Friday, July 30, 2010
The Best Long-Form Magazine Journalism Articles Ever
being a quick guide to some of the best essays published in magazines or newspapers, which is often enough just the best or most famous essays: [here]. You've probably read most or at least some of them, but if not, what a lovely resource this is.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Seneca Review 2008
Guest Post by Kelli La Pointe
The Spring 2008 issue of the Seneca Review offers a variety of different writing styles – from nonfiction to fiction to poetry. Unless you look at the back of the magazine to see how the different authors presented in it are categorized, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one style from another. The common theme that runs through the literary magazine seems to be that of experimentation. Straightforward narrations really don’t have a place here, at least not in the issue I’ve examined. All the pieces of this issue experiment with style, content, and structure, blurring the lines of traditional writing. Of the pieces in this edition, there are three that really stand out, representing three styles the Seneca Review publishes: lyric essay, poetry, and a hybrid lyric essay/poetry.
When looking at the pieces that are clearly not poetry that the Seneca Review names lyric essays, it is clear how these essays are something more than nonfiction. One lyric essay that caught my attention was “In My Version of the Afterlife Grandma is Riding an Elephant” by Alice George. The piece focuses on two story lines – one of the narrator’s grandmother’s death and the narrator’s desire to be buried when she dies, the other on the growing number of elephants turning against humans and killing hundreds and how hundreds of these people are burned because they believe burning purifies dead bodies. The connection between the narrator’s grandmother and the elephants seems tenuous at first, until the narrator mentions that her grandmother was cremated, just as many of the elephants’ victims in Africa and India. The subject of the piece is deciding which is better, cremation or burial. Each section is separated by an analogy. Each analogy connects to the section it precedes, giving a brief example of what is to be read. The title of lyric essay is well applied to these types of essays, which are more like – as a friend of mine once termed – prosetry, prose written as poetically as possible before turning completely into poetry. The essay moves well, the tone is even without giving too much to the exaggerations throughout the piece. Of all the essays in this piece, this one struck me most of all.
The poem “– U – R – Testimonies (An Excerpt)” by Philip Metres takes excerpts from testimonials from Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib. What makes this poem unique is that only a word or phrases from each line of the testimonies is presented. Everything else is white space, bringing up images of letters that have been censored for content. The words float about the page, nothing to anchor them in place, time or space, giving the poem a sense of helplessness one would feel in prison. The words, when read together, elicit emotions from the reader that one would expect to find in reading the full testimonials. It is an effective poem, drawing emotions from the reader and causing them to think, especially once the reader reaches the note at the end of the excerpt that explains where the words come from.
Between the poem and the lyric essay there are three hybrid pieces the Seneca Review dubs lyric essay/poetry. “When Dada Ordered Chinese” and “When Dada Skipped School” by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde fall into this category. The two pieces characterize Da-Ren, which according to the footnote at the bottom of the first page, is a “significant motif in traditional Chinese thought.” The author creates Da-Ren as a character, detailing different aspects of his life. Without knowing that Da-Ren is not a real person but the personification of an idea, it is easy to assume that this is a nonfiction piece, providing brief glimpses into the life of a man. It is an unusual piece that may not work in another literary magazine.
This magazine seems to look for very specific kinds of work, lyrical pieces that dance on the border of nonfiction. To be published alongside these poetic writers would require very special pieces. Many of these pieces, so artfully and poetically composed, seem to be experiments in nonfiction writing, creating new kinds of nonfiction, poetry, and sometimes combining both. Straightforward pieces about life or personal experiences, unless written in a poetic manner, have no real place in this magazine, as represented with the Spring 2008 issue. The three pieces that I have described are just examples of the many pieces of the three styles printed in this literary magazine.
The Spring 2008 issue of the Seneca Review offers a variety of different writing styles – from nonfiction to fiction to poetry. Unless you look at the back of the magazine to see how the different authors presented in it are categorized, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one style from another. The common theme that runs through the literary magazine seems to be that of experimentation. Straightforward narrations really don’t have a place here, at least not in the issue I’ve examined. All the pieces of this issue experiment with style, content, and structure, blurring the lines of traditional writing. Of the pieces in this edition, there are three that really stand out, representing three styles the Seneca Review publishes: lyric essay, poetry, and a hybrid lyric essay/poetry.
When looking at the pieces that are clearly not poetry that the Seneca Review names lyric essays, it is clear how these essays are something more than nonfiction. One lyric essay that caught my attention was “In My Version of the Afterlife Grandma is Riding an Elephant” by Alice George. The piece focuses on two story lines – one of the narrator’s grandmother’s death and the narrator’s desire to be buried when she dies, the other on the growing number of elephants turning against humans and killing hundreds and how hundreds of these people are burned because they believe burning purifies dead bodies. The connection between the narrator’s grandmother and the elephants seems tenuous at first, until the narrator mentions that her grandmother was cremated, just as many of the elephants’ victims in Africa and India. The subject of the piece is deciding which is better, cremation or burial. Each section is separated by an analogy. Each analogy connects to the section it precedes, giving a brief example of what is to be read. The title of lyric essay is well applied to these types of essays, which are more like – as a friend of mine once termed – prosetry, prose written as poetically as possible before turning completely into poetry. The essay moves well, the tone is even without giving too much to the exaggerations throughout the piece. Of all the essays in this piece, this one struck me most of all.
