Advent 2022, Dec 16: Sol Kim Cowell, The Final Girl

 The Final Girl: Groups, Series, Histories, and Transness

Sol Kim Cowell

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All bodies are gendered—even if it’s through the absence of it altogether—but few people are as intimately aware of this nature as those who experience an incongruence between the physical form and the gendered form. By which I mean anyone who is policed by the perceived gender of their body, but just for today: those who identify as transgender. To anyone outside of these experiences, it can be hard to imagine the complexity that exists even at the most fundamental level of perception. Not just externally, but internally as well, down to an organic and cellular level.

I’m not a believer that you have to medically transition to be transgender, but I do think it’s important to examine the many different pathways and experiences that trans people take throughout life, and it is for that reason that I consider Cavar’s “a complete family / hstry” to be one of many essays detailing a gendered experience that is simultaneously individual and universal.

Cavar’s ode to their hysterectomy begins with a quote from Alison Stone’s “On the Genealogy of Women: A Defense of Anti-Essentialism.” Parts of it are italicised for emphasis by Cavar’s own decision, and understanding the reasoning behind this is central to approaching the larger piece from the intended perspective.

[Groups] are collections of individuals who mutually recognize significant areas of shared experience and orientation to common goals. In contrast, membership in a series does not require sharing any attributes, goals, or experience with the other members. The members of a series are unified passively through their actions being constrained and organized by particular structures and constellations of material objects.

Now, I don’t intend to diagnose the intentions of any writer other than myself, but in the case of this specific decision, I can hazard a guess. We are connected not through identical pasts, presents, or futures, but instead through the collective shoehorning of us into neat little boxes. And who is we? Anyone who does not fit the patriarchal ideal. Women of all kinds, yes, but also those who transition away from womanhood, and therein lies the crux of this essay. I’m not a particular fan of the whole women-and-nonbinary-people rhetoric—I find it reduces the nonbinary experience to that of women-lite, in the way that saying “cats and kittens” implies that one is the derivative of another.

That being said, however, there is an important unity between people of any marginalised genders, and Cavar’s careful selection of this quotation serves to illustrate how their story sits in the intersection of all of these things without reducing it to any one of its singular parts. There is a way to shed light upon the tangents that interconnect this intricate web we weave without centering one experience above any other and Cavar’s story is just one part of infinite library of things.

He’s cis, straight, white, male, at least fifty, probably six feet-something with a hanging belly. I am transgender, queer, and barely-twenty. He is my gynecologist.

Immediately, there’s a dichotomy here, but also a connection between these two people. The picture of the gynecologist is painted first—we’re seeing this through Cavar’s eyes, and the comparison is not lost on them. I think back to the opening quote and wonder if underneath their differences, there is still some sense of togetherness shared in their humanity. And there is some camaraderie! A handshake, a congratulatory note, and Cavar’s tentative sense of wonderment (“And it’s—it’s out?”) punctuates the end of the beginning.

At this point, the narrative changes. It is no longer a quote from a far off philosopher or a post- surgery memory painted on the page, but now the inner musings and narration of Cavar themselves. They recount the long farewells of their uterus, saying “goodbye in crimson streams”, but then the focus shifts from the individual to the collective once more.

Still, I was thankful, having heard my whole life that this procedure was unthinkable for a healthy young adult—unthinkable to not make my future child, impossible to embody today an already-empty future.

It’s at this point that I realise the use of “hstry” in the essay’s title can be read as shorthand for both “history” and “hysterectomy”. The two are intrinsically tied in the way that the assumption of a “future child” is made by almost any doctor discussing the possibility of a hysterectomy with a younger patient. To them, this procedure is a defiant end to the creation of history and an unimaginable cruelty to the hypothetical children toddling around in what they assume must be a universal daydream. This isn’t something just faced by Cavar, but rather a collective experience that every young person pursuing anything seen as a permanent contraceptive goes through.

But Cavar draws us back to the multifaceted queerness of their existence, shedding light upon the way in which society views us. Queer, a synonym for odd.

Yet in hindsight, I understand: after two years of biomedical regendering—breasts gone, gelled testosterone a daily application—of course I could forfeit my uterus with relative ease. After all who wants a mother who is actually a monster? Who wants the deviant to spawn?

What’s important about this little segment is how naturally it addresses the medical changes that Cavar and many other trans people go through in pursuit of gender euphoria. Again, I want to draw attention to the use of “many”—many, but not all. More to the point, they continue past this to establish how these changes cause others to view them as a “monster” and a “deviant”.

There’s something of a bell curve in the transitioning process, at least medically. Before you undergo any procedures (should you wish to), you’re able to assimilate into the sea of cis people. Even with a binder or a packer, there’s always the option to remove those things. Transfems can boymode, should the situation call for it. But once you begin making changes to your body, you enter an uncomfortable in between state, where people take great pride in “clocking” your transness. Your voice may break and deepen. Going the other way, you might begin to develop breasts. Your fat distribution across your body will change, as well as your ability to build and retain muscle. Whilst you experience this second puberty, it’s extraordinarily difficult to feel like you’re simply part of a crowd — it’s not until after years pass that you can slip into the sea once more. That is, if it’s what you wish.

I don’t attribute my hysterectomy entirely to trans identity. [...] “Gender dysphoria” is a medico-psychiatric racket, a means of transmuting acute suffering under conditions of biological essentialism into individual fault.

To Cavar, it’s not all about transness, and indeed there are many reasons for pursuing a hysterectomy that are not exclusive to trans people at all. And the notion of gender dysphoria has long been used to exclude and gatekeep people from transness, implying that there must be a degree of inherent and vitriolic self hatred to warrant entry. But the reality is that this is not wholly separate from Cavar’s trans identity, either.

Yet for years prior I had taken extreme measures to cease menstruation, and even before puberty, I feared and loathed pregnancy. I begged to get my tubes tied the moment I learned of the possibility, feeling existential terror at the sight of a rounded belly, a growth hijacking some innocent gut. This growth would then bear my name, doing with my legacy things I would be unable to control.

Again, Cavar toes the line between the individual and the other. There is Cavar in the modern day, and then Cavar as an ancestor—something to be interpreted and reinterpreted by descendants long separated from their individual truth. This is Cavar as a footnote in a history book or a name on a family tree. It is not a child, but a “growth” that sprouts within their nightmares; something unwanted and unintended. Contrast this with their earlier reference to “[their] future child,” italicised in its irony and quotational nature. The idea of this growth does not belong to them, but has instead been ascribed to them by others.

I say goodbye to future. Goodbye to period promise. An organ to waste.

The first time, I was at my grandmother’s house. I spent the bulk of my childhood there, walking the same hall as my father and late uncle, passing several generations of family photos mounted on the violet wall.

As Cavar becomes “unwoman”, they reflect upon their first period. It’s back to history and future, the relatives of generations past witnessing the blooming of a new adult. Alison Stone’s quote comes to mind once more: is this a group or a series? They are connected by heritage, but unbeknownst to little Cavar, they will grow up to diverge from this path. To end the history of their family, even if only in a small way, and in a manner which staunchly resists the desires of their own grandmother (who vehemently declares that it’s “not the same” to adopt).

Someday, I will be the last living Cavar. I was a final girl, left to tell the story. But then I, too, would die, and take my family with me.

