Creative Nonfiction: The Voice of the Genre...

I have to admit that I liked Creative Nonfiction a lot more than I imagined I would. Or perhaps, in the cause of greater honesty – much more than I had secretly hoped I wouldn’t like it. In full disclosure, I should point out that the slight chip on my shoulder going into the exploration of CNF comes from being thrice rejected. In the self-defensive crouch of declined suitor, I imagined CNF to be the Old Guard – the stuffy tweed and pipe set – and thus I could wear my rejection as a point of pride. We young punks don’t want our Oscars, could care less what the Grammys say, don’t care about Pulitzers and Pushcarts.

But of course we do. We want – I want – this validation as much as anybody else, want the validation of the establishment, want to crack that upper-echelon, of which CNF is clearly a part. They are, after all, The Voice of the Genre, as their own subscription insert reminds me. Say it several times in a row. I like to intone The Voice of the Genre as I imagine Walter Cronkite would: Tonight - Creative Nonfiction…the Voice..........of the Genre… It is also strange that we only get The Voice of the Genre on said subscription insert, compared to the much more humble True Stories, well told, that is the official byline throughout the magazine proper. I suppose this is because one might assume that if you have the issue in hand already you don't have to be sold on it the way you might have to be if you're just holding the perforated subscriber card. The difference between say The New York Times as Paper of Record versus Competent journalism, mostly true.

But I digress.

It is also necessary to point out, for full disclosure, that I had never in fact experienced an issue of CNF. I’d read blurbs here and there – reprints or links – but never cover-to-cover enjoyment. So I won’t speak to the re-design – although I would encourage any of you that are more versed in the history of CNF to weigh in on the big change circa CNF 38.

CNF 39 is a pleasant mélange – and I mean that sincerely – of craft, insight and art. We begin with seven pages of tribute to Norman Mailer, on the 30^th anniversary of The Executioner’s Song, including personal interactions, excerpts of his work, and a must-read Mailer list, chronologically ordered. This is followed by a pair of what I would loosely term “Writer’s Insight” pieces – Heidi Julavits on reading (literary déjà-vu), and Robin Hemley on writing (defending the memoir) in Confessions of a Navel-Gazer.

At the heart of the literary sandwich that is CNF 39 are seven essays, and here is one of the truly pleasant surprises of this issue: four of the seven are writers being published for the first time. Lee Gutkind states, in his From the Editor intro to this issue, that “A primary mission of this magazine is to introduce new writers and to inspire them to keep writing,” and on this count he’s true to his word. This is an easy enough statement to overlook. If you glance at the “what we’re looking for” section of any literary publication – regardless of where they position themselves on the academic/artistic continuum – they all say something to the effect of “we’re looking to publish the best from established writers and up-and-coming newbies.” But often when reading the heavy-medaled bios of the Nonfictioneers included in any given upper-echelon publication, we get the feeling that they’re just saying they publish newcomers to keep their incoming slush pile big enough to justify their slate of interns. Which is to say, again, that I appreciate the emphasis on first-timers in CNF 39.

Of the three essays out of these seven that I chose for class discussion I should also admit to a couple of biases. First, I didn’t choose either of the two entrants from last year’s CNF Program-Off that were published in this issue, in deference to our very own Natalie Cunningham, who was one of the five finalists last year – and I make no apologies for my unreasonable home-team booster-ism in this matter. Secondly, I chose John Nosco’s Apology not just because it is awesome in general – which it is – but because it is a two-page sentence – a style of which I am admittedly partial to.

After the mid-sandwich artistic-essay meat, we end CNF 39 much as we began – with craft/insight and “etcetera.” The craft/insight being comprised of Phillip Lopate’s regular Show and Tell column, in this edition concerned with the uses of contrariety – and a Writer at Work section in which Michael Rosenwald explores and dissects the typed notes of Gay Talese from a New York Times piece circa 1979 on the loser Yankees of that year. And let it be said that though the Yankees may have purchased a few World Series titles since then, they are still, and will always be, losers in my heart.

Part One of the “Etcetera” (my term) is the entrant under the title of Pushing the Boundaries. Here again your trusty blogger must acknowledge a personal bias, in that I was disappointed to find that the PTB section was comprised of only one essay. If this is going to be a recurring section of CNF, I will be more forgiving of the meager three pages devoted to pushing said boundaries, but I have to admit that when I submitted my PTB essay, including a personally-burned soundtrack CD for said literary missive, I was under the impression that Pushing the Boundaries was going to be its very own special issue – or at least more than three pages in the back quarter of the next CNF.