The poem “– U – R – Testimonies (An Excerpt)” by Philip Metres takes excerpts from testimonials from Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib. What makes this poem unique is that only a word or phrases from each line of the testimonies is presented. Everything else is white space, bringing up images of letters that have been censored for content. The words float about the page, nothing to anchor them in place, time or space, giving the poem a sense of helplessness one would feel in prison. The words, when read together, elicit emotions from the reader that one would expect to find in reading the full testimonials. It is an effective poem, drawing emotions from the reader and causing them to think, especially once the reader reaches the note at the end of the excerpt that explains where the words come from.
Between the poem and the lyric essay there are three hybrid pieces the Seneca Review dubs lyric essay/poetry. “When Dada Ordered Chinese” and “When Dada Skipped School” by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingde fall into this category. The two pieces characterize Da-Ren, which according to the footnote at the bottom of the first page, is a “significant motif in traditional Chinese thought.” The author creates Da-Ren as a character, detailing different aspects of his life. Without knowing that Da-Ren is not a real person but the personification of an idea, it is easy to assume that this is a nonfiction piece, providing brief glimpses into the life of a man. It is an unusual piece that may not work in another literary magazine.
This magazine seems to look for very specific kinds of work, lyrical pieces that dance on the border of nonfiction. To be published alongside these poetic writers would require very special pieces. Many of these pieces, so artfully and poetically composed, seem to be experiments in nonfiction writing, creating new kinds of nonfiction, poetry, and sometimes combining both. Straightforward pieces about life or personal experiences, unless written in a poetic manner, have no real place in this magazine, as represented with the Spring 2008 issue. The three pieces that I have described are just examples of the many pieces of the three styles printed in this literary magazine.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Subtropics 2006
Another guest blog post, this time by fiction and nonfiction writer Lydia Paar.
Literary Journal Review
When I initially started this project, I was looking into the magazine Creative Nonfiction, produced by Lee Gutkind, to see what kind of work was in it. After I read a few of the pieces, however, I decided most of them, while well-written, were in the traditional memoir vein, and I wanted to see what kinds of other things were out there. I picked up an old (Spring/Summer 2006) copy of Subtropics and was attracted to what I saw as a deliberate non-distinction between fiction and nonfiction throughout the magazine; works were not classified or titled for us by genre, they simply stood alone. Some works, I could tell were nonfiction either because of the content of the piece or the tone, and others, I thought could probably be either fiction or nonfiction and still hold value for the reader for both learning and entertainment. I have decided to parse a few of these pieces apart to discuss the way they work and give an illustration of the wide variety of work accepted by Subtropics in the loosely nonfictional form.
The first essay I immediately identified as nonfiction is by Harold Bloom, and seems to be an interesting mix of historical/biographical content on Hans Christian Andersen and his peers crossed with cultural/literary commentary. Bloom’s tone is interesting—this piece, called “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller: Hans Christian Andersen,” does not read like a typical scholarly essay. Bloom does not shy from the use of the “I” or “you,” and his own voice comes through aggressively, perhaps overbearingly, and he makes a lot of assertions and assumptions about literature (and Andersen and other authors) I find rather…unfounded: “JK Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers…” (38, from his opening statements).
He goes on to dissect six of Andersen’s children’s tales, as he says he will, but not with limitations around focusing on the tales alone—he reads very much into who Andersen was as a person via the details he interprets in the tales. The format is very discussion-esque, in that Bloom moves from tale to cultural commentary to personal commentary on his subject (Andersen, more so than his works, I think) in a meandering way, and the quotes he uses from the tales are huge (one takes up almost two pages).
Again, as I read, I found more and more tumbling and unsupported assertions: “Andersen, whose project was to remain childlike, tapped into the energies of the sexual past and derived from them the verve and pace of his art” (47). I assume from Bloom’s incredible critical stature that he must have reasons for making the kinds of broad claims that he does, and at the same time I find it interesting that he assumes his readers will read enough of Andersen (and Freud, Kierkegaard, Whitman, and others he mentions) to validate or disqualify his arguments in their own minds. It seems most unusual to me that a critical giant would write a largely unsupported essay, and yet here is the place for it: a magazine that does not advertise itself as academic, but primarily creative. And surely, Blooms authoritative and still conversational voice contributes to his ability to be trusted by the Subtropics reader.
Another interesting piece is entitled “Grasscolored: A Threat Documentary,” and it’s by Anne Carson. Now, this piece is very short (one and a half pages) but written in such a dense and unconventional way it took me twenty minutes to make it out. It begins:
Little tough ones, some taller than others…There is no reason for you to wonder about this. Keep listening. Keep glancing out at the driveway…little grasses…in time can overtake the whole driveway and how strange this voice you don’t recognize is using your name, talking about you in the third person. Very bad accident…He? You? No ladders go up to this moment when you perceive the second person cut from the third person within you…you didn’t know the blades hung in your mouth (20).