The concept of the final girl stems from horror films, primarily slashers, and describes the last living victim who lives to tell the tale. And just as Cavar is the final girl of their family, their last period remains the final girl of womanhood—a survivor of the hysterectomy, but one that would die out like any other.

At the feel of another dam giving way to blood, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to laugh at the irony. Here was my heaviest period, unleashed in final protest against the uterus that isn’t.

And what place does a final girl have in a group or a series? They are the mouthpieces that tell the stories of those who do no longer have the voices to speak. The “final protest”, in this case, is made by the remnant of that which came before. In this way, could Cavar and the metaphorical final girl of their uterus be mirror images of each other? Cavar shedding womanhood, and the last period clinging to it posthumously.

I am not a girl but I am the final. I tell the story of a family history that will soon end. Without intending to do so, I have ended history: severing it and slowly, painfully, excreting what remains.

And just like that, the essay borne from the ungirling concludes, just as Cavar’s family history shall someday come to an end. From trans identity to familial inheritance, Cavar has woven a story of gender and the rejection of it: the series that is marginalised gender; the group that is their family, though they find themselves diverging from the shared goal of continuation; and the final girl, the last living member of her group, doomed to tell and retell their story until it dies with her.

The interaction between groups, series, and histories is central to the narrative of Cavar’s essay, but at its core, this piece is about the individual. This is Cavar’s story, not anyone else’s, and it cannot be taken from them, no matter how much their “grandfather’s heart [cracks] with pity” or their “grandmother [grieves] for the child that would not come”. Referencing the opening quote once more, Cavar has lived and will continue to live a life “constrained and organized” by others, but this moment is just for them. Their choice is their freedom.

Some may say the final girl is trapped in her role, forced to relive her memories again and again. I beg to differ—the final girl is the only one who can make the choice to move on and continue living. She’s the only character in the story who can learn and change, and she’s the one who can take ownership of her existence once more.

I leave you with an excerpt from Cavar’s ending notes for this essay and the hope that regardless of your membership to our group, series, or history, you hold this story in your heart. One of many stories, each different in their own way, but each deserving of individual understanding.

Perhaps last is simply the resting of a burden, only to be

drug up once more.                            Perhaps, then, final

just the broken promise of a last. Final—end of history, of a story

I did not know I was telling

(a story I today remake in text?)

*

Sol Kim Cowell is a transmasc mixed British-Korean writer and local café regular. He writes about the convergence of mental illness, sexuality, and cultural heritage. At his doljanchi, he picked up the pencil, and he hasn't put it down since. Find him at https://solkimcowell.carrd.co/

Advent 2022, Dec 15, Megan Neary, An Hour of Splendor

An Hour of Splendor

Megan Neary 

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I have loved E.B. White since I was an elementary school child, eagerly listening to my teacher read the class Charlotte’s Web. We’d come in red and sweaty from running in the sun, soaring high on swings, shooting baskets, or jumping rope. We’d sit down and the teacher would say we could put our heads on our desks, could cool our flushed cheeks on their chilly surface. And then she would open the book and begin to read and I’d be swept away, pulled into the story and, what was more, pulled into the sound of the words, their rhythm and beauty. Even then, White stood out to me as I fell in love with his style before I knew what style was.
     Years later, in high school, I found a book of White’s essays and was delighted to learn that the Charlotte’s Web guy had written for adults. I sat outside that night beside a dying fire and I read until it was too dark to make out the words and still I remember the pleasure of that, of reading as the fire crackled, as the smoke perfumed the air, as the sun set in beauty beneath the barren fall trees, as I laughed and ached over the words I read, as I fell in love with this brilliant author all over again.
     Years passed and covid came and I found myself in a dreary apartment, alone much of the time, and I came across another collection of White’s work. I bought it and devoured it, reading in long, thirsty gulps, reading and becoming a part of the world again, a world where people and nature were connected, where the little things of life that are so often swept aside were examined, seen for their place at the center of life.
     This fall, I taught my own class of third graders Charlotte’s Web. They fell in love as I had. They were swept into the story, understanding what was important right away, understanding this tale of friendship and love, though they did require several lessons on inflation before they could understand the prices that are mentioned throughout the book. But, of course, it doesn’t matter how much money Fern’s father gives her at the fair, there’s no question what price Charlotte pays for her babies.
     So it was with gratitude toward White, for having given me some successful lessons, for having taught my class some important things, that I returned to my little blue book of his essays. I found myself focused on a short, unassuming one called "What Do Our Hearts Treasure?" 
     In this essay, White relates his experience of spending Christmas in sunny Florida rather than snowy New England where he and his wife have always known Christmas in the past. The essay is simple, nothing much happens, and yet I return to it again and again. He tells of the shocking pink house he has rented sight unseen, of his wife’s crying spells, which she claims are on account of the situation in Vietnam—an explanation he doesn’t believe, and of a man who comes to fix the heating system and spends hours a day, “in a kneeling position, as though he were a figure in a creche, gazing at the table of tubes and wires left by the removal of the burned-out compressor. He, too, seemed melancholy, but did not weep. He kept his own counsel and did what he could, hour after hour, to remedy an almost impossible situation.” He’s described a repair man at work and somehow it makes me want to cry. We learn that White’s grandchildren have performed in a pageant, his granddaughter reciting something called What Do Our Hearts Treasure? It is a lovely title to an unknown work, a title that makes one think, stop and consider, what do our hearts treasure? It is a question I have been asking myself, in one form or another, as Christmas grows near and another year draws to a close.
     I find myself wondering what is truly important to me, what I ought to focus my energy and attention on. It’s not a novel or even particularly interesting question. There are clear answers, too. Just as everyone is supposed to say, “well the important thing is you weren’t hurt,” when someone totals their car without winding up in the hospital, just as they aren’t ever to let on that it would’ve been better if the driver could’ve not been hurt and not totaled the car, too, the things our hearts treasure are meant to be family and friends, maybe pets or good health or nature. And this is true, I think, for most people, at least some combination or variation of those things are important to nearly everyone. But what of the other things? The little things that aren’t really little in the view of a lifetime. The beauty of fresh fallen snow, the feel of warm arms embracing you, the smell of coffee in the morning. How can we begin to recognize these moments each day?
     White buys a poinsettia, but feels silly, its red flowers hardly special among the natural blooms of Florida. Instead of a Christmas tree, they buy something tropical called Dracaena marginata, the man selling it had called it Imaginata and White remarks that he preferred that. So do I.
     White treasures words, as do I. Am I comparing myself to White? He’s brilliant, a genius. I’ve written some pretty good copy for a deodorant company. And yet, I think he wouldn’t mind. I feel I know him and perhaps I do. I know his writing, I know how he saw the world and I know that I have been moved to awe by the everyday scenes around me as he so often was. In high school, I was desperate to discover my place in the world and I know that White’s words brought me closer to my destination. And so my heart treasures his work, as it treasures the work of many writers, writers who showed me that I was not alone.
     I imagine White driving his little potted plant to his rented home, perhaps it is buckled into the passenger seat, perhaps his right arm reaches out automatically when he takes a rough curve, protects the flower from harm. I imagine his confused sorrow as he drives past fields of blooming flowers, sorry his little plant no longer seems so special, aware even in his sorrow that if he loves flowers he ought to love the ones he sees outside his window.
     Then a package arrives, gifts from home, and with it comes an answer to the question of what our hearts treasure, or, at least, what White’s treasured. Inside is a branch from a balsam fir. White’s wife buries her nose in it, delighted. The package also contains photos of grandchildren and a little paper drum one had made. White places the drum at the foot of the little tropical tree and creates a paper star and cornucopia to decorate it. He looks out the window and for a moment is sure the Australian pines have “hardened up momentarily for this hour of splendor. They were spruce! They were birch! They were fir!” In that simple package, White and his wife received the treasures of their hearts—family in the form of photos, home in the form of a tree branch trimmed from the backyard woods, love in the form of a tiny drum carefully made, carefully packaged, carefully mailed thousands of miles, and carefully placed beneath a tree, a tree that had no history as a Christmas tree, but became one as soon as the heartfelt gift was placed beneath it.
     I don’t know what your heart may treasure, but I wish you plenty of it this year. And I think it holds true that, so long as we have love in our hearts, the world around us will be transformed, our dreams will come true, the Australian pines all around us will harden momentarily for an hour of splendor.

