8

The Tradition of the Personal Essay

After a time, some of us learn (and some more slowly than others) that life comes down to some simple things. How we love, how alert we are, how curious we are. Love, attention, curiosity. . . . One way we learn this lesson is by listening to others tell us true stories of their own struggles to come to a way of understanding. It is sometimes comforting to know that others seem to fail as often and as oddly as we do. . . . And it is even more comforting to have such stories told to us with style, the way a writer has found to an individual expression of a personal truth.

—SCOTT WALKER

I am a young woman in college, beginning to write. One day I pick up Annie Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A book-length, meditative personal essay, Pilgrim documents the speaker’s observations of the natural world around her home in Virginia. It is at once deeply individual, as she looks at the “rosy, complex” light that fills her kitchen in June, and deeply philosophical, as she draws everything into relationship with the galaxy that is “careening” around her. It is a bold book, drawing on the seemingly small to embrace the entire world. More important to me at the time, the speaker is a young woman in her twenties, the author herself. She’s not speaking with the authoritative male voice I have come to associate with the essay. She speaks as Annie Dillard, with only the authority of our shared human experience.

I was fascinated to learn later that Annie Dillard originally began Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the voice of a middle-aged male academic, a metaphysician. She didn’t trust her own young woman’s voice to engage and convince her audience. Other writers persuaded her to trust her voice and abandon the constructed one, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize, proving that the personal essay form is a broad one. It only requires that you be alert, perceptive, and human.

—SUZANNE

Find Your Form—Find Your Slant

We began this book with a nod to Emily Dickinson and her mandate to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Part 1, we hope, has helped you find out just what kinds of “truths” you may have to offer. Now your job is to find a way to “tell it slant,” to find the forms that will contain these truths in the most effective and interesting ways. As a writer of creative nonfiction, you must continually make artistic choices that will finesse life’s experience into art that will have lasting meaning for others. As Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta put it in their anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction:

The basket. The body. The canoe. The page. Each of these vessels has a form, a shape to which its purpose is intimately related. Each carries, each holds, and each transports. However, none of these vessels can be defined solely by their contents; neither can their purpose be understood as strictly utilitarian. Rather, the craft involved in creating such a vessel, the care and knowledge it takes to create the structure and shape necessary to convey, is inseparable from the content that the vessel holds. To pay attention only to the contents would be to ignore the very relationships that such vessels sustain.

Through a careful attention to form, you will be able to create art out of your own experience. Understanding how we are structuring our experience forces us to be concrete and vivid. Ironically, the more particular you make your own experience—with sensory details, compelling metaphors, and luscious rhythms—the more fully a reader will feel the personal story along with you. By experiencing it, readers begin to care about it, because your experience has now become their own.

The Personal Essay Tradition

The personal essay is “the way a writer has found to an individual expression of a personal truth.” When Scott Walker wrote those words in 1986—in his introduction to The Graywolf Annual 3: Essays, Memoirs, and Reflections—the personal essay was making a comeback. The reading public seemed hungry for a form that engages us the way fiction does, but that also teaches us something about the way real life works. While the phrase “creative nonfiction” had not yet come into popular use, “personal essay” seemed adequate to convey that sense of combining a personal voice with a factual story.

In the West, scholars often date the essay tradition back to the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne. Essays, composed in Montaigne’s retirement, lay much of the groundwork for what we now think of as the essay style: informal, frank (often bawdy), and associative. His book moves easily from a consideration of the classical author Virgil to pieces like “Of Smells” (see Anthology). His title Essays, playing on the French verb meaning “to try,” gives us the term we now use routinely in nonfiction writing. The essay writer “tries out” various approaches to the subject, offering tentative forays into an arena where “truth” can be open for debate.

Phillip Lopate, editor of the historically astute anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, puts it this way: “The essayist attempts to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation—by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter.”

Prior to Montaigne, as Lopate’s anthology illustrates, plenty of writers worked in what we would now consider a personal essay mode. Just a few examples include Sei Shōnagon, a tenth-century Japanese courtesan who created elaborately detailed lists that revealed much about herself and her place in the Japanese court; the Japanese monk Kenkō’s meditative ruminations translated as Essays in Idleness; or Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose book Meditations embodies an aphoristic essay style, creating pithy “slogans” as advice to those who will succeed him. The Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger and the Greek biographer Plutarch both wrote “essays in disguise” in the form of letters that ruminated on a range of subjects, from noise in the marketplace to the proper comportment to maintain in the face of grief.