WTF? Parts of speech all over the place, and how is this about threat, specifically? Well, it isn’t yet, but the piece goes on in a very strange, impressionistic way to rotate around the concept and emotional impact of feeling “threatened.” It reminds me of the scaffolding piece from Next American Essay, only maybe even less cohesive. It reminds me of those fabrics you can’t afford at the yarn store where there’s more negative space than fabric, and the fabric that is there barely hangs on, like the frayed rope on a fisherman’s net. And yet, the piece has appeal, if only because it is a puzzle, mental chewing gum, and one can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to tell if it’s “fake” or not, to disprove the validity of it, to dispute whether or not the structure really holds and constructs the meaning we expect or don’t expect (it’s like a game).
The third piece I’d like to discuss is the most typically memoir-ish in its construction, but it, too, is done in a slightly unusual way that seems to linger between formalism (the defining and rational discussion of terms and ideas) and story/poem/unfounded artistry. This is by Kent Annan, entitled “Sketches of Scarcity,” and is divvied up into sections, each titled by “Scarcity of…(fills in the blank with a different term: Birth Certificates, Pocket Money on the Morning Commute, Pride, Medical Inhibition, etc.) (24-33). The content under each caption is written differently: some in first person, story or anecdote form, some in second person, as in instructions, some in third person with a random but seemingly relevant anonymous subject. I haven’t figured out the significance of the rotation in perspective entirely, but it seems to lend itself toward keeping the readers’ attention and taking it from a fresh, new place at the start of each blurb. It’s also more sensory than all the other pieces (one might even say “lush”), and includes more facts, statistics, historical and personal event than either of the two other pieces. Go figure. This one had the effect of making me very wary at first (memoirs make me wary on principle, as I myself am aware of the self-indulgent purging the writer can attain and the risk of pushing: “look at this, my story is so important, it is so big, it is so deep, blah blah blah). I was especially wary since this was about Americans traveling (for godssakes, will we ever stop traveling and spitting out our two cents about third-world cultures?). However, I found the unique form snapped me out of my skepticism long enough to read, and in the end, I did learn a lot about Haiti.
The pieces, I think, certainly each had a place in this magazine, and I tend to think their juxtaposition with works of fiction and poetry did them a justice, as did their forms (unconventional) and their “unlabelledness.” Here, genre-crossing has had the effect of slipping new information or at least questions into my mind where, if they’d been presented in conventional form, I may not have been forced to pay such hard, careful attention to them. I tend to see this as a success both in collecting/selecting and in presentation on the part of Subtropics, and have sent a piece of my own work (“Spirit String,” revised) to the magazine, in the hopes that it may be included in an interesting and actively unusual issue as well.
Literary Journal Review
When I initially started this project, I was looking into the magazine Creative Nonfiction, produced by Lee Gutkind, to see what kind of work was in it. After I read a few of the pieces, however, I decided most of them, while well-written, were in the traditional memoir vein, and I wanted to see what kinds of other things were out there. I picked up an old (Spring/Summer 2006) copy of Subtropics and was attracted to what I saw as a deliberate non-distinction between fiction and nonfiction throughout the magazine; works were not classified or titled for us by genre, they simply stood alone. Some works, I could tell were nonfiction either because of the content of the piece or the tone, and others, I thought could probably be either fiction or nonfiction and still hold value for the reader for both learning and entertainment. I have decided to parse a few of these pieces apart to discuss the way they work and give an illustration of the wide variety of work accepted by Subtropics in the loosely nonfictional form.
The first essay I immediately identified as nonfiction is by Harold Bloom, and seems to be an interesting mix of historical/biographical content on Hans Christian Andersen and his peers crossed with cultural/literary commentary. Bloom’s tone is interesting—this piece, called “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller: Hans Christian Andersen,” does not read like a typical scholarly essay. Bloom does not shy from the use of the “I” or “you,” and his own voice comes through aggressively, perhaps overbearingly, and he makes a lot of assertions and assumptions about literature (and Andersen and other authors) I find rather…unfounded: “JK Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers…” (38, from his opening statements).
He goes on to dissect six of Andersen’s children’s tales, as he says he will, but not with limitations around focusing on the tales alone—he reads very much into who Andersen was as a person via the details he interprets in the tales. The format is very discussion-esque, in that Bloom moves from tale to cultural commentary to personal commentary on his subject (Andersen, more so than his works, I think) in a meandering way, and the quotes he uses from the tales are huge (one takes up almost two pages).
Again, as I read, I found more and more tumbling and unsupported assertions: “Andersen, whose project was to remain childlike, tapped into the energies of the sexual past and derived from them the verve and pace of his art” (47). I assume from Bloom’s incredible critical stature that he must have reasons for making the kinds of broad claims that he does, and at the same time I find it interesting that he assumes his readers will read enough of Andersen (and Freud, Kierkegaard, Whitman, and others he mentions) to validate or disqualify his arguments in their own minds. It seems most unusual to me that a critical giant would write a largely unsupported essay, and yet here is the place for it: a magazine that does not advertise itself as academic, but primarily creative. And surely, Blooms authoritative and still conversational voice contributes to his ability to be trusted by the Subtropics reader.
Another interesting piece is entitled “Grasscolored: A Threat Documentary,” and it’s by Anne Carson. Now, this piece is very short (one and a half pages) but written in such a dense and unconventional way it took me twenty minutes to make it out. It begins:
Little tough ones, some taller than others…There is no reason for you to wonder about this. Keep listening. Keep glancing out at the driveway…little grasses…in time can overtake the whole driveway and how strange this voice you don’t recognize is using your name, talking about you in the third person. Very bad accident…He? You? No ladders go up to this moment when you perceive the second person cut from the third person within you…you didn’t know the blades hung in your mouth (20).
WTF? Parts of speech all over the place, and how is this about threat, specifically? Well, it isn’t yet, but the piece goes on in a very strange, impressionistic way to rotate around the concept and emotional impact of feeling “threatened.” It reminds me of the scaffolding piece from Next American Essay, only maybe even less cohesive. It reminds me of those fabrics you can’t afford at the yarn store where there’s more negative space than fabric, and the fabric that is there barely hangs on, like the frayed rope on a fisherman’s net. And yet, the piece has appeal, if only because it is a puzzle, mental chewing gum, and one can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to tell if it’s “fake” or not, to disprove the validity of it, to dispute whether or not the structure really holds and constructs the meaning we expect or don’t expect (it’s like a game).
The third piece I’d like to discuss is the most typically memoir-ish in its construction, but it, too, is done in a slightly unusual way that seems to linger between formalism (the defining and rational discussion of terms and ideas) and story/poem/unfounded artistry. This is by Kent Annan, entitled “Sketches of Scarcity,” and is divvied up into sections, each titled by “Scarcity of…(fills in the blank with a different term: Birth Certificates, Pocket Money on the Morning Commute, Pride, Medical Inhibition, etc.) (24-33). The content under each caption is written differently: some in first person, story or anecdote form, some in second person, as in instructions, some in third person with a random but seemingly relevant anonymous subject. I haven’t figured out the significance of the rotation in perspective entirely, but it seems to lend itself toward keeping the readers’ attention and taking it from a fresh, new place at the start of each blurb. It’s also more sensory than all the other pieces (one might even say “lush”), and includes more facts, statistics, historical and personal event than either of the two other pieces. Go figure. This one had the effect of making me very wary at first (memoirs make me wary on principle, as I myself am aware of the self-indulgent purging the writer can attain and the risk of pushing: “look at this, my story is so important, it is so big, it is so deep, blah blah blah). I was especially wary since this was about Americans traveling (for godssakes, will we ever stop traveling and spitting out our two cents about third-world cultures?). However, I found the unique form snapped me out of my skepticism long enough to read, and in the end, I did learn a lot about Haiti.
The pieces, I think, certainly each had a place in this magazine, and I tend to think their juxtaposition with works of fiction and poetry did them a justice, as did their forms (unconventional) and their “unlabelledness.” Here, genre-crossing has had the effect of slipping new information or at least questions into my mind where, if they’d been presented in conventional form, I may not have been forced to pay such hard, careful attention to them. I tend to see this as a success both in collecting/selecting and in presentation on the part of Subtropics, and have sent a piece of my own work (“Spirit String,” revised) to the magazine, in the hopes that it may be included in an interesting and actively unusual issue as well.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Seneca Review 2009
We here at Essay Daily (not that daily, but maybe weekly, soon!) would like to include more voices here. Here's a new review from Erica Jones.
Nonfiction Essay Review of “Bricklaying” by Laura Brown-Lavoie
as published in the Seneca Review, volume 39/1, Spring 2009
First I must say that I will not get it all, will not tell it all. But that’s okay; I feel fairly certain that neither did Laura Brown-Lavoie and while that may sound like an insult it is meant as a compliment. Brown-Lavoie’s essay, like Walt Whitman, is large. It contains multitudes. Although the text itself is relatively short—six pages that embrace the use of white space, of shifting margins—the essay expands beyond these parameters, creating multitudes of texts, of ideas, that are as much dependent on how the essay is read, on what the reader brings to the essay, as they are on Brown-Lavoie’s intentions when creating this text. Drawing from sources as varied as the Bible, the Grimm brother’s fairy tales, Barack Obama’s political campaigns and writings, and many others, Brown-Lavoie forces together musings on multiple subjects, often cutting off one topic mid sentence and picking up on another, again in the middle of the thought. These transitions are sometimes seemingly seamless, as when she ends one paragraph with “A good writer lures everyone upstairs to his pleasure den with the promise of eternal spring,” and begins the next paragraph (after a white space enclosed in a series of square brackets) with “while a bad one snatches so many balloons that he looks down to find that his toes have left the ground and not a soul has grabbed onto his shoelaces for the ride.”