*

Megan Neary is a writer and teacher living in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared in After Dinner Conversation, The Cleveland Review of Books, The Amethyst Review, and various other publications. She also co-edits Flyover Country Literary Magazine. 

Advent 2022, Dec 14, Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick

Style Over Substance (At Least for Today):

Revisiting The Situation in the Story in the CNF Classroom

Here’s the situation: I’m sitting at my computer, reflecting on two decades’ worth of teaching failures. This fall semester marked my twentieth year in the classroom, a temporal milestone fitting for the teacher/essayist’s most essential criterion of reflection. Eventually, reflecting becomes something we learn to do without even trying.

What I’m reflecting on now is that I recently taught Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story for maybe the twentieth time in my career as the opening salvo for my Intro to Creative Nonfiction class. And for the twentieth time, it didn’t quite work. My instinct is to say it’s all my fault; it’s not the ideas, I’m just conveying them poorly. Gornick is one of my writing heroes, near the top of my personal pantheon of the Nine Muses of Memoir. I say this to my students. But still, year after year, they read her primer on personal narrative and just don’t get it.

Before I explore why my teaching of this text is a perennial failure, let me first say why I keep trying anyway. I love it for many reasons, including the memorable opening anecdote about a series of eulogies recited at the funeral of a famous, intransigent doctor, and how only one eulogist’s words had, for Gornick, “deepened the atmosphere and penetrated my heart.” (Aside: many students hate this opening anecdote, and they’ve cited the reason is that when they die, they don’t want any eulogies examining all of their complicated humanity and occasional pain-in-the-assed-ness, but instead for eulogies to shine singularly on their virtues. Problem for me is, I teach this text too early in the semester to say: “yes, but those hopeful eulogies about you would be lying, and the beauty, as Keats’ urn said, lies in the truth, and, further, that truth-beauty combo is what this class is all about.” Perhaps my whole dilemma could be solved if I waited to teach Gornick in Week 8. I’ve always begun the semester with it, though, with the belief that Gornick held a catchall theory for the essay, and given that the story part is hard, they needed to begin working on understanding it right away.)

But the reason I most love The Situation and the Story is that when I first read it twenty years ago, it taught me something essential about writing the memoir and the essay. For those uninitiated, this opening section sets up clearly and succinctly the two essential components of a successful personal narrative: the situation, and the story. The situation is the surface-level subject of the writing, “the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot.” But the story, well, that’s what we all came here for. For Gornick, “the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” This elucidation taught me that my goal as a budding essayist was both simple and impossible: I had to not only tell my stories well, but understand why I was telling them, what it all meant (without artlessly saying, of course, “this is what it all meant.”) According to my decade-old yellow sticky note on page 13 of the book, I’ve paraphrased her definitions by telling my students that “situation is the shallow end, summary, the ‘what,’ and story is the deep end, analysis, the ‘why.’” I’ve tried lots of other metaphors, as well. Situation is fun, story is work. Situation is the fabled hare to the story’s tortoise. In one example for my CNF students this semester, I proposed situation is foreplay and the story is orgasm.

Still, they did not get it. I mean, they’re smart people. They understood the gist, they got it intellectually, but there was not now—nor has there ever been for my students—a eureka! moment like there was for me.

I have theories as to why. Let’s start with the aforementioned My Fault. Any teacher knows it’s folly to teach what you dearly love, something that’s so fundamentally influenced your style or soul that its ideas become inextricable from your own. (Once, after assigning the first fifty pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I harpy-shrieked ISN’T THIS AMAZING to which I heard crickets, and proceeded to read aloud highlighted sections. Couldn’t they hear it, how everything about childhood and fear and regret and wonder and the whole of humanity culminated perfectly into this enormous block of writing? C’mon, y’all! More crickets.). In other words, Gornick’s eminence is so self-explanatory to me that when I assign it, I’m kind of like, “See? Great! Let this be your guide now!” And when their faces glaze over, I transition our discussion to Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” which I much-too-ambitiously assigned for the same class period.

It could be my students’ fault. Seriously, all nearly-twenty years’ worth of them. Because most of my students’ ages range from eighteen to twenty-two years old (many now younger than my actual teaching). It’s long been known in the brain scientist/researcher world that young adult brains continue developing and changing through their mid-20s; I even learned this in college, way back in the Stone Age of 1998. What’s less known is how the app-browse-click-swipe-right-social-media addled brain develops under the influence of incessant toxic stimuli. According to an article discussing the slowly growing Gen Z-brains-research on today.com (technically a news site…?), one neurologist suggests “technology has changed the demands on brain development for kids born after the year 2000, leaving a disconnect between the brain they need and the brain they have.” And the brains they have: unfocused, averse to goal-orientation, prone to taking risks. Even more so than the pre-internet young adult brain. These brains, developmentally, have more the metaphorical chemical makeup of sugar (the situation) than protein (the story).

Am I implying my students’ phones have made them dumb, and I of the superior Gen X Brain have escaped my own phone’s nefarious effects? Certainly not. I’m just saying, what Gornick and essaying in general asks of us, to making meaning both for ourselves and others about a segment of our lives…well, this calls for more intellectual risk-taking rather than physical, and the brain research makes clear that this age cohort is much more inclined to the latter. Essaying is already so much to ask of a fully-developed adult brain, and nearly Herculean to ask of a still semi-in-utero one.

All of this leads me to suggest now, upon reflection, something that Gornick and other writers I admire might constitute as essayistic sacrilege: what if, in terms of what I’m asking of students from their own writing, just their experiences (the situation) were enough? What if I asked them to foreground situation over story? What if I asked them to temporarily just forget about the story part altogether?

But, you may be thinking, who wants to read only a description of an event? Like, what’s even the point of that? Gornick says this herself later in the opening of S&S, admitting her earlier book on Egypt had been a failure because she simply tried to replicate her experience there rather than understanding the meaning of those events to her narrating self. (Students, who I suspect don’t completely understand time ticks by more quickly than they realize, also do not appreciate Gornick’s example that shortly follows the Egypt anecdote: J. R. Ackerley took thirty years to write his masterpiece My Father and Myself, because that’s how long it took him to find the story. Though to be fair, no writer wants any book of theirs to take this long to complete, which is another reason to say buh-bye to story for now.).