After Montaigne, British essayists such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt made the essay form their own. According to Lopate, “it was the English, rather than Montaigne’s own countrymen, who took up his challenge and extended, refined, and cultivated the essay.” Both Lamb and Hazlitt wrote in the style of Montaigne, creating essays with titles such as “A Chapter on Ears” (Lamb) and “On the Pleasure of Hating” (Hazlitt). At the same time in America, Thoreau was writing his journals and Walden, works that would form the foundation of American nature writing taken up by writers such as Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard.

Women left an indelible mark on the essay too. Just a few examples include Maria Edgeworth, a memoirist and feminist from the Romantic period; Isabella Bird, a nineteenth-century travel writer who died in her seventies with her bags packed; and Nellie Bly, another nineteenth-century woman writer who pushed her way into the male world of journalism, famously practicing immersion in sweatshops and institutions.

As an essayist, you should take it upon yourself to study the tradition, not only for general knowledge but to situate yourself within that literary lineup. How does your own writing work with or against the stylistic tendencies of a Joan Didion, say, who in turn has a voice that emerges in direct dialogue with the voice of essayists such as George Orwell? Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay is a good place to start, but also look at works of your contemporaries to see how the essay is evolving in your own generation. By reading widely, you will learn not only what is possible, but what has still to be discovered.

You may find, as Lopate has, that “at the core of the essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.” The personal essay carries the implication that the personal, properly rendered, is universally significant or should be. Montaigne echoes this: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” At the same time, Lopate writes that “the hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom.” These two poles—intimacy of voice and universality of significance—go to the heart of the personal essay tradition. The essay speaks confidingly, as a whispering friend, and these whispers must be made meaningful in a larger context—capturing a piece of larger human experience within the amber of your own.

The Way Essays Work

What makes an essay an essay? How can you recognize one when you see it? When we study fiction writing or poetry, certain elements of form are easy enough to identify, such as plot or character development in short stories, or lineation and rhythm in poems. Essays can be analyzed the same way, but the task is complicated by the wide variety of styles and forms encompassed by the term personal essay. Many of these forms overlap with content, and perhaps you’ve already experienced several of them in the first section of this book. You’ve already been writing memoir, for example, when you focus on selected memories for a particular metaphorical or narrative effect. You’ve already started a nature essay when you described some aspect of the environment around you. Perhaps you’ve already tried the travel piece or a biographical sketch of someone close to you. All of these are forms defined more by content than craft.

When we turn our attention to craft, we can begin to see some stylistic qualities that help define the essay form. In his essay “A Boundary Zone,” Douglas Hesse describes the difference between essays and short stories in terms of movement. In any narrative prose piece, some sense of forward movement emerges. Visualized horizontally, this line keeps the story moving forward. Some essays read almost like short stories, with clear plots, characters, dialogue, and so on, relying more on the horizontal movement. In contrast, a more essay-like narrative might have a stronger vertical line to it, going below the surface, using a reflective voice that comments upon the scenes it recreates. (See also Chapter 12, “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form,” for more discussion of forward movement in creative nonfiction.)

Once you begin seeing essays in terms of their movement, you can decide how your own work might fit or work against the categories of personal essay. At one extreme, we have the short-story style that engages us with plot, subplots, and scenes. At the other extreme is the analytic meditation that engages us through the power of the writer’s interior voice. Where do you fall on this grid? How can you expand your talents and write essays that create their own definitions?

The “I” and the Eye: Framing Experience

The self inhabits the personal essay, whether or not you write directly about your own experiences. It is this “I” that picks and chooses among the facts. This “I” recreates those essential scenes and makes crucial decisions about what to include and what to exclude. The “I” decides on the opening line that will set up the voice of the piece, the essential themes and metaphors. The “I” gives the essay its personality, both literally and figuratively.

A useful way of looking at how creative nonfiction employs the “I” is to align the genre with photography. Both photography and creative nonfiction operate under the “sign of the real” (a phrase coined by literary theorist Hayden White); both operate as though the medium itself were transparent. In other words, when you look at a photograph, you are lulled into the illusion that you see the world as it is—looking through a window, as it were—but in reality you are being shown a highly manipulated version of that world. The same is true with creative nonfiction.