Part Two of Etcetera is CNF Online, comprised of a couple blog entries and a collection of Twitter essays (750 words? How about 140 characters! Take that, Brevity!). Part Three is a last-page column entitled – cleverly enough – afterWORDS, in this particular issue being devoted to the artless idiocy of modern nonfiction book subtitles.

The layout is not that much different than the New Yorker, Atlantic or Harper’s in some sense – the bookending of the primary long-form literary main course with smaller chunks – the hors d’oeuvres and after-dinner cognacs. In particular the final-page articles – Findings in Harper’s or afterWORDS here in CNF – seem to imply a kind of utilitarian literary circle – as if one could start reading from either end of the publication.

A couple final notes on form – I like the purple hued pages and the watercolor art accompanying the essays. I think, for example, that the obscurity of the watercolor wolf in motion (in Why I Run) works much better than a more literal photo would.

Also a nice touch is the interactivity – we get online content from Jerald Walker and Robin Hemley, which I’m including a link to here. Both insightful, and for myself in particular I found Hemley’s response to his most hated question – “after writing X did you feel healed?” – to be a great addendum to his defense of memoir.

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/articles/index.htm

I honestly didn’t know that much about either CNF or last week’s entrant, the Kenyon Review. I expected CNF to be what The Kenyon Review turned out to be – somewhat tedious, marginally artistic, mostly academic essays. I was, unabashedly, pleasantly surprised by Creative Nonfiction, which is more humble (Voice of the Genre notwithstanding) and helpful than I would have imagined - and even though that means I can no longer wear my rejection slips like badges of young punk honor, I must now consider myself a fan.

And, o wow...

The New Haven Review's list of the best nonfiction writers under 40 here. One imagines part of the point of publishing a list like this is to invite dissension... this is the Internet after all. I do like many of these people whose work I know. At least a few essayists included...

Purpose of the "Best American" Series

I'm about halfway through this year's Best American Essays, so maybe this is unfair of me to say, but so far the individual essays have all felt exactly the same: they all seem heavily researched, which isn't a bad thing, but they rely so much on content (as opposed to voice, a new perspective on the narrator based on the research, etc) that they aren't necessarily compelling unless you are interested in the subject matter. Even the subjects, for the most part have felt similar: writing about the lives of writers/academics--there's been an essay looking at Tolstoy, another on Einstein, one on Isenberg's visits with four different scholars/writers that might need an entirely different post to articulate why it shouldn't be anywhere near a Best American anything, an essay on Montaigne, an essay opening on a scene with Nabokov...

This isn't to mention the fact that it's mostly essays written by men, and that a majority of the collection is made up of essays from the bigger magazines like Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker or NY Times Book Review or any other publication with 'New York' in the title. Meanwhile, a majority of the notable essays are from a more diverse set of smaller journals/publications.

Anyway, none of this should come as a surprise (the big magazines always have a significant representation in the Best American series), but it does have me questioning the purpose of the Best American anthology, and why so many similar essays would be put into a collection where there were a lot of opportunities for a variety of voices and content. Here's a couple theories:

1) In my mind, the anthology should be a venue for highlighting the diversity of a genre in terms of style and content (for many readers, this might be the only time all year they pick up a collection of essays, or short stories, or whatever). Furthermore, it seems like a wider variety of journals/publications would be ideal, especially when they could give attention to lesser known writing venues and writers that would benefit from the distinction, but it doesn't seem like that's necessarily the mission of the series.

2) It's simply a venue for that year's editor (in this case, Christopher Hitchens) to put forth the writing they're most interested in. If an editor were particularly interested in, say, reading profiles on famous writers, then they could go ahead and publish fifteen of them and call it a day.

3) It's an opportunity for that year's editor to set forth an agenda/message on where they see the genre heading, or what they'd like to see more of, or something along those lines.

Anyway, I don't want this to sound like a rant about me not agreeing with Hitchens' choices as an editor, but I'm honestly curious as to what people see as the purpose of this type of anthology.

