Nonfiction Ghost Hunting
Allison Ellis
8.1
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In 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man best known for his essays, lectures and championship of American values like individualism, self-reliance and freedom, pried open his deceased wife’s coffin a year after her death. He’d been in the habit of walking to her grave every day and writing to her as if she were alive in his journals. As Gay Wilson Allen details in his biography, Waldo Emerson (1982) Emerson had preached in a sermon not long after her death, “In the mind of the mourner… the dead are present still,” and described the relationship between the disembodied and the still-bodied soul as a “sublime attraction:” “When we have explored our desolate house for what shall never there be seen, we return with an eagerness to the tomb as the only place of healing and peace” (170-171). If there were ever an opening to a ghost story, I’d say this is it—a nonfiction ghost story. Emerson doesn’t tell us why he opened the coffin (his journal entry from that day simply states, “Opened Ellen’s coffin”) (JMN 4:7) but a closer look at his life and writings offer important clues. Click here to continue reading.
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A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoirs
Ashley Espinoza
8.1
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I hardly ever get to choose to be both Puerto Rico and Mexican on demographic forms I fill out. It is always a one or the other. I choose what best suits my mood for the day. Sometimes I gravitate towards checking the Puerto Rican box, and sometimes I choose the Mexican. I never consistently choose the same box because I am never just one of those, I am always both. Many authors of many races write in hybrid forms, but for me I wanted to take a look at authors who have multiple cultures and how the deal with writing in hybrid and segmented forms. I want to explore how Carmen Maria Machado, Myriam Gurba, and Virgina Grise use hybridity to reflect on their identities and the ways in which they write memoir. Gloria Anzaldua started this conversation in Borderlands, but my aim is to examine the contemporary Latina memoir and how they use hybridity. As a writer we must uphold who we are as a person, and an artist. As an American Latinx writer we must uphold our American culture as well as our Latinx culture. I want to explore how these books uphold both while using segmentation and hybridity to do so. Click here to continue reading.
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We Are All Modern:
Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in
20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing
Lisa Levy
8.1
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Despite their personal differences, Stein and Strachey shared a vital interest in pushing biography into modern art. Though their experiments fall on diverse ends of a spectrum of innovation in documenting real and fictional people’s lives, both are part of a revolution that transformed biography and ultimately changed the way people conceptualize their lives. Stein’s fictional Three Lives (1909) chronicled the consciousnesses of three poor women in Baltimore using prose meant to replicate their innermost thoughts and feelings. Strachey’s nonfiction Eminent Victorians (1918) cheekily revamped the way public figures of the recent past were memorialized and smashed the sanctity of his renowned subjects’ reputations. Yet both are participants in a revolution in biography firmly located in the modern age. Click here to continue reading.
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The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater's Lying
Cherie Nelson
8.1
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In the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate writes, “What is the stylistic function of quotation in the personal essay? One obvious answer would seem to be to lend authority to the author’s argument” and the other, to allow readers the “pleasure of knowing that we are in cultivated hands, attending to a well-stocked, liberally educated mind” (xli). Simply put, according to Lopate, quotation supports what the writer is saying and lets us know they are educated enough to “graciously inform” us (xlii). From the arguable father of the personal essay form, Michel de Montaigne, to current authors Maggie Nelson and David Shields, as well as innumerable others, quotation has become one of the most common craft choices for writers of creative nonfiction. But I posit that Lopate’s assessment is much too simple of a rendering: the inclusion of quotation and other intertextual figures within a nonfiction text can do more than simply demonstrate a certain type of authorial voice or add external credibility. Using intertextuality, specifically within creative nonfiction, can invite readers into an investigation of the unstable nature of language and meaning. Click here to continue reading.
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Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space
Amie Souza Reilly
8.1
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In other words, I wonder, how does the use of space—gaps between paragraphs, chapter breaks, text presented in columns, words presented in bricks—impact or understanding narrative, especially nonfiction writers, specifically nonfiction written by women, because it seems that women are increasingly writing in experimental forms, using large chunks of blankness between paragraphs or chapters, inserting more page breaks to create a fractured narrative, and writing in the marginalia in their nonfiction writing. Perhaps the fragmented forms appearing in more and more nonfiction works is a representation of how women writers think and talk—a reflection of all of the ways we are taught to be considerate of how much space we occupy in the physical world. Click here to continue reading.
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