Both photography and creative nonfiction actually function just as subjectively as fiction and painting, because the personal “eye” is the mechanism for observation, and the inner “I” is the medium through which these observations are filtered. As Joan Didion puts it, “No matter how dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable‘I.’”

The minute you begin to impose form on experience—no matter how dutifully you try to remain faithful to history or the world—you’re immediately faced with a technical dilemma: How do you effectively frame this experience? What gets left outside the confines of this frame? Are some frames more “truthful” than others? And the way you decide to frame the world directly reflects the “I” and the “eye” that perform this act of construction.

Wallace Stegner, in his book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, posits that our task as writers is “to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention.”

The Persona of the First-Person Narrator

Just as the details of the world and experience may be framed or constructed by a mediating “I,” so too is that “I” a fabrication for the purposes of the essay. We are not the same on the page as we are in real life, and we must be aware that the “I” is just as much a tool—or a point of view or a character—that we manipulate for particular effects. The “I” on the page is really a fictional construction, reflecting certain parts of us, leaving others out, or exaggerating certain aspects for the purposes of the essay at hand.

In The Situation and the Story, memoirist Vivian Gornick writes about finding her voice in creative nonfiction. “I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae,” she writes. “I have created a persona who can find the story riding the tide that I, in my unmediated state, am otherwise going to drown in.” The narrating “I,” the persona you create, is the one who has the wherewithal to rescue experience from chaos and turn it into art.

Traditional Forms of the Personal Essay

Remember, most essays use several elements of different literary approaches. But for purposes of scrutinizing our own work and understanding our traditions, we can discuss nonfiction in terms of categories, bearing in mind all the while that we don’t want to allow ourselves or the writers we admire to be limited by those categories.

Memoir

A nonfiction category strongly linked with the personal essay is memoir. Memoir comes from the French word for memory; to be memoir, the writing must derive its energy, its narrative drive, from exploration of the past. Its lens may be a lifetime, or it may be a few hours.

William Zinsser, who edited Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, says, “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance.” In other words, memoirists need not have had fascinating lives, worth recounting in every detail. (Those kinds of books, as Zinsser notes, are generally considered autobiography.)

Remember those “shocks of memory” from Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” and how those authors focused on small moments from their lives? These are great examples of how memoir works. The author is curious about a memory, then gradually finds a guiding, prevalent theme in that memory, leading to other connected experiences. Through this exploration, ideally, their writing not only describes the author’s life, but helps us understand our own. As Adam Gopnik wrote in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008: “Memoir essays move us not because they are self-indulgent, but because they are other-indulgent, and the other they indulge is us, with our own parallel inner stories of loss and confusion and mixed emotions.”

In his essay “Backtalk,” Richard Hoffman provides a defense of the surge of memoir as a corrective to a culture that has accepted the verb to spin to mean deliberate distortion of our news. “The ascendance of memoir . . . may be a kind of cultural corrective to the sheer amount of fictional distortion that has accumulated in [our] society.” For those of you interested in the memoir form, Hoffman’s words may provide a useful starting point; think of yourself as an “unspinner,” a voice striving to undo some of the cultural distortion you see around you.

Literary or New Journalism

In 1972, for an article in New York magazine, Tom Wolfe announced “The Birth of the ‘New Journalism.’” This new nonfiction form, Wolfe claimed, would supplant the novel. It allowed writers the luxury of a first-person voice and the use of literary devices—scene, imagery, and so forth—in the service of reporting. In other words, Wolfe’s new journalism marries traditional journalism with the personal essay. Wolfe cited such new journalists as Hunter S. Thompson, then writing a first-person account of his travels among the Hells Angels.

Wolfe emerged as one of the leaders of New Journalism, along with other writers such as Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer. Wolfe rode buses with LSD guru Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to write The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, all the while using his first-person voice liberally and appearing in his trademark starched high collars and white suits, a character in his own right. Wolfe’s insistence on the primacy of his own experience in the act of reporting comes through even in his titles, like this one of an essay about Las Vegas (surely one of the loudest cities in the country): “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” New Journalism does stress the act of reporting; its practitioners have done some of the most intense reporting in the nonfiction world. But they also avail themselves of literary techniques and a personal voice.

As research becomes more crucial even to very personal nonfiction, such as Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (a heavily researched but intimate look at depression), the lines between other forms of nonfiction and new journalism blur. And, in the age of instant information on the internet, traditional journalism becomes more interpretive and less formulaic. (See also Chapter 7, “Glorious Facts: Research and the Research Essay.”)

