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Glorious Facts: Research and the Research Essay

Facts in all their glorious complexity make possible creativity. The best nonfiction writers are first-rate reporters, reliable eyewitnesses focused on the world, not themselves, and relentless researchers with the imagination to understand the implications of their discoveries.

—PHILIP GERARD

Working on a book that combined memoir with environmental writing, I found in many areas I was overwhelmed with information. Pesticide research, industrial waste, radiation, and the course of the Cold War: books, papers, old newspapers piled up and slid off my desk, defying all attempts at organization. In other ways, though, I found questions that had no answers: questions about the root causes of environmentally related disease, family stories that were irreconcilably different in everyone’s telling.

It was an enormous relief to sit at my desk one day and realize that the lack of answers—the evasions, the uncertainties, the whole process—was a story in itself. I continued to research as doggedly as I could, but when I came up blank again and again, I began asking that emptiness whether it had a story to tell. One day I conclude the tale of a particularly frustrating phone call with these words: “I make telephone calls, hour after hour. Mostly I listen to message machines. EPA sends me to DEP, which sends me to ATSDR, which sends me to the County Board of Health, which says it has no records.”

By the time I wrote this passage, I had tried to write around what I couldn’t uncover, in many awkward and unsuccessful ways. I avoided subjects I needed to confront, or I tried to fake a knowledge I didn’t have. I finally realized—with a liberating shock—that the reader needed to confront my own frustrations and uncertainties just as I had, to understand this story. The reader needed to hear and see the whole inquiry, even the phone calls that petered out into more avenues of possibility without certainty.

—SUZANNE

The Myriad Things Around Us

Can you imagine writing an entire book about four plants? One exhibit in a quirky museum? Sand? Lovely, profound, and popular books have been published in the last few years about such things. We call this genre topical nonfiction—essays that draw from specific, concrete topics. New journalism, a mode of journalism identified in the 1970s, led the way to topical nonfiction, as journalists like Tom Wolfe insisted the teller of the story must always be considered an active and subjective presence in the work.

Michael Pollan, in the Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, chose as a subject four plants—marijuana, the app’le, the tulip, and the potato—weaving into their histories stories of cultural shifts, the drive for intoxication, and how we humans adapt to our plants as much as they adapt to us. Pollan’s own garden and experiences with these plants provide a memoiristic thread.

Another research-oriented nonfiction writer, Atul Gawande, is a surgeon. His books have covered medical topics such as how we handle the end of life, but also more apparently mundane subjects, such as checklists. Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, offers a fascinating look at human decision-making, and what happens in the process of making mistakes.

Finally, Mary Cappello’s Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them is a terrific example of how research can unlock new obsessions. With a spare afternoon in a strange (to her) city, she wandered into Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, a museum of the history of medicine and medical anomalies. There, she found herself drawn to a collection of strange objects humans had swallowed, amassed by a doctor named Chevalier Jackson. Cappello made many more visits to the museum to write her book, which encompasses Jackson’s biography along with deeper questions of why people, whether patients or healers, feel compelled to do what they do.

Eastern religions speak reverently of “Indra’s net”—a web of interconnectedness with a jewel at each intersection that can be used to embody the interconnectedness of the world. Gifted writers find the “webs” attached to the subjects that draw them—the deeper implications of an intoxicating plant or a compulsive, yet destructive, behavior.

As a writer, once you begin to look closely at what’s around you—recognizing both the closest details and the larger ways each thing fits into the “Indra’s net” that holds us all together—nothing will seem less than a fruitful subject for your writing.

Porosity

Perhaps we can equate openness to research with openness to incorporating the world around us and its events into our own life meditations, a kind of artistic porosity to the world around us. Porous materials, such as fabrics, absorb what comes in contact with them. The best nonfiction writers have a special porosity to what is around them; they’re unable to ignore even a moth they happen to notice.

Not everyone will want to do full-blown investigative journalism. It’s worth remembering that sometimes the best research we can do involves going somewhere we wouldn’t normally go and talking to people we wouldn’t normally talk to—and of course, really listening. Are you writing an essay about someone who lifts weights? Get a day pass to a gym and absorb the culture of weight lifting—how lifters push themselves, how muscle curves out of itself when flexed. Imaginatively, see your subject there.