Other times, although the grammatical sense of the sentence that bridges the white space is maintained, there is an obvious shift in subject that problematizes the reader’s desire for a clear linear understanding of meaning. Moving from Rapunzel back to Genesis, Brown-Lavoie writes “Then she let her hair drop twenty yards, and the sorceress would climb up on it. A few years later,” and again, there is white space enclosed in square brackets before we pick up with “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.” We know, because we have read Rapunzel, have had the story told to us with drooping eyelids years and years ago, that the Lord did not, in fact, enter in to the story, at least not so literally. And maybe we heard, with plaid skirts and doodled margins, the story of the tower of Babel, and are fairly certain that no sorceress climbed sixty feet of hair to a kidnapped would-be princess. By pushing these pieces together, Brown-Lavoie encourages us to understand our old stories, our old beliefs, in new ways.
If there were to be one story that works as a through line for the essay, it would be that of the tower of Babel, wherein humankind dared to create a tower so great to glorify its own name, and God punished humankind by scattering them across the world, and dividing their common language so that all of humankind could no longer understand each other. And this division seems to be, in many ways, what Brown-Lavoie is addressing. She speaks of “We” of “I” of “You,” of language barriers, even when we speak the same language, of “a common enemy” a “common oppressor,” of hope, of race, of country, of a “we” that is two and a “we” that is all and a “we” that is some but not others. She speaks of elephants and donkeys and races politically, geographically and visually defined. She also speaks of creation, of creators both mystical and human, of creations that are the world and of creations that are a story, a painting, a poem. She speaks of things that I have not yet discovered, and so I say again that I will not get it all, will not tell it all. And I say again that neither did she. Because what Brown-Lavoie does not do in “Bricklaying” is tell you what to think, or what is right. She does not define, but instead presents, and allows the reader to create a multitude of meaning through the ways that the ideas interact with each other outside of the page and inside the mind.
Nonfiction Essay Review of “Bricklaying” by Laura Brown-Lavoie
as published in the Seneca Review, volume 39/1, Spring 2009
First I must say that I will not get it all, will not tell it all. But that’s okay; I feel fairly certain that neither did Laura Brown-Lavoie and while that may sound like an insult it is meant as a compliment. Brown-Lavoie’s essay, like Walt Whitman, is large. It contains multitudes. Although the text itself is relatively short—six pages that embrace the use of white space, of shifting margins—the essay expands beyond these parameters, creating multitudes of texts, of ideas, that are as much dependent on how the essay is read, on what the reader brings to the essay, as they are on Brown-Lavoie’s intentions when creating this text. Drawing from sources as varied as the Bible, the Grimm brother’s fairy tales, Barack Obama’s political campaigns and writings, and many others, Brown-Lavoie forces together musings on multiple subjects, often cutting off one topic mid sentence and picking up on another, again in the middle of the thought. These transitions are sometimes seemingly seamless, as when she ends one paragraph with “A good writer lures everyone upstairs to his pleasure den with the promise of eternal spring,” and begins the next paragraph (after a white space enclosed in a series of square brackets) with “while a bad one snatches so many balloons that he looks down to find that his toes have left the ground and not a soul has grabbed onto his shoelaces for the ride.”
Other times, although the grammatical sense of the sentence that bridges the white space is maintained, there is an obvious shift in subject that problematizes the reader’s desire for a clear linear understanding of meaning. Moving from Rapunzel back to Genesis, Brown-Lavoie writes “Then she let her hair drop twenty yards, and the sorceress would climb up on it. A few years later,” and again, there is white space enclosed in square brackets before we pick up with “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.” We know, because we have read Rapunzel, have had the story told to us with drooping eyelids years and years ago, that the Lord did not, in fact, enter in to the story, at least not so literally. And maybe we heard, with plaid skirts and doodled margins, the story of the tower of Babel, and are fairly certain that no sorceress climbed sixty feet of hair to a kidnapped would-be princess. By pushing these pieces together, Brown-Lavoie encourages us to understand our old stories, our old beliefs, in new ways.
If there were to be one story that works as a through line for the essay, it would be that of the tower of Babel, wherein humankind dared to create a tower so great to glorify its own name, and God punished humankind by scattering them across the world, and dividing their common language so that all of humankind could no longer understand each other. And this division seems to be, in many ways, what Brown-Lavoie is addressing. She speaks of “We” of “I” of “You,” of language barriers, even when we speak the same language, of “a common enemy” a “common oppressor,” of hope, of race, of country, of a “we” that is two and a “we” that is all and a “we” that is some but not others. She speaks of elephants and donkeys and races politically, geographically and visually defined. She also speaks of creation, of creators both mystical and human, of creations that are the world and of creations that are a story, a painting, a poem. She speaks of things that I have not yet discovered, and so I say again that I will not get it all, will not tell it all. And I say again that neither did she. Because what Brown-Lavoie does not do in “Bricklaying” is tell you what to think, or what is right. She does not define, but instead presents, and allows the reader to create a multitude of meaning through the ways that the ideas interact with each other outside of the page and inside the mind.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Summer Reading
Ok, so this isn't necessarily a commentary/review of the Essay, but it's been a while since anything's been posted here and I'd like to keep the blog's momentum moving.
