Advent 2022, Dec 17, Michael Martone, Ten and a Half Short Essays on the Short Essay

 

Ten and a Half Short Essays on the Short Essay

Michael Martone

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Train Car Graffiti

The tags have largely disappeared from the urban canvases of subway cars and commuter coaches. Metal alloys were employed to foil the paint’s adhesion, the cars and yards surveilled. No, now the art is affixed to the pristine sheets of steel herded along the desolate rusting right-of-ways, the corridors of ruins, owned by the few remaining national railroads stretching across the nation.
     Boxcars and reefers, grain hoppers (with primer coats of paints the color of after-dinner mints), gondolas hauling scrap metals to mini-mills, and well-cars stacked with containers (not painted as the containers never dwell long enough to be tagged), flat cars, tank cars, litanies of letters, hieroglyphics, camouflages, ideograms, and the punch of punctuation. Their connecting knuckle-couplers could be commas, I think. Look! See what is done to the perforated siding panels (white cliffs to coat!) that protect the sky-scraping covered auto-racks! The fossil records written there!
     The economies of rail and scale are such now that the trains are longer and slower though they are express, stopping only in major cities and ports and mines or along long sidings to wait for longer trains to pass by. These drags are handled now by only one or two humans (an engineer, a conductor) stationed on the headend of the train. No way they are taking any notice about what is going on on the train they pilot. Their bosses would have them gone as well. Robotic trains would maximize profits….
     It once was the paint, the varnish and the livery of the cars, that ID-ed the companies (there were hundreds), advertised their speed and service, made proprietary their trademarks, illustrated the flanks of their rolling stock with maps, plastered with place names their cars, polished and edited, connected. But that’s all gone….
     Cars now are free-floating thought balloons, galleries on wheels, font books and follies, scrolling essays penned by some Pascal (in primaries and pastels) somewhere far away (the infinite spaces between the cars!) from where I am, here on this forgotten siding, reading these imaginary languages, in scripts that are at once organically expressed (in contrast to the framing machined edges beneath) and constructed in such a way (shading and chiaroscuro) the animated letters, trundling by, jump off their pages of steel like depression-era harlequin hobos.

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Junk Sequencing 

There are regions of the human genome that contain strands of DNA that are not coding, that are noncoding. That is to say these long sequences of the genetic basic base nucleotidal bits of alphabet (A-T and C-G) seem to be just there…. There? Fallow? Scrapped? Forgotten? They express no protein that creates eye color, say, or the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus, that wanders through the gut, the heart, and the larynx….
     Junk sequencing then is a kind of debased basic babble of inarticulate nitrogenous bases, neutered nucleotides. The proportion of coding to noncoding DNA swings significantly from species to species. The bacteria’s detritus makes up a mere 2% of its genome. In humans, the clutter we carry, the trash we horde makes up 98% of genomic static. No one knows. No one knows. Or maybe the bacteria know what all this material is there for. Leftovers from some long-forgotten shell of the former beings we were being? The drafts of essays that were written and never erased, shelved, stored? Juvenilia? Marginalia? Glosses that have grown dull? Scribbles that are part of our “papers” we will donate to the Lilly Library when we retire?
     I attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. My mother, back in Indiana, would tell her friends that her son attends The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore not saying what I was studying there, allowing the implication that I would become a medical doctor or biological researcher to float on the air, allowing that to go unspoken, a given. I was, of course, attending The Johns Hopkins University, where the human genome was then first being mapped, to “study” writing in its Writing Seminars, a long way from its laboratories and surgical theaters. I let it go….
     Though I did, one time, assist a friend, a graduate student in microbiology, as he practiced the new technique of gene splicing, gene editing. I watched as he introduced a junk sequence from a frog’s gene into the waiting arms of a random E. coli.
     Gertrude Stein too attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore “reading” in medicine to become a medical doctor. I still have a clipping taken from the SUN newspaper that advertises a house for sale where she once lived. Have you read her books? Have you seen how thick they are? How many pages of text? Word after word after word? How much had she had to write, the noncoding coding, to produce this this: “A rose is a rose is a rose?” Or this this: “There is no there there?”
     “There is no there there” is, by the way, the epigraph attached to my unpublished thesis, written over forty years ago, that now resides in the Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore called Cardinal Numbers, Ordinal Lives.

