Dec 8: B.J. Hollars on Paul Auster’s “Why Write?”

This was supposed to be an in appreciation for Paul Auster’s “3.”—the third segment of a larger essay entitled “Why Write?”  However, I’ve already screwed this up.  Be warned: this is no longer an appreciation for a part of the work, but the work in its entirety.  Not just segment 3 anymore, but 1 and 2 as well, and lest we forget 4 and 5.

Originally, I hoped to focus on the essay’s third segment, because that was the segment that once mattered to me most: the tale of a 14-year-old Auster at summer camp who, when trapped alongside his fellow campers in a rainstorm, attempts to crawl beneath a barbed wire fence to take shelter in a nearby field.  Auster never makes it there because the boy ahead of him—a boy named Ralph—never makes it there, either.  Ralph is struck by lightning mid-crawl, and as the electric current passes through the barbed wire, his back is seared with a scar.  Ralph dies, and the 14-year-old Auster—no more than a body length separating him from death—trembles belly-down in the wet grass, his own searing taking place in his memory.   

The end (at least for the segment that once mattered to me most).   

When I first stumbled upon “Why Write?” I was an undergraduate with little inclination to deduce the mysteries of the essay’s subtle linkages. I understood that segments 1, 2, 4, and 5 likely served some larger purpose, but all I cared about was “3.”  I was a camper-turned-camp-counselor myself.  A college-aged kid who for three summers holed up in a cabin alongside 10-year-olds like Ralph and prayed to God my charges didn’t get struck by lightning, drown in the lake, or fall from the climbing tower.   

Here’s something they don’t tell you on the camp brochures: there are a million ways for a child to get hurt in the woods.  And since I’d just read Auster’s “3.”, I could add one more to the list.  

*

You’ll be happy to learn that nobody ever died on my watch.  Nevertheless, each week, one of us counselors had a Ralph in our cabin; the camper who was a magnet for misfortune, some happy-go-lucky kid who always wandered into poison ivy, or a wasp’s nest, or a bevy of low-swooping bats.  I knew many boys like Ralph (heck, I had been a boy like Ralph), though I further connected with this particular segment of the essay because Auster’s mental searing easily translated to mental searings in my own life—the image of a grandfather lying lifeless on a bedroom floor, the memory of a last wet breath from a beloved dog spilling out into my palms. 

It wasn’t until last week that I got around to really studying the essay in its entirety.  

This is what I found:

Five anecdotes in five segments.   

Segment 1 describes a pregnant woman who, in the late stages of two pregnancies, serendipitously turns on the television to the exact same movie, and in both instances, gives birth by movie’s end.   

Segment 2 recounts Auster’s paternal instincts mysteriously transporting him to the precise coordinates that allow him to catch his free-falling daughter.   

Segment 4 shows a former German prison guard and his former prisoner-of-war who, despite their past, befriend one another many years later when their children fall in love.   

And finally, segment 5 describes Auster’s boyhood encounter with Willie Mays, a heartbreaking scene in which the author’s lack of a pencil cost him an autograph. 

But what, I wondered, connects these anecdotes?   

And why, I wondered, is this essay called “Why Write?” 

The answer comes in the essay’s second-to-last line, when Auster explains the long-lasting effect of missing out on Mays’ autograph. 

“If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”

* 

Upon first encountering “Why Write?” I could see no further than my own experience, but when reading it again, I began to see greater connectivity by zooming outward.  Each segment, for me, became a part of something larger.

When speaking to my students about similarly structured essays, I often find myself comparing their structures to constellations. I’m the hair-brained professor scrawling stars across the latitudes of the whiteboard and connecting them with dotted lines. 

“Much like a constellation,” I blather, “you can only understand the work as a whole by understanding the beauty of each star individually, as well as their collective beauty.” 

Who knows what the hell I’m talking about.  Who knows if my schematic makes sense.   

All I know is the students are kind enough to pick up their pencils and humor me with their half-hearted notes.   

They—like Auster—understand that the first rule of being a writer is to carry a pencil. 

