Containing the Chaos:
On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir
Nicola Waldron
3.2
The vortex or spiral form is useful because, like the blank page, it possesses these properties of infinite possibility while offering, simultaneously, the promise of the steady, step-by-step evolution of an idea—one that emerges with organic, incremental logic out of the sum of what’s come before. Its shape suggests a release of creative and forward-thrusting narrative energy within a controlled framework. Further—and here’s the really exhilarating discovery for the writer of memoir—the Fibonacci sequence also exists in negative form, known to mathematicians as ‘negafibonacci.’ Thus, the spiral offers both a path of forward-moving discovery—a systematic unfurling of experienced events—and a measured, meditative retracing of one’s steps. In other words: a balanced, dynamic tug between retrospection and narrative momentum. Click here to continue reading.
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Facts into Truths:
Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in Creative Nonfiction
Joey Franklin
3.2
To Thoreau these reports are, at best, sickly saplings starving for sunlight, all wood and no bud. And yet, he sees in these volumes of raw data, not a waste of time, but an opportunity. “Let us not underrate the value of a fact,” he writes. “It will one day flower in a truth” (39). Thoreau knows that the truths we discover in writing blossom from our engagement with facts, from reflection on experience and observation: “Nature will bear the closest inspection,” he tells us. “She invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain . . . every part is full of life” (22). And in his meandering essay he proves his point one animal, one leaf, one shell at a time. Throughout “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau treats the bland facts of those legislative reports as catalysts for anecdotes and meditations that lead to the discovery of a truth that really matters—a deeper understanding of our place in the natural world. A close reading of this essay serves as a master class in how writers can help facts blossom into truth. Click here to continue reading.
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When Worlds Collide:
Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context
Jennifer Lang
3.2
Baldwin, Beard, and Rich use themselves to write about the historical-political-literary-socio-economic-scientific worlds around them. Their singular, personal stories become magnified and unforgettable against the greater, complex contexts in which they are written. They become Aristotle’s whole, greater than the sum of its parts. As Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola write, the elements of our lives are reverberant with historical significance because we live in a communal group whose attitudes and choices are historically shaped. The only way to avoid or escape this cause-and-effect is to become a hermit on a remote mountaintop or bury one’s old identity and invent a new one. Or, as many essayists and memoirists repeatedly do, reflect on the relationship between identity and history, self and greater world, personal and universal, and write within that framework. Click here to continue reading.
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Remaking Relations:
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin
Charles Green
3.2
That narrow identification arose after the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an epistle to his son that is a memoir and a personal intellectual history. Between the World and Me is formally modeled after James Baldwin’s essay “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” the first of two essays in Baldwin’s remarkable The Fire Next Time; that formal likeness, combined with Toni Morrison’s lone dust-jacket blurb comparing Coates to Baldwin, led almost every reviewer to make the same comparison, usually positively. A qualitative comparison is, essentially, impossible; for us, Baldwin is a figure with a life-long bibliography of stellar essays, stories, and novels. Coates’s career is young, with two books, his writing for The Atlantic, and authorship of a Black Panther comic book series. Click here to continue reading.
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Educational Archipelago:
Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place & Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis
Creighton Nicholas Brown
3.2
By blending different subgenres of life writing, both Kincaid and Satrapi create new, decentered spaces within which to decolonize knowledge and focus readers’ attention on the means by which educational institutions, informed by national and international discourses, discipline the minds and bodies of students, promoting nationalism and national economic interests, producing economically productive subjects. Through these narratives, Kincaid and Satrapi provide readers with alternative knowledges that confront western audiences with the myth of education as emancipatory. Kincaid and Satrapi demonstrate the ways in which political and economic discourses emanating from or in reaction to the global North continue to inform educational institutions in the global South. Subjects who are not rendered docile and normalized through coercion, documentation, and examination in educational institutions are routinely segregated to other, more malignant disciplining institutions—such as prisons and detention centers—often indefinitely. Click here to continue reading.
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