Merry Wanderer of the Night:
awesome essays

My hope is that I'll be able to be so passionate and intense about A Field of Silence by Annie Dillard that you will all go out and find a copy of it in some book (probably Teaching a Stone to Talk) and read it immediately. Unfortunately when I am super excited about a book or an essay I become a blubbering idiot. But let's give it a go. The essay is about fields and farms and spirits. Dillard once lived on a farm with another couple, "an ordinary farm, a calf-raising, haymaking farm, and very beautiful." She spends a few pages talking about what she loved about the farm, the clutter of it, the loneliness of it. She gets the description exactly right when she calls it "self-conscious." Then she says something that made me squeal like a pig I was so thrilled to read this section of this essay.

"My impression now of those fields is of thousands of spirits--spirits trapped, perhaps, by my refusal to call them more fully, or by paralysis of my own spirit at that time--thousands of spirits, angels in fact, almost discernible to the eye, and whirling. If pressed I would say they were three or four feet from the ground. Only their motion was clear (clockwise, if you insist); that, and their beauty unspeakable.
There are angels in those fields, and, I presume, in all fields, and everywhere else. I would go to the lions for this conviction, to witness this fact. What all this means about perception, or language, or angels, or my own sanity, I have no idea."

I really can't explain why I loved this section so much. I think it perfectly encompasses the mystery of fields and the feelings I had about them as a child. I really liked Annie Dillard before, but now I love her. I love her. She goes from describing the loneliness of fields and the country to understanding how she is surrounded by tradition, by those who lived there before her. By the farmers who farmed and died and left their fields. It's just so completely beautiful.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Essays Read this Week:
1. On educating children

Favorite Quotations:
"In the case of those who wish to hide their borrowings and pass them off as their own, their action is, first and foremost, unjust and mean: they have nothing worthwhile of their own to show off so they try to recommend themselves with someone else's goods" (On educating children).

"My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me" (On educating children).

General Thoughts:
This essay brought up a lot of the same things last week's On schoolmaster's learning brought up. Montaigne talks about problems with educating, particularly with exams well, regurgitation, "Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given." Montaigne believes education should allow you to know yourself and school should be where you form yourself. He thinks teachers give students quotations and books to read in an attempt to make the students believe those are the last words on everything. In this way students never learn how to speak for themselves. They simply say what others have already said.

"I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally."

I really love the idea of learning to form yourself. I've gotten bad grades in some classes but walked out with information that really shaped my thoughts on the class topic. I've gotten A+ in some classes that I remember nothing from. These are obviously extremes, but I've often thought about going back to the professors of classes and showing them how much I actually did learn in their class-- even if it wasn't what I supposed to learn for an exam.

Questions:
1. What do you think education is for?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Paper Darts prompted writers to write a memoir in three sentences or less for a flash nonfiction contest. While the title says memoir, I think a lot of these are little essays. I'm only going to talk about the winner, Yielding to the Glory of the Gnarled... but I encourage to read more of the submissions! They are only three sentences long so I know you can read a few. If you read others let me know about your favorite.

When I was a child, they diagnosed the fire in my joints and encouraged me to fear every step I took, every action I made. As I grew older, I challenged the limits they put on me by running through the fire — as far as I could go — and yielding to the glory of the gnarled, twisted, burning healing process that followed... Today, I limp with exuberance... the confident gait of victorious warrior, destined to run forever. --Kim Opitz

I really love this and I can see why it won. The language is so poetic and it almost reads more like a prose poem than an essay. Poetry and essay are melding a lot right now, I've seen essays in the form of poems all over the place. I'm very excited about this phenomenon because it's really pushing the idea of what an essay is. These three sentences tell a story so succinctly, which is something I doubt most people think of when they hear the word essay. My impression is that most people think of long drawn out arguments.

You can tell that in Yielding to the Glory of the Gnarled each word, each punctuation mark, was chosen very carefully. I love how "gnarled, twisted, burning healing process that followed..." fades, leaving you to imagine what the healing process felt like. The sentences move through time easily, "When I was a child," "As I grew older," "Today."

What do you like about this piece? I would love it if some of you tried to write your own three sentence memoirs and shared them with me in the comments!