The Kenyon Review is a Serious Journal

I’ll open this post by admitting to a certain degree of ignorance. I’m not proud of my ignorance, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that before writing this post I knew nothing of the Kenyon Review.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I chose to blog about this journal because one of my housemates and close friends during my undergraduate years was a transfer student from Kenyon College. I liked her literary tastes, so I figured the journal would be pretty good. Of course, had I carried this thought process one step further and asked myself why she transferred in the first place I might have arrived at a different conclusion. But, the Kenyon Review it was, and now to the actual post:

The Kenyon Review is a serious journal. I could tell when I looked at the cover. I chose to focus on the four issues from 2009 and they all had classy black and white photographs of literary looking people or literary looking places (or literary looking people in literary looking places). What is a literary looking person, you might ask? I guess it’s a white middle-aged man standing at a desk, or sitting on a sofa, or holding a copy of the Kenyon Review. Upon further examination of previous issues over the past few years I noticed that classy black and white photographs seem to be the Kenyon Review’s signature move (the cover in winter 2010, a special issue with guest editor Simon Ortiz, is a notable exception- sporting a crayon drawing of an anthropomorphized insect).

Each issue in 2009 had two to three essays under the journal’s self-proclaimed nonfiction heading. There are about two or three times as many short fiction stories and around ten or so poems. I thought this wasn’t too bad considering how in some literary journals nonfiction still seems to be considered an illegitimate child. I figured the folks at the Kenyon Review were at least trying to incorporate the genre, but after browsing the nonfiction articles more closely I wasn’t too sure.

Out of the eleven nonfiction pieces published in 2009 seven are about writers and writing. They include book reviews, interviews with writers, and literary criticisms. When two thirds of the pieces under a journal’s nonfiction heading are of the meta-literary variety, I become suspicious. I was planning to contact the journal’s nonfiction editor to discuss my unease, when I noticed that according to the staff list there wasn’t one.

It’s possible that I’m hypersensitive. It’s possible this trend doesn’t indicate anything. Or it’s possible the folks at the Kenyon Review consider creative nonfiction to be a satellite genre, one whose presence serves only to observe and comment on real writing and those who engage in it, i.e. fiction writers and poets.

This may sound a little harsh on my part. After all, there are four non-meta-literary essays in 2009. I could have chosen to focus on them. But this somehow felt dishonest, and I preferred not to misrepresent what seems to me to be the Kenyon Review’s take on nonfiction.

The first essay I looked at was The Mysterious (Un)meeting of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway by John Rodden and John Rossi, published in the fall of 2009. This 22-page essay revolves around a chance meeting that may or may not have happened between Orwell and Hemingway in a Paris hotel in 1945 during the last days of WWII. “Great,” I thought to myself, “Could Rodden and Rossi (or John and John) have picked a more esoteric and boring topic to write about?” (The answer is yes, but more on that later.) If there is something more obnoxious than rehashing the literary canon, it must be more irrelevant minutiae about the literary greats (who happen to all be white men, did I mention that?)

Rodden and Rossi comb through all of the sources at their disposal to investigate whether this meeting actually took place. They contact Hemmingway scholars and Orwell scholars, look at the biographies of both men, examine letters by the authors to their friends and colleagues. All this work for a meeting whose actual implications no one really knows. It made me wonder. Who would find this topic so engrossing that they would actually enjoy reading this essay?

I wouldn’t. At least, not at first. I have to admit I found no interest in whether the meeting happened. I really couldn’t care less whether George Orwell met Ernest Hemingway in a Paris hotel in 1945. I could care a little bit if I knew what they said to one another, but even then not so much. But some interesting questions do come out of Rodden and Rossi’s investigation.

Underlying this entire quest is a desire for drama. It is the hope readers have that writers are not just human beings, but characters in their own novel. Imagining a meeting between Hemingway and Orwell is like experiencing a comic book crossover, when Superman meets the Incredible Hulk. It highlights the separation between the fiction and nonfiction of a writer’s life (and the nonfiction in the author’s fiction), and how obsessed we can become about discovering who the artist really is.

Of course, as the essay also highlights, this fabrication is as much the work of the artist as it is the obsession of the reader. Rodden and Rossi again and again point to Hemingway’s tendency to embellish and exaggerate, specifically his knack for self-aggrandizement. This would merely be an interesting trivial comment on the character of Hemingway the man were it not for the fact that all these questions of fiction vs. nonfiction are in fact an integral part of how literature is read. As Rodden and Rossi note “Whereas the Hemingway myth was both becoming a bloated, self-inflated media spectacle without underpinnings in Hemingway’s art and coming to overshadow his literary identity, the Orwell legend was being viewed as found on perceived transparency between his life and work and thus burnishing his reputation.” (72) In other words, how the audience views the artist’s work is consistently informed by how the audience views the artist’s life (and vice versa). In that sense a meeting between Orwell and Hemingway may not be so interesting, but what people read into a meeting between Orwell and Hemingway can be. Maybe. I’m still not convinced I needed to read 22 pages to understand that.