Speaking of anecdotes, the only evidence I have for my proposal to create this situation-over-story classroom is anecdotal, so here it goes. Weeks after I’d taught Gornick’s text this semester, I brought her up again: I asked students whether they’d consider rejecting the foregoing notion of story. Like, just create a series of scenes in your essays from here on out, what about that? One type-A, rule-following young woman balked at that. S&S had confirmed for her the need to know and show her purpose in any personal writing situation; she needs to make meaning for herself in order to make it for her reader.

Fair enough. Hell, I’d just taught them that this was their essayistic objective. And for her next essay, yes, my type-A lovely succeeded in her storying attempt. She wrote a Gornick-approved piece about her relationship with her father, how he pushed her to become an athlete rather than artist, how she struggled to become the person he wanted and repressed her desires to please him…until she recognized she’d always be treading water to keep up with this false version of herself, and so wrote a short story for her father about this struggle. Her piece of fiction, emblematic of her passions, was what finally led him to understand. The essay was quiet, and beautiful—she was one of the few who listened to and understood Gornick. Another student, less-fully Gornicked, wrote a less-baked essay about his time working the nursing home late shift and an unlikely friendship he made there with a resident octogenarian. Every night the elder man visited my student at the front desk, carrying with him two gallon-milk jugs, and settled into one of the musty couches to tell my student about bygone days while he ruminatively sipped his milk like wine. There was little in the way of Gornick’s approach to story: I never learned why this friendship stuck with my student, what happened to the octogenarian, what all of this has to say about how we treat the elderly in America, how when we’re older and weakened, we become disposable, someone else’s midnight problem. Because I’d already taught S&S, which implies Story is God, I asked these questions of my student for future consideration.

And while only one student expressed what her experience meant to her, it’s still those damn two gallon jugs of milk I can’t get out of my head. How stranger than fiction that image was, how totally it painted the situation for me…and how that became, metaphorically at least, suggestive of story. I wanted to say, but didn’t, that every essay should contain some version of the two gallon-milk jugs to tell its reader: I was there, and because I’ve shown you some of what was there, now you’re there, too. And maybe just being there, for my student-essayists and their readers, can for now, at least, be enough.

Part of Gornick’s situation-and-story theory, I think, is that the two are inextricable from each other. So if you’re the kind of writer who can conjure a wonderfully-wrought situation, you’ll find a way for the story to reside in those details. After so many years of teaching this text, just as I’m finally getting that concept, I’m rejecting it. Because this is part of my point. As writers, my students (and I) get so caught up in making meaning—“story” becomes the pinnacle of any writing event—that sometimes the smaller elements of experience get glossed over. We forget the surprising transcendence of presenting two gallon jugs of milk.

This isn’t an essay arguing we esteem imagism over reflection as the essayist’s greatest tool. It’s just that if we understand Story as God, it’s likely that whether we’re setting out to write our first essay or our hundredth, we feel like unworthy disciples. There’s certainly not time enough to reach essay heaven in the fifteen weeks of a semester. But we can create little saints-in-training from our situations in hopes that one day, some pearly, perfectly-composed gates will open wide for us.

Here’s the real story, though: despite everything I’ve said about foregrounding “situation,” I’m compelled to make “story” out of all this, to artlessly make meaning: This Essay Concerns the Noble Struggle to Keep Heart After Decades in the Classroom. I want you to know you came here for something, even if it’s ultimately wrong. And hell, maybe this is all Gornick’s fault. After all, she fails to mention in The Situation and the Story that one of the greatest parts about being an essayist is that no one can hold you to anything: this was all just an attempt, a rhetorical shrug, a sexy maybe. So if you shook your head nope to any of the above, it’s fine, because by this time, perhaps, I’ve already gone and changed my mind.

*

Brooke Champagne was born and raised in New Orleans, LA and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece 'Exercises,' which was published in The Normal School. Three of her essays have been chosen as Notables in the Best American Essays series, and earlier this year she won the 2022 March Faxness Essay National Championship Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” Her debut essay collection, Nola Face, will be published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press in 2024.

Advent 2022, Dec 13, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Museums of Natural History: Essay Collections as Curation

Exhibit One

I’ve long collected what’s been buried.

As a child, I spent afternoons digging with my tiny pail, later with an industrial shovel because plastic was no match for my obsession. I dug everywhere—my brittle California yard, the salty beach shore, the elementary school sandbox. I was desperate to get beneath the surface.

It was exhausting, dirty work. Digging marked my hands and clothes, left dark halfmoons under my nails. Sometimes I found treasures—pebbles, pennies, minerals, bones. I found old dog teeth and bullet casings, mucked feathers and sand dollars. I made up a story for each discovery. At the end of each day, I carried my collection home and displayed my findings in the windowsill like a natural history museum.

Nothing much has changed. I’m still digging, still collecting artifacts. I’m still telling stories by uncovering what has been buried.

My latest essay collection, Halfway from Home, is a curation of the self. Uncovering the stories from my past that led me to leave a chaotic home at 18 in order to chase restlessness, claiming places on the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast, I examine how difficult it is to move forward when you long for the past. With my family ravaged by addiction, illness, and poverty; the nation increasingly divided; and the natural worlds where I once sought solace under siege by wildfire, tornados, and unrelenting storms, I turn to nostalgia as a way to grieve a rapidly-changing world. Excavating the stories and scars we bury, the essays in this collection examine contemporary sorrow, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing.

I wrote this book at the start of the end of the world. Like many, I could not leave my home or see my family, and I watched as the social, political, and environmental landscapes I knew disappeared seemingly overnight. I was buried by grief and so I wrote to dig myself out.


Exhibit Two

It is not possible to essay without the act of digging. The genre asks us to uncover the self by mining through the strata of memory, to uncover the story by going deeper.

Essaying requires the same techniques as excavation. You must work slowly and proceed with caution. You first map out the area you hope to uncover, while acknowledging that what is beneath the surface is likely to sprawl in all sorts of unexpected directions, tree roots and mineral veins running jagged through the tidy plot at the surface.

Begin by removing debris you will not need, distractions that threaten what you hope to uncover. Apply just enough pressure to break beneath the surface but not enough to damage what you uncover. When you do strike something—a memory, an image, an idea, a version of the self you thought long buried—brush away the soil carefully. Do not try to remove the artifact yet. Instead, survey the site to see where it has rested all this time. Consider the surroundings.

When you finally begin the work of moving earth, remember to sift through what you plan to discard. Do not ignore what you were not looking for. Most minerals only shine when they are polished. Geodes must be split in order to discover what they hold, just like trees when searching for amber. Do not leave these riches behind.

Like excavation, essaying is not without its dangers. The walls might collapse. You might be struck by falling debris. You might begin the important work of uncovering only to find that what you are searching for is already damaged, or worse, that you damage it in your quest. You might find that the artifact you are searching for has already been taken by someone else, or is lost altogether.

If you find yourself buried beneath the rubble, remember your tools and training. Veer off the path to discover a new way. Tunnel yourself free.


Exhibit Three

Nonfiction writers are often accused of navel-gazing, of curling in on themselves like a fetus until their story is as small and insignificant as a bellybutton. But this ignores the fact that the navel once tied us to another body, and then another, an endless tethering back in time that leads to ancestors buried underground which thus ties us to fossils, to precious ore, to the microscopic organisms that lead to both deterioration and preservation.