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Note: I'm posting this on Thursday rather than Monday because I was participating in a book tour on Monday.

Essays Read this Week:
1. On the power of imagination
2. One man's profit is another man's loss
3. On habit: and on never easily changing traditional law

Favorite Quotations:
"When imaginary thoughts trouble us we break into sweats, start trembling, grow pale or flush crimson; we lie struck supine on our featherbeds and feel our bodies agitated by such emotions; some even die from them." (On the power of imagination)

"Married folk have time at their disposal: if they are not ready the should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better to fail to make it properly on the marriage-couch, full as it is of feverish agitation, and to wait for an opportune moment, more private and less challenging. Before processing his wife, a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all. Those who know that their member is naturally obedient should merely take care to out-trick their mental apprehensions." (On the power of imagination)

General Thoughts:
This week was essentially sex advice from Montaigne. What a dirty dead white guy. Okay, he wasn't that dirty, but he does seem awfully concerned with the performance of men's members during sex. On the power of imagination was an essay about our ability to convince ourselves bad things will happen. I can totally relate to this. I am the queen of psyching myself out. If you go into something thinking it will be bad, it will probably be bad. Montaigne has several examples of this, almost all of them are related to sex. Apparently the best way to illustrate this phenomenon is discussing men who are unable to have intercourse because they are convinced they won't be able to perform.

Seriously. If you read no other Montaigne essay read this one. It has some naughty bits.

One man's profit is another man's loss. Don't think that one needs much explaining and it's only a page long.

On habit was quite interesting but drug on way too long. He talks about how others perceive what we believe is perfectly normal. My favorite example was a guy who blew his nose with his fingers because he said boogers weren't special enough for him to blow them in a hanky and carry them around all day. Classic. Not all of his examples are boogers though. He lists several things that are considered normal in other cultures, like burning their dead and polygamy and nose rings, but that seem odd to Europeans. Then he turns the tables and writes about things other cultures probably find odd and he does so in such a way that makes the reader see the strangeness of these things too. Basically, everyone is weird.

Questions:
1. Would you take sex advice from a dead man?
2. Are boogers special?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The essay editor of Wag's Revue came to talk to my literary magazine publishing class today and I was impressed by how sizable the magazine's nonfiction section was. I've been browsing small lit mags for awhile and it seems like most of them throw nonfiction in as an afterthought. Wag's Revue seems to have a few essays in each issue, and they can all be read online. There is a short essay called Birdwatching in Fresno by Steven Church in issue seven which is very representative of poetical nonfiction writing. I've written several recent posts about misconceptions concerning nonfiction (like my last Sunday Salon, and Birdwatching in Fresno really pushes the definition of "essay."

"The bird doesn't suspect and won't chase what doesn't move, what has only recently roosted, relocated, separated and plugged into the seismic shifts of jobs and geography. And he cannot know how you feel caged by the noise, pressed and petrified like the prairie dogs back home in Kansas who duck back into their holes when a raptor glides over the flats--even though you've done nothing wrong, nothing but act like a prairie dog scratching in the yard."

This passage really struck me because I'm attracted to language that deals with nature but also has a dark edge to it. This piece is very short so it's heavy while you're reading it but once you've finished there is a sense of relief. I liked this essay because it illustrates how essays can be topical while still being literary. If this wasn't labeled as essay I'm not sure most people would give it that label, particularly readers who don't think they like essays. If you were convinced by my post last week and want to try an essay Birdwatching in Fresno might be a quick one to see how essays are different from their common perception.

Even if you're not interested in the essay you should certainly check out Wag's Revue. It's an online only literary magazine and there is actually some quality writing in it, which is surprising to me after perusing several small online literary magazines. If you love blogging and reading but don't have a lot of experience with literary magazines this would be a good place to get started.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

My mom always asks me why I love essays so much. "I always hated essays when I was in school. I hated writing them and I certainly wasn't searching them out to read for fun." This seems to be the attitude a lot of people take towards essays.

