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Interview with Samuel Ace
Julie Marie Wade
12.2

Julie Marie Wade:  How do you think about I want to start by saying in terms of genre? How important is genre classification to you before and during the process of writing anything, and did that importance shift for you after you completed this book? In other words, did you see it as something different after it was completed than how you imagined it when you first began? As a reader, I sense a special kind of urgency–this needs to be written now and in this way–that I associate with lyric essays, but I want to know how you think about the work. What would you like to start by saying here?

Samuel Ace:  I find genre categories, like gender categories, impossibly narrow. They cannot reflect exactly what is happening in an individual piece of writing any more than gender labels describe the reality and specificity of an individual’s experience of gender. Although some pieces of writing fall more easily into the generalized descriptions of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, many do not. However, the institutions of publishing, marketing, and classification (i.e., the Library of Congress), demand those categories. I do mostly think of I want to start by saying as a book-length poem, as it is built in non-linear layers, and relies so heavily on the rhythm of the anaphora. When my wonderful editor at Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Caryl Pagel, asked if I might consider publishing the book as part of their new non-fiction series, I thought about it for a moment, and agreed. After all, it was written in sentences. I also hoped that the book shared attributes (non-linearity, life-writing, fragmentation, juxtaposition) with other books that I take inspiration from that are classified as non-fiction—Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, Hervé Guibert, and so many others. I am not attached to genre and ultimately wish we didn’t need to assign one. Click here to continue reading.

“The Course of Interpretive Discovery”:
An Essay on the Essay, an Essay on Criticism
G. Douglas Atkins
12.2

Embodiment represents the essay’s manner. A person embodies the particular essay’s values; often this is the voice we hear speaking to us—rejecting that voice, say Thoreau’s—we reject the essay and its values. Zora Neale Hurston springs to mind in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” along with Belloc in the aforementioned “The Mowing of a Field.” In these, particularly striking instances perhaps but still characteristic of the essay as form, ideas function not apart from persons but, rather, as reflected by and in them; ideas reach their fulfillment in persons. Click here to continue reading.

Interview with Beth Ann Fennelly
Nicole S. Piasecki
12.2

NSP: Do you think about being vulnerable when you write? When you publish?
 
BAF: When I'm writing, I'm not thinking about the reader. I’m not thinking, Oh, what's this going to sound like to so-and-so? Is this going to be embarrassing?  Do I look fat in these pants? When I'm writing, I'm not asking myself those questions, because I'm not even thinking about a reader.
 
But later, when it comes time to publish, I do have a lot of hesitations and questions. For example, the closing essay in The Irish Goodbye, “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” is about posing nude for a well-respected artist: I knew that would be weird for my children, as we live in a conservative town in a conservative state. And there are complications to that kind of revelation, given that I have a public-facing job as a professor. I expect, always, to be judged harshly for my choices. I expect people to be horrified by my vulnerabilities, weaknesses, shame.
 
But, strangely, often the opposite thing happens. You admit to some dark feeling or shameful action, and other people say, Oh, I also have felt this ugly feeling. I've also had these crazy thoughts. You end up feeling that simply by the act of being read, you have a new friend, which is a very strange but kind of warm and wonderful. Click here to continue reading.

On Allusiveness
William Gruber
12.2

Allusiveness sprawls across all literature; at one extreme is plagiarism, at the other, echo or parody, while everything in between usually goes unnoticed, like the subsurface 9/10ths of an iceberg. Some allusions are easy to see because authors showcase them. One example comes from a short story by John Updike about the malaise of an American tourist on a holiday cruise up the Nile. In titling his story “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” Updike alludes ironically to a speech by Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. Antony’s speech is widely known, and most of Updike’s readers would have recognized it. Those same words have been used in poems by Civil War Brigadier General William Haines Lytle of Cincinnati, killed at Chickamauga Creek on September 20, 1863, and by Louis MacNeice in “Sunlight on the Garden”: “And soon, my friend/We shall have no time for dances . . . The earth compels/We are dying, Egypt, dying.” Click here to continue reading.

“Anger Had Snatched Her Pencil While She Dreamt”: Rage as a Craft Tool
Jill Kolongowski, Brooke Champagne,  Nicole Graev Lipson,
Amy Monticello, and Beth Ann Fennelly
12.2

Women’s anger is perceived as unserious, disparaged, pathologized as a kind of “illness,” and punished. This is also true for men and nonbinary folks who fall outside the patriarchal norms—this deviation from the masculine norms is considered, by definition, feminine, and thus also punished by extension. Rage is severed from “good womanhood” itself, anathema to our very being. Anger rejects all the norms expected of women, and reading it on the page forces the reader to confront that rejection as more than a loss of emotional control. On the page, rage is the opposite of rage in real life. On the page, rage is threatening precisely because it’s a deliberate, calculated violation. Click here to continue reading.

Bernard Cooper and the Essayistic Sentence
Max Rubin
12.2

God help Bernard Cooper if this is how he felt at 45. In the last paragraph of “Labyrinthine”—a shortish essay in which Cooper examines the continually accumulating and confounding corridors of human life—he confesses to being “lost in the folds and bones of [his] body.” Cooper is 65 now, and given the ways he found his mind failing him during the days of the Clinton administration, it seems like no small feat that twenty years later he still knows his own name, let alone continues to craft sentences on par with this beaut.

A quick survey reveals the sentence to have two main sections, separated from each other by a semicolon. The first section, which operates in assertions, is roughly three times the length of the second, which is concerned with unanswerable questions. In this way, the sentence mimics the essay as a whole, which also has two main sections (divided by white space), the first of which deals in assertions—nary a ‘?’ to be found therein—and is roughly three times the length of the second, which deals in unanswerable questions. The sentence is a microcosm of its home. Click here to continue reading.

Beginnings and Endings in Brian Doyle's "Joyas Voladoras"
Zoë Stark
12.2

In “Joyas Voladoras,” a six-paragraph essay by Brian Doyle as delicate as a hummingbird’s heart, the beginnings of each paragraph have a similar rhythm, purpose and substance. They establish the structure of the essay, its factual basis, and narrative. Endings of each paragraph explore metaphor and the writer’s contemplations. Beginnings share brevity, pacing, and tone. Ending sentences are longer, spanning lines with multiple clauses, often speeding up like a bike on a downward slope. Click here to continue reading.