Night Hawks, a much shorter essay by Charles Johnson in the summer 2009 issue, is another account of a meeting between two artists- Johnson and the celebrated playwright August Wilson. This time, we are led to believe, the event actually happened.

At first the essay almost reads as a tribute to Wilson, who passed away in 2005. Johnson reflects on his time with Wilson, his appreciation of the artist and the man, and a description of a particular night they spent in each other’s company in Seattle. But what begins as a description of Wilson’s thoughts on life, art, and the state of black America, slowly turns into a nighttime adventure. The two writers step into a fictionalized (though factual) world, becoming characters in a story, complete with a crime scene and a violent climax.

This piece once again speaks to the need of readers to see their authors as characters. Johnson notes that “the public could know only the media-created surface, not the subterranean depths, of any artist.” Could we read this essay then, as an attempt by Johnson to break the surface? But if that were the case, why does his essay lapse into the world of storytelling? Does his telling, using fictional conventions, break the media-created surface or reinforce it? Perhaps this is an indication of the limits of fictional narratives in creating a real intimacy between the person in the text and the reader.

The essay could have been chosen for another reason, one that indicates the values of the Kenyon Review and its relation to nonfiction. Perhaps the reason why meetings between artists are frequently featured in the journal is because the journal views itself as a meeting place between fellow artists. And perhaps this is an indication of its view of nonfiction, the genre whose purpose it is to document and elaborate upon this meeting.

If that is the case, what kinds of artists are meeting each other in the pages of the Kenyon Review? Mostly older men, it seems, who write in private, who live comfortably, and who escape their wives and their domestic life by fraternizing with other male writers till the wee hours of the morning.

OK, I have to admit I’m grossly misrepresenting the journal here. I found the Johnson essay quite enjoyable to read. I thought his closeness and intimacy with Wilson was lovely and heartwarming. But on the other hand the fairly conservative description coming out of these stories doesn’t exactly seem to push for a radical vision of who a writer is. I originally wanted to call this post “crusty old men” but thought better of it. (Actually, I wanted to call this post “crusty old white men” but Charles Johnson and August Wilson ruined it for me).

This brings me to the final essay I reviewed, Bluebeard Bellow by Jeffery Meyers in the spring 2009 issue. Remember how I asked earlier if there could have been a more esoteric and boring topic to write about than that meeting between Orwell and Hemingway? Meyers must have been going for that in his essay comparing the female characters in Saul Bellow’s novels with the writer’s five wives (four ex, one widow). I found this essay to be a somewhat tedious examination of the way Bellow used the autobiographical material of his various marriages in his novels. By intertwining Bellow’s life and stories Meyers manages to not only illustrate how closely related Bellow’s fiction was to the nonfiction of his life, but also show how Bellow exacted terrible vengeance on his ex-wives by portraying them as evil harpies.

In the process, Meyers also managed to completely confuse me. Who is the real wife, and who the fictional? Which character was the fictional portrayal of the wife before the divorce, and which one was after? For each one of Bellow’s wives there are usually two corresponding fictional characters, and keeping track of around 10-15 people, all of whom I’ve never heard of before reading this essay became entirely too taxing.

Perhaps that was Meyers’ goal all along, to blend fiction and reality so much that the reader can’t tell them apart anymore. And I have to wonder who would find this interesting? Saul Bellow fans I suppose, or misogynists who enjoy seeing women punished on paper. Meyers does seem to relish Bellow’s post-divorce vengeance a little too much for comfort. Not that I would go so far as to label him a misogynist, but he does describe the University of Chicago in his own words as a “breeding place of brides,” (172) not exactly the most humanizing of descriptions.