Because who among us can ever predict when and where lightning might strike?

*

B.J. Hollars is the author of two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America, the 2012 recipient of the Society of Midland Authors' Award, and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa, forthcoming in 2013. His short story collection, Sightings, is forthcoming next year from Indiana University Press. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Dec 7: Allie Leach on Nicholson Baker's "Books as Furniture"

It's the holiday season, which means, it's that time of year to write about my favorite Santa Claus look alike:

Nicholson Baker

I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty friggin' excited if I found him eating cookies in my house. Beyond that, Nicholson Baker's essays just give me that winter feeling. Maybe it's because I always picture him in his rustic log cabin in Maine, throwing hunks of cedar that he's recently chopped into a woodburning stove. Maybe it's because I imagine him drinking coffee at all hours of the day, lumbering around his house in ski socks and sweat pants. But mostly it's because the experience of reading one of his essays makes me wish that I was snowbound, even though I live in Tucson, because being snowbound would mean that I could sit in my house all day and read his essays, uninterrupted. That's how good they are.

It was hard for me to even pick one essay. Each one is like a charm on a bracelet, you want to keep them linked together and close to you. But the charm I always keep on my wrist is his excellent "Books as Furniture," from his 1997 collection, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. I first came upon it as a recommendation from a teacher, who said that Baker was a master of quirky research. I love how in many of his essays, he starts from a banal kind of stand point--in this case, flipping through a cheesy mail-order catalogue--but it's what he notices and how he pushes and pushes his observations that really make him a stand out. For those unfamiliar with the essay, Baker's looking through a catalogue called "The Company Store," when he notices that the books that live on these fake peoples' bookshelves and rest on their beds aren't your regular 'ol Penguin classics, but are instead "beat-up editions of forgotten nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century books." Many of the titles on these books are practically indecipherable, but, somehow, (I like to imagine that Baker got out a magnifying glass) he finds out. And he not only finds out, but he finds these books at libraries and reads these books. Some of the books are less than perfect and some of them, he says, are worth reading. The titles that he finds include The Wood-Carver of 'Lympus and Tongues of Flame and Learn to Die. These are books that would've been long forgotten, if it hadn't been for mail order catalogues from The Company Store and Pottery Barn. These are books that would've long been forgotten if it hadn't been for Baker's sharp eye, for his surprising and restless research. 

And, in true Baker fashion, he doesn't stop there. No, of course not. He not only reads these books, but these books lead him to other books. And those books lead him to more libraries. And the libraries lead him into deeper research, deeper thinking. He creates a beautiful spiral of digressions about the history of bookshelves and meditations on how and why we display our books and arguments about how "the book, considered as a four-corned piece of technology, bound on one side, is still surprisingly young." As the title suggests, he begins to see the books that line his six bookcases as furniture, as art, as ornaments. And, as so happens when one looks at an ornament, like a shiny red reflective ball on a Christmas tree, he sees himself. 

*

Allie Leach's work has appeared in South Loop Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Diagram, and Tucson Weekly. She lives in Tucson and works at The University of Arizona Poetry Center. In her spare time, she's plotting to become a professional tap dancer and collector of miniatures.

DEC 6: Barrie Jean Borich on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

In one of the opening sequence panels of Alison Bechdel’s graphic book-length essay Are You My Mother? (yes, I claim this whole book for the essay) the author has drawn herself behind the wheel of a car, a noir Dick Tracy-like self portrait with a question mark hovering in front of her face.  This is an instance of impassioned questioning, a graphic gesture of not only the frantic action of a pivotal moment but also the frustration of needing absolutely to know what is not possible to know. Such is the fury and quest of Are You My Mother? The text in this frame reads YOU CAN’T LIVE AND WRITE AT THE SAME TIME, but of course— as we read this book that the author calls a metabook, in a doubly-meta moment on the pages of the book itself— the reader knows the author is indeed, most perilously, writing and living at the same time. How essayish of her.