David Foster Wallace, both a novelist and a nonfiction writer, once said, “Writing-wise, fiction is scarier but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex.” He deals with this complexity through innovative uses of form: his writing often combines immersion research with a fiction writer’s sensibility, and the resultant work exhibits his unique voice and playfulness. For example, in his essay “Consider the Lobster,” he travels to the Maine Lobster Festival, where he observes:

. . . lobster rolls, lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and deep-fried lobster dumplings. . . . There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs.

These list-like observations are a hallmark of Wallace’s work, and he intersperses direct observation with in-depth information gleaned from many sources. Throughout the essay, footnotes give interesting “factoids” as well as his running commentary on what he is learning and observing about the humble lobster. These techniques let us learn a great deal about lobsters, certainly, but we also learn about Wallace and his own sensibilities. The essay ends up debating the moral issues involved with cooking live lobsters. “I am concerned,” he writes, after bringing up these issues, “not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused, uneasy.” We probably wouldn’t be all that interested in lobsters and the moral issues they raise if Wallace didn’t show them to us with this self-revealing, and highly entertaining, voice.

The Meditative Essay

Composing his essays, Montaigne referred to himself as an “accidental philosopher.” The term essay carries a double meaning of both trying and proving or testing. To essay an action means to attempt it; to assay a substance, particularly a metal, means to test it, weigh it, and try to determine its composition.

The essay form lends itself to tentative, meditative movement, and the meditative essay derives its power from careful deliberation on a subject, often but not always an abstract one. Some meditative essays announce their approach in their title, like Abraham Cowley’s “Of Greatness.” Montaigne is often a little more down-to-earth, with titles such as “Of Smells” (see Anthology) that announce their topic and the author’s intent to mull on that topic for a while.

Often a meditative essay must still have some grounding element to make abstract thoughts more concrete. For example, in his essay “Hereafter in Fields,” Robert Vivian meditates on the nature of hope, time, and the self—all within the confines of a long car ride through Nebraska. He begins the essay this way: “The way the sun shimmers in the long Nebraska grass just off the highway can make you feel hope again, like there’s still time for lovelier, finer things.” He uses the phrase “if only” throughout the essay to express his thoughts and longings, and he writes: “I am not the same person after this fifty-mile drive to and from. It doesn’t matter who I am in either city, but who I am in between.”

Take a look at Barbara Hurd’s essay “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” (see Anthology). Note how she literally grounds us in scene—kneeling down in the dirt with her granddaughter—to begin an essay that will meditate and muse on more abstract topics such as listening and trying to understand the world.

The Object Essay

Many writers have found that focusing on a physical object first, no matter how mundane, can also be a way into an effective meditative essay. For example, Dinah Lenney organized an entire book, titled The Object Parade, around a wide variety of objects that spurred memory or rumination. She writes in the introduction: “Things, all kinds—ordinary, extraordinary—tether us, don’t they, to place and people and the past, to feeling and thought, to each other and ourselves, to some admittedly elusive understanding of the passage of time.” The essays in the book are spurred by such objects as a metronome, a chandelier, a spoon, and a flight jacket.

Fabio Morábito wrote a book called Toolbox in which he delves into heady ideas triggered by objects such as screws, files, sandpaper, and nails. You can find other examples in the “Object Lessons” series published by Bloomsbury Books. In this series, authors write an essay or an entire book with a focus on a single object, such as “Sock” or “Remote Control.”

The Essay of Ideas

Strongly connected to the meditative essay is the essay of ideas. The essay has long been the form for exploring the workings of the human intellect. Running the gamut from argument to rumination, authors have always used the essay as a vehicle for both developing and expressing ideas, holding political debates, and delving into personal philosophy. Many of us have bad memories of writing “themes” in high school, the five-paragraph essay that rigidly prescribed the way an intellectual essay could work: thesis, three supporting paragraphs, and a tepid conclusion. Here, in the realm of creative nonfiction, you can redeem the essay of ideas and return it to its rightful place in the literary arts.

As with all good creative nonfiction, it’s important to make the essay specific to you and your particular voice. Writing about abstract concepts does not need to be dull or dry; on the contrary, here is an opportunity for you to use the techniques of vivid writing to illuminate difficult and obscure topics. You will seek to uncover the scenes, the details, the images, and the metaphors that make for a memorable essay.

