Thalia Field in Trickhouse

I just read “Anna Kingsford, Clothed in Clouds” by Thalia Field. It’s available here, at Trickhouse.

The essay focuses on (of course) Anna Kingsford, an early English feminist and one of the first women in England to earn a degree in medicine. It moves through a series of short paragraphs/lines that address AK, often asking her a question and beginning with her name. The rhythm and syntax have a heightened lyricism that makes the essay read almost like a nursery rhyme at times. Quotes by AK are also woven in, including a relatively long block of text that ends the piece.

The essay is also interesting for being part of a series of writing inspired by artist Heide Hatry. Hatry makes awesome people-heads out of the skins and body parts of animals (AK was an animal rights advocate). Her book _Heads and Tales_ includes photographs of 27 of these heads, each paired with a story/essay by a female writer. Field decided her head was a historical person, but many of the texts are fiction.

*

I’m interested in Field’s essay here not just because it’s beautiful, but because it also informs. I didn’t know AK going in, but that didn’t get in the way of appreciating and engaging with the text. In my mind, I often place the highly stylized/lyrical/&c essays in a different place than the informative essays. Like, give it to me straight, Doc. A lot of Field’s earlier work, for example, requires me to do some research before I can fully appreciate what she’s doing and saying. But here, the task of informing (explaining, maybe?) does not confuse the language or prevent the essay from progressing and doing the more-than-explaining that I read for.

In “Anna Kingsford, Clothed in Clouds,” it all fits together so nicely. Like there is nothing to worry about, like all the tasks the essay takes up are effortlessly the same task. It’s nice to see so many of the things an essay can do happening at once, rather than away in their separate compartments, to remember that there’s nothing wrong or un-artsy about giving your reader some information.

On Maggie Nelson and the Book-Length Essay

So I am reading Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which has been mentioned at least three times in conversations over the last two weeks, which usually means that I go ahead and order it, amazon-prime-style, which is like cobra style, only more expensive and probably detrimental to independent bookstores. Still: I like convenience. I like progress. I very much like speed. Indeed I seem to have ordered this book twice so I am lending the second copy to one of my thesis students who might find it (particularly its structure) useful as she thinks about ordering and structuring her own book (which is a very different project).

If you haven't read it, it's a shortish (though dense and beautiful) book-length essay loosely circling around lavish and varied descriptions of various blues, or instances of the color blue, or things that reference the color blue, as well as (you guessed it), the author's emotional and physical states and the ways in which she interacts with the world. That's reductive like any lame description of a piece of art that resists being encapsulated in description, but that's a capsule of it. Structured as 240 numbered sections/strophes/paragraphs, it moves via meander, returning periodically to these ideas. This prose is obviously written by a poet, which I like. (Actually I have been recently thinking that everyone should be trained in poetry before they are allowed to write anything else at all.) I won't speak to the whole yet, because I'm trying to move slowly, but the headspace that it creates is quite lovely.

The structure--240 separate short sections, and importantly, numbered consecutively--keeps it tethered down even as individual sections start to unhinge. It's important that the sections tend to circle back to the same ideas, enlarging and expanding on them as they go. It's essentially a meditation, which keeps the brain front and center, rendering it as essay. And there's world here, not just self (though self is explored too: the book is plenty revealing and naked-seeming when it has to about the nature of desire):

68. After building his bower, the satin bowerbird makes a stage nearby out of shiny yellow grass, upon which he will sing and dance for passing females. Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experienced builders sometimes don't attract any females at all. Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone. 

69. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species.

I could pretty much quote any two consecutive sections from the book, but this gives you a sense of what's happening easily enough.

The headspace is the important part: the mood varies from section to section, but within the same voice. There is a sort of narrative (a lover lost) as the book essays forth.

While not fancy, structure and voice are what makes this book hold together for this reader so far.

In a meaningful coincidence, my place in the book is marked by this:

And yes, I do own the CD single for this. I have been listening to it lately for an essay I'm working on.

BAE

Christopher Hitchens is going to edit Best American Essays next year.

Wait, what? Doesn't that seem odd?

Related, here are some people who have won awards for their essays, found on Google Image Search:

The Book-Length Essay

Ever since I finished D'Agata's About a Mountain, and I've been thinking about the book-length essay. Mainly, I've been wondering if such a thing exists.

About a Mountain reads like a series of well-linked essays (keeping the momentum of shorter work while tackling multiple, broad themes that seem wider in scope than what can be done in 20 pages), but I don't know if I can consider it an essay in and of itself. Another example of this is found in Eula Biss's The Balloonists, which reads like a 120 page braided, personal essay. With that said, there are bigger organization principles that amount to chapters, so would we call this a memoir, rather than personal essay? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?

I'm not making any real conclusions here, but I would like to try and generate some discussion here: How do we (or don't we) define the book-length essay? Other good examples out there?