Be open and interested. If you want to write about your childhood, don’t settle for your memories, but look at the inventions, history, and popular culture that shaped your world at the time. Look up timelines of scientific breakthroughs, hit movies and songs, and key events from the period. (Many online sites provide such timelines.) Do the same for family members you write about. Create an inner sketch of the tastes, politics, and social standards of their worlds. What messages were they hearing? How did those messages help shape them into the people they became—the people you know?

Using Fact as Metaphor

Factual research will most often be used for what it is: fact. Water may contain a certain complex of chemicals; weight lifting may have such-and-such effects on the body. These facts can become the basis of an essay that explores the physical wonders and limitations of our world. At times, however, fact will also function as metaphor, informing the essay both on its own terms—information about the physical world the reader may need or find interesting—and as a basis for comparison for a more intangible part of the piece.

One writer, Jen Whetham, wrote an essay, “Swimming Pool Hedonist,” chronicling how swimming and swimming pools have defined her and held her milestones: learning to trust, early sports success, even a first sexual encounter. The first draft of the essay began by saying, “My earliest memory is at a swimming pool,” and included a passing reference to the odor of chlorine. That odor turned up again and again, and so Jen researched the chemistry of chlorine; she came up with this section in her final version:

My skin has always smelled like chlorine. . . .

Chlorine is missing one electron from its outer shell: this makes it highly attractive to other molecules. Chlorine’s extreme reactivity makes it a powerful disinfectant: it bonds with the outer surfaces of bacteria and viruses and destroys them. When it kills the natural flora on human skin, the reaction creates the stuffy, cloudy smell we associate with chlorine.

Chlorine marks us in ways we cannot see.

The essay goes on to use the touchstone of chlorine—odorless, changing forever what it contacts—as a metaphor for all the invisible ways life touches and changes us, and how we touch and change one another. It is a subtle and nuanced use of fact as fact, and fact as metaphor.

Researching a Key Piece of a Story

In Terry Tempest Williams’s “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” the close of her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Williams begins to examine the larger forces that may be contributing to her family’s high breast cancer rate. In the following excerpt, you can see her seamless and organic movement from personal history into researched analysis. She has, as this dialogue begins, told her father of a recurring dream she has of a flash of light in the desert.

“You did see it,” he said.

“Saw what?”

“The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, California. You were sitting on Diane’s lap. She was pregnant. . . . We pulled over and suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it, clearly, this golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the car.”

Williams goes on to tell us that “above ground atomic testing in Nevada took place from January 27, 1951, through July 11, 1962.” Williams provides an analysis of the political climate of the period—the growth of McCarthyism and the Korean War—summarizes litigation stemming from the tests, and returns seamlessly to her own story. She clearly researches the dates of the bomb testing as well as the wind patterns during those years, but she weaves those facts unobtrusively into her own narrative.

Launching (and Loving) the Research Essay

Sometimes, maybe much of the time for certain writers, we use research just to expand on a key detail in a piece. When did a family member arrive in the United States? What is the science behind an eclipse you watched? When those crucial “moments of being” occur in your nonfiction, you want to make sure you fully understand their components.

Even in a more researched essay, one perfect fact can keep readers tied emotionally to your story. In Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies, the author spends a period of many months simply observing the terrain of the Savage River, near her home. In her essay from that book, “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” (see Anthology), Hurd begins her exploration of listening with a gripping piece of history:

In China long ago, people hid drums inside holes they’d dug along ancient roadways. To put an ear to the ground was to bend down, miles, maybe days, later and listen for the deep percussion of the enemy’s boots approaching.

China and its history do not recur in this essay, but the concept of listening as vital to survival does, as the author, a naturalist, attempts to connect with her home landscape through sound.

The research-driven essay, one that begins with a subject and builds its narrative on the quest to learn about it, is one every writer should try. We think you’ll want to keep research writing in your repertoire—doing original research and connecting it to your obsessions can be exhilarating. You get to challenge yourself to understand your own fascinations and draw readers into them as well.

Emily Dickinson calls those subjects that dwell in our minds and form our obsessions our flood subjects. Like Cappello visiting that swallowing collection at the Mutter Museum, we keep returning to our flood subjects. We can’t help ourselves. We want, even need, to know more.