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“Catch!”

There are websites where you can buy a bomb or a missile, a shell, an artillery round. The transaction is with the Ukrainian military. They will then send the round downrange on its way toward the invading Russians to stem the tide, to cover a friendly advance, or even do retaliatory damage behind the enemy’s lines, a kind of potluck of targets. With the purchase (everyone likes to think of it as a “donation” to the cause), you have the chance to have a message of your choosing penned, chalked, or painted on the ballistic flanks. The messages need to be pithy, brief, graphic, specific of course. There are pictures of the bombs bedecked. Soldiers snap a shot before the shot is shot. There are rifled cheers and jeers, puns and wordplay, obscene wishes and concrete descriptions of the target, the explosion, the aftermath of the pain on its way. Special delivery is a theme. The idea of a gift is turned inside out like a kernel of popcorn, iconic, ironic. Around Easter, the season of resurrection, “Here is an Easter Egg that finds you.” They are, in their way, elegant projectiles of ragged raw spontaneous anger. And I am trying to end this paragraph with some way to explode the notion of the pen being more powerful than the sword or how lethal language can be especially when applied to the skin of a shell made up of a high energy propellant and a depleted uranium slug, a projectile that projects physical rage, fury swaddled in a barbwire net of text.
     This is not something new. The British Museum has in its collection a lead slingshot (# 1851,0507.11) from the Golden Age of ancient Greece, almond shaped with a winged thunder bolt on one side and the high relief inscription DEXAI “Catch!” on the other. There are spent missiles from a Roman siege that tell the recipient to “relax your ass” and another taunts “you can’t hide from me,” decorations of penetration from a distance.
     Sticks and stones can break bones but words? I ask my writing students if they know about shaped charges, how modern munitions are constructed to “pierce” armor, concentrating the explosive expanding energy all into one tiny narrowed focus, a jet of sun-scalding plasma. I warn them! I use a trigger warning before I start up with this metaphor, adapting it to the way one might think about one’s writing, writing that selects minute details and then hyper-amplifies them. We do talk about the power of the written word, its energy, the focus. Its ability to pierce through, to devastate, to deliver. I warn them. It is on the way. I warn them, a message on a bomb I am about to hurl: “Catch this!” 

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Visible Invisible Prisons

I have a lot to say about the postcard. I have thought a lot about the postcard. How it is an analog Tweet. How I think of it as a kind of prayer, not a vehicle of correspondence. One does not expect a return message. Tom Phillips, the creator of The Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, died a few days ago so I am thinking of him (a postcard cliché!) and of his other big book, The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages. But the postcard, for me is always about edges and sides (the front and back), borders and frames. “Your message here.” “The address here.” “The stamp here.” There is even now a box along the bottom that is for post office use to print its barcode clearly to be scanned for sorting. The postcard by design is always about limits and fit. It is a puzzling box of boxes, quarantined, and partitioned off. As this essay about postcards is as well. I am always already running out of room….
     Now, when I do receive postcards, I have noticed how the writers (most of them new to the form) are novices to the particular problems of postcard composition. They send messages I must decipher not on purpose, mind you, but because for them to write a postcard is unlike any other writing they have ever done. They’re handwriting, for one, perhaps for the first time in a long time. They could type the card but what are the chances they have a typewriter? They assume if they sign just their first name, I will be able to suss out their identity. I know many Susans, Sarahs, Davids, Dans. They neglect adding a place where the card was written or sent, assuming, I assume (if they even know about the postmark and cancellation) that the PO will address the issue of routing. But the PO is all robots now and centralized distribution. No help helping me pin dowm the where of the person whose penmanship I am trying to detangle. No place for return address! Besides the PO’s mechanized intervention is overprinting much of the scribble (the barcode, the cancellation) if the mechanical teeth feeding the mail through scanners and sorters haven’t already eaten away at the card itself. 
     In “Postcards from the Maginot Line,” W.S. Merwin recounts the strange liminal space created when he receives intimate messages from someone he does not know or remember. Who is sending these semiprivate semipublic billets-doux? It is perhaps this particular space, this special theater, the occasional occasion, this whispered public address that attracts me to this kind of essay, the postcard. Even more than “purloined” letters with their obscuring envelope, the postcard hides itself in plain sight. Every kind of writing may be a collaboration between the writer and the reader in the making of meaning. But the collaboration that takes place within the confines of the postcard creates this unique and concentrated emotional escape and, strangely, this sublime imprisonment.