Sonora Review Double Issue: 55, 56, and DFW Tribute

Issue 55
Sean Lovelace- Nachos
Henry Ronan-Daniell- Regicide
Jennifer Schaller- My Father Was A Traveling Salesman

David Foster Wallace Tribute
Sven Birkerts- The Sentence
Marshall Boswell- Heading Westward
Greg Carlisle- Wallace's Infinite Fiction
Glenn Kenny- I Remember David Foster Wallace
Michael Martone- Footnotes & Endnotes

Issue 56
Riley Hannick- Microphonics
Riley Hannick- The Pradelles
Louis Alberto Urrea- Sonoran Desert Sutras

Just got my hands on The Sonora Review double issue. I should start by noting the quantity/variety of nonfiction in the issue—we get the lyric, the memoiristic; we find explorations of form and ruminations on environment. The double issue has enough content that there's bound to be something that fits your aesthetic preferences (and the DFW Tribute section alone makes the issue worth a read).

However, the range also allows for a fair amount of hit and miss, highlighting the good and the bad of the contemporary essay. I'm going to hone in on two particular essays, Sean Lovelace's "Nachos" and Henry Ronan-Daniell's "Regicide," as they seem to be the journal's best examples of two different approaches to approaching personal subject matter.

"Nachos," in a way, highlights a lot of what I like in the contemporary essay. I'll start with movement: The terse, one/two sentence sections (paragraphs?) allows the writer to cover a lot of ground. He's able to jump between nachos, nacho lore, loss/grief, and escapism (whether beer or food or physical pain) without transition. These short sections also put a necessary weight on the individual sentence/phrases since they have to be able to stand on their own. Other than the form, Lovelace manages to look at personal anecdotes through the lens of the nacho, and in this way manages to alter our perception of both in a way I found extremely satisfying.

Alternatively, in "Regicide," Ronan-Daniell approaches a high-school memory (our narrator was elected prom king, but faculty called for a second election because they assumed it was a cruel joke) in a straightforward narrative style. I don't have a problem with the form, though I do believe that it can (and does, in this case) lead to some lazy storytelling/shaping. By that, I mean the narrator spends too much time in the present—reflecting on the past and not enough time putting together a story. For example, the essay spends a lot of time building the teenage-self as awkward/ugly/antisocial, and a section in the middle (stating "I'm not as ugly now as I was then," going on to ensure the reader that our narrator is now well-adjusted and normal) nullifies any stake I had in the essay: why should I care when the narrator essentially tells us that this story is inconsequential? The ending is similarly cringe-worthy. It ties the essay up too cleanly, reducing the essay to some two-bit aphorism.

A quick word on humor: both "Nachos" and "Regicide" use humor, but again the approach/frame shapes the overall effect. Lovelace's essay creates humor from surprising juxtaposition (in one early section, we jump from MTV to nacho preparation to whitetail deer hunting). Ronan-Daniell's essay gets humor out of self-deprecation, which feels too easy (who wasn't awkward/embarrassing as a teenager?) and somehow less effective. I'm trying to figure out why it doesn't work as well, and here's my best guess: the self-deprecation doesn't rely of timing, and a lot of the personal descriptions could be moved around within the essay without being more or less effective.

"Nachos" and "Regicide" are on different ends of the narrative spectrum, and the other essays in The Sonora Review have more of a mix of the two formats. Still, the essays that put their focus outside the self manage to be the most interesting and paradoxically personal.

hungry

David Shields is interviewed over at BookSlut. It starts off with the interviewer talking about a box of galley copies being brought to a creative writing course. I saw a couple galley copies of this book while I was in Iowa, read a galley copy when I was on the West Coast, and borrowed another friend's galley copy in Chicago. And I have absolutely no connection to David Shields, which begs the question, how many galley copies were printed? And why? Isn't that kind of weird, that they were being distributed to writing classes and handed off to drunk people at bars and what-have-you? The book isn't even released yet and I feel like everyone's done reading and discussing it.

If I were going to write a manifesto about nonfiction I would say the only people allowed to use numbered sections anymore are zombie Pessoa and Olena Kalytiak Davis is she ever writes a book-length essay.

What the frack, Hayden's Ferry Review?

Zero (0, zilch) essays in your Fall 2009/Winter 2010 issue? I mean, it has some good fiction (or as your submissions guidelines page calls it, "prose" which to this reader encapsulates more than just fiction), and some quality poetry, but you couldn't find nothing nonfictiony? I suppose the Hong Hao images, "My Things No 5, 5000 Things I threw away in 2005" and "My Things Book keeping of 6c" might be considered to be essay, though it's a stretch. (They are pretty cool though: they have that documentary capacity that can fuel essay, but don't otherwise operate like essays). And they make a nice cover.

Feel the weight of this blog's collective displeasure from here. Let our scorn--rising like a spider, or possibly a spire--spur you to opening your doors a little wider next time.