It's unfortunate that creative essays share the word essay with academic essays, because they are completely different. I have to write academic essays for class. I have to read academic essays for class. I don't care much for either practice, even if I am a literary theory person. I mean, I like it as a form of study, but I don't search out academic essays to read on the weekends.

When you say essay to me, these are the things that come to mind. Joan Didion. Travel writing. Montaigne. Ryan Van Meter. Exploration. Narrative. Story. Dialogue. Chuck Klosterman. Michael Chabon. The Believer. Creative.

I'm beginning to realize that when I say essay to most other people this is what crosses their minds: boring.

This is what you make me do when you call essays boring.


I'm sure there are people out there who truly do hate creative essays and do find them boring. My guess, however, is that the majority of people do not. If you open your mind to the idea that a creative essay can be creative, interesting, innovative, you might be surprised by the amount of great writing out there you are missing. And it's all over the stupid name of the genre. This is why a lot of nonfiction enthusiasts have taken to calling it by different names. Creative Nonfiction. Literary nonfiction. Nonfiction writing. But to me these are good names for the practice of writing nonfiction creatively, and not so good for the practice of writing short creative nonfiction pieces. I suppose you could call it just that, short creative nonfiction, just like short stories.

In essence, however, short creative nonfiction pieces are short stories. The generally accepted layout is a little different, but they are essentially the same thing. I think if you explore some essays you will find writers you identify with, writers who thrill you, and writers who make you see things in a different way. At the core, this is what essays are to me: Pieces of writing which make me see things in a new way. And what is there to dislike about that?

If you're interested in reading more essays, please check out my weekly Saturday feature Awesome Essays, or if you looking for something more classical, check out my Montaigne Mondays to explore the father of the essay.

Do you already love essays? Are you thinking about giving them a try? What can I do to make you consider reading an essay?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Note: I'm posting this on Thursday rather than Monday because I was participating in a giveaway hop on Monday.

Essays Read this Week:
1. That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them
2. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without good reason
3. On punishing cowardice
4. The doings of certain ambassadors

Favorite Quotations:
"... that it is with pain as with precious stones which take on brighter or duller hues depending on the foil in which they are set: pain only occupies as much space as we make for her" (The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion).

"The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality" (The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion).

General Thoughts:
The longest essay I read was That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them, which is probably why I have the most to say about it. Montaigne spends quite a bit of this essay talking about pain and death, which was attractive to me this week because I have thumb injury causing quite a bit of pain. He says the most painful part of death is not death itself, but the time we spend thinking about it. Death, he says, is actually the release from pain. This basic principle can be moved to other parts of life though. For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about writing my papers, but once I finish the paper I find it's actual quite painless and relieving. If I would just quit thinking about the paper and write it I could save myself a lot of pain and misery.

I really liked the second quotation I posted from this essay though. It seems like the more negative energy you put out, the more you find yourself in a negative state of being. If you believe you are happy and put out positive energy, good things will come to you. This isn't always true, but I think there is something to be said for it. I've recently been dwelling in negatives so it seems like a lot of negative things have happened to me. In reality as many positive things have happened as negative, it's just easier to focus on the negative for some reason.

I did tsk tsk about halfway through this essay when Montaigne talks about how crazy women are for putting themselves through the pains of corsets and other crazier things (flaying themselves alive to have a fresh color in their skin?) just to become beautiful. Clearly Montaigne lived during a different time, but he doesn't acknowledge why women were driven to do these things, probably because no one thought about it much. But that is a story for another day...

Over the course of One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason and On punishing cowardice I felt like Montaigne was relying on Nature to explain new human values. He talks about how humans are going against Nature because of new technology and broken traditions, and what this means for humans. Just funny that this argument continues to go on today.

From The doings of certain ambassadors I came away loving the first idea of the essay. He says when he meets other people he tries to bring the conversation back to the subject each person knows best. I thought this was a great idea and one I should observe more frequently.


Questions:
1. Do you believe that having a negative/positive attitude changes the way you feel about yourself or your life? Do you think you can apply "positive spin" to your own reality?
2. What subject are you an expert on? What would others want you to talk about?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The New York Times is looking for essays on modern love by college students for a contest they are currently holding. I read last year's winner, Want to be My Boyfriend? Please Define by Marguerite Fields. It's a charming, real essay about the questions our generation has about love. Questions about monogamy and exclusivity. Fields describes her experience in the middle of everyone going against monogamy and rooting for multiple experiences, while she finds that this is not what she wants for herself.

She has a great sense of self, which is something I feel a lot of young nonfiction writers lack, and she is humorous without going overboard,"For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys, or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once. But there have been many, many encounters.
I’ve met guys in the park, at the deli, at galleries, at parties and on the Internet. The Internet idea came from thinking that if I could sift through people’s profiles, like applications, I could eliminate the obvious lunatics."

I think this section does a good job outlining the way love functions for young people today. We are constantly surrounded by reminders of it. If it's not a couple holding hands on the street it's the couple getting engaged on Facebook. We all know how Facebook has taken the importance of your relationship status to a catastrophic level. This isn't something Fields addresses, just one other factor to consider in the role of relationships in today's world.

Fields goes through the whole essay cooly, clear-headed, unaffected, until you reach the end and realize that she is not as unaffected as we thought. I was surprised by how well she pulled off that trick, for the majority of the essay I was frustrated with her, I didn't see the point in the essay if none of these encounters meant anything to her or changed anything about her. Then I reached the end and realized what she was trying to say all along.

You can read the whole essay at The New York Times, and if you're a college student with an essay on love you can enter this year's contest.

What would your story of modern love be about?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Rachel Kempf writes like she is my best friend. I say my specifically because in less than ten pages she talks about Belle and Sebastian, traveling, and the Missouri-Iowa border. Her essay Tricycle (which appears in the wonderful anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers

) is about her fear of graduating and leaving the wonderful friendships she created in college behind. More specifically she is afraid to leave behind her two best friends, Christian and Eric. Simultaneously she realizes her relationship with Christian and Eric is potentially toxic because Christian and Eric and a couple and she is the third wheel. They assure her she is not a third wheel, but that the three of them create a tricycle. This is a nice thought, but she is drifting away from her psychologist boyfriend and thinking about becoming a couple with Christian and Eric, even though she knows this is a dangerous idea.

The essay fits very well in the Twentysomething anthology because the thoughts are, well, very twentysomething. It's very concentrated on friendship, definitely a concern for young twentysomethings, but it's hard not to notice other people pairing off and becoming serious. Once people start pairing off it becomes clear that the friendships might not win out over the romance. College friendships are strange because you become close to the people you are with in college in a way that is so different from any other friendship. You are all going through the same changes and you see each other work towards adulthood. When college closes you realize you might never see these people you've become so close to ever again, and you're actually sad about it.

Kempf's strength is dialogue and uninhibited honesty, two great traits for any nonfiction writer to have. I did feel the conclusion to the essay was a little sloppy, she throws in several ideas she could have added to the essay in a paragraph at the end, but I think she needed to build the relationship between her, Christian, and Eric before sharing those details because the reader needs to really understand the relationship to understand why the details are important. She says a lot with small details, something I admire a lot because I know how difficult it is to do.

"On Tuesday it snows six inches, but by nighttime it's warm enough. We each pile on three layers of clothing and trek up to the quad at midnight for a snowball fight. An hour and a half later, we're walking back to my apartment for hot chocolate, and Eric stops on the sidewalk next to my building.

'Sweet, it's still there,' he says to himself.

I look down to where his feet are. ERIC <3's YOU is spelled out in footprints in the snow.

'Hey, I wrote you a message!' he yells to Christian, who is a few feet behind us.

Christian catches up, looks down at the ground. 'I love you, too.'

He says it quickly, like he's not used to saying it really, so this must be a fairly recent development between them. I'd suspected it for a while, but hearing it now makes me realize there is an entire world between the two of them that I am not even tangentially involved with."

I really like these scene because she manages to let you see the thoughts of all three characters in a very controlled way. I like how she sets the scene from a fun night with friends in the winter to a very specific realization.

