"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story
Tracy Floreani
6.1
A critical monograph by Mary Jo Bona sets a foundation for thinking about textile motifs in literary works and creative nonfiction titles by Rachel May and Clara Parkes contribute meaningfully to the conversation initiated by “craftivists” like Betsy Greer. These three authors link textile work not just to social or artistic statements but deeply, too, to the sense of self and historical truths found in textile work made by people from various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Each of these authors delves into the very idea of craft in an intriguing way and, zooming in on the details of the fibers in front of her, articulates the potential subversions of our cultural assumptions about what we make—or don’t—as well as how and why. Click here to continue reading.
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The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction
Tessa Fontaine
6.1
Even beyond our sensory constraints, writers always encounter unknowns, from small-scale memory failures to questions of cosmic enormity. A creative nonfiction writer frequently smacks up against the limits of her perception, of known truths, faced with what she does not know. There are many reasons this might happen—the writer was not present, the records are gone or never existed, the questions are too big, etc. Many of these gaps can be explored and made richer through speculation and invention. Click here to continue reading.
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Once More to "His Last Game"
Patrick Madden
6.1
The words hit with such force that I felt tears welling in my eyes. Jane kept reading, but I lost her voice, and my mind left the present completely. I knew this phrase, “exactly where we had left it,” and, unusual for me, I knew where I knew it from. It was a line from Brian Doyle’s “His Last Game,” about Brian’s last visit with his brother Kevin, who was then dying of cancer. [And here we have finally arrived at not only the happening but the happener mentioned above.] They drove a while aimlessly around the college campus where Kevin had taught. Eventually they found a pickup basketball game, which they watched in admiration. It is one of my favorite essays by one of my favorite writers, who happens to be one of my favorite people, who happened to have died not long before, as I’ve mentioned. I felt that the phrase was an Easter egg, a message, now from the great beyond, connecting two essays with similar themes and similar emotional resonance. I felt as if Brian were winking and whispering, revealing his intention via this quotation. I understood: just as White’s exploration of mortality broaches ontological questions of selfhood by conflating father and self and son, Doyle’s exploration of mortality melds his brother with himself, via memories and stories. I have preached on this feature elsewhere. It is a powerful idea, one that Brian explored frequently, but in this particular essay, he did it with poignant artistry and crescendoing subtlety that are unmatched in his other works, or in others’ works, as far as I’m concerned. Click here to continue reading.
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The Sitting
Randon Billings Noble
6.1
Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight
Donna Steiner
6.1
My grandmother kept a copy of the local newspaper and the most recent Reader’s Digest on the table next to her favorite chair. She had a little desk in her bedroom where she did her numbers, which meant paying bills. She wore reading glasses, and I picture her, head bent, signing checks or doing a crossword puzzle. There was an intimacy to these activities, a privacy she created that, even as a child, I recognized as sacred. I liked numbers and crossword puzzles and Reader’s Digest because I loved my grandmother; everything she did was automatically great. I’m not sure I even knew, at the time, what a “digest” was, and remember feeling frustrated that certain stories were abridged and, therefore, deficient...but I reasoned that I could find the sources if I wanted to, and I appreciated the appeal of a volume that could be dipped into for just a few minutes. My grandmother’s reading was tucked around the edges of her day and, although it was different from my youthful reading habit, which felt like unquenchable appetite, I recognized the appeal of bite-sized pleasure and loved when she’d mark a story in Reader’s Digest especially for me even though she knew I’d devour the whole volume. Click here to continue reading.
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Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use
Natalie Villacorta
6.1
As Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald, editors of Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), write, women’s rhetoric “existed only in the shadows for centuries” (xvi). The anthology includes works that “stretch” an understanding of rhetoric, in recognition that “women have often written in unprivileged or devalued forms such as letters, journals, and speeches to the other women.” But this nonfiction—letters, newspaper columns, diary entries, stories of a personal nature—was, for a long time, not considered nonfiction. The choice women face in this situation is to conform to genre or to develop alternative means of persuasion, creating new styles and forms “in order to break out of the confines of a rhetorical tradition that they believe reinscribes women in powerless and silent positions” (xxi). Click here to continue reading.
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