Hey there,
Big thank you, to those of you who signed on for a great conversation, this morning!
“The first time I heard someone use the term ‘bid’ was my first day in federal prison, just four days before my twenty-first birthday.”
—Eric Borsuk
*
“Dear McDonald’s—
When I called my friend Amy to try to explain why I was writing this letter to you she asked, ‘Are you trying to say that a marginal life will always unfold in a marginal place?’”
—Chris Dennis
*
The Chinese emperor who died one year before the Common Era began was a man in love with another man named Dong Xian.”
—Xujun Eberlein
Today we had our second of seven Sunday conversations about the essays in the new Best American Essays (2023) and it was so energized!
You all are great.
The material of the essays roams wide, the humanity runs rich. The three first-sentences above show some of the material…starting points, each one.
There are always questions or thoughts about form and content, but also about the why of it—why this?—and how. How? How has the author sifted through the contents of a life and found the pieces which come together to make sense of things? What to highlight and what to convey in a gesture? What to compress, and how to move through narrative time?
And, of course, in writing essays, even personal essays, there’s room for an element of research, outside sources, common knowledge, history and other material up against the personal, life experience, the chronology of days.
How can we look at our own lives and sort out the gold, find meaning, form and shape and hold on to or enrich our own shared humanity?
I hope that looking at the work of others and discussing it, in a small group, is as inspiring to you as it is to me.
Thank you all for being here.
Monica
Yeah yet again I learned something new. I got good information. On stuff that I am writing. Sorry I had to leave before everyone was done. I loved the conversation. I just had to go.
Filling up my notebook with the wonderful thoughts that were shared