For example, in her book The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison first presents us with a personal frame: she’s employed as an actor for a medical school, pretending to suffer from various illnesses and acting through medical visits, to help new doctors learn to empathize with their patients. The situation is intriguing, often awkward, and sometimes comical, as when she tells us that “one time a [medical] student forgets we are pretending and starts asking detailed questions about my fake hometown—which, as it happens, is his real hometown—and his questions lie beyond the purview of my script.” The reader moves naturally from Jamison’s odd line of work to a deeper examination of the idea of empathy.

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see: an old woman’s gonorrhea is connected to her guilt is connected to her marriage is connected to her children is connected to the days when she was a child.

Here the book expands enormously from an account of a job, however interesting the job may be in itself. Jamison uses her work as a lens to try to understand what elements form the basis of human empathy—to understand the feeling of empathy, and consider how to enable it further in ourselves. As in any great essay of ideas, she holds the concept up to the light and probes deeply what her subject is and what it isn’t: empathy is not just listening, but an unbiased inquiry into another person’s place in the world.

Paradoxically, when you write about abstract concepts—ideas—it is even more important to pay attention to the concrete details that make such things comprehensible. It is the combination of a personal urgency with intellectual musings that makes the essay of ideas thrive. Remember “Notes of a Native Son” from Chapter 4? Baldwin focuses on the death of his father, but issues of race and violence pulse through the essay, creating a political argument much more effective than any pundit’s analysis.

The Sketch or Portrait

One of the most popular essay forms of the nineteenth century, the sketch or portrait held ground partly because of the lack of other forms of communication—the average person traveled little and, even after the invention of photography, saw far fewer photos than we see today. Writers like Dickens stepped into the breach, offering verbal snapshots of cities, foreign countries, and people.

Today we have newspapers, TV, and the internet, but the power of language to provide not just verbal pictures but emotional ones keeps the portrait an important form. Immediately after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the New Yorker magazine commissioned a handful of writers to capture that day in short verbal portraits. The editors realized something crucial about that world-changing event: photos may best hold the searing image of the buildings, but a writer can also capture the reality of, as Jonathan Franzen put it, “stumbling out of the smoke into a different world.”

The character sketch is also an integral part of the portrait form. Originally a kind of verbal photograph, portraits still can capture individuals in a way visual forms cannot, using imagery and description to leap from someone’s surface to their essence. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” forms at once a largely imaginary portrait of the author’s disgraced aunt and a portrait of her very real mother:

If I want to learn what clothes my aunt wore, whether flashy or ordinary, I would have to begin, “Remember Father’s drowned-in-the-well sister?” I cannot ask that. My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life. She plants vegetable gardens rather than lawns; she carries the odd-shaped tomatoes home from the fields and eats food left for the gods.

What a world of information is packed into this formidable portrait! We see Kingston’s mother sketched before us in terms of telling actions—choosing the practical over the ornamental, refusing to waste food, even for presumably religious reasons. We’re prepared by this sketch for the tension mother and daughter experience over the suppression of the aunt’s story, and the way that story reflects their own uncommunicative relationship.

Radio Essay

The ancient art of oral storytelling underlies the impulse of much contemporary creative nonfiction. We once told stories as a way not only to pass the time, but also to pass along our familial and cultural heritage.

Radio shows have always embraced storytelling as a mainstay of their offerings; in the days when radio provided the primary form of entertainment, people gathered to listen intently to their favorite narratives spun out in familiar voices. These days, with so many entertainment options available to us, oral stories still have a powerful draw, and there are many ways to hear them and learn from them about how to tell our own stories.

Magazine-style radio shows, such as This American Life and A Prairie Home Companion, led the way in their field. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, chooses a theme for each week’s show, and then several segments elucidate that theme through true stories. Sometimes the story may be a personal narrative, and often the stories are research pieces with a twist. For instance, in one wildly popular episode, called “Act V,” the entire show follows the story of prison inmates in a high-security prison, many of them incarcerated for murder, as they prepare to perform Act V of Hamlet. The men—many of whom have little education—give startling insights into the Shakespearean characters they portray, while the narrator of the piece shows the complexities involved in putting on a show in the prison environment.

