as having an interesting essay. I see this frequently in submissions to Colorado Review: truly interesting things—sometimes amazing things—happening to people, that don’t translate into very interesting essays. As many of us nonfiction editors have said, writers sometimes confuse experience with essay, rather than finding the essay in the experience.

If asked to reduce the narrative of their essay down to one sentence, to its very kernel, this is what a few of Colorado Review’s writers might say:

My friendship with a woman took a really bad turn, and a lot of very unpleasant things happened after that. (Regina Drexler’s “Landslide,” Spring 2012)

My father is difficult to connect with. (Carole Firstman’s “Liminal Scorpions,” Summer 2012)

I never liked my name, so I changed it. (Silas Hansen’s “Blank Slate,” Spring 2013)

I have no sense of direction. (Jessica McCaughey’s “Aligning the Internal Compass,” Spring 2010)

So how did these experiences become essays? Generally, the writers took on parallel narratives. I tend to think of these narrative lines as the story on the ground and the story in the sky. Sometimes the story in the sky is closely related to the story on the ground, other times it may seem unrelated, almost random. A seemingly natural tendency has been for the parallel narrative to be research-oriented: astronomy, arachnology, historical events, etc., for example. But throughout the essay, the two narratives riff on each other, speak to each other (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly), creating resonance, and in the end come together in such a way that is greater than merely their sum—and we will have moved from a personal to a universal experience.

I’ll elaborate on just one of the examples above. In Regina Drexler’s “Landslide,” the relationship between the parallel narratives is a close one (a giveaway by the title), though their connection is not immediately clear. She opens the essay with the story in the sky:

Of all natural disasters, landslides are more devastating than most people realize. Worse, they are often triggered by other natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Scientists refer to this as the multi-hazard effect. In one of the deadliest landslides of the last century, in the Ancash region of Peru in 1970, the multi-hazard effect was responsible for the burial and death of over fifty thousand people. Of course, death usually comes before burial. Where there are multiple hazards occurring nearly simultaneously, however, it is likely that even if you survive the first disaster, there is another on its way to bury you alive.

And then, following a section break, she begins the story on the ground: “Ten years ago, as I was in my new-motherhood panic with an infant baby boy, I met her.” The essay moves between the two narratives—the science and history of landslides, and the relationship between Drexler and her friend—with the landslide sections presaging the disaster that befalls Drexler when the relationship sours. In the end, we aren’t left with simply a story about a falling out between two friends, colossal as it was, but an insight into the way disastrous events (both natural and personal) don’t just happen, and certainly don’t happen for one reason.

At a Nonfiction Now conference several years ago, Eileen Pollack articulated this form in a different way (which I have found enormously useful). She talked about the narrative—the here is what happened to me—as being like an album on a turntable. She then suggested that the central question, the reason for writing the essay, was the needle. Music, she said, is created in the friction between the question and the narrative. I really love this metaphor, and it’s easy to spin it out further: when you apply the needle to the album too timidly, it doesn’t catch and you get no music; apply it too aggressively, and you get that awful scratchy sound. We’ve all read essays that fall into these categories: Great story, but why are you telling me this? or Yes, I understand the Lesson that you Never Forgot.

In Drexler’s essay, the landslide narrative suggests a question—how did this happen?—that is never overtly posed, an artful placement of needle against album.

This ground/sky, album/needle multiple-narrative structure is just one form of essay, a form that I’m personally drawn to, and I don’t mean to suggest it as an all-purpose template. Some essays just won’t work this way. And I have published several in Colorado Review that succeed in moving beyond experience to essay by playing, for example, with form/format or by going the lyric essay route. All of which is to say, I love hearing about people’s experiences, but I love reading about them—and publishing them in the magazine—when the writer has found a unique way to tell the story so that we ultimately transcend it.

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Stephanie G’Schwind is Colorado Review’s editor-in-chief and its nonfiction editor. Director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, she also runs a small-press internship for graduate students. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

A Misplaced Literary Ancestry

            Anna Letitia Barbauld was a powerhouse. I could write about her. She was an anti-war abolitionist, and an advocate for freedom of religion during a time when the Church of England bullied for its monopolization. She wrote a forceful essay in 1775[1] supporting her dissenting opinion of the political institutionalization of religion, while simultaneously, and elegantly, conceding the benefit of the Church of England:

We may see such good in an establishment, the doctrines of which we cannot give our assent to without violating our integrity; we may respect the tendencies of a sect, the tenets of which we utterly disapprove. We may think practices useful which we cannot adopt without 

hypocrisy. We may think all religious beneficial, and believe of one alone that is true.

The essay is nothing if not rational, lucid, and persuasive. She argues that mandated association with the church would only weaken members’ devotion, and that the Church would come out stronger when supported by a willing constituency. She appeals regularly to reason and consequence, repeatedly pointing out the lack of opinion or prejudice in her argument.