So summer book lists:
1)What are you reading?
Currently reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and loving the hell out of it. Others on the stack include the newest issue of Gulf Coast, Reality Hunger, and Anne Carson's Nox (which is friggin' gorgeous). Might try and tackle a longer work like Moby Dick or Infinite Jest but we'll see.
2)Do you read differently in the summer months?
I'm always interested to hear that people go for different (often lighter, more plot-driven) books in the summer months, mainly because I do the opposite. Now that I have an abundance of free time, I like to take on books that deserve my time and attention, take some notes and soak in the words for as long as I can stand.
Feel free to add other questions/comments/suggestions, particularly if there's any good nonfiction-y books coming out in the next few months.
So summer book lists:
1)What are you reading?
Currently reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and loving the hell out of it. Others on the stack include the newest issue of Gulf Coast, Reality Hunger, and Anne Carson's Nox (which is friggin' gorgeous). Might try and tackle a longer work like Moby Dick or Infinite Jest but we'll see.
2)Do you read differently in the summer months?
I'm always interested to hear that people go for different (often lighter, more plot-driven) books in the summer months, mainly because I do the opposite. Now that I have an abundance of free time, I like to take on books that deserve my time and attention, take some notes and soak in the words for as long as I can stand.
Feel free to add other questions/comments/suggestions, particularly if there's any good nonfiction-y books coming out in the next few months.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Hotel Amerika: Spring 2010
I should probably start off by saying how much I appreciate Hotel Amerika: kickass production values -including what might be the best cover art I've encountered, seen above- a wide range of styles and forms that still feel like they belong together, a solid representation across genres (worth noting that fiction is the only genre with its own editor, though you wouldn't know it from the poetry and nonfiction represented here). In short, Hotel Amerika is giving me everything I want in a literary journal, and you should probably pick up an issue when you get the chance.
While working my way through the essays (and the Transgenre section, more on this later), I noticed a strong emphasis on structure in nonfiction: Bernadette Esposito's personal essay is told through a series of plane crashes; Marcia Aldrich's essay is organized by a series of definitions, interpretations, and diagrams, Barrie Jean Borich's essay looks at Chicago and personal history through several insets; Xu Xi's essay creates a new way of structuring the calendar to look at her time in Hong Kong and the United States. Although the unusual structure isn't necessarily the best choice for every essay (For example, Xi's essay probably puts too much emphasis on its structure, which ultimately hurt the piece in this reader's opinion), I did find myself less invested in the linear personal narratives found throughout the journal. I like my essays to jump, to digress, to give me more than event and reflection.
Structure aside, I'm most interested in the labels Hotel Amerika places on the writing it presents. The Table of Contents breaks it down into Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Prose Poetry (an interesting designation because it's totally unnecessary, but I'll let it go since this is Essay Daily and not Prose Poetry Daily), and Transgenre. Transgenre is the one that irks me, mostly because it primarily consists of weirdo nonfiction (7 out of 10 of the pieces read like nonfiction, though I suppose it could be more or less). At first, this section seems to represent "experimental" or "genre pushing" types of writing, but look at the introduction to Ben Quick's essay, "The Lotus Born:"
1. A sliver of moon flickers behind leaves. A clam shell broken by chlorophyll. The dream of the lunar shattered by the darkness of the earth. Sirens carry through the center of the city, collecting. Somewhere, tragedy blooms. Blood drips from an ear to a car seat. The momentum of a forehead craters a windshield. Or, the force of a body thrown from a stolen Lexus carries it through the front window of the home of a neighbor. The gore was impossible, she said. Slices of arm on the kitchen floor. Entrails stuck to walls.
Although the imagery is both beautiful and alarming, there's nothing here that screams Transgenre other than the essay coming in the form of numbered sections, which isn't exactly a new thing. More confusing still, the essays in the "essay" section tend to be doing more transgenre work, meaning, these essays play around with existing forms in a way that's entirely their own. Here's a couple of sections from Marcia Aldrich's essay, "Sidestroke: The Mother Essay, 2.0:"
Use (1): rescue maneuvers. Recall lifesavers with one arm locked around a body on its back, limp, waterlogged, the one arm a hook that clamps drowner to swimmer, whose form is rotated to its side, a flotation device, her head up, her other arm free, lifting and pulling like the boom of a crane, laboriously rafting toward a shore. That is the sidestroke.
Aside: My grandmother saved a person from drowning using just such a stroke. In the photo in the newspaper clipping, her arm forms a bold arc like a wishbone, curving across the man's chest. Dead before I was born, she was a mystery to me, by repute a dominating being, bending people to her will. As I hold the photo of my grandmother's heroic stroke, her arm reaches out of the frame to clasp me to her.