Some popular radio shows have more affinity with spoken word or slam poetry, as the narrators tell their true stories to an audience. For example, The Moth: True Stories Told Live broadcasts live performances from stages in New York and around the country, with the rule that the narrator cannot use notes, so the pieces have a quality of spontaneity and vibrant energy. Often these stories are funny, but just as often they are infused with powerful emotion. For instance in one show titled “It Wasn’t Enough,” Charlene Strong tells us what it was like to experience the death of her partner while not being allowed in her hospital room. She went on to become a gay rights activist who was instrumental in change.

Video Essay

Some writers have gone further and taken the essay off the page and onto the screen. Triquarterly, an online literary journal, has become a showcase for the video essay form; the curator of this section, John Bresland, publishes several video essays in every edition.

The video essay allows the creative nonfiction writer to bring in still images, moving images, music, animation—a panoply of tools that bring your work to life in new and unexpected ways. In “Dead Christ,” for example, Brian Bouldrey can show us a painting—Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb—while we hear the author’s voice describing the details of that painting. Our gaze pans the disturbing image with Bouldrey’s voice as a guide, leading us to an emotional and stirring association of Bouldrey’s experience with the death of his partner from AIDS. Such an experience—while powerful enough on the page—is enhanced by the multimedia Bouldrey is able to include in the video form. (See also Chapter 10, “Mixed-Media, Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Digital Works,” for a further discussion of using other media in your work.)

TRY IT

1.   Write a short piece of memoir using a particular event. Write quickly and then examine the piece in light of the distinctions between the intimate and the universal. Where do you speak as though the reader is a friend, listening at your side? Do you need to reveal more of yourself, of your feelings? And where is the universality of your experience? You may want to trade with a partner to uncover the answers to these questions.

VARIATION: With Richard Hoffman’s comments in mind, write a memoir of an event that seeks to “unspin” some kind of official version of it.

2.   Write a journalistic story, perhaps about a colorful place nearby or an event in your community (a protest? a festival?) that uses reportorial style to capture the story but also includes your own presence as a character. Use literary devices to describe the people you see; use metaphor to paint their lives. Take advantage of literary devices, while respecting the factuality of journalism.

3.   Write a sketch of a person or a place. Focus on keeping your work vivid and simple—a language portrait. Think of it as being intended for someone who cannot meet this person or visit this area.

4.   Write an essay titled “On ____________.” Fill in the blank yourself and use the title as a way to explore an abstract concept in a personal and concrete way. All of us have abstract questions we would secretly love to write about. Why are we here? What does it mean to love a child? Why does society exist in the form it does?

5.   Write down the abstract question you would most like to explore. Then freewrite a group of events you somehow associate with that question: a brush with death, giving birth, living in a different culture. Meditate on the question, alternating your meditations with the actual event.

6.   Choose an object. This choice can be random or deliberate. You could start by choosing something that’s right in front of you: a pencil, a stapler, a picture frame. Or look at something outside your window, or in your window. For example, in Virginia Woolf’s famous essay “The Death of the Moth,” she notices a moth fluttering in the corner of her window, which leads to a somber meditation on mortality. Start by describing your object and then allow this object to lead you into a meditation on larger ideas.

7.   Consider recording your stories to tell before an audience and see how that process affects your structure, your content, and your written voice. Look at websites for storytelling shows and give yourself a goal of submitting a story to them.

8.   Consider exploring how one of your essays could be expressed in video form. What kind of music could provide a soundtrack? What kind of images might you include?

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “Of Smells” by Michel de Montaigne

•   “First” by Ryan Van Meter

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

Resources Available Online

•   “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion

•   “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard

•   “Backtalk: Notes Toward an Essay on Memoir” by Richard Hoffman

•   “Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

•   “The Birth of the ‘New Journalism’: Eyewitness Report” by Tom Wolfe

•   “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

•   This American Life (radio show/podcast)

•   Modern Love (radio show/podcast)

•   Quotidiana, curated by Patrick Madden (public domain essays)

•   Snap Judgment (radio show/podcast)

•   Triquarterly (video essays)

Print Resources

•   Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

•   Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

•   Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

•   Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

•   Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

•   “A Boundary Zone: First-Person Short Stories and Narrative Essays” by Douglas Hesse in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads

•   Half the House by Richard Hoffman

•   The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

•   The Object Parade by Dinah Lenney

•   The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate

•   Toolbox by Fabio Morábito

•   Cold Snap as Yearning by Robert Vivian

•   The Graywolf Annual 3: Essays, Memoirs, and Reflections, edited by Scott Walker

•   Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta

•   Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser