We were not ready to say goodbye to our good friend and Advisory Editor, Ned Stuckey-French, this summer, when news came that cancer had taken him from us. It is impossible to overstate how important Ned was to us at Assay, who he was to us personally and professionally as individuals. Ned was one of the first people I contacted with this new idea for a journal back in 2014, wondering if he would be willing to lend his advice and insights. He agreed so quickly and with such generosity of spirit that he became one of my most trusted voices when I needed perspective. We published his "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" in our very first issue, a piece that has become one of our most-read on the website, and it was our first Notable in Best American Essays. When Assay hosted a panel called "Assaying the Future of Nonfiction Studies" at the 2017 AWP in Washington, DC, Ned was our necessary historical perspective. It is not too much to say that the nonfiction world lost a singular creative voice, an essential critical voice, and a truly excellent human being.
Before he died, Ned and I talked about bringing his extensive website under Assay's umbrella, particularly his wonderful "Essays in America." While we weren't able to manage that before he passed, I am so pleased to announce that the transfer is underway. We're so honored to be the stewards of Ned's work as we move forward. If you don't know "Essays in America," we hope that you'll take a look through the tributes here to his work and then spend some time with Ned there.
Our literary world is dimmer for the loss of such a light, but we are grateful for the eternal nature of his words. I don't think any who knew him would be surprised by the tributes that poured in after his death, a recognition of the wonderful person he was to so many of us. For Assay, I wanted to remember the important contributions Ned made to the world of nonfiction, so I asked several who knew his work well to choose a favorite essay or a book or a review to use as a touchstone, so I hope you enjoy them. Karen Babine, editor |
The Book Reviewer
Marcia Aldrich
6.1
No one is simply a book reviewer; they aren’t born to be a book reviewer, they can’t support themselves writing book reviews alone. They are writers who take a turn at reviewing; they are editors who review, scholars in the field who write reviews, sometimes occasionally and sometimes regularly. For me, they are defined by providing a service to others, to the larger literary community, and often they are unsung and not nearly appreciated enough. There’s a long history of wringing our hands over the decline in book reviewing. It’s always been a difficult sell to get someone good to devote their time, energy, and skills on behalf of bringing light to someone else’s book. And in this age of self-promotion, it’s even harder. Click here to continue reading.
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Meeting Bobby Kennedy
Bob Cowser
6.1
The essay of his I remember and love best is “Meeting Bobby Kennedy,” which recounts a moment’s conversation high school senior Ned had with the presidential candidate on a noisy, windy airfield in West Lafayette, Indiana during RFK’s campaign stop in the late spring of 1968. (Ned had been canvassing for the senator all spring). That moment is the essay’s beating heart, but Ned’s descriptions nest it carefully in the Indiana landscape, the political and cultural landscape of the country at the end of the tumultuous 60s, the shifting topographies of Ned’s own personal and family lives. So this is not a typical historical account, but, in the words of another great 60s chronicler Joan Didion, “how it felt ” to the writer. And no one else there could have recorded the moment as Ned has; he was the sort of writer Henry James had in mind, “on whom nothing is lost.” Not the spring rain, the tension in his own father’s neck, Bobby Kennedy’s boyish freckles. He brings you that close to the man, remarking on New York senator’s strange combination of “vulnerability and power.” We share in the encounter. Click here to continue reading.
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Working and Trying
Sonya Huber
6.1
There are several ways to write an essay about being in a series of far-left groups, and I’ve tried a range of possibilities to describe my own experience and never been happy with the results. The topic is tainted, still, with red-scare shock or with the equally frustrating shock (these days) that there have been socialist or communist groups active in every big city in every decade of our nation’s history. That the left is, in fact, part of American history. One of the ways to ruin an essay like this is to present the confusing array of acronyms and vocabulary to make the whole movement sound obtuse and out of touch. Another way to do it is to laugh at yourself in retrospect, thereby denigrating the lives of people who believe that capitalism is dangerous (we can all admit this, yes?) and are willing to give up time to act on that belief. A third way to ruin an essay like this is to come off as a battle-hardened hero, opening a gulf between the reader and writer and making whatever experience you had sound like you’re Ché Guevara. Click here to continue reading.
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On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay
Carl H. Klaus
6.1
Fifteen years before Ned and I produced Essayists on the Essay (2012), his forceful writing caught my attention when he was a graduate student at Iowa in the mid-1990s, enrolled in courses I was teaching on the essay. Then in his mid-40s, Ned was energized by an exceptional drive and enthusiasm that must have made him very effective in his previous work as a trade union and political organizer. Activities far afield, it might seem, from the art of a personal essay, but as Ned made clear in a 2017 interview, he was drawn to essayists “who were also activists.” At Iowa, he developed such a wide-ranging and intense interest in the essay that I invited him to take part in a graduate student research group committed to finding and discussing hitherto unknown pieces on the essay by past and recent essayists. A rarified non-credit project that could only have appealed to devotées of the essay— and he readily accepted. Click here to continue reading.
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On The American Essay in the American Century
Robert Root
6.1
I’d reviewed the book years before, when it was first published, and reread it without consulting that review in hopes of avoiding mere repetition, no matter how admiring. The “American Century” covered in the book runs roughly from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. It required a voluminous amount of reading on Ned’s part of all the American essayists, all the critical essays on the essay, and all the reviews of essay collections. It distinguishes among literary trends and simultaneously locates them in cultural and sociological contexts. I re-discovered how alert Ned was to the historical context of the essays he discusses, his awareness that an essay read in such a context makes us appreciate more profoundly what that essayist was thinking about when he or she wrote it. In the course of a thorough and wide-ranging historical overview, he makes it difficult for a reader to detach the individual essay from its era. All readers bring their own predispositions and prejudices and preferences to whatever they read; Ned manages to shift our focus to an appreciation of what the writer was bringing to a specific essay at the time it was written. He deepens our comprehension not only of what is being said but also of who is saying it. Click here to continue reading.
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