In his conclusion, Meyers says that if Bellow “married Janis Freedman [his fifth and last wife] in the first place he would never have written these great novels. His ex-wives provided emotionally intense material and generated the anger, misogyny, and guilt that fueled his creative powers. He needed these witches to torment and inspire him.” This quote raises an interesting question about writers and the way they use, perhaps even exploit, their life in order to create their art. Is that really necessary? Meyers suggests that Bellow’s greatness came from these failed relationships and the literary material they provided. This may be true, but at the same time this supposition reduces Bellow’s companions from real live human beings into objects and caricatures which are used to delight us the readers, and I’m not too sure I’m comfortable with that. Not that anyone asked me.

I wonder about the meaning behind these three essays; are they really emblematic of how the editors at the Kenyon Review view nonfiction, or am I just judging them unfairly? They raise some interesting questions about the relationship between the lives of artists and their art, but never quite answer them. I would like to think that the Kenyon Review sees nonfiction as more than just a tool for writing about writing. I would like to think that what appears to be the journal’s adherence to a conservative canon (at least for its nonfiction) is a fluke. But I’m just not sure.

The Sun: Chicken Soup for the Graduate Student Soul

After reading through my first three issues of the non-profit literary journal The Sun, it didn’t surprise me to find the slogan, “Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free”, as the header on the journal’s website. This journal is nothing if not personal, both in content and in philosophy. Gracing nearly every page of each issue are stories about people. Stories about all manner of things: women who want to try sticking their finger up their husbands’ anus, about working as an aid practitioner in war-torn Sierra Leonne, about Hurricane Katrina, about alcoholic fathers, about buying a new car, about living as an amputee. A plethora of political and oh-so-personal stories abound.

There are no advertisements. There are pictures.

Oh yeah, The Sun also provides complimentary subscriptions--$39.00/yr for the rest of us—to prisoners, people with limited income, the homeless, women’s shelters etc. The cumulative effect of all of this is a warm-fuzzy going home for Thanksgiving kind of feel. A friend of mine recently commented that after having read several literary journals she had concluded that it was “mostly writers who read them.” “Nobody else really reads them,” she repeated to me.

The Sun is the kind of literary magazine you can safely assume is read by non-writers; it is accessible and I like that. Perhaps this is why it is one of only three literary magazines that can be found of the shelf of my local Bookman’s; when I asked why this was so, the cashier told me they were ‘really popular’. Usually this is something we hold against a book (journal in this case) but since I am usually one of the plain popular dopes who fall right in line with the mainstream, I decided to withhold judgment.

Then there is the section called Sy Safransky’s Notebook where the journal’s editor-in-chief publishes excerpts from his supposed notebooks (“My cat Zooey woke me up this morning. He licked my hand, then stretched out besides me […] That’s what we all want, isn’t it? A place at the table. Room in someone’s heart”), as well as a section called Reader’s Write in which readers are encouraged to write in on a variety of topics from Porches, to Saying Yes, to Small Victories, to Change of Heart.

The Sun blurs the line between professional writer, reader, and editor; each is contributing to the magazine in a less than conventional way (i.e., the writer is contributing personal journal entries and readers are called upon to submit a short piece of literary nonfiction). This is another way in which the journal seems to want to establish a personal relationship and dialogue with its readership.

To wit:

“Your magazine has shown me that I am not alone.”

Bridget Willey, Sun reader

“‘I’ve felt so many things. It’s not like a magazine. It’s more like a person, a friend.’”

Ashley Walker, author

Editor-in-chief Sy Safransky resists defining the magazine, claiming that labels feel reductive (between the labels is where the magic happens, he says), but the journal’s online mission statement describes the journal as a fusing of the personal and the political, as an attempt to honor the genuine and the spiritual, and as an effort to “invoke the splendor and heartache of being human.” According to Sy, “exploring the vagaries of the human condition”, and “honoring the mysteries of the heart” are the driving forces behind his vision for The Sun.

Even for me—an infamously uncritical consumer of inspirational (read cheesy) writing—this seemed like a lot of times to mention the human heart and the human condition and the human spirit, and all this talk about being best friends with the magazine and being uplifted started to make me a little uncomfortable. That was when I noticed a section at the end called Sunbeams (eek!), which turned out to be a page of inspirational quotations. I was about to put it down then and there—write it off as not a serious literary journal—when a quotation (“to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”—Simone Weil) caught my eye. I sheepishly wrote it down, like a spy taking notes in a badly lit Eastern European café. I had to admit: I liked that section. I liked the chicken noodle soup, rolling around in your snowsuit, man who triumphs over terminal disease feel of it all. Let’s face it—most of us like to read stories about people like us, about people who are challenged in great and mundane ways; a lot of us like to read for that gem of meaning, so that along with the writer, we too feel we have learnt something.