In order to tell our stories, we have no choice but to consider how they are part of a richer landscape. We cannot consider our personal histories without also telling the stories of our family trees, the ways they fork and split, the tangle of roots beneath the surface, which spread unseen up to five times as wide as the radius of the canopy. And because these roots work with the soil’s fungal networks to share messages and nutrients between trees of many species, we must consider how our stories are linked to many communities. Positioning the story of the self this way—one of humility rather than hubris—counters the claim that ego drives the essay.

To broaden the story beyond the self, we must essay to uncover the artifacts of our lives but also those of others. We unearth family secrets, painful experiences, our own shames. We dig up the histories and selves that once were but that have been buried with time or violence perhaps our own willingness to forget or change. We dig up what was once buried in order to examine the ways the story has decayed while out of site, in order to understand what remains. We gather the artifacts; we make sense of the relics.

In this way the essay is an exhumation. You participate in your own unburial. You uncover what you have concealed—sometimes for your own survival—and through that act, you have the opportunity to offer yourself understanding and forgiveness. Perhaps navel-gazing is not such a terrible comparison for the work of essayists after all, for the belly button is the first human scar and we write the world through our wounds. To display the scars of the self in an essay, as in a museum, is to claim a place above ground, in the light.

Some of the earliest fossils of animal life are ammonite. Extinct shelled cephalopods, they bore the distinct intelligence of contemporary creatures like squid and octopi, the kind of intellect that rivals our own. Like humans today, ammonite have been found across the earth, of interest precisely because of their diversity and rapid evolution. Much like humanoid remains, they are important, too, for scientific dating of the geologic record and for what they teach us about how animals responded to climate change. In natural history museum displays of bright gemstones and stuffed exotic animals, however, it is easy to miss these small brown fossils.

But look closely and you will see these fossilized shells are tightly curled in on themselves, a spiral reminiscent of our own in the womb before we first unfurled.


Exhibit Four

It is not possible to essay without the act of display. We catalogue the artifacts we have uncovered—those we were searching for, those that revealed themselves along the way—and curate a narrative. We write these stories because we believe they will be of beauty and utility to observers from other places, times, and lives.

Like excavation, curation requires careful craft. The display you create changes with time and context—personal and political, national and environmental. It changes as you view it from many angles, enter from different directions, move through the museum clockwise or counter, in the early morning when the artifacts are bright beneath the lights or late evening when the setting sun illuminates even fingerprints on the glass. Remember that while you can construct the display and the story you hope to tell, you will have little control once the patrons arrive.

As the curator of your natural history museum, consider the following: Who are you inviting into your display? What do you hope viewers will do with this story? What might they do once you relinquish control? What hope or hurt could happen?

More important: Who have you forgotten—or refused—to welcome? Who is erased from your display? Who have you silenced? Is this your story to tell at all? Much can be said of colonization and the conquest of curation. Artifacts are stolen. Artifacts are sold. Artifacts are displayed by those far removed from the lives of those they seek to honor. Like stories, artifacts can be used for personal and political gain. If weaponized, they can be used to wound.

Both the essayist and the archivist bear tremendous responsibility. By selecting which artifacts to display and which to file away, and by writing the placards that accompany the objects you have the power to shape truth. Museums offer opportunities for witness, and while it is wise to consider the possibility of your work, it is also prudent to consider the peril.


Exhibit Five

While writing Halfway from Home, the act of digging through my past brought up all sorts of nostalgic memories to the surface. I wrote about my childhood treasure hole, my father hiding gemstones and small ceramic animals for me to discover. I wrote about going berry picking with my family when my parents could not keep the cupboards full, how they managed to make something from nothing and feed us from that fruit.

But as I dug, I discovered darker truths. Addiction tangled the roots of our family tree. Abuse was carved into the bones of our women like scrimshaw. Early members of my family made their living by contributing to the violent legacy of environmental conquest in America.

The story of an artifact does not exist free from the bedrock that surrounds it, so I wrote, too, about the natural world. I wrote about the childhood wonder of pulling starfish from the coastal California tidepools and the adult horror of watching as my home state burns each year. I wrote about fleeing my chaotic childhood home to seek solace in the grassland prairies of Nebraska, where roots stretch endlessly underground to survive the roughest conditions, but how this vital ecosystem weakens with climate change. I wrote about finding an unexpected home in Massachusetts where the forest fungal networks share resources between species to protect the community even as throughout the pandemic humans would not do the same. I wrote to discover what it meant to live before the world was dying, when the tides were gentle, when monarchs clustered together for warmth each winter, when history was a hope rather than a hurt.

And I wrote to uncover how to live now. The grief I felt lifted as I unearthed the stories for my essay collection. The more I wrote, pulled stories up from where they were buried to be visible at the surface, the more the ache receded. You see, excavation and the essay are used for exploration, but they can also be used for restoration, perhaps even rescue.

Writing this book was no different than the love and labor of my childhood. I dug, uncertain what I would uncover once I got past the surface of memory, surprised by what had been buried—by others, by myself. I pulled ideas and images from the darkness, dusted them off, and displayed them in the light.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery will be joining Sonya Huber for our next digital salon event, "Essays and Embodied Voices," on December 16th. See here if you'd like to join us over Zoom for the salon.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery's latest collection, Halfway from Home was published with Split/Lip Press this November. Essays from this lyric essay collection on nostalgia, climate change, and searching for home during emotional and environmental collapse have appeared in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fourth Genre, New England Review, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review, and Zone 3. Several have been listed as Notable in Best American Essays. Dinty Moore calls this collection “intensely intimate” and Kwame Dawes says it is “a work of urgency, sensibility, and immediacy.” Sarah Fawn is also the author of Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press), as well as three poetry collections. She is currently an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Bridgewater State University.

Advent 2022, Dec 12: Dave Madden, On Ending and Unending

On Ending and Unending

Dave Madden

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At the start of Essay Daily’s 2020 Advent, Michael Martone wrote (per Aquinas) that "without death life has no meaning.... Death defines, shapes incident into a shaped charge of meaning. But if death (a real death) defines, it also renders the writer mute.... So the memoirist’s first move is to simulate that death ... create an artificial parenthesis, a cyst of sorts to sort it out."

I’m afraid of death.

Not so much the dying as the part afterward.

I’m also writing my first memoir.

It’s sorting out, among other things, a history of shame and gay sex.

That old French chestnut: La petit mort.

*

Whatever happened to queer happiness, Kevin Brazil asks in his essay of the same name. It’s the right question to ask in a time when queer bleakness wins awards. Queer tragedy gets all the New York folks in a lather. But, as Brazil writes, "Maybe it isn’t possible to write about happiness at all.... Happiness leaves no trace on a state of blankness, and it is happiness because it leaves no trace."

It’s unhappiness that scars, leaves a mark. The coming of unhappiness is the death of joy that gives joy meaning. Advent marks the season of comings, of preparation, of pending arrival. Joy to the world. What is the meaning of the messiah’s coming? Is it an end (of this life, this world) that will give our lives meaning, or does it suggest another end, another death: the going of the messiah, and whatever mark they might leave behind?

Rapture can be the start of your story or its end. It’s all in which parenthesis you favor.

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Gut trouble runs in my family. My mother’s told stories about sitting at home as a teen and waiting for boyfriends to come pick her up for their date. She was an only child, in rural Appalachia, waiting for a man to deliver her anywhere else. She’d stand in the kitchen, looking out the window at the long country road that led to her house, and her stomach would roil and churn the whole time. "It was terrible," she told me. "I’d just get so sick."