I’m not the only one to call Bechdel’s first book since her memoir Fun Home an essay. Nuria Sheehan did so brilliantly in the Fall 2012 issue of Brevity, writing, “While Fun Home moved forward through narrative, building to revelations about erotic truth and the queer desire experienced by both the narrator and her father, Are You My Mother? circles around meaning… narrative is secondary to the essaying, as the narrator tirelessly attempts to understand herself, her mother, and the world by juxtaposing memories with psychoanalytic literature and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.”  

Let’s assume we can agree, for now at least, to see this book as graphically Montaigne-ish; what then is the beauty of the essay, and how does this beauty differ from that of the memoir?

What I’ll disclose before saying more might be obvious who anyone who knows both me and Are You My Mother? First: I am one of those narratively essayistic writers working in-between memoir and essay.  I allow my spinning ruminations on maps and memory, as well as vignettes of family dysfunction and lesbian love, to be called memoir, in hopes that the work will find some grubby cubbyhole in the essay-dissing lit marketplace, but at the same time I dislike the cap of redemptive expectation the word memoir places over my work. Second: a version of me appears in a couple of panels of Bechdel’s new book, because Alison and I were friends in the late 1980s lesbian world of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the days (as she and I like to say) before “creative nonfiction.”  Which might suggest I have a stake in this book beyond that of just another reader, and perhaps I do, but perhaps not entirely for the reasons I state above. Rather, I have a stake in both the essay and in work by genre indeterminate queer women, both being forms not well-enough loved in most of the worlds I inhabit.

I write this now because I keep hearing readers say they like this book but not as much as they loved Fun Home. I do love Fun Home too, as a memoir (though some have suggested that book might also be claimed for the essay, and perhaps so especially if we consider essay and story to be opposing poles with memoir moving back-and-forth on the slider in-between). I love Fun Home for many reasons, but mostly for its form, the way Bechdel disrupts story by revealing the central crisis at the start of the book. We know right away that her father’s death was probably a suicide, which then makes the book’s narrative arc that of figuring out how to come to terms with this death and both her father’s and her own homosexuality. Fun Home is a double coming-out story turned inside out and backwards, and succeeds the ways intricately plotted and disrupted films like Run Lola Run and Memento and Pulp Fiction succeed, by shaking down, questioning, and re-inhabiting time. In these works, and in Fun Home, we experience the pleasure of story, but that pleasure is interrupted by another pleasure, the surprise of revealing the stories within stories that transform the way all narrative is understood.

Because I knew the author before she wrote Fun Home I also know how long she was inhabited by her origin story. Everyone who knew Bechdel when she lived in Minneapolis (with the lover named Eloise in Are You My Mother?) knew the story of her father’s secret life and death and anyone who talked to her about her work knew that one day she’d find a way to tell this story, visually and textually. Most writers who carry a formative narrative of loss and forbearance have to write that story, and these days that story is probably a memoir. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is an example of this, as is Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, Mira Bartok’s The Memory Palace, Joy Castro’s The Truth Book, to name just a few.  These are all books led by some unavoidable life story, and supported by the author’s thinking about that story, and their beauty is expressed through the language, container, and arc the writer creates to find meaning in their tale.

Are You My Mother? is another kind of project, and, in terms of the artist’s career, more complex and ambitious art, because she had no single base story to bend, except perhaps the immersive societal lie about mothers and daughters, a master narrative bound to gender conformity, heterosexuality and sentimentality, none of which apply to the relationship of Bechdel and her mother. What the author did have to work with was an intense flat-line of repeating scenic action made of a mother and daughter’s echoing grief, beleaguered identities, and intellectual dissatisfactions, so what is disrupt-able in this work is less a story than a condition. As in Fun Home she turns to big texts to guide her, but this time uses psychological speculation, dreams, and Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose to direct her query. The question of what the narrator is to make of both self and daughterhood is at the forefront of the telling, and the scenic moments— from phone calls to therapy sessions to sex– come into play only in service of questions, ideas, and suppositions about the daughter-mother bond. In the process the daughter both includes and moves beyond the parameters of the lesbian story, applying that noir question mark to the complex needs, desires, and strategies of all human attachment.

