Interview with Justin Martin
Lynn Z. Bloom
11.2
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Lynn Z. Bloom: As a writer, what attracted you to biography?
Justin Martin: The simple arc of a biography attracted me. It’s one of the simplest stories on earth because it’s a person’s tale, with a clearly defined beginning , middle and end. In what’s known as a cradle to the grave biography, or, if the person is living, cradle to the current time as in my biography of Ralph Nader, you’re looking at a single person, telling their story. There’s an elegant simplicity to it. Do you think that the biographer imposes elegant simplicity or is it inherent in the narrative? The biographer imposes elegance. My wife and I always joke that if we have two facts about someone we will connect them, although any person is more complicated than that. A good biography, you hope, is complex the way people are and it captures many facets of a person’s life. If it incorporated everything, all of the complexity, it would probably be incoherent—a hot mess. If you go to a party and see someone you might think that’s the way that person always responds, but that’s not true. People think Abraham Lincoln had a sterling character because there are biographical details that bear that out, and that’s what we want to believe. But that doesn’t include lots of other complicating information. Somebody once tried to write a complete record of his every thought for a twenty-four hour period, but he couldn’t do it. He could never get everything down, and what he did say was totally boring, and very hard to follow. I’ve been asked what I’d do if I had complete access to the mental processes of an individual. The volume would be so overwhelming and incoherent. The elegant simplicity of the biographical arc is very satisfying to the writer—themes that can be teased out, character that can emerge. Click here to continue reading. |
The Reader's Mental Ear
Thomas Larson
11.2
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1 / From “The Graces of Prose,” a chapter in The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1941), I note this: “Though modern prose is intended to be read silently and two or three times faster than at ordinary speaking rate, some people read with their mental ear not quite closed.”
I’m reading an essay about Caravaggio by Teju Cole, and, as I go, I hear his words inside me. Like a tongue, my mental ear, forked and flicking, activates my response: one tine sees the word, the other tine hears the vibration of the words’ syllables, fast-read, quick-consumed, much the same as the words motor on when I type or longhand. Cole’s essay burbles along, whether I’m notching the sounds or not—until I get to the word, misericordia and I pause. I don’t register its meaning, though its rolly collocation is so softly vocalic that I say it aloud. I’ve heard it before, I think. A bell rings. That word applied to musical illustrations of Christ’s suffering, a scene commonly painted and set into a musical narrative by composers of the Medieval and Baroque eras. Encountering a new term, like Anthropocene or wifty, I stop the flow and out-loud them for my ear alone. Several reasons. To taste it on my tongue and in my mouth. To see how it fits with syllables I’ve spoken previously. To see how it fits into the roomy mansion of my vocabulary, in effect, making space for the term to join its cousins who already occupy my nomenclature. Click here to continue reading. |
An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle; On some things I’ve learned, and keep learning, from you and your writing
Patrick Madden
11.2
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Dear Brian,
I have been tossing around various titles to help me indicate to readers what is going on here. The one I ultimately went with, “An open letter to my late friend Brian Doyle,” gets us to the fact that you are gone and to the fact that I know that I’m not really writing to you (despite my hope that some part of you still exists), I’m writing to interested readers, many of them essayists themselves, whose knowledge of you I cannot be sure of. Some of them may not have heard of you, though many have likely read your essays or proems or stories or novels, and some probably knew you and miss you as I do. In any case, I’m grateful for the clue provided by the word “open” before “letter,” which allows me to avoid some of the awkward falseness inherent in writing to a mentor who can no longer read my missives as he once did, and I appreciate the efficiency of that adjective “late,” more than, say, “dear, departed” or the stark “dead” or any other way of conveying the fact that you died almost eight years ago. No matter what, all the ways are ready-made, on the shelf waiting to be called into service. Which is a bit disheartening, to think that I write, we write, simply by arranging preexisting materials, some of which are tired and worn from use. Which makes the little things quite exciting, like how you sometimes repurposed adjectives as nouns, as in “I want it so bad I can taste the stony chalky desperate of it,” or another one that I’ve just decided to save for the end of this letter. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Michael Ramos
Sayantani Dasgupta
11.2
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"I think newness comes from a person’s perspective, their insights, their pattern recognition. In my case how I relate writing and teaching to military service and how I think about form and structure and chose nonconventional essays to tell a story (the return from war) that is as old as humanity is how I demonstrate for my students how to think about newness. I also encourage my students to think about their writing as problem solving and the problems are: what story do I tell? And how do I tell it? That allows me to encourage my students to read widely to observe how other people have solved a similar problem, and how they can in turn use and repurpose those techniques or find alternative solutions, which is a lot of what we do in the military, or at least in my experience." Click here to continue reading.
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Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry”
Rhonda Waterhouse
11.2
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In Toni Jensen’s 2018 lyrical braided essay “Carry,” she forms a tapestry woven from words and ideas, weaving together campus shootings, Indigenous land theft, and violence against the less privileged. Like her Métis ancestors, Jensen combines a First Nations’ sense of rhythm and design with European yarns of language into a meaningful yet beautiful finger woven sash. This first-person tapestry weaves together the narrator’s experiences and the experiences of people she knows, with the yarns of Indigenous stolen lands. The title of the essay, “Carry,” begs readers to ask, What are we carrying? In this essay, people carry the literal: water, guns, and babies. The essay also lifts the metaphorical like snakes (one’s defenses against predators) and empty glasses (our own and others’ grief). The rest of the burdens are implied: white privilege/guilt from ancestor’s actions (stealing land from Indigenous peoples), responsibility for others, trauma, and bias/hate (both given and received). Ultimately, “Carry” compels readers to confront both the tangible and intangible weights that shape our lives revealing that what we all carry is not just physical but also historical, emotional, and deeply personal. Click here to continue reading.
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