Cue Tom Petty: the waiting is the hardest part. Contrast this with cruising, anon hookups, where the anticipation is often hotter than the sex it precedes. The hardest part? On my way to a bathhouse, truckstop, or video arcade I sometimes have to pee three times an hour. I wouldn’t call it terrible, except retroactively. When the event you’ve waited hours (or days, or adulthoods) for is bad, and not for the first time, you return to an age-old question: Why did I do that again?

Waiting as self-mesmerizing. What comes of our fantasies, our fantasies of coming and second comings, when they become reality? Is there a word for that accomplished disappointment? That advent-ure?

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In "Ash Wednesday", Samuel R. Delany is ‘worried about [his] trip up to New York to attend a party.’ It’s a party for men over the age of 50 who like to have sex with men over the age of 50. Delany—who, as he writes, is ‘known as a “sex radical”’—is all the same a stranger to such parties, but what worries him isn’t the party itself, it’s the many tiny scuffles that departures and transit present for a person of a certain age with a recent ADD diagnosis:

‘Would I arrive with phone and luggage intact? Would I be able to get back with everything I started out with? Would I be able to negotiate my medications, food? Sleep? With ADD wreaking havoc on logic and focus, would I be able to document the trip as I hoped?’

I think of that hope, the hope of every reporter, chronicler, essayist. If I can capture what is happening around me in words, I can look back later and learn what What Happened means. Or it’s, Forgetfulness may have a stronger appetite than memory, but by writing this down I can even the score.

For much of "Ash Wednesday," Delany does his job chronicling: "The bus has skipped Mount Laurel and is going express to New York City. The trees on the far and near sides of the fields beside the roads are all bare, and remind me of underwater sponges. Despite the bursts of warm weather, there is just old grass—some dull green—amidst browns and tans." But when it comes to his task of meaning-making, the parts won’t come together:

"On Ash Wednesday, one of those warm days, I only saw two people with the traditional cross of ash on their foreheads in the Gayborhood streets of Philadelphia. It seemed fewer than in former years. Are activities of the sexual sort, the real subject of this meditation, replacing it? Is there any connection at all? Am I taking this trip for sex, for friendship, or just to be able to spread information to people who need it or might benefit? Or all three? Some of them all, I suspect."

After the sex party, Delany heads north to the home of an old fuck-buddy and his partner, ruminates on the differences between a hovel and a barracks, and gets on a bus back home.

"I think of myself as somebody who is interested in the differences, the differences between straight society and gay, the differences between male and female, but all of those presuppose a set of similarities on which those differences have to be marked out. Beginnings and endings are the hardest parts for thinkers who utilize such structures. Perhaps that means the best way to end this essay is to say, as of yet, it is not finished." Goes the end of this finished essay.

*

Ash Wednesday, the day, is about beginnings as endings. Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Another stay against forgetfulness, one that sits at a distance from its Science Is Real cousin, You are made of stardust. The secular version wants to lift you up, expand you to the farthest reaches of the universe. The Catholics suggest a little more humility.

To what end? Humility and pride are secret siblings, like the rabbi in the old joke who wails "I am nothing! I am nothing!" while praying in the synagogue, but once the janitor is inspired to do the same, nudges the cantor and whispers, "Look who thinks he’s nothing." One effect of making yourself small is that the world around you—your material—gets bigger, which feels both scarier and more honest. Life is a mess we’re forever inspired by, but only in the interests of cleaning it up. Making a pretty shape. The Greeks called it hubris.

By concluding with the statement that the essay is not finished, Delany suggests "Ash Wednesday" has no ending, or that its ending, like the messiah, is TK. But without our ending, as we await it, what meaning can be made of what we just read?

A cold evening, many years ago. I’m 26 years old, and I’ve been standing silently in the dark of my bedroom for the last forty-five minutes, staring out my window and across three yards at the blazing windows of my neighbor’s house. I am waiting to see if he’ll walk into the frame, and waiting to see if he’ll be naked when he does so. He is a man over 50, a man I’ve never met or even seen outside his home, but he’s a man I like the shape of enough that this waiting, standing alone and watching in silence out a window, feels like nothing.

The waiting is everything. At the end of this essay, you’re wanting to know whether the man will appear in the window. So was I.

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Dave Madden is the author of two books. His essays have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Guardian, Lithub, Harper's, and elsewhere. He teaches nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and writes a fortnightly newsletter named Shenny. You can read the Behind the Music of this essay in a recent Shenny.

Advent 2022, Dec 11, Ivy Taylor on the Tangible

On United States of America v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster (or, In Praise of the Tangible)

Ivy Taylor

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The specific facts of Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster demand attention. The federal government, on the strength of an alleged violation of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, had a 206.3 Troy ounce golden rooster that had spent two years in the dining room of a casino, seized by, and remanded into the custody of, the U.S. Marshals. United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster, 186 F. Supp. 526 (D. Nev. 1960). Some accounts say that the rooster was arrested, which is hilarious, but imprecise. The rooster was treated as an object, as is evident in the Court's comparison of the rooster, in an opinion denying the casino owner's effort to obtain custody of the rooster, to an automobile. 186 F. Supp. at 527. It does appear to be true that, if the government prevailed, the rooster would be seized and forfeit, and likely melted down and returned to Fort Knox. See United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster, 191 F. Supp. 198, 199 (D. Nev. 1961). Ultimately, a jury found that the rooster was an “object d'art” of “fabricated gold,” exempt from the Gold Reserve Act. United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster, 208 F. Supp. 99 (D. Nev. 1962). The Court overruled the government's protestations that such verdict erred, because, the government contended, the rooster was not “a customary artistic use” for gold. 208 F. Supp. at 101. The rooster returned to the casino. 

I enjoy imagining the bronze rooster dressed in prison garb that the casino installed during the two years the case was pending. Link at para. 13. I delight in the idea of the rooster itself, presented at trial (would it create undue prejudice if it sat at the defense table during the proceedings?). But I especially love the title: United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster. There is a facially boring, but genuinely exciting, reason for the title; it's a case involving in rem jurisdiction—that is, the exercise of the Court's power over a specific object, rather than a specific person.

In civil procedure, which is the most odious class for first-year law students, we spent at least a month going over specific personal jurisdiction (fair play and substantial justice, International Shoe, Pennoyer, stream of commerce), a week on general personal jurisdiction (Helicopteros, continuous and systematic contacts), and maybe five minutes on in rem jurisdiction. 

I can give you a whole lesson on in rem jurisdiction right here. How do you know where to file a lawsuit? You file it where the thing you're fighting about is. Hanson v. Denckla, 357 U.S. 235, 246 (1958). You have a problem with a golden rooster in Vegas? Sue in Vegas. Boom. That's in rem jurisdiction. (Of course it can get messier than that–what’s power over a thing if not “an elliptical way of referring to jurisdiction over the interests of persons in a thing,” Shaffer v. Heitner, 433 U.S. 186, 207 (1977), and isn’t everything actually quasi in rem where sufficient minimum contacts are required? Id. at 208. But when we’re dealing with tangible objects, not trust pledges or stock property or fungible assets, it’s pretty straightforward.)