What I mean is Bechdel truly essays in this book, the way James Baldwin essays in that moment of “Notes of a Native Son” when he throws a half-full water mug at a waitress and shatters the mirror over a bar where they “don’t serve Negroes”. Baldwin begins with the conditions of his life as a Black man in an exploding America. At the same time he essays into a psychology of rage and revelation, and finally tells us not just what racism is but also how racism feels and what racism means. What follows is our more complex understanding of how humanness feels and what humanness means. The beauty of the essay form is an uncomfortable and hard-won beauty, more difficult to read than most stories —we have to slow down, discern, reread and pause for understanding—but discursive rumination supported by story is a necessary way into rethinking our worlds. I don’t mean to say the essay is a better beauty than memoir, but it is often one that takes more work to read, and has a different sort of payoff. Even in its most lyric forms the essay assumes thinkiness is no less valid than emotion, and in doing so might give us the intellectual tools we need to re-architect the ways we live.

I know it’s foolish to wish for readers-at-large to climb into the essay in the same way they do story. Essays don’t allow us to collapse into the dream of linear narrative. The best essays are “tough love” mothers, hurling us directly back to that huge cartoon question mark hanging over all our heads. Stories do this too, some stories do this very well, and I’m not against story, but I love, and want others to learn to love, the ways essays hurl us unmasked into the not-knowing.

Another panel of Are You My Mother?, a two-pager from the center of the book, illustrates what I really have at stake in essaying about this book I insist on claiming for the essay.

The image is a layered cacophony: part homage to Dr. Seuss, part a still life of the artist’s eyeglasses, her father’s letters to her mother and other ephemera, part a highlighting of another psychoanalytic quotation applied to her relationship to her mother. The Doctor Seuss image serves as the author’s “room of  one’s own” and as an architecture of unconventional creativity, and as a womb. The page is a chaos, yet all is connected. The lesbian daughter. The thesbian mother. The missing father. The mother’s enclosures and imprisonments. The daughter’s convoluted pathways of escape as she does, absolutely, live and write at the same time. These two pages are essay as palimpsest. The echoes and erasures, here and throughout the book, probe old and new ways of understanding the social and the intimate self, so much so that this work could add up to be one of the great essays of our day, or at least one of the most original. What I have at stake here is the way out this book offers someone like me, should the world we all share finally let itself be seen through Alison Bechdel’s always essaying gaze.

All images from Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. 
Used  by permission.

BARRIE JEAN BORICH is the author of BODY GEOGRAPHIC, forthcoming in the American Lives Series of the University of Nebraska Press. Her previous book, MY LESBIAN HUSBAND (Graywolf) won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, and she was the first nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review. She teaches at Chicago’s DePaul University, in the English Department and the MA in Writing and Publishing Program, and splits her time between Minneapolis and Chicago.

Dec 5: David LeGault on Tom Bissell's "Escanaba's Magic Hour"

Have you ever seen the movie Escanaba in da Moonlight? Ever even hear of it? Well I have, for better or worse. I watched it once, in 2001, when the movie was premiered at (where else?) the movie theater in Escanaba, Michigan, one of the major population hubs of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a population of roughly 13,000. I went and saw the movie with my parents and sister, and it is no exaggeration to say that this is one of two, possibly three times in my life where I went to a movie theater with my family. It is not something we did together, and as a kid who went to the movies with a religious fervor, it stands out as a pretty significant. And it was: a famous actor from Hollywood (Jeff Daniels) wrote a movie about our little-known community and was even filming it here! We could sign up and be extras and would be famous by association. We would have what at least I wanted: some recognition of our existence, of some tangential connection or significance to the world at large.

I don't believe we talked on the car ride home. What was there to say? There are jokes and there are parodies and there are stereotypes, and for a place where I never felt fully connected, I don't know if I've ever felt so offended by a piece of entertainment. I can't accurately describe how unbelievably awful this movie was, like extended scenes where conversation was made up entirely of farts, where a man is publically ridiculed for having never shot a deer (and privately ridiculed by his wife who doesn't consider him a man), where aliens abduct the men at hunting camp before eventually transforming into a deer who is actually—I shit you not—the spirit of the man's dead grandfather. We drove home in awkward silence, aware of how there was nothing to say other than we would never get another chance like this.

