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​Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir
Megan Brown
4.2

The tension about #MeToo—widespread support for the idea and significant criticism of it—seems in line with broader uncertainties about the uses and effects of personal storytelling. We hear about the importance of personal stories from many, and quite disparate, realms. Pop psychology insists that keeping stories of traumatic experience bottled up is unhealthy. Activists and scholars want to hear from “unheard voices”—people whose views and stories are ignored as power dynamics favor the wealthy and white. Corporations, not typically seen as institutions that celebrate individuality, want to know the life stories of their employees, clients, and customers in order to leverage talents and increase market share. Doctors struggle to help patients who refuse to disclose their medical histories or lie about those histories. Yet, the risks of storytelling remain: the teller’s sometimes-painful struggle to be heard and believed, the vulnerability involved in sharing a story with a judgmental audience, and the real-life, everyday effects of the stories people share. The memoirs under consideration in this essay, all written by women about their experiences with violent crime, are different from each other in terms of content and style but share a common theme: an effort to use storytelling to understand a crime, its victim(s), and its perpetrator(s). People often call crimes “senseless,” especially when they are particularly shocking or heartbreaking, but these memoirs all aim to reveal, imagine, or impose a certain “sense” on the crimes they describe, some way of seeing and understanding developments through a psychological or sociological lens. Click here to continue reading.

Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire
Corinna Cook
4.2

From the perspective of nonfiction studies, Janke’s decisions remain quite intriguing. By reflecting on How People Got Fire, I am working to broaden the role played by imagination and abstraction in the expression of truth and reality. Might this film reveal some of the ways in which documentation and its associated nonfictionality can gain, rather than suffer, from departures and complications of “factual reporting”? And might nonfiction’s most essential form, the essay, provide insight in the discussion? Since the first radio entertainment broadcast in the mid-twentieth centry to early video essays of the 1980s, the twenty-first century in particular has seen a flourishing of digitized nonfiction. This includes not only an expansion of audio and video essays, but also hyperlink essays and social media essays (and other essays relying on web-based platforms), as well as digitally interactive essays and cinematic essays. John Bresland points out the common thread here is not medium at all, but the particularities of the essay as a form that makes an inquiry, pushes toward an insight, yet tends to ask more questions than it answers. In his comments on video essays, Bresland thus argues “that asking—whether inscribed in ancient mud, printed on paper, or streamed thirty frames per second—is central to the essay, is the essay” (2010). Reading Janke’s film as an essay, and investigating its blend of abstraction with realism as one of its essayistic elements, thus means paying attention to the question(s) the film is asking. ​Click here to continue reading.

Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for 
“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
Michael W. Cox
4.2

On reserve at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas is the archive of David Foster Wallace, which holds various drafts and proofs of the writer’s oeuvre, including both fiction and nonfiction. Much scholarship has been devoted to Wallace’s fiction; less to his nonfiction. This essay is interested in the latter, in particular Wallace’s piece on 9/11 for Rolling Stone, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” (Oct 25, 2001). Multiple versions of it are on file at HRC, including, in one folder alone, Wallace’s handwritten draft, a largely pristine typescript draft, an edited version of the typescript, and a copy of the article that appeared in Rolling Stone. Wallace did fairly light editing in the second typescript: just a few word changes and the striking of a paragraph that he restored for Consider the Lobster. Rolling Stone, for its part, changed very little from this second typescript. Nearly all change takes place between Wallace’s first two drafts. And so this paper will devote most of its attention to the difference between the handwritten draft and first typescript, in particular to changes Wallace makes to his sentences. By honing them carefully, Wallace finds his way inside the story, understands its structure more deeply, and enables himself to turn an incomplete rough draft into a thoughtful, polished essay. While such a process is not without precedent, the degree to which Wallace trusts his sentences to lead him from darkness to light is rare, warranting a close look by nonfiction writers and scholars alike. Click here to continue reading.

“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction
Sarah Pape
4.2

Not only does the nonfiction writer study the objects that reverberate in tandem with experience, but they must also impart physical movement, a sense of passing time, an emotional tone, as well as a consciousness of self in relationship to all of these narrative physics. In The Language of Inquiry, Lyn Hejinian interrogates the inherent limits of poetry and language, expressed through prose forms: “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The material aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and language itself” (42). Looking closely at the writing of Sarah Manguso, Deborah Tall, and Maggie Nelson, and presenting them in conversation with modern artists and those theorizing about the connection between writing and visual art, I intend to illustrate how closely the meaning-making and observation of artistic approaches already parallel one another. In each section, I will place these voices in dialogue with the artistic process and product, exploring the ideas of collage/décollage, sculpture, and performance art. ​​ Click here to continue reading.

Moving Towards What is Alive: The Power of the Sentence to Transform
Annie Penfield
4.2

Thus, this article is able to take for granted that work such as the Harper’s and Atlantic review essays have satisfied the need to expose dangers posed by spurious claims in The Seneca Review, The Next American Essay (2003), Lost Origins of the Essay (2009), and The Making of the American Essay (2016). Aiming to progress beyond the above-noted necessary correctives, I’ll demonstrate the importance of theories of the lyric and theories of the fragment to advancing our understanding the lyric essay itself. I’ll also show that advancing a theoretical analysis of the lyric essay as a genre with a unique history allows that history’s implications about genre as a force within literary culture to emerge. I’ll argue that the naming of the lyric essay as a genre ultimately mattered to readers and writers alike—at the juncture in history when the term emerged, readers and writers needed the name lyric essay to facilitate communication between them. Click here to continue reading.

Partnership, Not Dominion: Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir
Keri Stevenson
4.2

Memoirs like Haupt’s or Margaret Stanger’s That Quail, Robert document the relationship between human owner and pet bird, no different in outline if different in detail from canine-centric memoirs like Marley and Me. None of these bonds with birds, as important and diverse as they are, rises to the level of partnership. Only the relationship expressed in falconry memoirs does. Falconry memoirs, each expressive of an individual partnership with birds of prey, also take measures to safeguard that partnership from decay (which can lead at best to injury in falconer or bird, at worst to a lost or dead hawk). Language—from the language used in falconry itself to the rhetoric of the writers—carefully emphasizes the traditions of falconry; while some have changed, old and new traditions alike require a level of focus on the raptor that is total. Decay is held off as the partnership is constantly renewed, constantly balanced in the tension of the tightrope between making the hawk a pet—a relationship into which the human may fall even if the bird does not—and making it so wild that it will decide it can better hunt without its partner. The human must learn to be that partner, the junior partner, as master falconers Nancy Cowan tells Sy Montgomery, a nature writer interviewing her (120); the hawk learns to come back to the falconer instead of taking off into the sky, as it could easily do (Bodio Rage 92). Fragile, threatened, in danger of being ignored as often as it is complained about, the partnership in falconry resembles the birds themselves. That it is built at all, and then successfully expressed in writing to an outside audience who will include at best only a small number of falconers, is an indication of the memoirs’ enduring success and importance, a triumph like falconry’s triumph in enduring four thousand years. Click here to continue reading.