Picturing the Perfect Essay: A Visual Guide
Tim Bascom
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Nothing is wasted, though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content.
The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms that, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures could help an essay writer invent a more-personal, more-unique form. Here, then, are several main options. Click here to continue reading. |
I Create as I Speak: Myth-Making in Creative Nonfiction
Samantha Edmonds
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This idea—speaking as an act of creation—is a common example of mythopoeia, literally the making of myth, a form of fantasy writing often associated with J.R.R. Tolkien, who viewed mythopoeic writing as more than merely referential to an ancient or classical story; instead, he advocates that myth-making is something anyone can do. [2] His poem “Mythopoeia: Philomythus to Misomythus” (myth-lover to myth-hater, 1931) chastises C.S. Lewis for assuming myths were only “lies and therefore worthless,” arguing that people are all sub-creators, through whom the world is made by story.
In this way, he determines mythopoeia is more than the making of supernatural falsehood—rather, mythopoeia is the making of truth that can only be reached through myth. He does not believe in a “world immutable,” wherein “the little maker” has no power or part to play (stanza 12). Instead, he suggests the elves, goblins, and gods of legend are “mirrored truth” from which “the likeness of True” might be illuminated, sharpening one’s understanding of reality; for though myths “make anew, they make no lie” (13). I intend to take this concept a step further by suggesting that mythopoeia—though most associated with speculative and fantasy genres—is not in itself a genre at all; it is a technique, and thus can be applied to any category of writing, including creative nonfiction. Click here to continue reading. |
Fragmentation as Necessary Literary Form:
Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter
Janelle Lynch
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Prosaic scrapbook, shadow bibliography, postmortem theatre, Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter resists definition. Part memoir, part essay, part archival meditation, it combines fragments of text with photographs and white space and accrues to create a nonlinear literary portrait of Zambreno’s life in relation to herself, her mother, and artists and writers exploring similar themes of trauma, grief, and loss, including Louise Bourgeois. Written intermittently over thirteen years, from 2003-2016, the book mirrors the uneven rhythms of a maternal relationship that it seeks to explore.
While generally considered a work on grief, Book of Mutter can also be analyzed as a trauma narrative. The literary device of fragmentation is its necessary form because it formally mirrors trauma’s neurobiological impact—disjointed memory, nonlinear temporality, and fractured sense of self—while also accommodating the paradoxes of the author’s emotional life, particularly the simultaneous attachment to and rupture from her mother. At the same time, its fractured form gestures toward healing by enabling a slow, recursive, reconstruction of the self through the writing and reflection process. Click here to continue reading. |
Essaying the Image
Robert Root
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The challenge of combining visuals with text may be one of deciding whether the images illustrate the words, as a supplement, or whether the images and words are integrated and interdependent. My favorite editions of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and Dante’s The Divine Comedy have illustrations by N. C. Wyeth and Gustave Dore, respectively, but these images are merely splendid additions rather than integral elements. On the Internet, the insertion of some visual separating segments of text is commonplace. Every essay or article posted in the online journal Brevity has a photograph attached, usually by an editor rather than the author; each article on the digital version of The New Yorker also includes a relevant illustration: a photo of men kissing for an essay on sex in gay novels, a still from a film or television show for a media review. At the other end of the spectrum graphic memoirs like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Are You My Mother? or a work of literary journalism combining text and photography like Salt Dreams by William deBuys and Joan Meyers are works in which text and image are interlocking, fully balanced and harmonious, each meant to enhance or complement one another. Inevitably much else will fall on different locations along the line that stretches between these two poles. Click here to continue reading.
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The Mosaic Lyric Essay:
Spatial Form in Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
Benjamin Wielechowski
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During the Roman Imperial period, art in general began to transition from the plastic to the two-dimensional, and from an external, naturalistic style to an internal, more contemplative style of abstraction (L’Orange & Nordenberg 8). Literary Scholar Joseph Frank, in his seminal work, The Idea of Spatial Form, attributes this transition to a distinct cultural shift, where a sense of dissonance between humans and their environment resulted in the appearance of non-naturalistic forms featuring linear or geometric shapes and patterns. This was in direct contrast to the naturalism that had dominated the artforms of preceding years (Frank 56-57). Frank’s theory of spatial form posits that, just as in fine art, literature has responded to contemporary cultural pressures, transforming from natural forms governed by time and narrative to spatial forms governed by atemporal structure and spatial logic. The mosaic form of the lyric essay is one such result of what Frank terms a “spiritual crisis” (58).
Viewing the mosaic lyric essay in the context of its fine art analog in this way allows us to see not only the mechanisms at play but also their effects. When viewed through the lens of Joseph Frank’s idea of spatial form, George Lowenstein’s information-gap perspective on curiosity, and Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein’s principles of film-editing, a newfound understanding of the mosaic lyric essay’s beauty, power, and possibility comes into being. This analysis demonstrates how the form works to expand the boundaries of current nonfiction aesthetics and evidences the necessity of just such a transformation in form. Click here to continue reading. |