Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in
Scott Russell Sanders' "Under the Influence"
Kelly Harwood
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“Under the Influence” first appeared in Harper’s in November of 1989, but maintains popularity due largely to its inclusion in Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay. Of Sanders, Lopate writes, “[He] threads his way through this minefield, so susceptible to cliché and victimized self-pity, with exemplary honesty, feeling, and willingness to take responsibility. His quiet Midwestern modesty and sense of privacy, seemingly at odds with an autobiographical genre that normally attracts flamboyant, self-dramatizing egotists, accounts for some of the essay’s tension—as though he would rather not write about himself, but the form demands it” (732). Sanders’ success in avoiding the common pitfalls of melodrama and self-pity is at least partially the result of his ability to write effectively from both his ‘then’ and ‘now’ narrative perspectives. Click here to continue reading.
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Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that
Bind the Lyric Essay
Diana Wilson
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Imagine a warp in time, centuries deep, where writers gather on full-moon nights. Perhaps it surrounds a Concord bar where in the darkest corner sit Henry Thoreau and Sylvia Plath—she’s on her third vodka-on-the-rocks; he nervously swirls a tall glass of water. Envision them sharing a slow dance beneath a disco ball. During a lull in the music you overhear her confessing a fear of commitment while he strokes her hair, gazes into her bleary eyes, and murmurs that he sometimes questions the solitary life. Picture them in the hours before dawn, strolling along a winding woodland path leading back to his place; his long drawn-out sentences matching his long stride as he expounds on the wildness of the woods, unaware that his companion has fallen behind. Click here to continue reading.
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A Taste for Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation
Randy Fertel
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Since Montaigne, the rhetoric of spontaneity — spontaneity as a rhetorical device — has been a characteristic ingredient in creative nonfiction. “Is it reasonable,” asks Montaigne, "that I should set forth to the world, where fashioning and art have so much credit and authority, some crude and simple products of nature, and of a feeble nature at that? Is it not making a wall without stone, or something like that, to construct books without knowledge and without art? Musical fancies are guided by art, mine by chance" (611). Montaigne points to the implicit dialogue with artifice that lies behind most claims of spontaneity. Why claim crudeness and simplicity when fashioning and art, as he says, have so much credit and authority in the world? His appraisal is right on target. We credit, we esteem, we lend authority, and we are convinced by those forms of discourse that display craft, care, and thoughtfulness. The scholar’s footnotes or the lawyer’s citations lend authority by their mere presence. They say: I have researched this; I have thought long and hard; I have burnt the candle at both ends—believe me! And the spontaneous writer? S/he asks to be believed because, “guided … by chance,” s/he has given this no thought or effort. Claiming to be improvised, such texts place themselves outside the mainstream of what garners respect in the world. Click here to continue reading.
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Why the Worst Trips are the Best:
The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff and Jonathan Franzen
Lynn Z. Bloom
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Bad trips make the best stories, the most compelling tales of comic travel, which inevitably involve travail. Tragic trips, such as the Everest climb detailed in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, in which a dozen people died through tragic intermingling of egotism, masochism, nationalism, and hubris, enable readers to dangle over crevasses, crawl up precipitous slopes, and hang breathlessly on every word. As de La Rochefoucauld observes, “We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.” With the author, whether a hero or heroic failure we make it through, ascending the narrative arc from innocence to life-changing crisis, whose spiritual or intellectual profundity illuminates our return, sadder, wiser, cleansed of pre-travel detritus. Such tragic trips embed only a scintilla of existential comedy, and then only in the cosmic sense that the author has lived to tell the tale. Click here to continue reading.
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What Lies Beside Gold
Ingrid Sagor
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Children, like adults, construct narratives around the fracture of their memory in order to make solid, make gold of what is otherwise gravel. It helps us to make sense of our peculiar isolation, our embodiment, in relation to the people we love. When I boil it all down, I can say this: I both distrust my first memories, and find them quite honest. They represent the general feel of the moment, are some kind of collage of experience and empathetic perception, an occasional layering on of photographic evidence, and peripheral knowledge.r The memories, like writing, are golden, amber encapsulations—constructed and false, aiming to contain experience in a solid way. Click here to continue reading.
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Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction--and Destruction--in Creative Nonfiction
Catherine K. Buni
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A couple years ago, I headed downtown to a used bookstore and asked for a copy of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Rob, the owner, looked me over, brows down and frowning. “I thought I would never sell this,” he said. “That and Three Cups of Tea,” said the saleswoman standing next to him. “Every time we get news a book is made up, we get three or four dropped off a week. For weeks.” She, too, looked me over. “Nobody buys them,” she said. I had held onto my gift copy of Three Cups of Tea, had even defended Greg Mortenson to a couple friends more inclined to pull the book from their shelves. More to the point, I had tried to imagine Greg Mortenson. Had tried to understand just what the hell he’d been thinking, fabricating those stories and calling them true. Click here to continue reading.
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