Class 13 - Diving into the Literary Essay
The Literary Nonfiction Essay
The word ‘essay’ might fill you with dread, or bring back terrible memories of being at school. But don’t worry! When talking about creative nonfiction essays, we are talking about something much more flexible, supple and creative than the essays you may have been encouraged to write during your schooldays (or even here at Parami — for example, the essays I assign in some of my other classes). But in the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the nonfiction essay more deeply, to see its possibilities.
Quitting School Exercise
Before we start diving into all of this, a short exorcism might be in order. So in this exercise (or ‘exorcise’) , your task is to reflect on your own experience of writing essays.
- What do you remember about essay writing from school?
- What were the rules that you were taught about essays?
- Did you enjoy writing essays? Or was it a strange kind of torment?
Write for 10 minutes about your experience of writing (or reading) essays. We’ll share these thoughts on a single shared document.
Rethinking the Essay
As we’ve already seen, Annie Dillard, the great American nonfiction writer (who wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), says, “There’s nothing you can’t do with [the creative nonfiction essay]. No subject-matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own form every time.’”
But this freedom makes it a difficult form. One way of thinking about the literary essay is as a form that bridges two kinds of stories:
- stories about ourselves
- stories about the world
In the 1970s, the slogan “the personal is political” became a rallying- cry for feminist thinkers. Personal concerns and stories can have much broader social and political resonances. But the converse is also true: the political is personal. Creative nonfiction unites the personal and the political; it brings together both intimate questions about the self, and bigger questions about our shared world, it acts as a bridge between two “poles”: on the one hand, there are subjective truths; and on the other hand, there are objective realities.
This is powerful. Because we can see on the one hand how big issues impact individual human lives, and this can make those issues less abstract, and more real. But on the other hand, we can see how our individual lives are tied in with much larger issues.
The other thing to say about literary essays is that they don’t need to be all about storytelling. You can move — as you would in everyday conversation — between storytelling, and other modes of communication.
Reading the literary essay
One of the best ways of getting the hang of the literary essay is simply to read some. In today’s class, we’re going to look at Momento Mori, by the excellent Dimiter Kenarov. It is in twelve numbered paragraphs. This will be a more intensive writing/reading exercise.
Read each paragraph in turn. When you have completed that paragraph, write the number down on a piece of paper or a document, and write a short response. This can be a story of your own, a word, a thought, an idea… anything you like.
Then move on to the next paragraph. Keep going until time is up. If you get to the end, return to the earlier paragraphs, and add to your notes for those.
We’ll share our responses at the end of the class.
Homework
Upload your comments from the Kenarov essay to Canvas. Then read Ellen Wayland-Smith’s wonderful essay “Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through” (see the link here).