A word about some of the posting for the next couple months

I'm writing here to contextualize some of the talking that's going to be happening on this blogspace over the next few months. This semester I am teaching a course--a graduate craft seminar on essaying--at the University of Arizona. This course is being taught alongside a similar course that John D'Agata is teaching at the University of Iowa this same semester. The texts for this course are the nominees for the Essay Prize--listed on the linked website. We are reading these texts (or ten of them, anyhow), one per week, as a way of talking about what the essay is, but more importantly what it does. Writers at Arizona and Iowa will be blogging back-and-forth or maybe just alongside each other in this space (and anyone reading this is more than welcome to join the conversation), partly in evaluation of the essay-nominees (for the classes' job is to come up with critical language and criteria by which we might judge the essays we read, and to select the finalists, and then, in a glorious public flourish in Iowa City and Tucson, to present on the three finalists and to choose the winner).

Partly I hope we'll be talking to each other, and to ourselves, and to the unknown quantity of you which is italicized not just for emphasis but because of its amorphous quality--we'll be talking about the essay, and probably about genre, and about writing acts and reading acts and performing and the ways in which we are always as writers (or rather, as authors, as public figures, like it or not), performing on the page or on the webpage or in the air performing. Starting next week we will be looking at a video nominee: 



and writing/talking/thinking about it, for these three things are in many ways the same. See you back here soon.

The better question is whether a thing essays

and whether the way that thing essays--which is perhaps to say wiggles slightly, in a provocative or interrogative manner, as if by its act of unsurety, or doubling-back, renouncing its previous movement of mind or body--whether it reveals or illuminates some edge of meaning. I am thinking of Mary Ruefle, with whom I took half of one class one semester of graduate school some time ago. I left the class at break time because I was under the impression that all she had said she would talk about was things I already knew, nay, was master of. And besides, from what I had seen, Ruefle was clearly on the edge of something, a precipice, probably, and on the other side--what? madness? an effervescent otherness? the clouds? a descent or ascent into something uncalculable and therefore terrifying because it remained beyond my sight? I don't know. It was other, and it didn't appeal to me. I had drinking to do. I had workshopping to do. Not necessarily in that order. She appeared to be one in a series of professors brought in for the semester who would half-ass their way through a "class" on some subject that devolved into gossiping about whatever and gave little fuel to our small, desperately churning creative engines.

Eight years later, in the preamble to teaching my craft seminar in nonfiction (the rather-badly named "Essay as Activity") at the University of Arizona, I found myself reading The Most of It, her book of "prose" or possibly "fables" or possibly "poems" or possibly "prose poems" or possibly "psalms" or possibly "lyric essays" (I am not sure which genre tag is most appropriate, or whether any genre container can hold these in; yet Russel Edson sez: "if it's not something else it's probably a prose poem." Thus?). Now I'm convinced that Ruefle is a genius, which is to say completely unhinged, unbound, lovely. As in her brain opens--or a brain opens, a construction of her brain and a collaboration with whatever radio signals from beyond it picks up--and she gives us these odd, uncoiling, elaborate, lovely, hilarious, and above all things utterly surprising sentences.

And they are sentences. They certainly are sentences. Admittedly they have the lyric capacity of lines of poetry or crots of essay or whatever. Her associative shifts and leaps, the ways these sentences essay, are pretty awesome to watch. This extends to her lectures, which to this reader at least have the same odd conchlike and borderline insane quality:

"If you bother to read this at all it is a clear indication your life is intolerable and you seek a distraction by engaging in the activity you are presently pretending to engage in. I say pretending because you would never have reached the conclusion your life is intolerable had you not also reached the conclusion it is unreal.... This is what pretending to write looks like: it looks like this. Not a landscape and yet passing before your eyes, unrolling as featureless as a plain and often you are the antelope, scared to have been born under such dismal skies.... Isn't existence grand, the grandest bond between two you can imagine? Doesn't it outstrip your finest memory? Memories are worthless, have you ever stopped to consider that? Do you remember being by the seashore and watching the great broom of the sea come swooping down on the shore, pushing all the glinty particles of sand out of its way? The sound of the sea's broom was so tremendous, it sloshed the fluid in your ears?" ("Some Thoughts on the Lyric Essay, from the Seneca Review)

Or you could also try out her excellently wandering lecture at Vermont College, "On Theme," later published in West Branch, worth your time on interlibrary loan or at AWP.