I am drawn to the in personam jurisdiction side of things–the ​​abstraction, the qualified, the "it's complicated"–but I recognize that the concrete example, the short, declarative sentence, is the only way anyone else can understand what I am trying to communicate. (In undergrad, my strictest professor told us that if you can’t summarize your thesis in a single, simple sentence, you don’t know what you’re saying. Ouch.) For instance, in the early pandemic, on a Zoom call with strangers, I said that one of my recent interests was in memorializing rare feelings. It was clear that no one understood what I meant. But if I pointed to the end of The Burning Girl, when the main character suddenly realizes her mother realizes the main character is in some ways unknowable to her creator, they might have said, oh, that rare feeling. 

Lately, I’ve been leaning into the crisp joy of tangible reality. Almost every morning this winter, my school-aged son complains about socks. “Why do I have to wear these?!” he whines. I tell him that they are to keep his feet warm, and when he doesn’t like that, and says his feet get too warm, I say either “society” or “gym class,” which is a more specific word for society. While he capitulates, I wiggle my toes in cotton (or nylon) and think about how weird it is that we have feet, and socks, and that I’m comfortable enforcing norms–that much of parenthood is the enforcement of norms–that I have never fully interrogated.

And I love a good grounding detail. This week, at work, when I was talking about a fraud argument in a probate case, I gestured at eye level, then chest level, then to my left, at the floor, as though the argument were physical. Ugh, the physical. This body I drag around. “Isn't it weird that your teeth just erode until you die?” a colleague asked me after a conference call. 

When I told a friend I wanted to write about the Golden Rooster case, and that I was looking for the poetic equivalent of in rem jurisdiction, which I described as, “Look at this thing, it’s not complicated, it’s in my power,” she suggested I read some Wallace Stevens. Instead of doing that, I pulled an old birthday present—The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry by Thomas C. Grey, would recommend—off my bookshelf, and remembered that Wallace Stevens was a lawyer. (Well, he was a VP for The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and wrote legal opinions about why they should approve or deny claims on surety bonds. Grey at 14, 16.) As relayed in that book, Wallace Stevens set up clear boundaries in his life between the short-sentenced, clear writing of his day job and the obscure, ambiguous, mutable, and apparently feminine world of poetry. See, e.g., Grey at 24-26, 48, 50, 57, 59. And if Stevens had to decide between viewing the law as Y, a set of coercive signals, transmitted by a transparent and unambiguous medium, or, X, as a "distinctive manner of imagining the real," a social construct of ritual, drama, myth, and poetry, he would almost certainly choose Y. Grey at 38, 51.

I like to bring that kind of tension to the office. So when I drank too much at last year's holiday party, I started conversations by asking people if they knew who Wallace Stevens was, then berating them when they didn't. Later, when I was less churlish, I requested and received permission to discuss Wallace Stevens, and his poem, “The Motive for Metaphor” at a lunch meeting for all of the attorneys at my firm, called Attorney Roundtable. At that meeting, I told them he was a modernist poet in the first half of the last century, that he was a well-regarded legal writer at The Hartford, and gave some background on the "scientific" and "humanistic" approaches to the law and on the law and literature movement. When I heard myself starting to say things like, “Because we are human beings, who, I think, have interests beyond, you know, the uses of power and objective reality,” I decided to tack back to the text, and asked for a volunteer (none appeared) to read the poem out loud.

The first two verses refer to a “you” who likes the half-dead autumn with wind that “repeats words without meaning,” and a “spring/ With the half colors of quarter things." The poem then moves to a transitional third verse about an “obscure moon lighting an obscure world/ Of things that would never be quite expressed,/ Where you yourself were never quite yourself,” and so on, until we end up “Desiring the exhilarations of changes:” Oh colon, you confident punctuation, you exhilarating change! And then here it comes, in the middle of verse four, our titular “The motive for metaphor, shrinking from” all of those hard, concrete things we shrink from, “The weight of primary noon,/ The A B C of being” until we end, in the last lines of verse five, at “—the sharp flash,/ The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant, X.”

In law school, we learned to brief a case by building the essential facts into the statement of the rule. The most important words of the 10,000 or so allowed in an appeal brief are in the sentence that frames the issue on appeal. 

“What is X?” I ask all of my bosses and my few underlings. And what a specific, but not rare, feeling that evoked in me. What a relief it is to imagine that anything can be boiled down to a single variable and an answerable question. What kind of comfortable confinement do I construct with these minute, arbitrary, divisions.

If I was limited to the context of Stevens' poem, I'd say X is death. That's the end of the alphabet of any human's existence, and it’s certainly a “fatal” something from which to shrink. But given all these facts—the frame of the poem, the frame of the meeting, the frame of Wallace Stevens's decision not to accept the Norton lectureship in poetry because it would detract from his precise scholarship of surety bonds—I suggest that X is me, standing at flat edge of Attorney Roundtable, one of dozens of adults in human bodies that are slowly deteriorating, .8 hours deep in time billed to overhead, who navigate our minds past the “obscure world/ Of things that would never be quite expressed,” and express this: here we are, shortly after primary noon. The rooster, though excessively gold, may remain fully formed, because it is an object d'art. Being is as orderly as A B C. There is jurisdiction, it’s in my power, because look at this thing. It’s not complicated. Boom.

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Ivy Taylor is living that sweet, sweet MFA/JD life, and occasionally publishes essays on public radio.

Advent 2022, Dec 10, Andrew Bertaina on Lia Purpura

on Lia Purpura

Andrew Bertaina

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I begin, as I often do, in irritation. Many things irritate me, but I suppose this isn’t supposed to be an essay about my irritations. In fact, as easily as I am irritated by people and swear I’ll take a grudge to the grave, all it takes is a glass of wine and a winsome smile, and I’m entirely won over by whoever I’ve sworn was a mortal enemy. Admittedly, a past partner found this quality annoying. You lack a sense of self, she said. No, I responded, it’s just that I lack consistency. I am quixotic.

Which is perhaps a seemingly strange digression to take in an essay about an essay. But it’s the one that comes to mind first. Irritation. And one of the chief things that irritates me is when people talk about the essay, describing its constituent parts or what makes for a particularly compelling sort of essay, laying out the rules for others to follow as though such a path existed. No one, in my mind, should make such proclamations about the essay, I say in an essay where I make proclamations about the essay.

In graduate school, my classmates and I often wrote personal essays, which meant, bad things that had happened to us and our reflections on them. This, the recording of a life, according to our professors, was an essay. A personal experience drawn from your life that you seek to make meaning of. Preferably a bad one. 

But this is a rigid definition of only one kind of essay. The essay is quixotic. It is at its best when it dwells in uncertainty, when it doubles back on a previously held assertion, delighting the reader with some new piece of knowledge, of insight, of delight. Certainly, I make space for the personal essay, but when I read people making claims about the personal essay as the ESSAY, I balk. I dwell in irritation. I say to my spouse and friends, “the essay is capacious”, so often that I begin to irritate myself. It is not, I say, found in any one thing or anthology. The form isn’t expanded, merely enjoyed. I teach the essay now myself. Of course, the teaching of the essay is a symbol of my unwillingness to conform as I teach it in a comp course.

In my course, after students have finished the traditional personal essay, scouring their lives as a buzzard might an open road for carrion, the way an octopus might scour the ocean for crabs, we move towards the classic essay. We speak briefly of Montaigne. We read Ross Gay and Zadie Smith, parsing out the meaning of joy, of sorrow, of the odd connections between seemingly disparate things. We watch those writers struggle on the page, trying to make a meaning of that which eludes, which cannot be pinned down. After reading these essays for two weeks, my students ask. What do we do exactly? What’s the point of the essay? Can we just write about anything? Baffled by the task. Anything, I say. An essay can be about anything. It is your style, your voice, the internal rhythm and insights that make up an essay. It is the quality of your looking, your attunement turned on the world, seeing what fresh, pulpy thing appeals. 