A powerful way to begin a research essay is by freewriting on a flood subject. When did you first learn about, or encounter, this subject? Why does it obsess you? What was your version of that fateful turn into the Mutter Museum? Consider what you do know about your flood subject, what you don’t, and what you most want to learn.

As you write, list questions. Create “research challenges” for yourself. If you want to understand why physicists believe time may be only a limited construct, or why birds migrate, or why your grandparents won’t talk about the country they emigrated from, write down all the questions you have, with provisional ideas for answering them. Write the simple, factual questions first and proceed to the more complex and conceptual ones. Don’t stop yourself because you think you cannot answer the question. Often, if you consider your options—participatory research, primary sources, interviews—you’ll find the impossible becomes possible. Research plans should always be ambitious.

As we freewrite about a research subject, deeper, metaphorical, even philosophical questions often emerge. Scratch the surface of a fact and it may suggest something profound about what it means to exist in this world. To continue the grandparent example, this progression from straightforward to more complex questions might look like this: “I wonder if I could learn details of the political situation at the time they left,” to “What does it mean for family trust when stories are kept secret?”

Science and Other Technical Research

Albert Einstein wrote, in his essay “The World as I See It”: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” This sense of the mysterious can visit us daily, if we’re open to it. A friend said recently that every time he reads the news, he finds something that shakes up his view of the world: Stephen Hawking has pronounced we must colonize other planets and should fear computer intelligence; there may be infinite parallel universes; smart homes may soon make more decisions about our lives than we do.

When you write about science in creative nonfiction, it becomes much more than a recitation or analysis of facts: it is a means of probing the deepest levels of our common existence. Right now, we live steeped in startling scientific and technological advances. These changes signal more than quirky facts. They speak to our deepest assumptions about who we are.

It can be intimidating to draft an essay about a field in which we don’t have expert training, whether it’s medicine, science, technology, or another area. But many successful writers, including Annie Dillard and Mary Roach, show us how an interested layperson can bring plenty of insight to such essays. These writers do their homework, using reading, immersion, and interviews. They also bring their vulnerable selves to their subjects. In the essay “Total Eclipse,” Dillard writes, “The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” Later she tells us “the Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, looks, through binoculars, like a smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploding. Light from its explosion first reached the earth in 1054.” Dillard lets us see the sky with her subjective vision before giving us astronomical history.

Of course, in areas in which you have training and expertise, use them! Just remember that your readers will always need your personal voice to guide them through an unfamiliar topic, as the image of something as temporary as a smoke ring makes the millennia contained in the nebula’s light hit home.

Participatory Research

Working with Immersion

Immersion refers to the technique of actually living an experience, typically briefly, to write about it. The late George Plimpton, who was a writer and editor of the Paris Review, lived as a football player to research the book Paper Lion. Lee Gutkind, a writer and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, has done a great deal of immersion writing: he has lived as a circus clown and has followed transplant doctors and umpires on their rounds.

Writers differ in their approaches to immersion research. Gutkind writes of the author’s need to become invisible, almost a piece of furniture in the room with the subject(s): “I like to compare myself to a rather undistinguished and utilitarian end table.” Joan Didion, on the other hand, is always a presence in her research, one whose shy and questioning self forms another character in the piece.

The writer Mary Roach’s books are remarkable for the zeal with which she tackles immersion. Funny and deeply informative, Roach’s books offer readers a chance to share experiences we’ll probably never have. Her fumbling around in odd situations makes her books funny and approachable. In Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, for example, she experiences as much as she can of space simulations. Roach “Supermans it,” as she puts it, around a capsule in zero gravity, examining how simple bodily functions can become ludicrously difficult in that environment.

Immersion provides readers with a real-time experience they would likely never have. At the same time, immersion exposes you, the author, in a profound way. You are the reader’s surrogate, with both your curiosities and your uncertainties illuminated by this new act. Your sense of yourself, your self-confidence, and your assumptions will probably be pushed and probed. When we’re in unfamiliar territory, it outlines who we are—both before and after the experience.

Suzanne once, for a book, learned simple sign language and conversed with an orangutan named Chantek, who had been raised signing. The gravity of the orangutan’s responses, the sense of him as a present, sentient being, revealed a great deal about animal intelligence. It also challenged Suzanne’s sense of what it means to be human and revealed her nervous presence, as she attempted to converse with a creature so seemingly different, one caged in a zoo.