Have you ever had an incredibly close relationship with a friend that you feared losing? What would your twentysomething essay be about?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Awesome Essays has returned, and with a graphic essay! Today I'm going to talk about Alison Bechdel's graphic essay Compulsory Reading. I think a lot of you will like this essay because you are readers. She starts the essay talking about how she hasn't read a novel for enjoyment in a long time and how she feels guilty about it, but then moves onto her early reading and how she felt she had to read a lot of classic novels because her dad told her to. She ends the essay on a different note, which is hilarious and true. You can read the whole thing on her website, Dykes to Watch Out For. Here is a funny bit from the beginning of the essay to start you off.

I obviously really like the subject of this essay as a reader and someone who believes that reading for enjoyment should be exactly that, enjoyment, and not an attempt to complete some lists of books "everyone has to read." I love the way Bechdel portrays the frantic search for a book after she realizes how long it's been since she read one. It seems like she is chased by a reading guilt ghost (don't we all have one of those?) and she can't escape the ghost until she finds the perfect book and finishes it. Of course, it's not enough to just pick one book, she has to make a stack of books to finish in order to assure herself she will not go this long without reading again.

There are a couple of questions this essay raises for me. Firstly, do any of you have a "reading guilt ghost" too? When you know you haven't read enough or feel like you haven't been reading the "right" books does it make you sweat a bit? How do you deal with that? Secondly, I've tried to show essays that take the idea of the essay to a different medium. This is obviously a graphic essay and I've also done posts about video essays before. Have some of you been surprised by how many forms essays come in?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Instead of talking about an essay today I want to share a video from the nonfiction blog Brevity that somehow manages to sum up my entire education on essays in a two minute xtranormal video. That is, how important is "truth" in creative nonfiction. Obviously when an author labels something as nonfiction he or she is implying that there is some truthiness to what he or she is saying, but there is also an understanding that in its creativity it is shaped by an author to appear a certain way. I know I emphasize certain parts of myself depending on what I am try to show in an essay-- the person I am on the page is a version of who I am in real life, but not my entire self. This is true for characters in fiction too, we're only getting a part of who that person is and we can never get a completely whole picture of a character because no narrator can be entirely objective.

How important is truth to you in nonfiction? For those of you who don't read a lot of nonfiction, are these things that you think about when you do encounter it?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Realism is a bore and a bother. It's been infinitely nicer to live in a world of illusion-that we were different from other nations, that we could ignore international agreements that didn't suit us, that we could go on using cheap energy without ever paying a price. Our success and our geographic isolation have let us get away with those delusions, but September 11 has shown them for what they were. Hence the need for real realism, for a view more clear-eyed and hard-nosed than we've had before.
This fall seems to have been the fall of Bill McKibben. I saw him at the Englert Theater in October, I read his writing in my nature writing class, I participated in a climate awareness event the organization he leads hosted, and I talked about his book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

on the most recent Green Reads podcast. He has several articles up on his website, but one that really struck me was An End to Sweet Illusions, which you can read in Mother Jones. The above quote is from this essay (Is this an essay? Is it an opinion piece? I must admit I'm straddling the line a bit.) and I think it's a good summation of the overarching point. This is from early 2002, so clearly September 11 was still extremely present in America, and there were a lot of questions about how we should approach the War on Terrorism.

McKibben shares ideas on the war, but uses it to help us understand that the way American functions today is not stable. And that going to war, while it might seem realistic on the surface, might actually make our country more vulnerable than we have been. "The American Way of Life," he says, should not be seen as stable because it has been successful in the past. Almost nine years after this essay was first written, I think it's safe to say the way we live is not stable. We are still struggling to find the security we thought we had before 9/11, but instead of backpedaling to the past we need to make plans for our new future.

I love the way McKibben writes because he uses simple language to describe environmental and political problems so anyone can understand him. Even though his ideas seem daunting at first, you find yourself wanting to learn more and more from him. On our podcast I talk about how his book Eaarth is a great starter book for anyone interested in environmentalism right now. I came away from that book with so much knowledge. I think this essay is a great starter piece to get you thinking about problems with the environment and politics, and while McKibben is kind of a downer, I do think there is some hope in what he writers.