As Brian Phillips notes in his essay, "Cocteau and Catfish: on Poets' Fiction," reviewing The Most of It: "What makes this ["Hard-Boiled Detective"] so funny is that the obviously insane theme is presented deadpan, as an essay, with a logically developed (and screwily persuasive) argument.... But the logical order is intrinsically a narrative as well, because Ruefle's sense of language and character is so vivid that the real fascination of the story comes from imagining the person who would create this piece of prose and the events that led to its creation."

(As an aside, I find her sentences incredibly tweetable: "Is there anything sadder than the sight of a medium heartbroken dove stuffed with French fries on Christmas morning?" At least, when they're short enough to tweet. Usually they are not--and the length is part of the pleasure of the magic trick: the longer the sentence goes, the more oddly it trajectories, and the more pleasure is arrived at when we get to the detonation of the period--assuming it works. It doesn't always work, of course, but it works a lot.)

That this book was the winner of the Essay Prize in 2009 seems about right to me. While it may or may not be nonfiction, it is quite clearly a brain on the page--not always Ruefle's brain directly as much as the product of Ruefle's brain and its capacity for imagining. Check out the excerpt on the site I just linked. The interview is absolutely worth your time.

Her class clearly would have been more than worth my time eight years ago, but as with many other things, understanding comes late. And maybe it's better to have had this near miss with Ruefle's actual brain to regret, and to essay, albeit briefly, here. This way I narratize and contextualize my rediscovery of some seriously kickass work--whatever tag you want to hang on it.

Or perhaps it is better to forget. As Ruefle says in a long essay on her erasures published in Quarter After Eight, a magazine I continually forget about and rediscover, to my pleasure:

And who can forget? And who can forget? I CAN, you may be thinking, because I never knew any of this before, or I CAN, because none of this is of interest to me, or changes my life-so I, I can forget.

And that, my friend, is the art of erasure, as it is enacted in your own life, and all lives: life is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don't know or haven't experienced, and on our deathbed, even that limited and erased "whole" becomes further diminished, if you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others having been erased; if you are lucky you will remember one place or one person, but no one will ever, ever read on their deathbed, the whole text, intact and in order.

First your life is erased, then you are erased. Don't tell me that erasure is beside the point, an artsy fragment of the healthy whole. If it is an appropriation, it is an appropriation of every life that has preceded your own, just as those in the future will appropriate yours; they will appropriate your very needs, your desires, your gestures, your questions, and your words.

Or so I believe. And I am glad. What is the alternative? A blank page.

Essay Prize

Are you familiar with the Essay Prize, a yearly prize for "the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying—inquiry, experimentation, discovery, and change...the activity of a text, rather than its status as a dispensary of information"? The current nominees are up if you're interested, and you should probably expect a flurry of blogging about these texts over the next few months here on Essay Daily.

Alain de Botton's "A Week at the Airport"

I picked this book up a few weeks ago since the project seemed to parallel certain aspects of a book I'm working on: de Botton is paid to spend a week in the London airport as a writer-in-residence with full access to the facilities (he goes into secured areas, sees how luggage is moved/organized by a system of conveyors, witnesses 80,000 meals being prepared in a day, etc) and a writing desk in the middle of the main terminal. Through his explorations --broken into approaches, departures, airside, and arrivals--de Botton makes a strong case for considering the unconsidered, looking for art and beauty in a place where most of us want to spend as little time as possible. He argues that the airport is just as much of a destination as, well, our actual destinations.