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Slips

Ephemera

I enjoy meandering through the office buildings of the university where posting is usually prohibited on hallway walls, restricted to bulletin boards. But the office doors of professors provide a blank canvas to install ephemeral collages of all kinds. Texts and images create (in their recontextualization) found poems, juxtaposed jokes, startling defamiliarizations. To read the office doors is to do a kind of archaeology. You delaminate the layers and work the grid. It is also a mental documentation of the eccentric academic documentation of the absurd, the Kafkaesque giggles adhering to thresholds between high-functioning insanity and measly manufactories of meanings inside the offices. I always find when I read a well-encrusted, thoroughly scaled, and chain-mailed door, that I am often a tweedy Zeno enroute to paradoxical, Escheresque illusions. I riffle through the slips of foxing paper, paper consuming itself with the leftover acid it took to make the pulp into paper in the first place that now crumbles into crisp burned curling edges.

Memoranda

The Marxist, in the office next to mine who would work while listening to public radio classical music played loudly, would not speak to me. I asked if he could turn the music down. He wouldn’t answer. He didn’t speak to anyone. He didn’t speak, he let us know in a written memo, because speech could not be critiqued. In my office next door, I’d compose elaborate theses about communal space, privacy, what is meant by the “ringing” in the ears and the “wasting” of time. I would type these critiques up on an old manual typewriter, hammering the keyboard as loud as I could, making a racket. When I finished, I’d slip the bruised and battered paper under his door. 

Fortunes

Attached to the doors of many offices were slips of fortune cookie fortunes. I think the size of the little strips often worked in the overall door design while indicating the popularity of SWEN’s (the nearest Chinese restaurant) lunch special. The slips were counter punctual, a contrast to the letter and legal-sized sheets elsewhere, to the four-panel comic strips, to the posters with the frill of phone numbers, to the printouts of spreadsheets and memes. For me it isn’t so much about the fortune per se (the parodic aphorisms and obvious predictions) but the fortune cookie fortune writer. As a writer, I think about the fortune cookie fortune writer. I picture the writer in some cramped minuscule office somewhere typing out the pithy pronouncements, a pantomime of “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The running out of words. The inevitable probability inherent in the endless act of creation, the dwindling ability to imagine another improbable probability. The writer, exhausted, staring at a screen, slipping down in the chairs, stacks of empty slips of paper spilled all around, the reeking smell of burnt sugar emitted by nearby assembly lines, always already baking cookies, seeping under the closed office door.

Aphorisms

An aphorism is a short “saying” in need of interpretation according to Andrew Hui in A Theory of the Aphorism. Maybe. In all the years I have haunted the hallways of English Departments, Creative Writing Programs, Textual Studies, Rhetorics and Compositions, Communication Schools, and Media Colleges there have been plenty of theories of language and meaning bandied about, scalloped and overlapped like the pith of paper bark on a pithy door. Interpretation? No. One never quite reaches an end to the reading-into of the reading into. I have always liked better the slipperiness of words, the play in their meanings the muddy banks of a river I can’t step into the same twice. You know, the slip in the poetry’s transmission that makes the nothing in nothing happening happen.

Props

Often after a famous writer gives a public reading and before the dismissal to the author signing books or the reception, there is a brief period set aside for questions and answers. The questions are pretty standard. How did you get your start? Where do you get your ideas? Do you write every day? What are you reading now? That last question (all of the questions, really), posed by an audience member who might also be an aspiring writer, is really hoping for a shortcut or some direction to “good writing,” good writing that might rub off on the writer who is reading that “good” book or story or essay.
     John Barth anticipated that question— “What are you reading now?”—at a Q&A I saw. He lifted to the podium an old over-large leather attaché case, pried it open, and, like pulling rabbits out of a hat, produced a whole series of things he was reading. He started with SUN newspapers, the mail (junk mail, bills, postcards, letters, flyers, offers, coupons), magazines in the mail, catalogues, advanced reading copies of books he wouldn’t blurb but still read, galleys, books he was reading for pleasure, the books that were texts for classes he was teaching, papers his students in composition classes produced, fiction typescripts his creative writing students had turned in, a thesis a graduate student was working on, a brochure on a sailboat he was thinking about buying, journals that his former students sent him of their published work, books by the same, one of his own published books, a book by a friend. He pulled out a cereal box saying he liked to read all the different things printed on the box while he ate the cereal. Then he said, of course, he reads every day his own writing, what he had written the day before, before he begins writing today. And then out of his pocket he pulled out a little slip of paper, a fortune cookie fortune, saying he got this after dinner before the reading. And read it to us. That was what he was reading now.
     In a way he was poking fun at the desperate unasked question of the question, “What are you reading now?” But at the same time, he was making a serious point. That one never knows what writing one reads will be useful, instructive, inspirational even. There is no “good” writing one can cozy up to to become a “good” writer. Notice all that you are reading all the time, and welcome, every day, everything you read as necessary and, yes, as “good.”

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Memory Foam Moon

On the nightstand (nightstand! I never noticed the word until now) a notepad and pen are no longer provided by this hotel. The pushbutton (pushbutton!) telephone and alarm clock remain, objet d’art, obsolescent curiosities now that the phone, the alarm are folded into the handheld (handheld, another word to notice!) device that also provides (without a pen, a pad) a place to write a note and even a nightlight (nightlight! compounding compounding words) that ignites when a message arrives, an illuminated notepad (notepad!) on the nightstand (nightstand!).

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I am allergic to down. And I forget when I make a reservation for a hotel room to request a foam pillow or one stuffed with polyester fill. I forget, and the first thing I do is wrestle with the pillow’s sham and slipcover (slipcover!), extract another sleeve, a shell this time, its zipper stuffed into the cover opposite the opening, and open the pillowcase (pillowcase!), flipping the pillow, searching for the tag, the tag, that should never be removed, to inspect the contents enclosed. Often, by then, some feathers have found ways to surface, float in the air, a cartoon of struggle. I have knocked the stuffing out of the stuffing.

*

I use the ancient phone to call the desk and request a hypoallergenic pillow, and they oblige, a clerk knocking at the door, telling me to have a good night, it is memory foam (memory foam!), the pillow, and before my head hits it, I remember you in bed next to me, the moon in the window, its light landing on the nightstand (nightstand!) next to you sleeping, illuminating the notepad, a moon in the moonlight, the glint of the nib, the barrel, the pen’s button, the tangled sheets, your breath, all of it, it must be written down so I never forget what I just remembered, within the paradox of a sheet of paper, even within this bounded space it contains an infinite number of points, and will I even recognize what I have remembered to write, written, will I even remember that I have written this in the night the next morning, this lucid dream of lucid writing, and I reach over you for the pen, the paper, not wanting to wake you but then not wanting not to wake you.