Today, friends laugh about it when someone inevitably brings it up in conversation at informal high-school reunions; we laugh about a movie we can hardly remember; we create and join Facebook groups called "Escanaba in da Moonlight ruined my life." We laugh, but there's still the pain from that initial cut: outsiders came in and we felt like they were one of us, like these Hollywood-types could ever understand. They didn't, and because of their failure, nobody else will, either.



* * * *



Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past, particularly a period or place with happy personal associations. Although these feelings can come from a trip to our hometowns or a visit from a childhood friend, nostalgic connections to music, books, movies, and television allow a writer to connect with their audience. It's why we like reading celebrity gossip; it's why we go to comic conventions, buy overpriced nonsense on eBay, and get ironic tattoos: we can connect with others through a shared history—one that is both universal and incredibly personal. It's one of the appeals of pop culture writing. Some writers (I'll go with Klosterman since he's the easiest example) do this particularly well, looking critically at a subject that we haven't taken seriously, or maybe one we hate, and making it a valued part of our shared cultural experience.

This is a roundabout way of talking about Tom Bissell's essay, "Escanaba's Magic Hour," found here as well as in his collection, Magic Hours. Admittedly, I am biased by my own strong feelings about the essay's locale and subject matter: Bissell is hanging out with the production crew as they film Escanaba in da Moonlight, and I see myself in his description of the Midwestern rubes, the (literally) hundreds of articles about the filming and production, about the locals getting in the way with their desire for autographs or conversation, about the desire for fame, for cultural significance.

And a big part of my own excitement comes from reading about an event I experienced: I remember the call for extras in the football stadium; I remember the joy when I first discovered Bissell was from Escanaba; I remember that the out-of-place athletic director he writes about, with whom I've had several run-ins, all of them awful and mostly embarrassing high school nonsense. Bissell achieves what the movie never did: showed the place where I'm from, with legitimate sincerity, without the need for stereotype or maudlin descriptions of tanking industry or hunting culture.

He writes my hometown better than I write my hometown; I might hate him for it.

Of course, this is the point when I remember that this essay is about how foolish we are when encountering celebrity, how much stock we place in cultural significance, particularly as rural Midwesterners. And though I've never met Bissell I can already see him turning celebrity in my mind— one I admire for this piece of writing, for his urban versus rural sensibilities, for being one of Us. None of this should be particularly surprising, and yet…I feel like I should know better than to put so much stock in this.

Even now, I know nothing.

Even now, I crave for the lost potential of Escanaba in da Moonlight, for the feeling that the place where I'm from matters to anyone. We "Yoopers" have continued to chase that pop culture moment: Ben Affleck's Reindeer Games (filmed in Canada) involved a casino robbery at (supposedly) the same casino where my mom briefly worked; Jimmy Stewart's Anatomy of a Murder was filmed in nearby Marquette and is still revered for it; The Rolling Stones flew into town for their tour manager's funeral and it was front page news for weeks.

Even now, I kind of want to hang out with Tom Bissell, to cling to this Escanaban writing aura, to see how this writing can come from the same place and the same pop-culture hunger in an artistically-starved Delta County childhood. Maybe we can hang out at Drifters now that the Dew Drop Inn has closed up for good; or maybe we can go to Hereford & Hops for some microbrews and steaks that we cook ourselves. Afterwards we can head over to the Delft or the Stalls and make fun of the high school kids in their shitty Trans-Ams filled with subwoofers that rattle in our chests like the fist of God. Or maybe we can go to Gladstone Video and rent a copy of our movie, watch it with our friends and talk about how we could probably kick Jeff Daniels' ass. Maybe we can see that we all have these cultural hang-ups; that essays like this help us understand where they're coming from.


