Dec 13: Dinty W. Moore on Sven Birkerts' "Telescope"

I can’t help but admire the remarkable concision and precision in Sven Birkerts’ essay “Telescope” in TriQuarterly.  I can’t help but admire that the essay, and essayist, cover so much ground in a paltry 630 words.  I can’t help but admire the way in which Birkerts captures the movement of the human mind, or at least the humanist mind, so carefully and exactly on the page. I love this small piece of nonfiction prose in much the same way that I love a brilliant short film.  It is all about the movement.

Birkerts begins with the possibility that Italian researchers have uncovered proof that neutrinos – those miniscule particles that only physicists can see – travel even faster than light at times, upsetting nothing less than the scientific applecart that is Einstein's special theory of relativity.  He then, deftly, references string theory and parallel universe theory, via a colleague “who actually can think about these things in intelligent ways.”  Birkerts momentarily threatens to swamp our mind with super science then lets us down easy through his own essayistic persona; he too is boggled, grasping these enormous concepts for only a fleeting instant before they become too huge to grasp.

So Birkerts moves on to the directly observable, “metal filings on a sheet of paper,” “baking soda added to vinegar,” radio kits, and chemistry sets. The quotidian trumps the unfathomable.  We are kids again, when science was as simple as an apple dropping from a tree.  

And then the turn. Birkerts once had a microscope. Once startled at “a sudden eyeful of the honeybee’s shockingly hairy leg.”But he didn’t like the squinting. “That magnitude of inspection,” he writes, “did not compel me—which should have told me I was a humanist.” He wanted a different view, not a view of micro-phenomena, but of “people who did not know they were being observed.”

In the end, Birkerts brief meditation on science and observation becomes an essay about essaying, about his own use of the essay as a vehicle for understanding human nature, and about the “glimmer of how the one thing related to the other.”  

Like Montaigne before him, Birkerts sees drama in the movement of a curious mind.  Suspense, even.  His essay is itself a telescope; “with a few gratifyingly decisive moves,” his essay pulls “section from section, snap snap, elongating, until” the essayist has created “a device worthy of old-time sea captains” and of a certain crotchety 16th century French noblemen who invented the form.

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Dinty W. Moore is the editor of Brevity and writes books.

Dec 12, Colin Rafferty on Sherman Alexie's “My Encounters With the Homeless People of the Pacific Northwest”

The problem with Sherman Alexie as an essayist is that he’s usually playing a fiddle numbered somewhere after Sherman Alexie the novelist, Sherman Alexie the short story writer, Sherman Alexie the poet, Sherman Alexie the screenplay writer, Sherman Alexie the stand-up comedian, and Sherman Alexie the singer (maybe not the latter, as I’ve only heard him sing once). Nevertheless, Alexie’s nonfiction, when it does appear, is remarkable in its ability to make a complicated mix of emotions. Like all good stand-up comedians, Alexie realizes that comedy and tragedy share a duplex, and their interaction is maybe the most essential part of the human condition.

Alexie’s essay “My Encounters With the Homeless People of the Pacific Northwest" [pdf link], printed originally in the Fall 2006 of Willow Springs, is a simple list essay: seven narratives chronicling exactly what the title promises. Alexie plays social observer of the urban invisible, calling our attention to these ignored people, a kind of tribe of their own, while still arguing for their individualities. Alexie is too smart (and too aware, I imagine, of stereotypes of Native Americans) to find any quiet nobility in these people; they’re larcenous, crude, and racist, calling him fat and questioning his sexuality (Alexie recognizes one man who’s just called him a “half-a-fag” as the same one who called him a “fag” two years earlier: “from fully fag to half-a-fag in only two years. I guess I’m making progress”).

Alexie’s first six sections ask questions of the reader: how do we, as city dwellers, deal with the mass of tragic humanity living without housing in our cities? How do we help them—really help them? We can buy them food; Alexie does, offering groceries to a man who throws a bag of bagels back at him, saying “I hate that Jew shit.” We can try to engage them; Alexie does, asking three homeless Native Americans which tribes they belong to, to which one replies “the Eat My Pussy tribe.” Alexie suggests that we are driven by a desire to help, but that in trying, we run up against humanity’s tendencies towards conflict and frustration.