What experiences would enhance your research? Keep this question in mind as you plan, laying out research challenges for yourself. Our students have practiced tantric yoga, interviewed therapists, spent time in sensory deprivation tanks. Again and again we hear comments like, “I couldn’t believe they let me do this,” and “I couldn’t believe how open they were.” Don’t write off any possible experience. Most people love introducing someone to things they are passionate about. One deep immersion can make an essay or even a book.

Place-Based Research

Place-based research may overlap with immersion, but it invokes a greater sense of observation. It is experiential, but in a less participatory sense. In place-based research, we work on uncovering and meditating on the meaning of a place—the layers of geography, history, even human desire that have made it what it is. And part of this story of place is our story—our need to be there, our fascination with the place, and often our drive to put our own mark on it. It differs from the approach to place writing described in Chapter 3, “Taking Place,” in that here, the place itself becomes the subject.

In place-based research, you might choose a place that interests you but that you don’t know well. Or you may decide to sink yourself into a place you already know. Orhan Pamuk, in Istanbul: Memories and the City, meditates on the city of his childhood, its history, its neighborhoods, its faults, and its triumphs. It is his intimacy with Istanbul that propels the book, a connection he describes this way:

My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.

In “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” (see Anthology), Barbara Hurd, along with her granddaughter Samantha, chooses to connect with this land through listening, like the Chinese peoples she references at the start. She goes out to the river with a game plan: “Sometimes when I put my ear to the ground, I make my own arbitrary rules: No listening for anything that has a plan for me. No listening to anything that knows I’m listening.” Along with her granddaughter, the author puts her ear to the ground—literally!—and hears the “whish of ferns,” a sound that leads her to a meditation on these plants, at once both so prevalent and so primeval, and their role in this place she is observing.

Marjorie Rose Hakala, in “Jumping the Fence” (see Anthology), offers a meditation on a type of place: zoos. She focuses on the significance of places where animals exist to be seen, live in confinement, and only capture the public’s attention when “(1) An animal was born. (2) An animal died. (3) The barriers broke down. Something got out of the zoo, or someone got in.” Her piece focuses on times when creatures escape their enclosures, or when humans break in, and the implications: A cobra escapes its glass case, but after a long period of searching, is found still in its World of Reptiles building. A tipsy dental student jumps into an ostrich enclosure and steals an egg. Ultimately, Hakala considers the yearnings of both humans and animals, as these are captured in the physical places of zoos:

Building a fence and tearing one down are both acts of violence against the ideal of peaceful freedom, an ideal that could never be realized unless we redesigned the whole menagerie of earth. We build an illusion of that world instead and gaze in, our hands against the glass, hoping the barrier will hold, wondering if today is the day when it will break.

Focusing in on a place through research, striving to understand it, is deeply rewarding. What places feel essential to you, your family, your history? Or conversely, what places seem to hold secrets you would love to unlock? As you plan your research, make note of the places that inform your story or capture your imagination. Stay attentive to what wonders observation can unfold.

The Interview

You’ll find as many interview styles as there are writers in this world. One of the great interviewers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was Italian writer Oriana Fallaci. Fallaci was more than a questioning presence at her interviews: she was an active listener and provocateur, one whose presence often became the interview. When the Ayatollah Khomeini told Fallaci he did not force women to cover themselves, she removed her head covering. (He left the room.) She also asked the Shah of Iran if he would arrest a journalist like her if she were Iranian. (He would.)

Regardless of your style, here are some tips that will help any interview go more productively. Most researchers ask a few “throw-off” questions—those with simple and less important answers—to relax their subjects before moving on to more difficult questions. And, as far as that goes, the toughest questions should be saved for last. If someone shuts down because you ask her about her silence around her first marriage, you don’t want that uneasiness to ruin the whole interview. Begin with the simplest and least emotional information, and move forward from there.

Always begin an interview with a list of questions you want to ask; a prepared list will prevent you from forgetting to ask something important because of nerves or simple absentmindedness. Also, end interviews with an open-ended question that will direct you to your next research source. Finally, ask your subject what questions that person thinks you should ask. It’s surprising how much insight and new information emerges through this method.

Be respectful, always, with the people who grant you an interview. And with everyone who appears in your writing, for that matter. Always ask people how they wish to be designated—pronouns, titles, and how they’d like their names to appear.