David LeGault's essays have recently appeared in Hobart, Fourth Genre, and Ninth Letter. He lives and writes in Minneapolis, where he fills recycling dumpsters with old books for a living.

Dec 4: Morgan Sherburne on Pete McDonald's Fishing Jones

Fly fishing blogs are weird. Or can be. They seem to be a brave new territory, a flock of people testing the market and audience for writing about fishing. Most of these blogs are pretty straightforward: "I came, I fished. I caught/didn't catch fish. I thought about it, then I wrote a blog post-cum-essay." These exist because fly fishing is a cool sport, a lifestyle for a lot of us, and a way, sometimes, to establish bragging rights. I suppose they exist for the same reasons blogs about niche anythings exist.

My favorite fly fishing blogs are the ones that aren't pretty straightforward, that have one toe in poetry. One of them, I'm fairly close to, so writing about that one would be pretty nepotistic.

But another I've been reading recently is "Fishing Jones," a blog by a guy named Pete McDonald. He's a magazine editor and Columbia journalism grad, so I think, in addition to the fishing connection, I like his writing because it seems, on a sentence level, almost like reportage.

Because I've been a reporter for a few years now, and did my last degree in essentially journalism, it's been a while since I've been in the creative writing world. So Craig's point about Joni Tevis's description of cacti versus Jon Krakauer's description of cacti was an idiot moment for me. Oh yes. That's what I loved about nonfiction. And of course, that's it. The difference between essaying and reporting. I mean, I think you can have beautiful prose in reporting. But emotive, beautiful prose is harder to come by. So Krakauer's "towering saguaro and flame-tipped octillo," v. Tevis's "the ocotillo in bloom is a god's hair ablaze with fire, or blood," is a pretty great example of how nonfiction writers can arm-wrestle journalistic rockstars like Krakaur and come out on top, sans heavy breathing. As Craig points out. I've even met Ms. Tevis. She's pretty nice. And gave me a copy of Holy The Firm.

And as Brenda Miller says in Saturday's post/excerpt from The Writer's Chronicle, short short essays leave "little room for abstract thought or cliché or long-winded setups."  In short shorts (not a term to Google, I learned a long time ago), the pontification and the image are the same thing. I like it best that way, in my own writing, but wonder if I'm being lazy, or just am not very good at pontification. I think that's the hardest thing. To pontificate, and be right about the stuff about which you are pontificating. (That right there is what you call setting up an unreliable narrator. But trust me about Pete McDonald.)

Both of these things — remembering what I love about nonfiction and flash essays — are things I find in the most rewarding of these fly fishing blogs. In particularly, obviously, is McDonald's blog. Some of it is as beautiful as any strange prose poetry or flash nonfiction/fiction.

A lot of his posts are mini essays, those short shorts Miller was talking about. I like the post, More to the Point: "The air cooled. The water cooled. We took a boat. We caught fish. We liked it." That's it.

Another post's title, "F#!k I Love Steak," bleeds into the post itself. "My brother said that aloud once at a dinner table in the Adirondacks. I wish I had said it because it's true but I'm the quiet brother less likely to make profane announcements in social situations." The post cycles through a memory of a cow the family helped raise when McDonald was growing up, and he was present (and ice skating) when the butcher killed the steer. In the third paragraph of the short, five-paragraph post, McDonald alludes to a frequent criticism of our food system: that we are disconnected from origins of the meat we eat. McDonald ends the fourth paragraph with "We went back to playing hockey." Yes, connection with your own personal food chain is good, the post is saying. But it can also be matter of fact, unlike so many of these books lately about the transformative magic that is killing the meat you eat.

My favorite post so far starts with something you might not highlight, usually: "I was standing on a rock and I fell off of it." That sentence has been banging around in my head since I read it in August. Not much room for pontification. Something charming and beautiful in listing the things that happen to you. I'm not sure why, but that listing seems to make your experiences stand on their own and say something about the world you're living/fishing in: I fell off a rock. Someone laughed at me. I fished again, and did not fall off a rock. These are fish that I fished for, and they, and fishing for them, are both beautiful. I will not tell you why, but you will see why.