As a result, all our encounters with the homeless are unsatisfying, no matter how good our intentions are. Carrying groceries to a panhandler outside a supermarket, Alexie wants “to stop every attractive woman and tell her I bought food for the homeless.” We use the homeless for our own ends, Alexie argues, seeing them when it’s convenient for us, when we need them to make us feel better about our own privilege.

The final section is where Alexie explores that idea to devastating effect. Outside an upscale grocery store, he meets a young woman with a dog, who explains that she needs $500 for an operation, to be performed at cost by a kindly veterinarian, to remove a tumor from her dog. Alexie, “feeling artistic and generous,” asks for the vet’s phone number. When he speaks to the vet, he learns that the dog’s tumor is in his spine, and that even if the operation succeeds, the old dog would suffer for the rest of his short life.

“She has to let him go,” the vet tells Alexie.

He returns to the grocery the next day, but can’t find the dog’s owner, who had assured him that they were always there. Later visits fail to uncover her whereabouts, and years later, Alexie looks for her and her dog every time he passes the grocery; “I can’t let them go,” he writes.

What Alexie wants to tell her is unclear; does he want to tell her what the vet said in order to convince her that she should not save money for the dog but instead for her? Does he want to comfort her in the loss of her companion? Or does Alexie want to prove to her that he did follow up on what he said he’d do, to show her that people—and him specifically—do care about the homeless?

None of these. In the final two sentences of the essay, Alexie destroys our comfortable narrative about our relationships with the homeless, our passive benevolence towards them.

“I can’t let them go because I’m a liar,” he writes. “I never called the vet.”

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Colin Rafferty teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Recent work has appeared in Witness, the Rumpus, and Used Furniture Review.

December 12: Jill Talbot on Brian Oliu's "mfw-22-Craigslist"

If you’ve never looked at the “Missed Connections” section of your city’s Craigslist, do it now.  It’s under personals on the left side of your screen. 

My area, Potsdam-Canton-Massena, has one that reads, “The store owner told us a funny story about herself in NYC, and you were wearing a shimmering Renaissance dress. I really wish I had introduced myself to you. Here's hoping.” 

Most of the posts aren’t that eloquent or interesting (a shimmering Renaissance dress on a Thursday night?), but they’re all messages to strangers in the hopes that “you” (“you were wearing,” “you were in a blue Ford truck,” “you ordered a soy latte”)—will not only find and read the message, but will reply.

Think about this for a moment:  a person has an encounter with someone—in line at Starbucks, at a long light, at the tricep machine in the gym—and his (or her) response is to write something and send it out into the world, not knowing if it will ever be read, if it will matter.  Sound familiar?

I love the direct address of “you” in writing when it’s done well.   Take Maggie Nelson in Bluets when she writes, “Above all, I want to stop missing you.” I was cracked apart by that line. It’s the idea behind everything I’ve written in the past ten years, essays about my own “you.”  I suspect I’m not alone here.   

The Beatles’s “Long and Winding Road”: “You left me standing here a long, long time ago.”  I once read a McCartney interview in which he said it’s one of his most requested songs and when he sings it, he looks out to the crowd to see grown men weeping. 

We all have a you.  

But sometimes the “you” in essays is what Ira Sukrungruang calls the “disguised I” It’s a distancing technique that allows the writer to engage via disengagement, so to speak.   Ryan Van Meter does this well in “If You Knew Then What I Know Now.”  

But there’s one essay that fuses both instances of “you,” and it’s from So You Know It's Me by Brian Oliu.  These essays were originally published as a series of posts on Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connnections over a period of forty-five days in June of 2010.  In them, Oliu writes, again and again, "This is about you." And it is. It's about each of us. And what we miss.  

“mfw-22-Craigslist” is a piece of metawriting (so of course, I’m intrigued).  It addresses a private, yet universal “you.” Someone has been/is missed.  But the “you” may also be read here as the “disguised I,”  and a very important one:  the writer. 

I argue that it may be read as a direct self-address in which Oliu attempts to get at why we write.   In other words, he converts Didion’s “writing is the act of saying I” to his act of saying you.   When I read the essay, I hear the writer talking to himself (or in my case, herself).

Personal essays are like Missed Connections, the sending out of a self into the world in hopes of making a connection without knowing if and when one might be made.  “Here’s hoping.” 

What I’ve been writing for the past ten years is about missing a “you.”  But if I really think about it, I’ve been writing how I miss myself—the roads I used to run, the states I moved away from, the good-time-girl who went bad for a while.  Isn’t that one of the reasons essaysists essay?  To attempt to get at who we once were? Or weren’t? 

From the final line of Oliu’s collection: “Believe me when I tell you that you, you are the one missing, and that I, I am the one missed.”  We all have a you, and in writing, sometimes that you is ourselves.

I didn’t want you to miss this one:

_______________________________

“mfw—22—Craigslist”

Make no mistake, this is about you.  This is about you, sitting there, reading this.  This is about you, touching the keyboard, reading this.  This is about artifice—this is about you knowing that this isn’t about you.  But make no mistake, this is about you. It has always been about you. It has always been about you reading this, even though you are reading this for the first time. This is about you typing, letter after letter. I can’t remember the last time I saw you typing—I only see the product of the motion of fingers. The products, the thoughts that start as thoughts from the heart—no—though I wish they came from there, they are beautiful. They say beautiful things, about the occupying of space, about “if I,” “if I were,” “if you,” “if you were.”  This is about you moving your hand from keyboard to mouse.  This is about keeping tabs. This is about rotation. This is about you messaging me to ask if this is about you. This is about you typing. This is about you asking what was the deal with the last time we spoke.  This is about you asking what was the deal with these missed connections—this invisibility.  The others, they aren’t real, you think. This one, this isn’t real either, you think, though this one is about you.  This one can’t be about you, but it is about you. This is about you asking me if this is about you.  This is about me telling you that it is not about you, although it is about you. This is about me not telling. This is about one person.  This is about me, you think. This is a mistake—this is about you.

*Thanks to Ander Monson for creating this forum and for the opportunity to join it, to celebrate the essay and essayists and each other.

Jill Talbot is the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction.  Recent essays may be found here and here, along with one of her own second-person essays here. 

December 11: Julie Lauterbach-Colby on Arianne Zwartjes’ “This Suturing of Wounds and Words” and Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel’s “Cannulated Screw”

My sister called to say she’d wanted to ask me a question about our childhood but then forgot. When she called back in the morning it was to tell me she’d remembered and had written the memory down, call her when I could.

The memory turned out to be a recurring dream she has, usually after she encounters a person on the street who resembles our father. Our father who died when I was thirteen.

In her dream it’s as if he’s alive again; that whole death thing, it was actually just a cover. He’s off somewhere in a new life. The most recent story she’d told herself: he’s picking grapes in Napa.

I tell her I have a similar thought, every once in a while. Because I think, to a certain extent, it’s easier to deal with grief when that grief has the possibility of temporality. If I could only see him again, then I’d be able to say my last words and be done with it. 

The trouble with grief (read: pain), I think, is that so often what’s aching on the inside manifests itself on the outside. This can be a problem, when you’re just trying to deal with it, and it can make for some awkward transitions in conversation. So…how’s it feel to have one dead parent? (True story there.)

But the trouble with grief is also what draws me to it. When I read works about pain, I relate them to my own. And I’m reminded that if religion and politics are topics we are trained from youth to avoid with others, talking about our pain with company has become second nature. What ails you? How do you suffer in this life? If you are able to get to the heart of the matter, will you know why you are in pain?

I am thinking of my grandparents this summer. Of their aging and, with the years, their increased levels of pain. They suffer, each in their unique way, which only they can explain: the story is theirs to tell, no one else has the right to it. I, and the rest of my family, are held still in their telling. We sit around the campfire, nod our heads, and think of our own discomfort during that moment: the way our sit bones have dug their way into the tree log underneath us, the stiffness in our necks and backs, the itchy, burning heat from the fire against our bare shins.

When my friend Ari’s grandfather died, she wrote an essay on how the body physically heals from a wound. How the layers of skin and muscle and fiber stitch themselves back together. But how that togetherness comes with a caveat: a scar in the healing’s wake. Throughout the essay, Ari takes us into the body’s layers. Through the collagen microfibril helices that weave the skin into place. And in the same breath, she points out that as we age, the collagen that has, up until that point, kept our skin soft and elastic, begins to disappear, leaving us hard, brittle, and yes, fragile: more susceptible to pain.

Physical cuts, lacerations, “may be clean and linear if they are caused by a knife, glass shard, or other sharp object. They may be caused by slicing at an angle, separating an entire flap of skin like a peninsula. Crushing injuries, caused by a direct blow or impact, may cause a stellate laceration, irregular in its course. If deep enough, a laceration may reveal underlying tissues: fat, muscle, tendon, or bone.”

Different kinds of wounds require a different kind of attention. The pattern/tracing of one’s pain creates a varying threshold of meaning, a different narrative for how one might begin to think about the healing process.

Which takes us to Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel’s “Cannulated Screw,” where we find a different story of pain, a different approach to what gets left behind in the wake of trauma. In the opening lines we read that the author’s in bed; she’s having two screws removed from her foot. The screws, the nurse tells her, “might break. They could crack and split, cleaving shrapnel to bone. Pieces could get left behind.”

In the stories of pain I’ve read, it is precisely this crack and split that draws me in: I am interested, after having to pick up my own pieces, to learn how others try to rebuild their narrative. (Or seek out a new one entirely.) I’m interested, not so much in the cause of pain itself, but how others choose to live with it or beyond it.

Back to Ari’s essay, and fracture: “Deep wounds sometimes accompany underlying bone fracture; it’s even possible for the broken bone to cause the laceration to the skin, sharp, splintered ends jutting through what was intact.”

Because the rub is, there’s no getting around the physical splintering into the non-physical. Through what was intact, and no longer is: that’s where the narratives begin to overlap.

And Kisha: “To remove [the screws], the osteopath cut along the scar of the old suture, made by a careless doctor who cut out a painful tailors bunion and broke the bone of the pinkie toe to straighten its crooked deformity, screwing the healing in place.”

What our stories of pain amount to is a one big ball of collective hurt. But this individual narrative of pain begins to speak with others’. While our stories of pain are our own, they grant space for this common narrative. They provide an entry point for our day-to-day dealings with others. I’ve been thinking a lot about these points of entry lately, and it seems to me that if nothing else, pain opens us up, in the very physical sense of the word, but pain also gives us a chance to be open on other levels as well.

In Ari’s case, she opens up to a world of hurt all around her, flashes of familial scenes mixed in with those she’s experienced in the field as an EMT. In Kisha’s essay, the time of healing (“screwing the healing in place”) becomes a mathematical equation parallel to the emotional healing of her father dying when she was a child.

Whatever our narrative, be it recurring dreams of isolation, empathy of aging parents/grandparents, real-life loss, our narrative allows us some clarity, a space in which to fight against the compassion fatigue which occurs within such a fragmented world. (To paraphrase Ari’s words.)

Today marks the second week of advent. If we were to consider—which I will—the point of the biblical story in which we now find ourselves, the wise men have left the court of King Herod. Herod, having received word of the mysterious child’s birth, has ordered an infanticide of male children throughout the land. There is pain everywhere. There are swords passing through women’s bellies. And Herod’s whole body is wrecked with pain—and fear. That is the common story shared throughout the kingdom. Mothers-to-be are talking in low voices: Did you hear, did you hear what is happening? How I suffer. How we all suffer. And so on, until the narrative swirls and mixes with our own, today: Syria, New York, Libya, North Korea, Nogales, the world over. How we all suffer. Perhaps the hope is in how we are all driven together because of that pain. We notice, and by noticing, we begin to heal.


 Julie Lauterbach-Colby lives and gardens and rides her bicycle in Tucson and works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Some of her recent work appears here, here, and here.

Dec 10: Hannah Ensor on Eric LeMay's "LOSING THE LOTTERY"

I really like this essay by Eric LeMay in Diagram 11.5. It’s called LOSING THE LOTTERY, and it does some fancy interactive computer stuff alongside more classic essay things. It starts by asking you to choose six numbers from among floating gray lottery balls. Once you do, you enter the essay: split into two parts, the essay sections (49 in all and, besides the first, randomly presented) on the left and on the right a computer-generated simulation of lottery results: using the six numbers you chose, it simulates winnings and costs based on buying a hundred $1 Ohio Classic Lotto tickets every second. Which, for the record, would be a lot of lottery tickets. Just keeping the page open for a couple of hours, I’ve already “spent” upwards of $200,000 on lottery tickets! Spoiler alert: no jackpot yet, fictional or actual.

As you might hope to see in an essay about the lottery, this one takes up questions of “luckiness” (an anecdote about an Ohio man who wins the 6-number-match Powerball, has his car broken into twice, loses incomprehensible sums of cash, only to win a second time); class (you might guess that Ohio’s poorest neighborhoods outspend on the lottery by a ratio of 2 to 1; that the fact of the lottery enables the sociological myth that, despite devastating wealth disparities, in this country, we’re all just one lottery ticket away from affluence and financial security); the business of the lottery (that, including payouts, the Ohio lottery’s expenses are only 60% of its profits; that if you choose the “cash option” instead of the 30-year installment payment on a jackpot, you only get half of the stated sum); and statistical manipulation (the author’s grandfather once schemed to record which numbers have come up most likely so as to predict what’s due to come up next).

The essay itself, or rather its 48 sections after the first, are presented in random order, making for 14,106,722,264,245,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible sequences. I like the order I first read them in. I obviously never got that order again, still and each time I’m pretty convinced that this is the best order: the one I’m reading them in now. The fact remains that I can’t even comprehend of the number 14,106,722,264,245,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Do you know how you would say this out loud? And, I mean, even if you knew the right word, how would you say this out loud and mean it? 

I think I like this essay in large part because it’s perfect for my little tiny attention span. Each section is a paragraph, at most 100 words or so, that ends. And then I’m on to the next one. Also: look over to the right! Have I won yet? Reading, reading, another second ticks by and I’ve “bought” another hundred lottery tickets. Good news: I’ve won $1,876. Bad news: I’ve spent $19,372. This is crazy!

(You know those billboards on the highway advertising casinos? They say ridiculous things about what their slot machine payout is. Brag about 70% or whatever. As a kid, I used to think that was so absurd. All that sign does is promise you that you won’t win. I mean, come on.) (My boyfriend and I have started buying lottery tickets. Not Powerball-types, just the cheesy scratch kinds that cost $2 and either end up paying out $3 or nothing, with the alleged possibility of $10,000. They’re crossword puzzles that totally aren’t puzzles. To quote John Ashbery, “I feel ashamed for myself and everybody on this planet.”)

“Odds of winning the jackpot in the Classic Lottery,” LeMay writes, are “1 in 13,983,816.” He says this and I do the math with the calculator on my phone, in part because I know from my college statistics class that computer-generated randomness is impossible, that it’s all just steady and predictable enough algorithms. I figure out that if I keep my web browser open to this page for 38.9 hours, I could hit the jackpot. I process that at that rate I will have spent 13.98 million dollars so as to win the 24.8, which isn’t bad until I realize that there is no way I will ever have access to 13.98 million dollars, short of, uh, winning the lottery. Finally, I remember that it’s not a real jackpot. I could keep my browser open for a day and a half and have nothing at all to show for it. Maybe a screenshot to post to Facebook or to this blog post. I am empty inside.

On my most recent spin through LeMay’s essay, the 49^th and final section was about how computer-generated randomness does not and cannot exist. After all these minutes watching the numbers tick and tick up, I feel duped, even by a thing I knew.  Well. There’s an experiential moral for you.

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Hannah Ensor writes poems and watches sports in Tucson, Arizona. You can read some of her poems here, and forthcoming here.

Dec 9: Joshua Foster: Dispatch on Patrick Madden "Dispatches from Montevideo"

Dispatch on Patrick Madden's "Dispatches from Montevideo"

McSweeney's has been running a series of dispatches these last four months written by Patrick Madden as he bums around Uruguay. So far, Pat's posted five. They range from travelogue to rumination to lyrical essay. Content varies from hauling six kids through airports domestic and foreign--on the surface, a horror story that would write itself--to machine parts, futbol, public transportation systems, the band No Te Va Gustar (an "innovative mix of rock and ska with a touch of Uruguayan murga," according to Madden), and buried memory. All five have merit: they are small in stature but big-hearted. I came away from each feeling--dare I be sentimental--that our world is good and kind, and that the webs of our experience intertwine and influence.

I'll let you peruse the five on your own. They're each worth a glance. The essay that drew me in most--whether my sporting interest is piqued because I'm currently entering the playoff stage of my Fantasy Football league (name: Imaginary Football) as the #2 seed; or because I spent last weekend watching the College Football bowl matchups come to light (will be attending the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl to root for Toledo, a college I've never been to in a state I've never visited because, if I'm inherently against anything, it's Utah (coincidently, last year I bought Ohio University gear [Madden's alma mater] and Ohio rallied to win 24-23 vs Utah State); or because I have a collection of miscellaneous repair parts, including ball bearings, dating back to 1989--was "In Which We Consider the Glorious History of Uruguayan Soccer, and Ball Bearings."

"IWWCtGHoUS,aBB" does everything that I appreciate in essays. It takes me to an unknown place, teaches me things--facts, history--I did not know, surprises me in language and plot, and, in the end, makes me wonder. In this case, I'm dropped in next to Madden at the Uruguay-Ecuador World Cup qualifier. From the onset, Madden's attention--curious as ever--is not focused on the game, but on an ad blaring over the loudspeakers for rulemanes, ball bearings, and he thinks, "WTF(lip) [Madden teaches at BYU, btw], ball bearings? At a soccer match?" And, even stranger, the crowd sings along to the company's jingle! A phenomenon, sure, when I consider my local awkward Chevy dealer preach, "If you don't want it, you don't keep it!" intoned by a stadium full of sports nuts.

The essay then moves expectedly (and not in a bad way; it's satisfying and intriguing) to Uruguay's soccer history. Madden, always interested in numbers and percentages (check out his essay collection Quotidiana for some deep explorations of mathematics and the band Rush), shows the improbability that Uruguayans, population-wise, shouldn't be as good at soccer as they really are. It's fascinating and unfolds over 12 paragraphs.  

And then comes the 13th, which is the wonderful surprise of the essay. Madden, nonchalantly, wanders to headquarters of Larrique Rulemanes, sits down with the owners, and asks them why they would take out ad time for ball bearings during a high profile soccer match. In the prose, he's given no warning of this action. He does not spend time describing the faces of the Larrique brothers or what they're wearing. He just arrives, investigates, and reports. It's this authorial curiosity that keeps me engaged.

Satiated, Madden then moves from the concrete of the essay to the abstract, and speaks to ideas rather than events. Here's the second-to-last paragraph:

Which is more than we can say for the essayist, who by habit lifts up the hood and begins tinkering without an instruction manual. But the experience of writing of fútbol and rulemanes has given me at least this: that as much as essays are an act of self-effacement, they are also, necessarily, a declaration of ego, an action on the belief that the world might care enough to read my doings and thinkings. Montaigne’s assertion that “each person bears the entire form of the human condition” has guided my reading and writing and thinking for decades, but not only my essaying, my living, too, and not only mine, but most everybody’s. We think through the misaligned machinery of a limited first-person perspective, supposing that our own motivations are unanimous, or should be, and judging others based on the rationales we can muster for their visible actions.

“Even among those who most pride themselves on their knowledge of mankind, each of them knows scarcely anything apart from himself.” 

— Rousseau, from The Confessions

It is weird and wonderful to begin reading about soccer and wheel bearings and end up musing about the finite first-person? Yes, and I like it. But is it any weirder than an Idaho farmkid now knowing--and probably never being able to forget--the jingle to an auto parts store some 6,593 miles away? Not at all, and I like that too.

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Joshua Foster writes about and lives in southeastern Idaho where he works on his father's potato and grain farm. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction writing at Stanford University and has earned MFA's (nonfiction, fiction) from University of Arizona. He serves as Terrain.org's nonfiction editor. His stories and essays have appeared online and in print.

Shout out to Kim Dana Kupperman

who may or may not be joining this advent calendar this month (but who will hopefully be convinced to join us in 2013 if not this December). She's an interesting essayist (her collection I Just Lately Started Buying Wings was one of the better collections of 2010 we read), and a new essay, "Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing" just debuted in the new Hunger Mountain, which, gratifyingly, publishes quite a few good essays online. In the same Baldwin tribute issue, you'll find essays by Robert Vivian; Sion Dayson; Carole K. Harris; and Marita Golden, Baron Wormser, and Liz Blood, among other good stuff.

Only sixteen shopping days left until Xmas. Consider gifting an essay or an essay collection to someone who interests you. Try Syzygy, Beauty by T Fleischmann or Elena Passarello's Let Me Clear My Throat, for instance. Or Lia Purpura's Rough Likeness. All three are published by Sarabande Books, one of our favorite essay presses.