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Floating Quotations

Four buildings, you are told, survived the burning of the University of Alabama’s campus at the end of the Civil War. You are told that one book was rescued before the burning of the library, a copy of the Quran, and that the president’s wife saved the president’s mansion by refusing to leave the house. The observatory is still there with a plaque that mentions the telescope either being scrapped for the war effort or tossed into Marr’s Spring to keep from falling into Federal hands. Oddly, the last building to avoid the torch was the only military structure, a guardhouse. The campus today is studded with plaques spelling out what happened here, the running battle, the strategic burn. The bronzed embossed letters cast shadows, foiling the stories and statistics. [1]
     Writers have come from all over the country to study writing here in the MFA program. They have their own received narratives about what has happened here, here where they now find themselves, what is happening here now. All the buildings, even the ones finished yesterday, camouflage themselves in fluted columns, in limestone metopes and triglyphs, decorative capstones and stuttering dentitions, disguising themselves, in whitewash and Alabama red-clay brick, as antebellum buildings.
     And plaques are everywhere addressing the biography of the names naming those building, the history of a tree, the footprints of football players, this well, that bell, the heralding of philanthropy. The lettering seems to levitate, jumps off the stern sheet metal page. One of my favorites is a modest tarnished tile saying simply that the new library was built by the WPA, another visit from the North. It doesn’t tell the story I heard when I got here that President Denny petitioned President Roosevelt for the library’s funds only to be told that there was no money left for such construction, only emergency money for acts of God and war. Denny made his case by reminding Roosevelt that the Yankees had burned the library, and Roosevelt, amused, released the funds. I don’t know. I am not sure. It is a good story. It’s something I heard. It isn’t, like so much else, set-in stone.
     A fact is a thing done. A fiction is a thing made. A fact having happened is finished. It leaves behind a residue, records of its happening, its occasion, evidence of the event. Even nonfiction, an essay, say, is a fiction in this sense. A made thing.
     I walk with the writers through a forest of plaques and carved stones, on paths of bricks inscribed with messages, the thick atmosphere of texts, a weather of words, reading the inscribed essays cast across campus.
     At the doorway of Foster Auditorium, a plaque that recounts the integration of the university. It is surrounded by others, newer plaques, revisions, edits. The writers read closely all that remains of that day, stamped in metal. I point out that the original plaque calls what happened here “The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” I think about, and I ask the writers gathered around me to think about, those floating quotation marks. Who “wrote” this? I wonder. Who wrote this and when? Who added the “quotation” that is buttressed by those marks? The writers deal every day in abstraction, using language to make those abstractions concrete. I tell them to go ahead and touch those raised letters, read by feel. Feel those slugs of punctuation, feel the prick of the periods worn smooth by the concentrated touch of others.

[1]  Of course, more than four buildings survived. The president’s mansion’s slave quarters survived. They are still there behind the big house. There are no plaques. There is a warning not to trespass. The last I looked, it was being used as a garden shed (hand-tools and hoes, rakes, a lawn mower, gloves, sunhats, clippers and pruners, a wheelbarrow) to tend the mansion’s property, its rose gardens and azalea hedges. 

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One Hundred Frogs

Universities stage annual fairs to introduce their international students to the community, the community to these students from other countries who now find themselves in Iowa or Central New York or Alabama, Below the Bug Line. Each booth a new food or craft, a loop of music, a slide show of landmarks, accented by unique accents. Often at the Japanese table there is origami, and I am encouraged to fold a crane or two. Other paper is used to demonstrate calligraphic talent, the students offering to write your name in kanji. I always thank them, but then I request their take on Basho’s frog haiku:

Furuike ya/kawazu tobikomu/mizu no oto

“Old pond,” I say, I don’t dare the Japanese. “A frog.” “Splash,” I say, gesturing with my hands. They know instantly what I am asking for and are always willing, eager in fact, to take a break from the name-writing and paper-folding to attempt to capture again the most famous seventeen syllables on earth. Every student there takes up a brush, pauses, and jumps in. I do love the way the letters spill down the page, how the composing and the composition mimics the flight of the frog, the disturbance of states, the stirring of liquid stillness, the slight sigh as the writer breathes out at the conclusion. The physical performance of writing that is so often passive, private.
     We think of haiku as poems. It’s the syllable count, the line breaks, I guess. But I think of haiku as a kind of essay of course, an attempt, a meditation. Place is there. And motion contrasted with stillness from the microscopic to the cosmic. But also, season, time, a second and, then, a second second.
     In the anthology One Hundred Frogs, Hiroaki Sato collects over 100 attempts at translating Basho’s moment in time. I think as a writer of essays I worry time, worry it too much in that linear way, wishing in the next new essay for the next new thought, a next new insight. The existential nature of the art of writing is that it is linear. It wants to go someplace. Beginnings, middles, ends. It leaves a straight wake in the water and not the radiating ripples, circles after a frog jumps into….
     In what way does the essay, does this essay, think the same thought, nothing new, over and over again and again? Nothing new! This essay, a practice, a practice of practice.

