ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.1

Abby Manzella

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In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum:
​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand
Each day when I walk to campus the fox squirrels greet me. They are possessive of the nuts in their clutches with a confidence and determination that my 9 a.m. self lacks. I laugh and tell them out loud that I have no intention of trying to steal their acorns. As a born-and-bred East Coaster used to grey squirrels, their Midwestern fur mixed with red warms me. Seeing these rambunctious, we-rule-the-school squirrels is delightful!

I started expressing such moments of pleasure after I began teaching Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights to my Introduction to Genre: Nonfiction students at Truman State University, a small public university in northern Missouri. The course is filled with memoir, essays, and hybrid forms from before Montaigne (with authors like Seneca and Shōnagon) to the present. It is a mid-level course open to all students but required for creative writing majors; the purpose of the class is to ensure that our undergraduate creative writers are “reading as writers.” Together we search for craft within a variety of texts and respond with critical analysis. But since the goal is to help them as writers and since the students yearn to emulate some of the approaches they see, I also build in hands-on tasks to apply what they’ve learned. That’s where Gay comes in.

The Book of Delights (2019) is a wildly popular project Ross Gay developed where he wrote short “essayettes” regularly for a year, each focused on a “delight.” He has since followed up with The Book of (More) Delights (2023). While Gay avoids totalizing definitions, what one quickly learns is that Gay’s sense of delight is not the coffee table variety, where the eye quickly skims, takes in the beauty, and moves on. Instead, he sees delight as comingled with terror and sorrow, tied to an awareness of the losses and afflictions of our lives from racism to death. Because of this awareness, he grabs delight, and I am glad to seize it with my students.

My main writing assignment on Gay’s book falls over halfway through our reading of it. By this point, we have already discussed some of our favorite pieces, worked through some definitions of “delight,” made lists of our own delights, and appreciated the conversational, parenthesis-filled, directed-to-the-audience style of the book, which is to say the comfort of Gay’s words. (That previous sentence and this one are an attempt at some of that pleasurable style.)

We’ve also discussed the powerful distillation of language and ideas in flash CNF and considered the structure and mode of such short pieces. For instance, in “5. Hole in the Head” Gay’s seemingly small pleasure of hearing the titular vernacular phrase eventually becomes both the symbolic and literal topic of the piece about cruel medical experimentations on black bodies—there is a weight to words. This wandering linguistic association creates a sense of movement that is meditative/assaying as well as lyric.

This analysis adds to the class’s growing understanding that there is more than one way to tell their stories—that creative nonfiction isn’t just about moving from point A to point B or sharing what happened. Through this kind of close reading of the building blocks of a piece, they continue to develop their knowledge around the artistic choices in the how of telling true events and thoughts. They also see that just because there is an “I” in the story doesn’t mean that each story is solely focused on the self. Gay uses his narrative position to consider the small and the large that includes but extends well beyond the self.
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With all of this knowledge in their toolkit, the students then read aloud essayette “10. Writing by Hand.” Each student speaks a few lines about the benefit of writing by hand. Gay even specially describes the tool he is using for this collection:
the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language, I mean writing. (33)
The students appreciate the specificity, even as they also point out that sometimes Gay’s sentences get away from him, which is, of course, also Gay’s point—to luxuriate in the words and to see them as the foundation of the mode and structure of writing.

I tell them that we are going to be thinking about just such connections in our own writing. I begin the task by asking them to recall a few of their own delights that they listed and voiced in a previous class to bring them to the forefront of their minds. Then I tell the students that we’re going to have a writing day at the campus art museum. They are delighted at the prospect of changing locations, which is of course also part of my purpose. For students, variety helps them to think and write in unexpected ways because of this alteration to their routine. (You may have a different kind of location that works for you such an exhibit in the library or an outdoor space with a sculpture.) For my class, the added benefit of this specific location is at this point in the semester the museum exhibits the works of other undergraduates. So, the students will get to see the work of fellow artists in other mediums, hopefully reminding them in another way that all art requires attention to the tools at hand.

My surprise gift to them is to hand out a box of Le Pen Flex markers and allow them to select their own color for use. They are even more delighted! (Free stuff, I hear one student call out.) The purple-hued pens are first to go, since Gay named them directly. After the pens have been chosen, we read over the assignment to write their own essayette that considers elements of pleasure but also the complications that go along with it. I ask them to write about one of their chosen delights, remembering that it is a reflection of “being of and without at once” (Gay 44) while also considering the mode and structure of their writing. How are they telling their story? No matter what their delight, I repeat my standard reminders to dig into the concrete details, scenic possibilities, and to show off their own voice through diction, syntax, imagery, etc. Then they grab their stuff, and we head out.