This is what The Sun delivers. Not to mention pretty good writing. No, this is not Chicken Soup for the Graduate Student Soul (despite my earlier allusion to chicken soup), but it is writing of fairly high caliber. Though the journal is by and large interested in the narrative essay, recent issues have shown new enthusiasm for more experimental forms.

In the January 2009 issue, Cary Tennis’s Since You Asked features a conglomeration of pieces culled from the writer’s advice column on Salon.com, and though this was not written as a cohesive essay (or an essay at all for that matter), it is interesting to examine the way it works as a piece of nonfiction— or what Sy Safransky might call a ‘true story.’ Each response works as a sort of micro essay in and of itself. Help-seekers write in about a variety of problems, such as the neglectful wannabe Hollywood boyfriend, the guy who doesn’t like finding right-wing propaganda in the loo, the woman afraid of falling into a complacent and passion-less rut with her boyfriend, the guy who ditched his pregnant girlfriend as a teenager and is now dealing with the fall-out.

The questions themselves seem suspiciously uniform in style (not to mention the curious content…I mean, who takes the time to write to an advice columnist about the fact that they are feeling, meh, kinda irritable?), which leads one to wonder if they are real at all. Perhaps they function rather, as a sort of intro to the topic at hand, i.e., provide Tennis with the opening he needs in order to pontificate/ “essay” on his subject of choice. The last response in the piece for example, becomes an enraged mediation of the fact that bad things happen to good people, concluding with the words, “It’s the truth. You’re wiser now, though black-and-blue, sobbing in the firelight, waiting for the dawn.” It’s the truth. The author provides us with a final truth in each of these vignettes: a lesson if you will. And this seems similar in structure and ambition to all the pieces in The Sun. There’s an issue, it’s discussed, and some kind of resolution—or revelation—takes place.

Emily Rapp’s “Surviving the Body”, an essay about an amputee who goes to Korea to teach English, ends on a similar note. “Grace,” she tells us, “can only be experienced when we fail.” The reader is left with an image of Emily literally burying her discipline stick in the yard (presumably symbolizing the various types of violence portrayed in the essay). As in many of the magazines other pieces, things are tied up and—quite literally—buried. Though the end seems to suggest that the essay’s largest ambition is related to the experience of triumph over failure, the essay as a whole feels as if it is divided into two vectors: violence and healing. Rapp moves predictably back and forth between these two threads: the egregious violence (including spousal abuse, date rape, corporal punishment),which she witnesses in Korea; and short sections of prose describing the various therapies and surgeries (including learning to walk again) that she underwent as a result of a congenital bone-and-tissue disorder.

The most engaging sections of the essay are those where Rapp uses vivid imagery to describe her leg, doctors, and the various procedures she underwent. Ex. “Wooden limbs and rubber feet hung from the ceiling on frayed cotton straps. The legs were like body parts hung out on a laundry line, estranged and neglected, waiting to be claimed and inhabited by a person who would give them a reason to exist. My dad and I sat in silence, watching the limbs sway in the feeble breeze from the single ceiling fan and listening to the whine of the saw in the room.” Perhaps this is a result of temporal distance, but these sections feel better processed, and more wholly digested, than the parts that take place in Korea. In Korea, Rapp gives the reader scenes of physical abuse (her kicking the American soldier in the mouth with her carbon and steel foot, the young girl being made to endure physical torture in the schoolyard for their transgressions) but there is little reflection on what these scenes might mean, in particular with relation to the healing vector of the essay. Though the essay closes with a climactic image and a lesson (grace can only be experienced when we fail) one is left wondering (as we often say ad nauseum in our MFA workshops): was it earned?

The micro essay “The Things We Say When We Say Goodbye” by Alan Davis, a tender portrait of Davis’s Uncle Joe, is similarly precarious. A conversational tone, employing snippets of dialogue, and anecdotal memories, creates a picture of a peaceful man. We come to know Uncle Joe via his belief systems: his philosophy of life. The essay is divided into two sections, each ending on a hefty, yet puzzling note. The first section (a brief sketch of Uncle’s Joe’s religious beliefs) ends with the words: “Those were probably my last words to him, aside from the things we say when we say goodbye”. The sentence echoes the essays title, and one expects it to be picked up again later in the essay (what are the things we say to each other when we say goodbye?), but it is not. The second chunk is a speculative account of Uncle Joe’s death terminating in the unexpected conclusion that “disaster was always, is always, a heartbeat away”. ??? This dramatic conclusion felt particularly unearned, but perhaps such are the limitations of working with such a short format.