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Parasitic Texts or Enabling Apparati

I started teaching a class called “Contemporary Rural and Agricultural Literature” in Iowa where most of the students were from Iowa farms. Later, when I taught the same class in Boston, Syracuse, and Tuscaloosa none of the students had any real connection to farms or farming. I asked them to draw a picture of a farm. And they all drew a gambrel roofed haymow barn with an attached silo, a water-lifting windmill, and board or barbed wire fencing corralling mixed livestock—cows, goats, pigs, chickens and, often, a horse. My students in Iowa who had lived on farms, who still lived on farms, would never have pictured their farms like that—the barn, the bungalow, the garden, the picket fence—the idealized landscape of the American farm. The tableau exists if you stumble into the Amish community of Kalona, but it is mainly gone. For my purposes of teaching a class on contemporary rural literature, it was interesting to ask the urban students why they think a farm looks like this and/or why they desired farms to look like that.
     I could go on about that class, but mostly here I want to talk about a bag of potato chips—the bag more that the chips—Miss Vickie’s, Sea Salt Original. Each meeting, I would bring in food to my Farm class. One of the lurking questions in the class was “What is food?” so I would bring in examples of things purporting to be food. I could go on with that. Or I could go on with just doing a close reading of the various banners and headlines of the potato chip package—Made with Love and Care (a handwritten font), No Artificial PRESERVATIVES OR FLAVORS (a rubber stamp font), guaranteed fresh (in a crisp Helvetica)—but what most interests me is the body copy on the back.

Every bag of chips began somewhere, but ours began with someone. Miss Vickie wanted better chips for her family so she made them using ingredients fresh from her family’s farm.

In her kitchen –where work was respected, family loved, and honesty was a must—she spent years getting just the right crunch and flavors to put big happy smiles on every face in her farmhouse….

It goes on.
     I don’t remember when I began to consume words like this with my consumption of “food.” I don’t remember when they began printing essays on packaging, but I do know that the practice has grown, expanded, become ever more elaborate in my lifetime as the companies making the products became larger in scale, more anonymous, and well, less artisanal. They actually plagiarized the hand-made rhetoric to promote the handmade-ness of the product, borrowing from the competing actual artisanal artisans who were deploying the essay sincerely, not cynically, to reveal ingredients, craft, traditions, and histories they were attempting to revive.
     The “ours” above is the Frito-Lay PepsiCo Company. The package disguises the connection. The only tip-off being that someone or something in Purchase, New York, manufactures the chips for Miss Vickie. So, a snack company owns the copyright of the little personal essay and the trademark to “Miss Vickie.” Now, you might regard it as a fiction, but it is a fiction in the form of an essay, an essay of a particular kind.
     There are four times as many words in that parasitic essay as there are sea-salted chips in the bag. I counted. How many bags and boxes now come to us fortified or invested with the ingredient of language, a season of syntax?

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Lastly, Lists, Listicles, Litanies

It is that time of year again, the season of countdowns and the tallying of lists. This short essay is the short essay that is about lists and will be contributed to The Essayist’s annual Advent Calendar’s list of essays. Originally, I imagined the larger essay to be made up of 24 short essays (for the 24 days of Advent—though the days of Advent in the western church tradition can range from 22-28 days), but I ran out of time.
     When one is not, as I am not, a narrative writer and does not depend on the skeletal structure of beginning, middle, and end (a little list right there!), one often employs a numerical scaffolding, cartilage instead of bone, to give the writing shape, structure, a sense of an ending. The number of minutes in an hour, the hours in a day, the days in a week, the weeks in a year…. I could go on…. But I’ve run out of time.
     Here is my original list, taken from my notes, of the short essays I was going to write for this essay about short essays:

1. The Subtitle: The Colon or Titles: The Subtitle
2. The Blurb (this Advent essay is due December 15th and that same day two blurbs are due too—the clock ticking)
3. Last Words
4. Nose Art/ The Writing on Bombs
5. Fine Print
6. Skywriting
7. L’esprit de l’escalier
8. Understatement: Sighted sub. Sank same.
9. The Memorandum. The Extinction Layer?
10. The Quip
11. Junk Sequencing
12. IKEA Directions
13. Dance Steps
14. Haiku
15. The Postcard
16. Labels
17. 30-Second Ads
18. Epitaphs
19. E.B. White’s Rowboat
20. Kurt Vonnegut’s Typewriter
21. Those Church Billboards
22. Train Car Graffiti
23. Side Effects
24. Candy Sampler Box
25. Recipes
26. Tattoos and Body Copy
27. Fortune Cookie
28. The Advent Wreath
29. The Faculty Annual Report or FART

It was only after I started writing these short essays and when I mentioned to Theresa that I was running out of time that she suggested I add “Lists” to the list of short essays after seeing all the year-end lists online, on the TV, in magazines, and in newspapers.
     If there was time, I would write a little essay about the invention of the listicle and its connection to blogging and clickbait. I made a note to find Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” again and to read Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists. I keep Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities on my nightstand, used it as a backing when I woke up thinking of a list of short essays I could write. Invisible Cities was a model for Michael Martone, my memoir, a list, a list of “Contributor’s Notes.” But how to fit all that in?
     I took the time to re-read Henry Reed’s poem, “The Naming of Parts.” I was going to do something with that. “The Naming of Parts” is one of six poems in a cycle he called “Lessons of War,” a list inside of a list.
     The first edition of David Wallechinsky’s, Irving Wallace’s and Amy Wallace’s Book of Lists made the list of books that were banned in 1977 because it contains a list that described popular sexual positions and the pros and cons of their use. I thought, maybe, I could do something with that too.
     The nouns (the persons, places, or things) of the list are like little essays, just the names of names, written out after bullet points, behave like four-handed carbon, a bristle of bonding points, a schematic of out-of-the-box thinking, all juxtaposition and glancing associations.
     The writer of lists is not so much a composer of music but the music’s arranger. It is a kind of writing that dramatizes the collaboration between the writer and reader. The list presents as some kind of direct (my computer program is calling for concision here, but that’s the point of lists—you think they are channeled but they soon begin to meander) route going to a particular destination, yet it also gives you the unfolded and unfolding map as well on which the route is inscribed. The side trips and scenic byways, the periphery that draws the eye, the detours to the places you didn’t know to know.
     I know about the Great Lent, 40 days leading up to Easter, that practice of fasting. As a joke, I’ve posted on Facebook a list—40 days of Fish Sandwiches. Something to pass the time. You would not believe, or maybe you would, how many images exist of fish sandwiches and where my fishing took me on the internet to find them. And just now I discovered that Advent is the Little Lent, 4 weeks instead of 40 days of fasting in preparation for the Feast of Christmas. Instead of fish sandwiches I am posting short essays.
     Church Litanies were the bee’s knees in the Middle Ages. The prayer, made up of lists, a prayer of listing, became so popular (close to 100 different versions) that Pope Clement VIII forbade, in 1601, the publication of most of them.
     Here is a list of the litanies approved by the Roman Catholic Church for public recitation:

• The Litany of the Holy Names of Jesus
• The Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
• The Litany of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus
• The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• The Litany of Saint Joseph
• The Litany of the Saints

A lot o’ litany.
     I don’t know what to make of these little scraps I have assembled here, lists of lists. I think it has something to do, for me, with time and our sense of how time moves. Time moves in a direction. We sense that direction is forward, toward something. The litany, the list, is a kind of prayer. It suggests a direction, a destination, but, as I said, it begins to spread, to resist the relentlessness, the relentlessness of time.
     We mark the time of Advent with a calendar, yes, but also by a wreath that is circular. It and the season will come back around. There will be another round of essays about essays.
     After Advent and the twelve days of Christmas, after Epiphany, we return, again and again, to Ordinary Time, another kind of time that is anything but ordinary.

*

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and educated in the public schools there. His newest books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (Baobab Press) and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone (BOA Editons, Ltd). The Flatness and Other Landscapes (University of Georgia Press) won the Nonfiction Book Award from the AWP.  His memoir, Michael Martone (FC2), is a collection of contributor's notes like this one. After teaching for 40 years in four different universities, he retired to garden and to attempt his first novel, Fort Fort Wayne.  He lives in Tuscaloosa, Below the Bug Line, with the poet, Theresa Pappas.  

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

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

Sol Kim Cowell

*

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 

*

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.

*

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?

*

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.

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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.