The essay goes on to use other uses, viewpoints, histories, and sentence diagrams in a way that helps to tell the personal story through a means of definitions. Again, this feels more hybrid or cross-genre or whatever than most of the work in the transgenre section, so I'm still having a tough time deciding what its purpose could be (I suspect it goes back to the CNF review that appears before this review, that it may be the journal patting itself on the back for being edgy/experimental, which seems unnecessary when the journal is already putting out a lot of interesting writing)
I may be wrong, but I can go through Transgenre section and put my own labels on everything (some read like nonfiction, some are obviously fiction, etc). Since every reader approaches a piece of writing with their own genre expectations, I'd be more interested if: a) the difficult to define works were put in unexpected sections (a ten-page prose poem, a piece that reads like a short story appearing in the essays section, etc), or b) not putting any labels on anything and making the reader sort it out themselves. Either way, it seems better to leave things less defined. It might take away some editorial control, but it would allow for a more interesting conversation on what makes up a story, a poem, the essay.
One sentence essay reviews:
*Bernadette Esposito "If You Had Wings: A Biography in Plane Crashes"- My favorite in the issue, reminds me of Eula Biss' The Ballonists for its mix of tragedy and parents' divorce.
*Marilyn Abildskov "The Summer of Barbecues" - short memoir piece on a breakup, nothing we haven't seen before.
*Marcia Aldrich "Sidestroke: The Mother Essay, 2.0" - Unfortunate title, terrific essay.
*Barrie Jean Borich "Alabaster City's Gleam [A body map of Chicago, with insets]- Reads like a love story to Chicago, mixed in with Borich's own love story, rockin' essay.
*Kathryn Winograd "Guns, Knives, and the Amazon Warrior Princess"- What's with the titles of these essays? Clearly an excerpt from a larger work, would probably work better in that form.
*Tony Whedon "Looking For The Three-Toed Woodpecker"
*Xu Xi- B.G. The Significant Years "B.G.=Before Google, probably relies too much on the structure, especially since it doesn't add much to the essay.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Creative Nonfiction's redesign, issue 38 of the new era
One of the things I picked up at, or possibly was sent after the AWP conference was the new issue of Creative Nonfiction, the first in their new redesign (for more on this, you can take a look at the site; they're doing some interesting expansions). If you haven't seen it, it's setup as a magazine like, say, Real Simple (which was/is a magazine theoretically in pursuit of simplicity by virtue of buying a bunch of shit to simplify your life), perfect bound, 96 pages or so, in a more traditional magazine size, 8.5 x 11". Gone are the boring litmag conventions of old. Now here are some nice design decisions, excerpts from their Tiny Truths daily #cnftweet contest on Twitter, bits of things that connect to bigger bits on their website, a bunch of non-essay stuff such as interviews with Dave Eggers, columns from Phillip Lopate, and a chunk of the now-everywhere (even the Colbert Report) David Shields' Reality Hunger. There's also their new section, "Pushing the Boundaries," in which they apparently plan to feature nonfiction that "pushes the boundaries."
I also ran into an editor of Fugue magazine from the University of Idaho, and they have a similar sort of section, where they run one experiment each issue. I look forward to checking that out. As for CNF, this issue's experiment (they never say essay) by Sarah Gorham, a piece (essay, obviously) called "Study in Perfect." I'd like to talk more about this particular essay at some point, but for the moment let me say that it is by far the most interesting contribution in the issue. And that we should perhaps be cheered by the small chink of "experiment" in the Creative Nonfiction definition of nonfiction.
I think we should also be irritated by the compartmentalization of "experimental" works to the "Pushing the Boundaries" section, both here and in Fugue (though I haven't looked at Fugue in a while so I can't speak to how it works there just yet).
When I say we, I mean anyone who appears in CNF's pages, particularly in that section. When I say we I also mean readers. I also mean writers. I also mean people.
(As an aside they have an early list of writers "whose work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction since issue #1" which oddly includes my name. I'm not sure where I got drafted.)
If you know me at all, you've probably heard my irritation about the term experimental before. As if any worthwhile piece of anything that aspires to art is not an experiment. Otherwise it's all just plug-and-play, which is to say genre. Pick your subject, pick your research, pick your standard narrative nonfiction form, and boom! there's your essay.
As we know writing anything interesting is not like that. And though most of the essays in this issue do not do a lot to interest me (a couple of the columns are somewhat interesting, however), they're probably confined somewhat by having to be on-topic (the topic for the issue--that section anyhow--is "immortality").
And I hate to think that inevitably the most interesting in the issue is the one labeled experimental and boundary-pushing. And the only one (apparently) written by a (gasp) poet. Yet it is.
I don't know if it's a good sign that CNF, which has of course published some very good essays in its previous 37 issues, is including this "boundary pushing" section, possibly curated by the forward-thinking Dinty W. Moore (I'm not totally sure about this, but it seems likely). More fruitful might have been to just publish these sorts of essays in the magazine without the label. I think we can all figure out what is boundary-pushing and what is not. CNF has always been honest about the fact that there is at least a boundary.
