Mapping the Surprising Territory of Old Age: A Conversation with Memoirists
Lynn Z. Bloom
12.2
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I was expecting memoirs of the aging and aged to provide role models for this inevitable voyage into waters charted and uncharted, more authentic and inspiring than the plethora of self-help books written by peppy people much younger than their readers. For some months I floundered in the shoals, looking for ninetysomething professional authors whose experiences paralleled my own, but they were scarce.
Finally, when I lowered the age limit to 70 (but it could have also been 60) and focused on the topic of aging, a number of authors swam into view, some panting and grumbling from the exertion, many floating happily with the current, others making waves of their own. And I realized that together these authors were mapping the territory of old age. Click here to continue reading. |
The Science of Awe and the Essay
Heather Lanier
12.2
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I suspect I’m not alone when I say that Keltner’s definition of awe captures what I want from essays. I want the essays I write to leave me changed after finishing them. An essay often starts with a question, then proceeds when the essayist considers various threads and angles to explore that question. An essayist might start from a narrow pinpoint of a topic, like a memory of a doctor’s appointment or a weird encounter at a fish fry. But the essayist often widens that pinpoint moment, expanding outward into “something vast and mysterious,” as Keltner says, something that “transcends [the essayist’s original] understanding.” My best essays disrupt the way I knew the world before I started writing. A good essay can put me and, hopefully, the reader in a place that is, if not full-blown awe, then awe-adjacent.
Which leads me to ask: What can the science of awe teach about writing essays? How can essayists apply the science of awe to the craft of essay-writing? Can writers create essays that intentionally induce awe? Click here to continue reading. |
Queering the Essay
David Lazar
12.2
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Genre and gender are indissolubly linked, etymologically intertwined. Clearly the two words emerge from an intertwined root system that speaks to typologies, distinctions, styles—and they are almost homonyms, fraternal sound twins. Turn to genre in the dictionary, and you will be pointed to gender. Early uses of genre cited in the OED refer to distinguishing types of people; the first cited, interestingly, by Lady Morgan, says, “But what is the genre of character . . . which, if in true keeping to life and manners, should not be found to resemble anybody” (1818). How queer, that one of the first uses of genre suggests a person who is impossible to characterize. Genre is a category after all. So is gender. And the gender category difficult to characterize by normative standards is queer. The genre category difficult or impossible to characterize, the essay, is also queer. The essay is the queer genre. Click here to continue reading.
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The Lyric Calls:
Writing and Reading Trauma Paratactically in a Hypotactic World
Christine Light
12.2
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There are certain experiences (from the self-fragmenting poles of ecstasy on one end to trauma on the other) we cannot begin to approximate through linearly narrative exposition. It is unsurprising, then, that writers of trauma would reach, perhaps must reach, instead for lyric strategies to trouble the segmented realities of their lives post-rupture. While linear narration would coerce a writer’s experience into reported cause-and-effect, invalidating the dissociated self, trauma writing requires other logics. Here I frame parataxis—from the Greek for arrangement beside—as a primary strategy writers of trauma employ (in conjunction with supporting strategies of assemblage via montage and segmented essay; recursion; and the use of white space on the page). These strategies work in tandem to preserve the writer’s agency among multiple self-states without subordinating one to another or forcing a single “reasonable” voice or patterning for sense-making.
These strategies reach toward self-constitution and coherence that coexist with segmented states; they expand into and exist within space on the page, mimicking a reclaiming of consent for both writer and reader. These strategies are not decorative. They mark ethical technologies that allow breaking-and-cohering on the writer’s terms, operating both on the mimetic level—mirroring how trauma occupies the psyche—and on the conductive level, mediating an experience of meaning for writer and reader without necessarily generating overwhelm. I track these strategies across three nonfiction texts that center trauma largely related to loss and grief: Here After by Amy Lin, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, and Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix, highlighting the ways writers of trauma reach for parataxis to simultaneously break and cohere and thus to gift readers permission to do the same. Click here to continue reading. |
Erin Dorney and an Ontology of Ambivalence
Keene Short
12.2
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Erin Dorney’s Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering (Autofocus Books, 2025) demonstrates the utility, and not just the study, of ambivalence. The text is organized as a daybook of thirty short entries paired with collages juxtaposing sidecut views of geodes, nature imagery, and minimal text, amounting to how Dorney uses ambivalence as an organizing principle that implicates the reader as a co-constituent observer in the author’s personal experience with lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
The expression of ambivalence in literature is commonplace, to be sure, and CNF authors frequently use the genre to articulate mixed, contradictory, inconsistent, or simultaneously opposing feelings. What makes ambivalence worth interrogating now is its potential as a model of expression (and not just as a subject that is expressed) which can contradict the ideological capture of rationalism in service of imperialism—that is, ambivalence has the potential to challenges hyper-rationalist and binary thinking that has structured colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. Click here to continue reading. |