Developing Print Research Skills

Here we’ll explore three commonly used and easily accessed print research sources—the library, the internet, and primary sources, such as legal documents and letters.

The Library

Libraries, even in the age of the internet, remain a powerful resource. They are home to books we need, along with archives, special collections, and research librarians. Library websites have become more and more helpful, as the last few decades have seen a rush of digitizing library collections. The New York Public Library, one of our country’s premier libraries, has digitized three-quarters of a million documents, photos, and other media.

Library collections differ greatly, and it helps to get to know the libraries you have access to. Cities like New York have an astonishing number of libraries. Major universities alone may have upward of a dozen. Identify before you go what books or other materials will help you along.

For library browsing, reference librarians are every library’s secret treasure. They are there to help you find the resources you need for your work, and they will know their library’s collections well. Western Washington University’s reference librarian Paul Piper suggests you develop a relationship with the research librarians at any library you regularly use. Let them know what your projects are—they will get a sense of what you want and keep a lookout for it.

Libraries often house special collections and archives within their walls. These hold rare books and manuscripts and other original materials: videos, photos, diaries, to name a few possibilities. Often the papers of notable people, such as letters, handwritten poems or stories, sketches, and the like, are housed in libraries. Library archives, too, hold original documents and other historical works. Some archived material may be available online in digital form. But much will not, and we encourage you to carefully search library holdings. Seeing and holding original documents related to your passions is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Special collections can be regional. The Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at our Western Washington University library houses an in-depth collection of materials involving the Northwest. It includes letters, photos, old newspapers, maps, and rare books. These collections are treasure troves. Even if you’re not certain what you’re looking for, if an archive or special collection dovetails with your interests, it will richly reward your time.

The Internet

An enormous amount of material is posted on the web in its entirety—Environmental Protection Agency reports, NASA photographs, the records of ships carrying immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island. And so much more. Numerous databases can put you in touch with books and articles on particular topics—PubMed for medical research, and JSTOR, which is a wealth of books, primary sources, and journal articles, to name just two. JSTOR alone allows full-text searches from nearly two thousand journals. There are thousands of quality databases out there.

It is an exciting and a bewildering time to do internet research. In addition to text-based search possibilities, there are videos, photos, podcasts. There are several thousand TED talks available online, talks by experts on an enormous variety of topics. The Khan Academy offers quality, free online courses on everything from literature to computing, geared to all levels of learners. Other institutions offer free online courses as well. We strongly urge you to go beyond looking for specific answers to your research questions and cast a wider net to see what’s out there.

If you can think of an institution that would house information you need, consider checking its website. Museums, libraries, government organizations, private groups, all offer immense amounts of information on the web.

Primary Sources

One writer we know wanted to research a point in family history about which he’d heard conflicting stories—his grandparents’ marriage and the birth of his mother. Visiting the courthouse in the county where the marriage took place, he requested his grandmother’s marriage license and was handed a license to a marriage other than the one to his grandfather. Intrigued, he recovered copies of both marriage licenses, wedding announcements that ran in the newspapers of the time, and his mother’s birth certificate—and discovered his grandmother had been pregnant and just divorcing when she married his grandfather. Back in the 1930s both events would have prompted a great deal of scandal. Tensions in family relationships suddenly fell into place.

You may not discover anything quite so interesting, or you may find something far more interesting, but the fact is, courthouses keep records of births, adoptions, marriages, divorces, deaths, and more. Anyone can request copies; you visit the courthouse in the proper town or county, ask to see the directory of records, and request copies of what you want. Or you can register with an online service like Courtlink, which, for a fairly low fee, can generally obtain legal documents on file anywhere in the country. If you’re researching a topic in a particular town, you might want to try the historical society; most towns have them, and they keep all sorts of documents, including deeds of sale, photographs, and frequently, diaries and old publications. Old newspapers, too, teem with information and are often kept in local libraries on microfilm. You may want to back up your family interviews with research into what really happened.