Although the book, in many ways, accomplishes everything I like to see happen in writing about place, A Week at the Airport didn't go nearly deep enough into its subject matter. The book is a slim 107 pages, and there are A LOT of pictures, putting it closer to a long essay than anything. This is fine (I'm not trying to advocate for books being longer for the sake of feeling more like a book, or for getting my money's worth or anything along those lines), but it seems that a lot of the writing here comes up just short of what would really make it interesting. For example, there's a reference to the ways faith and God are necessary to the act of flight that is explained in about half a page and should have gone on for far longer, and could have easily been the heart of the book if de Botton had wanted to go there. It's like if Let us Now Praise Famous Men was a fifty-page essay (including Evans' photos) describing the farmer's field and house. There would be value in Agee's description and characterization of place, but we would miss out on the moments where the writer's voice overwhelms any actual "plot" and goes into the obsessive/frustrated/manic territory that keeps me returning to the book.

A Week at the Airport is a good model of structure for the place essay (he does do a good job of making the book move forward even when 80% of it is physical description), but it's also a cautionary tale for what happens when we stay too close to the surface.

The "Writing" Essay

I just finished reading the Spring 2011 issue of Gulf Coast (I'll probably put up a review a little bit later on) and there was one specific essay that has been bothering me: "Nobody's Friend" by Molly Giles. The essay is about how Molly wrote an essay where her daughter and granddaughter show up as characters, and how her daughter--even though she was presented positively in the story--swears she will never forgive her mother for it. The essay explores typical memoir territory (do we have a right to tell other people's stories? Do we ask permission to write on certain subjects? James Frey, libel, etc) and how it applies to Molly's particular experience as well as writers everywhere.

There was nothing particularly wrong with the essay, and maybe this is my editorial impulses talking, but it didn't feel right appearing in Gulf Coast. I wouldn't mind if this article had showed up in Poets & Writers or some similar venue, but showing up in a literary journal felt somehow inappropriate.

Here, I should admit my bias: it's not that I dislike writing "on writing," but I hate when it appears in literary journals/creative venues. Admittedly, it is mostly (if not entirely) writers who are reading literary journals, but that doesn't mean we should be publishing work that would be of little to no interest for a casual reader. I think literary journals should be pushing in the opposite direction--looking for ways to bring in readers from outside of academia--and the inclusion of writers writing about writerly subjects feels incredibly insular.

Writing this, I feel like I'm being a bit harsh on Molly, and I don't mean to be, but I am wondering what y'all think about the "on writing" essay: does it belong in literary journals? If not, where is the appropriate venue? Does publishing this type of nonfiction close off the genre from the mainstream?

The Nonfiction Reading List

I was just reading this post over at HTMLGIANT and it occurred to me that I've seen a lot of these lists for fiction, but I've seen very few nonfiction equivalents (and, to be honest, those lists all seemed fairly inadequate in terms of variety of styles/gender/ethinicity/nationality/etc).

Anyway, the last week of my nonfiction workshop is next week and I'm going to try and compile some type of master reading list over the next few days to give them all as a going away present. With that said, I'm not nearly as well read as some of y'all here and I'm wondering: what books you would include if you were making a list that adequately covers the entire spectrum of creative nonfiction?

Post your lists/ideas in the comments section or email me and I'll make a master list that I can share with anyone who's interested.