The essays in The Sun all seem to beg a similar question. While we all want to take a journey with the writer and feel we have arrived somewhere by the end, essay upon essay of tidily wrapped up narrative, may leave us wondering how much of the human condition is really being represented here. The stories in this journal are powerful, and it is possible to be drawn along by the plot points themselves—not to mention some authentically well written prose—but there is a fairly polished quality to the magazine that may be problematic for some.

Best American Essays 2010 Table of Contents

I haven't had a chance to read through it yet, but figured I'd post the Table of Contents here, as its nearly impossible to find anywhere else (every year they keep their contributor's a mystery, it's pretty bizarre):

Elif Batuman- The Murder of Leo Tolstoy (Harper's)
Toni Bentley- The Bad Lion (NY Review of Books)
Jane Churchon- The Dead Book (The Sun)
Brian Doyle- Irreconcilable Dissonance (Oregon Humanities)
John Gamel- The Elegant Eyeball (Alaska Quarterly Review)
Walter Isaacson- How Einstein Divided America's Jews (The Atlantic)
Steven L. Isenberg- Lunching on Olympus (The American Scholar)
Jane Kramer- Me, Myself, and I (The New Yorker)
Arthur Krystal- When Writers Speak (NY Times Book Review)
Matt Labash- A Rake's Progress (The Weekly Standard)
Phillip Lopate- Brooklyn the Unknowable (Harvard Review)
Ian McEwan- On John Updike (NY Review of Books)
Steven Pinker- My Genome, My Self (NY Times Magazine)
Ron Rindo- Gyromancy (Gettysburg Review)
David Sedaris- Guy Walks into a Bar Car (New Yorker)
Zadie Smith- Speaking in Tongues (NY Review of Books)
S. Frederick Starr- Rediscovering Central Asia (Wilson Quarterly)
John H. Summers- Gettysburg Regress (The New Republic)
John Edgar Wideman- Fatheralong (Harper's)
Garry Wills- Daredevil (The Atlantic)
James Wood- A Fine Range (The New Yorker)

Not sure what to think of this list yet, but I'm sure y'all will have your own reviews/thoughts. Mainly, I'm hoping that we won't get a dozen essays about the process of writing, as last year's edition felt pretty overwhelmed with the subject. As always, I find myself more drawn to the Notable Essays in the back, where one finds a more interesting variety (as well as a few familiar names/contributors to this blog, congratulations all.)

The Evolution of Fourth Genre

Fourth Genre--an excellent literary journal and major crush of mine--has been around for awhile (ten years to be exact).  For this blog entry, I thought it would be interesting to look at how Fourth Genre has evolved over those ten years.  To illustrate this, I'll look at two issues and discuss two essays: the first from Fall 1999 (insert Prince lyrics here) and the second from Fall 2009.  Ten years.  A lot can happen in ten years.  Heck, ten years ago today, I was fifteen and heading to an N'Sync concert.  I digress.

Let's start by looking at Bret Lott's "Toward Humility," published in the Fall 1999 (Vol. 1, No. 2) issue.  First, a bit on structure.  This piece is structured with numbers, but instead of going in numerical, chronological order, we get a backward numbering set: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.  I tend to dig this kind of organizing principle--not just because I'm anal and I get off on numbered chunks (so crisp, so clean!)--but also because it keeps me reading until the very end.  And that's important.  It's so easy, with essays, to stop reading a piece if you have a hard time following it's path.  Now onto content.  "Toward Humility" works for me because it does a great job utilizing its second person narrative voice.  I'd imagine most people who read Fourth Genre--and most literary journals in general for that matter--tend to be writers.  Since this piece is from the perspective of a writer who has earned enormous and unexpected fame, we writerly types can sink easily into this voice (we want to imagine that one day, that'll be us).  But, as we read on, we see that this fame and fortune comes with its downfalls.  The author, after gaining major attention for his first book (even getting to be on what we presume to be "The Oprah Winfrey" show), never achieves the same amount of attention for his later work.  In the essay, the protagonist is currently working on a new novel, but it's not living up to his (nor his editors') sense of potential.  Towards the end of the essay, there's a poignant scene where we see narrator yelling during his son's soccer game: "Let's GO!  Get in the GAME!" He yells at his son.  We realize though that he's not so much yelling at his son, as he's chastising himself: Finish that book!  Make it good!  By the end of the book, the narrator has isolated himself (presumedly just temporarily so) from his wife and family.  We see that the price you pay for fame is the frightening possibility of losing those that are most important to you.