There are so many other print sources of information they’re hard to list here. The Government Printing Office, for example, has reports and statistics available on everything imaginable, from congressional testimony to government-sponsored research. Of course, many primary sources are now available on the web. You can find some of these on your own. Ancestry record services can unlock more: you can pay to sign up, if you want to do significant family research, or see what you can glean in the free-trial period, if there is one. It is a mistake, though, to try to find records online and give up if you cannot. Places like courthouses and city halls hold marriage certificates, old deeds, and trial transcripts that provide firsthand information you cannot get anywhere else. Visit them, look carefully, and see if you find the kinds of facts that give surprise and energy to your story. (See “The Coroner’s Photographs” by Brent Staples in our Anthology for an example of how to use primary sources as the basis for an essay.)

Finally, primary sources include documents held by individuals—their letters, journals, photographs, and so on. We know writers who have gained a new understanding of an ancestor by finding the notes she put on the pages of an old cookbook. Do not assume people you are interested in learning about won’t share their private papers. Ask. Sometimes people are surprisingly willing to share their histories with you. Remember, most of your subjects won’t object to the fact of you writing about them, but will simply want to feel understood.

The Research Map

It is nearly always the case that research begets more research. Our initial questions suggest other questions, and as we go, we refine the true nature of our curiosities. Sometimes our starting point turns out to hold just a kernel of what really captures our imagination.

Our student, writer Zoe Ballering, began a research essay by freewriting about her fascination with naked mole rats. She had seen them at a science museum—hairless, blind mammals that live in colonies like ants. She realized as she freewrote that she was most fascinated by the mole rats’ inability to feel pain. As Zoe considered her questions, she realized pain itself was what intrigued her. In the process of researching the mole rats, she learned about a rare medical syndrome: a congenital absence of ability to feel pain. Then she discovered associated research on the relationship between physical pain and the capacity for empathy. Zoe finished her research process with an essay rich in detail and profundity, addressing empathy, embodiment, how pain is experienced and measured. She never returned to her naked mole rats!

Research can be overwhelming. You have material from each stage of the journey building on your desk and in your computer files, and often a less-than-coherent sense, as time goes by, of how you got there. You may have pages of your own notes, piles of books, articles, copies of deeds, and so forth. How do you keep these pieces together?

We suggest, for a research-driven piece, building a “research map.” It will allow you to track where you have been and where you are going in your research, generate new questions, and continually note the connections you make. Some writers take construction paper or a whiteboard and use a Sharpie or pen for their map. Another writer might create an online document in a presentation platform; another might choose a large notebook. What works for you may be wholly unique to you. The point is to create a space in which you can map the progression of your research, your ideas, and the questions and answers bubbling out of both.

Make a circle or other point on your research map in the place you started, with the questions you first raised. Make notes on what interested you. Then map each move with another circle or point each time your research changes or expands. Write down new questions raised by each move; freewrite a paragraph. Note your sources. Zoe’s research map began with naked mole rats, but her next circle concerned what it would mean not to feel pain. You can update your research map as you go or set a time—maybe once a week—to check in with yourself. It’s a wonderful activity for a group or a class.

The research map is a way of mapping your curiosities. It also enables you to keep your research material organized as you plot new courses—you can label each circle on your map by letter, A, B, C, and so on, using these letters as a sorting or labeling device for your notes and documents. You can begin your research with a provisional research map. Just be open to the many diversions, zigzags, and fruitful detours that will come your way.

Finally, the research map offers useful structure to draw on for your final essay. You can see where you began and what you were curious about at that time—material you may draw from to start. The you who began the journey of the research essay is always partially the person you were before you learned more. Your transitions between the research threads of your essay will be outlined for you, to draw on in drafting and revision. The map provides a tool for understanding your research progress, and for going back and recreating those moments when a casual remark, or a few sentences of text, changed the course of your essay. Those twists generate the kind of excitement that makes an essay sing.

TRY IT

1.   Create research challenges for yourself, or do this with a group. List types of research—primary source, immersion, the interview—and write out for yourself how each one could add to your project. Who could you interview? What historic documents might help? Where could you go to be part of an experience related to your search? Also write questions this research might answer, and commit yourself to a time frame for each challenge. If you do this with a class or a group, report in once a week or so on your progress.

2.   The poet Kimiko Hahn wrote her book Brain Fever by clipping neuroscience articles from newspapers like the New York Times. She used language from these articles in her poems as well as facts, melding them into meditations that are often deeply personal. From an article on the millions of miles of wiring in the human brain, Hahn moves in one poem to her young child, eating a bowl of spaghetti. Spend time reading top-notch science reporting. What in your life feels connected to the research, as Hahn’s child eating pasta does with her developing brain filaments? Write an essay that brings these facts together with the richness of your own experience.