Which brings me to Lia Purpura’s essay, "On Coming Back as a Buzzard," which originally appeared in Orion. It immediately confounds my students. Why is she talking about coming back as a buzzard? The essay didn’t make sense. What did she mean? I am content to give up my students to bafflement. It seems a good preparation for life, which rarely conforms to narrative conventions.

Purpura’s essay begins, “I KNOW, COMING BACK AS A CROW IS A LOT MORE ATTRACTIVE. If crows and buzzards do the same rough job—picking, tearing, and cleaning up—who wouldn’t rather return as a shiny blue crow with a mind for locks and puzzles?” Contrast, of course, is at the heart of good essays, avoiding the expected turn. Surely we’d all rather show up as the sleek crow, intelligent, capable of problem solving, of remembering where it has hidden items. Instead of the clever crow, Purpura wants to be a buzzard. She now has a task ahead of her, convincing us, by precision of language and the delight of thought that we too, humble readers, should understand her desire to be the naked headed buzzard, entrails slippery on its beak. A task so odd to set oneself, it nearly boggles the mind. And in bogglement as in bafflement, I take pleasure. 

As for me, I’ve never thought about coming back as a buzzard. A butterfly maybe? Of course Zhuangzi, another thinker, has already beaten me to it, his old Daoist thought about not being sure if he’s a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. So butterflies are out. A friend suggested I might like to come back as a cow. We were at a farm recently, and I took picture after picture of the horned beasts gently clipping grass, idly watching us, attempting the occasional acrobatic screw, autumnal leaves, pattering in the pasture, graceful as they fell. While on the farm, we learned that even the female Texas Longhorns have horns, which is precisely the sort of thing I’d love to have already learned in an essay.

I tell my students that a good essay is about remaining in the match as Jacob when he wrestled God. In the essay, Purpura says of buzzards, “They intensify my thinking. They look prehistoric, pieced together, concerned. I might simply say I feel closer to them—always have—and proceed. Because, really, as I turn it over, the problem I’m working on here, coming back as a buzzard, has not so much to do with buzzards after all.” Yes, I exclaim. An intensity of thinking. A good essay is merely that. An intensity of thinking. And you can see Purpura doing precisely this, preparing to turn the idea over and over, to pursue the problem of buzzardry.

As she begins to worry the problem, the essay expands, bulging as a buzzard might, gorging on roadkill. From there Purpura inhabits the mind of the buzzard, “With me around, mishaps—side of the highway, over a cliff, more slowly dispensed by poison—do not have to be turned to a higher purpose. I step in. I make use of.” Then she pauses, a line break. “And here, I’m whittling away at the problem.” In the classic essay, I tell my students, borrowing from Purpura, you want to circle the problem, to come at it from several different ways, as a wake of buzzards. There it is, the pleasure in discovery, a wake of buzzards, there circling, a funeral in the sky. Without which, as Purpura tells us, abundance is lost. Perhaps I am trying also to teach them abundance. 

But beyond that, what marks Purpura’s essay as singular, is her poet’s facility with detail. For she doesn’t just convince with the oddity and wonderment of reason, but with the tenderness, the specificity, the surprise of language. “I’d get to be one who, when passed the plate, seeks first the succulent eye. This would mark me: foreigner. Stubborn lover of scraps and dark meat. Base. Trained on want and come to love piecemeal offerings—the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal, but carefully, singularly gathered—like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising.”

I first read Purpura’s collection of essays, On Looking, and was immediately taken, my mind alight with the power of words, of observation. I love her so because she seems to support my pedagogical aim. That anything, when looked at closely, when turned over in the mind, can be of interest. It is all a matter of the quality of the looking. And perhaps I can’t not write about the struggle to teach in this way because the semester is deep into the doldrums, when students dully look back at me or at their laptops, preparing for finals in finance, in economics, in anything that strikes them as having some deep utility. What most of them don’t want to do is look at something in depth, to mull. For mulling is to waste time, to worry it as a retriever might a bone, an octopus, a shell. 

“The sudden cool from a sewer grate rising.” This, I want to say to my students, is it. But of course, I’ve said that about many other essays, many other times. I pause often, telling them that they’ve encountered genius and then we haggle over it. For I let them haggle, express boredom and frustration. Often, I even lock away my own interpretation. I let them meander.

I too desire to meander. I want, as Purpura wants, to glide on the thermal updrafts, to coast over the world, her, in search of carrion, me of freedom. I want, as her essays teach me, to bend and whir, to ride the updrafts of thought, to wait patiently for the next thought or meal to come. And yet, I cannot wait. I would glide forever if I was buzzard, make a skeleton in the sky. 

The truth is, I’d rather be an octopus, solitary as they are. I suppose it’s that nasty pretension of mine, silly from a native Californian where the sun scours the mind as a buzzard scours the roads. But still, mine, the slight pretension. I seek depth. Thus, an octopus, eight arms, radiating with neurons appeals to me, stretching forth on the ocean floor, making cities and hunting crabs, shimmering and brilliant as it shifts. Recently, they’ve discovered only the second octopus community off the coast of Australia. Perhaps I could live among them, those gloomy octopuses, telling them about the long malaise of mid-life. 

Purpura asks that question which can unmake an evening, a marriage, a life, “Am I happy? Yes, in momentary ways. Which I think is a good way to feel about things that come when they will, and not when you will them. While I’m waiting, I get to be with the light as it shifts off the wet phone wire, catches low sun, holds, pearls and unpearls drops of water.” I am impatient, rarely happy when waiting. My mind flits. No buzzard for me. 

And finally, the meander comes to an end, the essayist, wearied or baffled by their own pursuit: “The problem with coming back as a buzzard is the notion of coming back. I can’t believe in the coming-back.”

I can already hear my students. Why did she write the essay at all if she didn’t believe in coming back? What’s the point? What happened to her and how are we supposed to make a meaning of it?” I adore my students. In fact, if I came back, it would probably be a golden retriever, eager to find anyone with whom they can be friends, ready to chase the ball, ready to come back as anything to keep alive whatever this whirling mass of plentitude is. 

I tell my students that to push for the epiphany, the big moment of understanding, is not just to miss the point of the essay, but of life. It goes and goes, expanding as the universe. But I keep that to myself. Thankfully, I am not that sort of professor. Like Purpura, I am content merely to provoke, to hang on a wire “arranged in a broken-winged pose to dry feathers and bake off mites in the sun, that I love the wait, that I have my turn, that no one wants my job so I go on being needed—I have my human equivalences for these.” 

I have my human equivalences too, my ways of looking. But sometimes, I confess, in the wreck of days, in the changing of sheets, the arguing with four children, the slog from job to job through small arterials in the city, I forget that there is anything to look at after all. 

And then I read Purpura, and the mind sets to churning again, to looking, to seeing, to sorting through the wreck of days–the white curve of the Longhorn framed by purple light, the patter of leaves, gnats worrying grass, fractals of light on water. I look, not in search of an answer, but for another way of understanding, another way of seeing. 

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Andrew Bertaina's short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, Open bar at Tin House, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. His work is available at andrewbertaina.com