That post reminds me a lot of the novella/long essay-memoir that is the book that many fly angling writers aspire to — A River Runs Through It, especially because, in reference to a fellow angler who laughed, McDonald wrote, in a parenthetical "(He was a plug fisherman.)" Which is to say he wasn't a fly fisherman, just like Norman Maclean's slimy brother-in-law who, the Maclean brothers note, shows up to fish with a red Hills Bro. coffee can filled with worms. Jerk.

Writing about fishing is hard. Describing an outing or trying to describe what it feels like to hook and fight a fish (it fought like a bus in rush hour/like a train/the reel screamed/rod was bent to the cork) is tough. It's tough to avoid nature-writing pontification. Which is great — Annie Dillard is someone I wish to be — but difficult to do well. This flash essay way of writing about it, writing about fishing by eliding it, by writing around it, by connecting a memory with another memory of fish, and writing about fishing by backing into the experience. Well. It's pretty good.

Try mentioning that in a way that doesn't make you seem like an asshole. 

*

Morgan Sherburne is a reporter at a newspaper in Northern Michigan. She has a few pieces forthcoming in a magazine, The Flyfish Journal, that publishes both weird and good photography and weird and good writing. She hopes to only pontificate safely.

Quite short bonus post: consider Allie Leach

Well, a very short bonus post. Check out Allie Leach's essay, "Life in Miniature," about the Mini-Time-Machine Museum in Tucson in the summer issue of South Loop Review, an increasingly good and interesting journal. PDF here.

& expect more from Allie, contributing to our advent calendar this month.

Dec 3: Amy Wright on Rebecca Evanhoe's Bowl Lens

Sometimes an essayist reaches into an experience so common, so plainly right before our eyes, I canʼt believe I havenʼt examined it more closely. My teaching brain reformulates a writing prompt while Iʼm reading, curious how I might answer the question of that particular activity, what mystery it has to reveal.

In “Approximately Thirty-Six Toilets,”  Rebecca Evanhoe gathers thirteen titled sections that contemplate the prettiest toilets she ever cleaned, the residence hall toilets she brushed in rotation, the toilets of a divorced couple she scrubbed during her first job in high school. That porcelain lens of human intimacy—so overlooked and sanitized and downright grotesque—is such a good idea for considering how we relate to each other and our bodies, my mind spins off in a reading experience so creative that before I know it, Iʼve got stories spilling from it onto a new page.

My parents invested in rental property over the years. Some tenants leave the sinks pristine and the hallways swept. But more often, they require them to haul truckloads of garbage and flood the tubs with bleach. In high school and during the summer after college, I helped them with my rubber gloves and Vanish, thinking about nastiness and distance, class and squalor. I recognized that some people lived in filth and wondered how they let things get this bad. I came to appreciate the speed with which it happens even as I judged them for wasting the opportunity of moving into a sparkling house a year before. Our familyʼs weekly cleaning ritual took on greater significance, distancing us as it did from their alien lives by mere weeks of regular brushing. One had to stay ahead of that third law of thermodynamics that threatened to overtake order.

It was the toilet bowl cleaner that got me on my first shopping trip in college. Spending the allowance my parents sent with a tuition check to buy household products was not in the cards I planned to play out. It was some stalwart remnant of a life I thought I escaped for one of joy and glory. It meant I was still fundamentally the same. Toilets were a harsher equalizer at seventeen than death.

Evanhoe uses these toilet bowl meditations to carry her to the pubic-hair-and-hemorrhoid-side of grace. On her knees with a toothbrush and cotton swabs, she contemplates her need to be needed, the degradation and transcendence of our desires and work. A woman, she recognizes a gender platform gets leveled and crossed in a familyʼs bathroom. A writer, she knows how often the cycle of work needs to be repeated. A human, she knows the potential shame in the gestures we make in an effort to please the ones we love, and that those rewards will never be done.

*

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal, as well as the author of three chapbooks—Farm, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, and The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip. She was a 2012 fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and writes regularly for The Writer's Life, the blog component of Her Circle magazine.