Check out An End to Sweet Illusions on Mother Jones and let me know what you think about it! I'd also really appreciate it if you listened to the most recent Green Reads podcast.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

It's obvious I'm obsessed with essays and really want to make all of you love them too. I've studied essays as long as I've been in college (almost three years!) and read them before I came here, but in 2011 I would like to take a few steps back. My Awesome Essays posts typically focus on newer essays, or at least essays from the 1960's to present. I like that focus because I think it's easier for people to read those essays and discuss them. But for those of you who are up to a bit of a challenge, you might like to join me in the 2011 Montaigne Readalong. This isn't a challenge, you can participate as much or as little as you like.

This really my own self challenge. I want to read all of Montaigne's essays in one year, no small feat. Michel de Montaigne is a 16th Century writer, so obviously the writing style is very different from what we read today. The edition I plan to read is 1,344 pages long! Now you understand why I want to read it over the course of a year. Break that huge number down, and you're reading about 25 pages a week, which probably about as much Montaigne as I can take every week.

So where do you fit into all of this?

You don't really even need to sign-up, although it'd be nice to let me know if you want to participate in any way by leaving a comment. I'm going to post a schedule for what essays I'm going to read each week on a page underneath my header. If you're struck to join in for any particular week, you can go there and find out what essays I'm reading so you can discuss them on my blog post that week. Basically you can follow along as much as you want, joining in on conversations a few time over the year or every week (if you dare).

How do I find the essays?

The great thing about Montaigne is that he is in the public domain! That means you don't even have to buy a book to participate in this. One option is to subscribe to Montaigne's Essais on Daily Lit. This way you'll get essays emailed to your account as often as you like, although I'll tell you there are 459 parts to the Daily Lit subscription, meaning that if you got an email every day it would still take you over a year to read. I think these should line up with my book, although I'm not entirely certain yet. You can also check out some of the essays on Oregon State's website. If you're really excited you can read the same book I am, the Penguin edition called The Complete Essays.

I'll provide more information about all of this later, but I wanted you all to know I am hosting this next year!

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

We spent the entire week talking about AIDS in my essay film class and the first piece we read was Richard Rodriguez's essay Late Victorians in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

. This essay deals with AIDS, San Francisco, and the gay community. I'm not going to talk about that essay here though, because you can't read it online, but I highly advise all of you to read it in the anthology if you get the chance.

Instead I'm going to talk about a short essay he wrote called Speaking American. This appeared on PBS Newshour in June 1998. California had just voted to end bilingual education in an effort to make Spanish speaking children in particular learn English. In the essay Rodriguez explores the meaning of our language and argues that we do not, in fact, speak English. We speak American-- a language comprised of all the immigrants who have landed here. We use German words, Spanish words, Yiddish words. We use it all. And he argues for a pride in this language, a pride in the fact that a language such as this can exist.

I love Rodriguez's writing style. It's very simple, yet powerful. I had never read anything by him until this week and I was instantly hooked by his essay, Late Victorians, because it so clearly outlined a place. It reminded me of Joan Didion's writing in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but then entirely different. What I love about both writers is that they tackle the present in such a way that they encapsulate a generation. Rodriguez writes from a completely different time and perspective than Didion, but I love him for a lot of the same reasons. Speaking American is very short, and you can read it at PBS.

If you want to read more about my obsession with Joan Didion you can read the Awesome Essays post I did on her.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

A couple of weeks ago we watched a film called Chekhov For Children in my essay film class. Out of everything we've watched so far this semester it is probably my favorite film. The actual film is 74 minutes long and difficult to get ahold of because it's an essay film and not something you would see in a movie theater. If you're at the University of Iowa or in the area you should go see it at the Bijou Theater between December 10 and 14. Visit their website for more details on that screening. The film is about the director, Sasha Waters Freyer, and her experience in a New York public school where her class worked with Phillip Lopate (a god of essays) on a production of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya. Anyone who knows anything about Anton Chekhov realizes that a play by him is probably incredibly difficult for students in the fifth grade to put on. Lopate wrote an essay about this experience as well with the same title as the film.