This, along with her other broadly read essays of dissent and civic engagement, contributed to the eventual repeal of Great Britain’s religiously restrictive acts. If that doesn’t convince my readers she’s worth looking into, I should mention how she published an open letter to one of the era’s most fervent abolitionists in support of his cause, excoriating Parliament for refusing to pass a bill that would end the slave trade.[2] And she wrote it in verse, no less!

But Barbauld’s religiosity is more intense than I’d prefer to spend much time with, which would be necessary in order to properly explore her work…and then there’s the story about her turning down a position to educate young women because she didn’t think they were as capable of rigorous instruction as their male counterparts.

Perhaps I should write about someone like Margaret Fuller, a journalist and women’s rights advocate. She was also the editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal The Dial, a position extended to her as a friend of Emerson. Surely her transcendentalist work will attract those readers whose interest might not otherwise be piqued by her feminist tone. I can discuss the philosophical essay she published in 1843, which encompasses both views. In it she suggests that the spectrum of masculinity and femininity can be experienced within the individual, rather than within a male/female dichotomy:

In so far as soul is in [woman] completely developed, all soul is the same; but as far as it is modified in her as woman, it flows, it breaths, it sings, rather than deposits soil, or finishes work … But it is no more the order of nature that it should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy should exist unmingled with it in any form.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

The essay demonstrates her ability to blend personal perspective, metaphor, and literary and cultural references into a legitimate critique of society.

But if I’m to be honest with myself, and my readers, it’s most appealing to expose an author who wasn’t borne of Western traditions. The contemporary essay can benefit most from an exhibition of the successful perspectives, styles, and experiments of writers couched in a heritage wholly different from those juggernauts (Montaigne, for example) usually extolled and analyzed. Perhaps someone like Jelena Dimitrijević, a native of the politically and culturally piebald Serbia. From 1881 to 1898, shortly after the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic stronghold there was dissolved, she lived in the southern city of Niš. During a time when most of Serbia’s non-Muslim citizens felt little sympathy for their Muslim neighbors, Dimitrijević befriended a Muslim family, including a harem of women, and published a series of ethnographic letters addressed to a deceased friend that enumerated her experiences.[3] She wrote with respect and curiosity for their customs, out of a desire to humanize the stranded denizens. By employing an epistolary form, she was free from the restraints of stringent anthropology or sequential chronology, and had formal permission to digress.

If I ever heard someone say “Evil as a Turk”, I would smile and remember my present neighbors. I went to see them the day before yesterday: the father was shelling peas; his son hanging out nappies (who knows, he may even have washed them, so that his wife should not tire herself).

            Despite being identified by literary scholars[4] as one of the few Serbian women to have made an intellectual impression in Serbia during the 19th century (some listing as few as three), I was unable to find a translation of Dimitrijević’s epistles, resorting to my own translation. Unfortunately, this in and of itself may not be as surprising as I would like it to be.

Perhaps then what I need to talk about is the fact that I keep bumping into the same phenomenon with all three of these authors: their literary legacies have been altered, ignored, and nearly forgotten. As much as I want to focus solely on the literary accomplishments of these authors, I can’t in good faith leave out this distressing observation.

History contains an overwhelming wealth of authors and essays to be found, the nature of which prevents many of us from even attempting. It’s easier to assume the myriad scholars working before us have curated a well-rounded literary oeuvre deserving of our time and attention. In my quest for a worthy subject, I haven’t found this to be the case. Until the 1980s, Anna Letitia Barbauld was remembered as a writer of didactic children’s textbooks and hymns, her place in 18th century England’s political battles erased from contemporary consciousness. It wasn’t until feminists sniffed out some of the works of a lost literary ancestry that her essays resurfaced. Shortly after Margaret Fuller’s death in 1850, a memoir was published of her life and some of her work, though details were omitted, and her essays reworded as to be less offensive. According to scholars,[5] she was remembered not on her own merit but for her proximity to others of merit. This is despite the fact that many of her contemporaries held her in high regard, including Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, and of course Ralph Waldo Emerson. Jelena Dimitrijević, too, was shortchanged. Despite being well known while alive, even being awarded the Matica srpska prize for literature, she was literally forgotten until literary scholars exhumed her work in the 1980s.

This is all to say that we as essayists can’t take the linguistic heritage handed to us as comprehensive, or even representative. It’s our responsibility to seek out the fruits of history that are just out of reach, to push aside branches we have been told are sturdy and to climb onto the limbs of writers offering something forbidden.

Molly Coon is an MFA candidate in the University of Iowa nonfiction writing program.

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[1] “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste on Sects, and on Establishments”, 1775. http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/womenpoets/barbauld/sects.html

[2]  “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade”, 1791. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barbauld/wilberforce/wilberforce.html

[3] Pisma iz Niša o haremima, 1986, Belgrade. https://archive.org/details/pismaizniaohare00pekogoog

[4] See Celia Hawkesworth, “A Serbian Woman in a Turkish Harem: The Work of Jelena Dimitrijević”, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (1999), 56–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212795

[5] Slater, Abby. In Search of Margaret Fuller. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978.