Once at the museum, we enter a place that this particular group of students has never visited, except for one student who said he had been there on his campus tour. I tell them to walk around the museum to take in the art and free their minds. (The art isn’t intended to be brought specifically onto the page but to get them out of the stresses of everyday and into the world of art. This is helped by the fact that these are artists like themselves, some of them will even recognize the work of friends. How are these other artists sharing their stories through their art? How might they?) I continue with my guidance by stating that they should start by thinking about what pleases them in this space and in this art as a warm-up. Then, after about five minutes, they should find a spot where they would like to work and write for about half an hour.

The students take the instructions seriously, and I watch as they move around the main gallery and then duck off into a side room for other pieces. A few watch me as well for the cue to sit down and focus. The main room, where everyone eventually settles, is two stories high with tall expanses of white paint that you might expect in an exhibition hall. The space is quiet except for the sound of the museum’s consistent hush of air conditioning. Students sit on viewing benches, recline against walls, and prop themselves up on their elbows from the floor. Each has found a way to slip into their own world, angling their bodies in different directions and focusing on their own creation even while we are all in the space together. We all write in the stillness.

At the end of the time, I stand from my seat, where I was attempting my own delight, which unexpectedly turned out to be the draft of this essay. I used the last remaining Le Pen (oh poor, neglected apricot orange!). It slowed down my hand in a pleasing way. As I walk around the space, I individually tell each student, “Take a minute or two to finish what you are writing and then we will come back together.” This is a refrain they have heard from me before, so I hope it feels like part of the writing process itself, perhaps like the call to come out of meditation.
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I usher them into a room off the museum so that we don’t need to walk back to our classroom, and the continuance of new spaces adds to the special sense of the writing day. We reflect on our process via my spurring questions:
  • How did it feel to take that time to walk around the museum? They express pleasure in seeing others' art, especially the work of those they know. One mentions that she saw a textile piece by her roommate that she had also seen in development. Another offers that it helped him to clear out the clutter of his mind. One describes the noticeable texture of paint on a canvas and another the cleverness of using found materials to build a sculpture. They are impressed by the creativity of these other students in an area that many haven’t explored. At the same time, one student talks about her pleasure in seeing printmaking because she took that class in another semester. She discusses the process for a moment that others might not sense from the final product. They see connections, they see alternatives, they know they are seeing possibilities for themselves.
  • How did it feel to use the pen? They talk about feeling painterly, of the tactile experience of putting pen to paper that reminded them of their bodies and the physical space in which they sat. They also discuss sensing that they needed to keep pushing forward through each word instead of dwelling too much on editing because erasure wasn’t the easy tap of the backspace bar or the application of the eraser. One says that she wrote on the color blue because the sky color of her pen took her mind there. They notice that the literal tool they use affects their writing.
  • Finally, I ask, How was the writing itself? Some found they drifted from their initial aim but discovered something unexpected, some are still searching within their words, and some feel they have full-fledged draft. All results are, of course, valid and important parts of the writing process, which I gladly remind them. Practice itself is part of the goal, and for this assignment, the mere moment of typing what they had handwritten today will be an easy point for additional editing, as they decide if they want to transfer every word or refine as they go, perhaps also thinking further about the structure of their writing.
It's a pleasurable conversation because of their easy willingness to work out loud through both their content and their process. I think their extra chattiness is tied to the novelty of the experience, and at its end, each student stands up from the table with notebook and Le Pen still in hand.

When the completed assignments are submitted the next week, I see a wide variety of strong responses to the prompt. Some of the delights that the students transfer to the page include the feelings behind objects left by a lost loved one, the gratitude of singing with a family member, or even the joy of facial hair. Discussing delights may be about introspection, but often I find that students take it as an opportunity to write about their most cherished and bittersweet connections with others. They take in Gay’s complicated sense of searching for joy amidst our travails. Additionally, they structure their pieces much more radically than they have in the past with the reflective narrator intruding more often, with breaks in linearity, with more wordplay, and with one even including found form elements (perhaps recalling the sculpture made of paperclips and buttons), and all show an awareness of voice and diction that is continuing to deepen. They know that they’re not trying to directly imitate Gay, but through Gay, they’re willing to explore their own voices a little more fully. And, through our discussions as well as their trip to the museum, they are reminded of the power of their choices in the telling itself. They are all artists.
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In addition to the concrete lessons about the style, structure, and content of Gay’s work and the importance of the writing process, my small practical hope is that students will leave with a little more of their work done and a bit more ease going into the week. Perhaps they will gain some of the confidence I see in my morning squirrels as they, too, claim ownership of their newly embraced nuggets.
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On the day, what they all seem to have gained is a sense of renewal. I hear one student say about the overall experience: “What a delight!”
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​
Abby Manzella is the author of Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements (Ohio State), winner of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, she has published with The Threepenny Review, Lit Hub, and Massachusetts Review. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Truman State University. Find her on Twitter @abbymanzella and @abbymanzella.bsky.social

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