While the film is about Sasha Waters Freyer, it is also not. She is rarely present in front of the camera and the majority of the film is interviews with other students who were involved with the production, interviews with Phillip Lopate, and video footage Freyer took in elementary school when she filmed the play. There are also videos the children made in elementary school during that time Lopate was present. It's amazing in the video to see these children working with really complex ideas and it shows just how aware kids really are of the world around them. There is also a sense of nostalgia for the time Freyer grew up but also a sense of pride for the people who came out of that production.

Since I obviously can't show you the entire film I thought I'd show you the trailer and a section of the film I find particularly essayistic, even though Freyer isn't speaking in it.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

Last night I kind of officially threw the hat in on National Novel Writing Month. I currently have about 17,000 words and there is no way I'll be able to catch-up in a week. When I first looked back on last year it seemed like this year should be just as doable. But in reality my job actually requires me to do real work now, whereas last year I just sat at a desk and worked on homework. I also lived in the dorms last year and didn't have to deal with any real life responsibilities, like cooking dinners and cleaning. And I had a lot less night classes. All three of these things seemed to contribute to my downfall this year.

But I'm not giving up entirely. I'd still like to write another 15,000 words before the end of the year, which is a goal that seems doable to me. And as far as writing goes, I've been more successful this year than I was last year because I have produced five essays this month that are great starts. I actually want to work with these essays more and continue honing them. At the end of last November I said I would go back and edit my novel, but I never did. I never edited it because I didn't feel passionate about anything I wrote. I think I learned more from National Novel Writing Month this year than last year. I learned what process works well for me when writing an essay, and I pushed myself to write some narrative nonfiction which I've never done before.

Overall the experience was a success. It got me in the habit of thinking about essay topics all the time. Whenever I had a conversation or saw something happen I thought about how I might turn that into an essay. The truth is that great essays are all around you, you just have to be aware. I think that is what essaying is all about-- being aware of what is going on around you and how it fits into a chain of reactions. So while I didn't win in the sense of getting 50,000 words, I still consider this year a win.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

I was struck by Bonnie Rough's essay, Walking With an Essayist, this morning for two reasons. One, I love to walk and have been doing far too little of it as of late. What is it with essayists and walking anyway? I feel like we do so much of it. Fiction writers must be runners. Poets are swimmers. Two, I'm working on an essay collection for National Novel Writing Month and was inspired by Rough's thoughts on writing. Hopefully other NaNoers will find this essay inspiring even if they're not working on essays this month. You can read the entire essay online at Identity Theory.

Rough starts the essay saying she wants to speed through her walk because she has an essay she wants to work on when she gets home, but then her inner essayist reminds her of what a favorite writer, Brenda Ueland, said about walking:
“‘When I walk grimly and calisthenically,’” I recite, “‘just to get exercise and get it over with, to get my walk out of the way, then I find that I have not been re-charged with imagination. For the following day when I try to write there is more of the meagerness than if I had not walked at all. But if when I walk I look at the sky or the lake or the tiny, infinitesimally delicate, bare, young trees, or wherever I want to look, and my neck and jaw are loose and I feel happy and say to myself with my imagination, “I am free,” and “There is nothing to hurry about,” I find then that thoughts begin to come to me in their quiet way.’”
Bravo, says the Essayist with brisk applause.
The essay continues in this manner with Rough thinking about the essay in one way and her inner essayist coming out to remind her of what Brenda Ueland said about writing. I love Rough's description of her inner essayist, and how she treats her like a frenemy in the essay. At one point two other walkers are giggling and Rough thinks they are laughing at her inner essayist because "she is wearing ruffled gauntlets under a purple cape pinned by an enormous brooch. But it turns out they don’t even notice us. Between hysterical gasps, they cough out words to each other."

Rough gets excited about the idea of her essay and begins to think about who will buy it, even though she hasn't put a word on the page yet. Her inner essayist comes in here as well, asking her how she can think about such a thing when she doesn't even know what she is making yet. I think all writers experience this. Our excitement about what we're writing makes us have so much faith in it and we think about where we will take it. But then we end up writing for that person we want to take it to, rather than writing the essay for itself.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

When I'm stuck writing one of the first essaysists I look to for inspiration is Joan Didion. I reviewed her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem recently, and while I only gave it a B I really loved it. As a collection I just thought it moved rather slowly. While reading that collection I found another essay by her called In Bed. The version I'm linking to is a little different from the version I read in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

, but you'll get the idea. It's very short-- just about four pages. I was drawn to this essay because I've been experiencing some medical issues recently that are outside of my control. I could really relate to Didion's story about migraine, an illness she has struggled with her entire life and has absolutely no control over.