I should pause for a bit and talk more about this Fall 1999 issue.  The journal is arranged in very predictable patterns.  In other words, there's nothing fancy going on here.  As I scan through the issue, I see the essays are just about all similar in length (15-20 pages long) and are structured the same.  With the exception of Bret Lott's essay (he uses numbers) and John Lane's essay (he uses Roman numerals), within each essay, three black boxes are always used to indicate section breaks (the same way that dots or asteriks are utilized in many essays).  I found it somewhat shocking that the journal kept this form going for the entirety of the journal.  It was as if the journal was saying, "If you don't have an organizing principle for your essay, we'll make one for you.  We love these three black boxes!"

Fast forward ten years later.  Now we have the Fall 2009 issue.  A lot has changed in terms of the structure and content of the journal.  To find out what specifically changed, I emailed the current editor, Marcia Aldrich, to hear her perspective.  She graciously answered my email with some awesome, detailed answers.  Here's what she said:

1. Wanted to bring younger writers into the journal, and younger readers, I made a concerted effort to do so, and think I have made a big change in that area. A good mix of talented graduate students, or recent graduates have been making their appearance in our pages. Lots of emerging writers as well mixed in with more seasoned writers, but a dramatic shift. At AWP, lots of graduate students coming by the table NOW because someone in their program had a piece accepted. I wanted more diversity of age: got it.

2. I think, though some may argue against this, that we've moved the journal into welcoming more diverse styles of creative nonfiction, with an openness to innovation and lyric essay. We're publishing more short essays of an experimental sort. I wanted to represent better the range of writing being done under the umbrella heading of creative nonfiction. I think there's been improvement. Still we're dependent on what comes through the door.

3. Introduced picking a clearly innovative essay to spotlight and ask the writer to write an accompanying essay about the essay's composition.

4. Introduced Writer as Reader section. See guidelines. Eula Biss is writing on Joan Didion for our spring issue. This is the most exciting feature for me that's new and my idea.

5. New book review editor, emphasis on more diversity of what we review. Deliberate attempt to make sure we're reviewing widely. moving in the right direction.

6. Cutting capsule reviews which I thought was a weak part of the journal. Gone as of spring.

7. Trying to publish more graphic essays. Trying.

8. Redesign to make a little more elegant and literary within the limited means at my disposal.

So, there goes.  I too noticed quite a shift in terms of variety of content.  Whereas most of the essays in the Fall 1999 issue were of similar length, style, and structure, the Fall 2009 has some surprises: shorter essays, a graphic essay, and a bit more experimentation in terms of style.  The magazine still has its organizing principles (it has traded in the three black boxes for three black arrows facing northeast), but has allowed for more structurally experimental essays; one of my favorites being Heather Seller's "Becoming a Mouth."  Again, gotta love the organizing method here: Sellers uses ten headings (i.e.: 1. CRAZY GIRL, 2. HUMOR I DESIRE, and so on).  This is a new kind of story-telling unseen in the first issue.  The story isn't linear, but served to us in episodic chunks.  The chunks are all related, but we see more of a non-linear mind in action.  Seller's opens with a vivid scene of an outcast girl (presumed to be her?) on a playground.  The section ends strong and shifts from sad to hopeful with: "...and the girl on the edge alone has one idea she knows is good.  She's going to be funny" (17).  BOOM!  Killer line.  Then she goes into how she honed her specific breed of dark humor and how she has utilized it--for herself and her writing students--throughout her life.  She shifts from the personal into a more big picture essay as she discusses the role of comedy--"we laugh at painful things"--and the role of the comic writer: "we have to digest what is not digestable" (24).

I find it interesting that both pieces I read (and loved) were addressed to writers.  The first being a caveat to the fame and fortune of best-selling authors in "Towards Humility," and the second a "how-to" on comedy and comic writing in "Becoming a Mouth."  Again, maybe this is because the people at Fourth Genre know who their main audience is: writers, of course!