The Georgia Review – Bringing the Finest Writers to the Best Readers

At first glance The Georgia Review looks like the type of journal you'd want to spread across your living room coffee table: glossy, showy, and professionally constructed with attention to the finest details, a journal almost worthy of holographic Christmas giftwrap. The cover of every issue is artfully decorated with paintings, sketches or photographs that beg passersby to pick them up. Inside, the magazine only gets better, as one would hope. Each issue—approximately 175 pages in length—contains essays, fiction, poetry, book reviews and, of course, more eye-catching art (the Spring 2009 issue, for example, subtitled Culture and the Environment—A Conversation in Five Essays, contains a painting of bikini-clad woman cowgirl-straddling her hunky boyfriend on top of a motorcycle while wearing an American flag helmet—need I say more?). Not only does each section contain several submissions—except art, which only displays one artist per issue—varying from one to forty-something pages, but they reap with quality: recent issues contain essays by Albert Goldbarth, Lia Purpura, Scott Russell Sanders, and Barry Lopez; silhouette art by Kara Walker and poems by Stephen Dunn and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, just to name a few. Don't be discouraged to submit your work, though, as the journal claims to debut between one and five new authors every issue.

As nonfiction goes, the essays range from the academic, literary-types—Anne Goldman's “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante,” Spring 2010—to straight forward memoir, as in Reg Saner's “Back Where the Past is Mined,” Spring 2008. At 35 pages, Saner's essay recounts his Korean War tour as an army soldier, focusing heavily on his self-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and often drawing comparisons to returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. But his essay is not just a psychiatric analysis of war but a funny, insightful case study on what it means to wear a soldier's boots during a “Forgotten War.” He writes about all the expected war-related themes—machine guns, booby traps, blood and death—but he also provides stories that will make most readers laugh, cringe and turn away simultaneously, leaving the essay with a nauseating smile and puckered asshole. In one anecdote, Saner tells of how he always carried the most recent letter from his stateside girlfriend in his helmet, an ubiquitous habit in all combat zones. During a nasty drought when his soldiers drank oily water used to cool machine gun barrels and toilet paper supplies ran low, and with what he now thinks was a serious case of hemorrhoids, Saner resorted to using his girlfriend's love letters to wipe his behind because the feathery paper she used comforted his bleeding asshole. Thankfully, warfare technology has improved in the past fifty years, so now soldiers fighting the war on terror feel the cool caress of moistened baby wipes and not college-ruled paper.

In another issue (Summer 2009), Judith Kitchen uses her mother's 1930s European travel journal as the basis for a researched essay. Although the essay is eerily reminiscent of Louise Steinman's wonderful book The Souvenir, Kitchen's essay, titled “True Heart”, reconstructs her mother's post-adolescent European travels from her mother's diary entries, sometimes guessing wildly to decipher the meaning of what seems more like coded hieroglyphics than prudent record keeping. The essay, which contains photographs of her mother and actual scans from the pages of the diary—both of which provide a nice visual supplement, focuses on her mother's possible love encounter with a man known for most of the essay only as “True Heart.” Throughout the essay, Kitchen presents herself as her mother's cheerleader, rooting her along as she meets True Heart—a polite, Yale educated Southern gentleman—and engages in a sexy relationship after only a few days. One aspect of the essay that I found especially interesting, beside her mother's inscription “2 Ys U R, 2 Ys U B, I C U R, 2 Ys 4 Me,” was a scan from a boarding ticket given to Kitchen's mother after boarding a United States-bound ship on her return home. The ticket, a warning against contraband possession, lumps tobacco and cigarettes with heroin and other chemicals that in today's America would secure you a prolonged stay in one of Arizona's grimiest jail cells. From what I can tell, passengers carrying heroin, tobacco, or firearms only needed to report their contraband to ship officials; contraband confiscation is not mentioned on the warning flier. Rounding off at 28 pages (including pictures and scans), Kitchen presents the reader with an insightful, passionate essay about a daughter trying to understand her mother's early life—a read worthy of every page.

Although it's tough to judge the quality and scope of a journal from a handful of essays, The Georgia Review appears to be a top echelon publication, the type serious writers should gravitate towards. Perhaps the journal's only vice is that they do not accept unsolicited manuscripts between May 15^th and August 15^th, but I imagine this is typical of most literary journals. And at $8.25 per issue (with subscription), The Georgia Review really delivers “the finest writers to the best readers.”