This essay is really more personal than most of Didion's other work-- The Year of Magical Thinking

removed from that statement. She does very little "journalism" in this piece, although she does have a good paragraph of research about migraine and what causes them. Research is something I really admire about Joan Didion's writing, and it's something I wish I could incorporate into my writing more. Through research Didion is able to give us a whole new understanding of what a migraine is, and then when we have the scientific understanding of it that makes our understanding of her personal experience that much stronger. I also love that she includes others outside herself who experience migraine. She doesn't describe anyone directly, but lists off other kinds of people who are challenged by migraine, including "unfortunate children as young as two years old." She weaves herself into these people as well though; directly after the previous quotation she mentions her first migraine happened when she was eight.

And of course this essay is about migraine-- but it's also about having no understand of something that effects you every day. It's a universal problem, and it transcends the "simple human experience" and moves to our experience as a nation. War effects some people every day, they cannot even begin to understand it or control it, but it comes. This is an extreme example, but when Didion says, "We do not escape heredity. I have tried in most of the available ways to escape my own migrainous heredity... but I still have migraine" --- I'm led to think that it's more than just medical history we try to escape, it's our connections with anything we'd rather not be a part of.

This video is really interesting in regards to Joan Didion. She kind of describes her love of writing in this short interview.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

I haven't read a lot about Africa or a lot of postcolonial literature, but I was really struck by this satirical essay in my essay film class this week. How to Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina is a look at the Western perception of Africa and how Westerners portray Africa in literature, film, and other media. I'm not a big fan of satire, but Wainaina does a great job of controlling his comments and returning to ideas over the course of this very short essay. He talks a lot about the African landscape; it has to be portrayed as beautiful, orange, and rolling, but people on the landscape must be black, thin, and starving. The following passage encompasses a lot of the feelings that come out in the essay:

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.
Africans are often associated with music, and while there is some truth to that there are other cultures that are highly musical that we don't pay as much attention to. With the bit about food I think he is trying to point out how Westerners push the differences between the West and Africa and really dehumanize it. Earlier in the essay he says we "should" talk about Africa as if it were an entire country, which of course Africa is not. It's a continent. The final sentence is what really interests me though-- "because you care." As Westerners we feel the need to talk about Africa and discuss it to show that we care about it. But we only care about it in a cultural sense.

You can go to Granta to read the essay, or you can listen to it by watching this video. I like the video, but I'll warn you that some parts of the essay are missing-- not a lot, you'll still get the idea.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

After spending a lot of time listening to panels about the future of books today I thought it was only fitting to talk about an essay I read (in an issue of Creative Nonfiction I got at the Twin Cities Book Festival) about what publishing will look like in 2025. In number 31 of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction essayists wrote on the topic Writing and Publishing in 2015 and Beyond. Phillip Lopate, the man who edited the anthology The Art of the Personal Essay titled his predictions The Best of Times, Worst of Times. One of his most interesting ideas is bringing old authors back from the dead, and in doing this he predicts they'll produce nothing more than boring biographies full of their regrets. You can read a portion of this short essay on Creative Nonfiction's website.

Lopate also predicts that the physical book will continue to exist, but that the industry will be full of experimentation. One example is the book-lozenge, "which dissolved novella-sized works on the tongue, not to mention the book-shot, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary does with their daily injections." Can you imagine being given an entire book through candy? I think it might be fun to try every once in awhile, but I wouldn't want it to replace books. What does that say about our culture? That we'd rather be fed culture than experience it?

I'm really interested to hear what other people think about Lopate's predictions and what all of you think might happen in the book industry by 2025. A more serious suggestion made by Jeff Kamin at the Twin Cities Book Festival today was offering paperback books with the hardcovers simply because people will probably buy the book sooner. I think this is a really good idea and a lot of us agreed on that today.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.