Do any of you write essays?
I’ve been working on an essay collection. The collection has now split and divided and become two separate books, expanding. When I mention that I’m writing essays, I swear I’ve seen a person or two wince, as though I might be writing lesson plans, or punishments or some kind of dreaded assignment, a hold-over from the kind of nightmare high school you never leave—that never leaves you—the high school of fever dreams, the high school seared into your bones, where you’re dressed wrong, you can’t see anyone’s face right and you’ve forgotten your backpack and never knew the room number anyway for a class you didn’t realize you were taking in a wing of the school you’d never seen…and there’s always another forgotten assignment…another failure on the horizon, a mistake, a way of being lost…
Write a five-page essay, write a five-hundred-word essay or a five-thousand-word essay; use footnotes and endnotes and an annotated bibliography. MLA or Chicago style? Write an essay on Eisenhower or the Antebellum Period or To Kill a Mockingbird. And maybe you think, “Hasn’t this already been written…?” And it’s all so baffling and yet urgent…
(Wait—am I the only one who has those dreams?)
Essays are an awesome form.
An essay can be as indulgent and surpising as a holiday debauch and as insightful as a TED Talk, yet somehow the American educational system, at least, has a way of making the essay form feel fairly Puritanical. Perhaps the world has, too. In the wrong hands, they’re used as assignments that veer toward punitive, like an ongoing challenge or test, demanding a show of understanding of some specific content. They become a process where a student loses their voice on the page instead of finding it, hoping for a better grade, reaching for institutionally sanctioned words. By college, if your professor is an expert in a field, there’s a major audience question: What to write about art to an art historian? How to address history to a person with a PhD in history? Do you parrot, summarize or challenge the course content? There are problems with form and grammar and the rest of it, and essays become something to get through rather than a conversation to sink into.
But there are so many amazing essayists, all over the world and through history, voices talking back to each other and to power, to memory, to love. Essays are one part of the creation of meaning in the world of human experience, living an examined life. There are essays that serve as urgent journalism or cultural critique, and others that reach back in time. I’m writing personal essays with a larger social significance—at least, I think they have significance—though I’m working on ensuring that second, larger layer comes through.
I have two days to myself, right now, and I am writing. Yesterday, I took a break and took a short walk. Portland city streets can feel fairly empty, at times, and they were, out in the near-freezing cold, with a sharp wind and a clear sky. But on those empty streets, I ran across the writer Aaron Gilbreath, an essayist. We talked and I told him about my project, and I was so happy to see the look on his face, the engagement, the understanding. He said words to the effect that we should all be writing these essays, that he’d had an idea for an anthology, “And you,” he said, pointing at me, “are exactly who I was going to ask, who I had in mind…”
My heart sang! We went our separate ways. It was too cold to stay out on the sidewalk talking about essays and Portland and life, but to cross paths was an unexpected gift.
When I write essays, I write from a personal perspective. There are all kinds of ways to approach the form, from research and interviews to memory and travel, learning new things…I write essays using a novelist’s tools, a short story writer’s tricks of compression, while adding the promise, as a tacit contract between author and audience, that the content is true, as true as anything, in a mix of the objective and subjective truths. I aim to write essays that both expand and magnify, a telescope and a microscope, made out of words.
Also, a big shout-out of appreciation to memoirist Kelly Sundberg, who read the collection as it stands and said she could offer nothing but praise. Yay!
Damn, I hope this thing sells, right? I love it, but it’s mine, so there’s that. Write the work you want to see in the world. Write the words that matter to you. I’ve followed my own advice…because time is short and writing takes time, and I’m invested in this art in ways that reach well beyond money, invested in the writer’s craft, the life of the mind, the world of the heart, the art of self-expression and connection and humanity.
Do you have a favorite essay, a favorite essayist, a nightmare of essays, a teacher who haunts you? Ha! Okay, forget the teacher. What essays do you love?
xo
ps—I’m still looking for one or perhaps two more to join our upcoming January workshop. Let me know if you’d like more information about that, and you can find it right here: Writing Workshop | monicadrake
You can bring stories, novel excerpts, essays, other…any content, to this in-person, Portland-based writing workshop, with the aim of finding support and deepening, and perhaps also expediting the revision process.
In my final year of uni, so quite well acquainted with essays at the moment.
As for essay leisure reading, I quite liked Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘White’ that came out a few years back.
I have yet to delve in, but many of my writer friends ADORE Ligotti’s ‘Conspiracy Against the Human Race’!