And CNF is trying to join the conversation at least about the expansion of nonfiction, so that's something.
But this shit still rankles: Oh, you can come in, but you have to use the back door. Stay in the small green room. Wear this sign. Don't speak too loud or you'll disturb the guests and irritate our readers.
And maybe that's it: the readers for the new design of the magazine are meant to be nonliterary magazine readers, which is, after all, just about everybody. So baby steps, right?
Hmmm.
One also wants to know: who is pushing the boundaries? Who is congratulating themselves about their pushing the boundaries?
Let me be clear: Sarah's essay is a lovely essay. She is an interesting poet and editor (she edits Sarabande Books, that published, among others, Jenny Boully's recent book, The Book of Beginnings and Endings and Lia Purpura, etc.). I don't think she's the one congratulating herself for pushing boundaries. I'd actually be interested to know if she submitted or was approached, if she knew she'd be the one to push boundaries here.
To awkwardly change subjects, this redesign and rethink of the magazine seems to me to be a mostly successful outgrowth of what CNF and the Gutkind editing and textbooking empire has been doing for quite a while, which is to be more expansive, pretty, commercial, and more (one hopes) relevant. I have to admit that I do feel obliged to keep up on what's going on with CNF, because the magazine is certainly part of the conversation in nonfiction.
(Also part of the conversation in nonfiction is Fourth Genre, who has a full-page advertisement in the issue, interestingly enough.)
And CNF is a whole lot better in this format, so I actually want to read it and keep track.
I also ran into an editor of Fugue magazine from the University of Idaho, and they have a similar sort of section, where they run one experiment each issue. I look forward to checking that out. As for CNF, this issue's experiment (they never say essay) by Sarah Gorham, a piece (essay, obviously) called "Study in Perfect." I'd like to talk more about this particular essay at some point, but for the moment let me say that it is by far the most interesting contribution in the issue. And that we should perhaps be cheered by the small chink of "experiment" in the Creative Nonfiction definition of nonfiction.
I think we should also be irritated by the compartmentalization of "experimental" works to the "Pushing the Boundaries" section, both here and in Fugue (though I haven't looked at Fugue in a while so I can't speak to how it works there just yet).
When I say we, I mean anyone who appears in CNF's pages, particularly in that section. When I say we I also mean readers. I also mean writers. I also mean people.
(As an aside they have an early list of writers "whose work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction since issue #1" which oddly includes my name. I'm not sure where I got drafted.)
If you know me at all, you've probably heard my irritation about the term experimental before. As if any worthwhile piece of anything that aspires to art is not an experiment. Otherwise it's all just plug-and-play, which is to say genre. Pick your subject, pick your research, pick your standard narrative nonfiction form, and boom! there's your essay.
As we know writing anything interesting is not like that. And though most of the essays in this issue do not do a lot to interest me (a couple of the columns are somewhat interesting, however), they're probably confined somewhat by having to be on-topic (the topic for the issue--that section anyhow--is "immortality").
And I hate to think that inevitably the most interesting in the issue is the one labeled experimental and boundary-pushing. And the only one (apparently) written by a (gasp) poet. Yet it is.
I don't know if it's a good sign that CNF, which has of course published some very good essays in its previous 37 issues, is including this "boundary pushing" section, possibly curated by the forward-thinking Dinty W. Moore (I'm not totally sure about this, but it seems likely). More fruitful might have been to just publish these sorts of essays in the magazine without the label. I think we can all figure out what is boundary-pushing and what is not. CNF has always been honest about the fact that there is at least a boundary.
And CNF is trying to join the conversation at least about the expansion of nonfiction, so that's something.
But this shit still rankles: Oh, you can come in, but you have to use the back door. Stay in the small green room. Wear this sign. Don't speak too loud or you'll disturb the guests and irritate our readers.
And maybe that's it: the readers for the new design of the magazine are meant to be nonliterary magazine readers, which is, after all, just about everybody. So baby steps, right?
Hmmm.
One also wants to know: who is pushing the boundaries? Who is congratulating themselves about their pushing the boundaries?
Let me be clear: Sarah's essay is a lovely essay. She is an interesting poet and editor (she edits Sarabande Books, that published, among others, Jenny Boully's recent book, The Book of Beginnings and Endings and Lia Purpura, etc.). I don't think she's the one congratulating herself for pushing boundaries. I'd actually be interested to know if she submitted or was approached, if she knew she'd be the one to push boundaries here.
To awkwardly change subjects, this redesign and rethink of the magazine seems to me to be a mostly successful outgrowth of what CNF and the Gutkind editing and textbooking empire has been doing for quite a while, which is to be more expansive, pretty, commercial, and more (one hopes) relevant. I have to admit that I do feel obliged to keep up on what's going on with CNF, because the magazine is certainly part of the conversation in nonfiction.
(Also part of the conversation in nonfiction is Fourth Genre, who has a full-page advertisement in the issue, interestingly enough.)
And CNF is a whole lot better in this format, so I actually want to read it and keep track.
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