3.   Chances are you’ve already had at least one terrific immersion experience, even if you didn’t call it that: maybe it was a summer working at a ranch. Maybe it was the time your uncle dragged you along to a meeting of the local Elks Club. Fascinating immersion experiences exist all over. Do you live near a hospital? A casino? A Society for Creative Anachronism? Ask folks if they would mind you observing them a while for an essay. Keep notes, use a recorder, or both.

Decide, before you begin your immersion experience, how you see your role. Will you take the approach of Didion and acknowledge your presence in the events you write about, or like Gutkind, try to keep yourself out of the narrative? Adjust your presence accordingly.

4.   Consider a place that is meaningful to you, as Hurd considers the Savage River. Or like Hakala, choose a type of place that fascinates you. Spend time at this place, or places, with a notebook and an open mind. Don’t make judgments ahead of time about what might prove worth writing about. Experience the place, its inhabitants, note its rhythms and cultural assumptions.

5.   To hone your interview skills and create a body of information you’ll almost certainly want to come back to, try family interviews. These interviews are generally far less intimidating than tracking down your local physicist to ask questions about the implications of the Big Bang (if they are even more intimidating, write about that!). Start with a question you have always wanted to get an answer, or a clearer answer, to. It may be the life story of the family scapegrace, an immigration story, or a detailed picture of a parent’s early years. Make a list of questions; keep them fairly simple.

Ask your questions of two or three different family members—preferably several generations, such as a cousin, a parent, a grandparent—and make note of the discrepancies between their versions of events. This will tell you a lot about the structure of your family. Typically, families have keepers-of-the-family-name types, as well as “tell-all” types. You may want to meditate on who plays these roles in your family (does the answer surprise you?) and, of course, who you are in the hierarchy of things.

6.   List all the “flood subjects” you can think of. Freewrite on each: When did this subject begin to interest you, and why? What is your personal connection to each? Create clear connections between these questions and episodes from your life, as Pamuk does in Istanbul. Write a short and concise question that each of these subjects raises for you. Use each question as a title, do some research, and see how your question pushes your integration of what you learn and what generated your wonder in the first place.

7.   Begin a research map, starting with initial questions and freewriting at least a paragraph about how these questions inform your sense of the world. Create tentative new points on your map. Give yourself a deadline for each piece of research and include at each stop on the way a freewrite on how this knowledge changed your thinking. Who was the early you of this research? How does a more informed you now emerge, and how do these voices differ?

8.   Write, perhaps after doing some initial research for your essay, all the aspects of your research questions that must remain unknowable. For instance, we can know how possible it is that we humans will colonize other planets. We cannot know if we actually will. Freewrite on these unanswerable questions. Describe how it feels to acknowledge the limits of your research. We sometimes forget the fascination of what cannot be known.

9.   Look for experts whose work dovetails with your interests. If you are at a college or university, you will have access to physics departments, advanced computing and technology, possibly schools of medicine, to name a few possibilities. Identify what expertise you can find locally. Then consider other experts you may be able to reach by email or phone. Ask to conduct quick interviews, including distance interviews, and see what you can learn. It’s useful to check whether there is an experiment or other experience related to this person that you can witness.

10.   Check your local libraries for archives and special collections. Again, you limit yourself if you have an overly narrow sense of your interests. Even if the collections don’t immediately speak to a subject at hand, make an appointment to visit (many of these library collections, though not all, will be available by appointment). Ask the librarians who work in these areas to tell you what they think the most interesting pieces of the collection are. See if any piece of this archived material sparks an essay.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “Jumping the Fence” by Majorie Rose Hakala

•   “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” by Barbara Hurd

•   “Leap” by Brian Doyle

•   “The Coroner’s Photographs” by Brent Staples

Resources Available Online

•   “Marrying Absurd” by Joan Didion

•   “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard

•   “The World as I See It” by Albert Einstein

Print Resources

•   A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World by S. (Paola) Antonetta

•   Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by S. (Paola) Antonetta

•   Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them by Mary Cappello

•   Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

•   Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

•   Paper Lion by George Plimpton

•   The Botany of Desire: A Plants’- Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

•   Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

•   The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

•   Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams