ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
    • 11.2 Articles >
      • Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)
      • Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Conversations >
      • Thomas Larson, "The Reader's Mental Ear" (Assay 11.2)
      • Patrick Madden, "An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle" (Assay 11.2)
      • Rhonda Waterhouse, "Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry” (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Pedagogy >
      • Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler, "Avoiding Empathy Fatigue: What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist" (Assay 11.2)
      • Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger, "Essayism in the Age of AI" (Assay 11.2)
      • Marco Wilkinson, "Exquisite Copse" (Assay 11.2)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • Subject Index
    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 1.1 Articles >
        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
        • Andy Harper, "The Joke's On Me: The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative" (1.1)
        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
        • Brian Nerney, "John McCarten’s ‘Irish Sketches’: ​The New Yorker’s ‘Other Ireland’ in the Early Years of the Troubles, 1968-1974" (1.1)
        • Wendy Fontaine, "Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir" (1.1)
        • Scott Russell Morris, "The Idle Hours of Charles Doss, or ​The Essay As Freedom and Leisure" (1.1)
      • 1.1 Conversations >
        • Donald Morrill, "An Industrious Enchantment" (1.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Amazon Constellations" (1.1)
        • Derek Hinckley, "Fun Home: Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir" (1.1)
        • Interview with Melanie Hoffert
        • Interview with Kelly Daniels
      • 1.1 Pedagogy >
        • Robert Brooke, "Teaching: 'Rhetoric: The Essay'" (1.1)
        • Richard Louth, "In Brief: Autobiography and Life Writing" (1.1)
    • 1.2 (Spring 2015) >
      • 1.2 Articles >
        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
        • Diana Wilson, "Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay" (1.2)
        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Why the Worst Trips are the Best: The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff & Jonathan Franzen" (1.2)
        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
        • Catherine K. Buni, "Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Conversations >
        • Doug Carlson, "Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic" (1.2)
        • Patrick Madden, "Aliased Essayists" (1.2)
        • Beth Slattery, "Hello to All That" (1.2)
        • Interview with Michael Martone (1.2)
      • Spotlight >
        • Richard Louth, "The New Orleans Writing Marathon and the Writing World" (1.2)
        • Kelly Lock-McMillen, "Journey to the Center of a Writer's Block" (1.2)
        • Jeff Grinvalds, "Bringing It Back Home: The NOWM in My Classroom" (1.2)
        • Susan Martens, "Finding My Nonfiction Pedagogy Muse at the NOWM" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Steven Church, "The Blue Guide Project: Fresno" (1.2)
        • Stephanie Vanderslice, "From Wordstar to the Blogosphere and Beyond: ​A Digital Literacy and Teaching Narrative (Epiphany Included)" (1.2)
        • Jessica McCaughey, "That Snow Simply Didn’t Fall: How (and Why) to Frame the Personal Essay as a Critical Inquiry into Memory in the First-Year Writing Classroom" (1.2)
    • 2.1 (Fall 2015) >
      • Editor's Note2.1
      • 2.1 Articles >
        • Daniel Nester, "Straddling the Working Class Memoir" (2.1)
        • Sarah M. Wells, "The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: ​Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth" (2.1)
        • Chris Harding Thornton, "Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose" (2.1)
        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
        • Megan Culhane Galbraith, "Animals as Aperture: How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Conversations >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character" (2.1)
        • Tim Bascom, "As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay" (2.1)
        • Adrian Koesters, "Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir" (2.1)
        • Interview with Simmons Buntin (2.1)
        • Mike Puican, "Narrative Disruption in Memoir" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Pedagogy >
        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
        • Crystal N. Fodrey, "Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship" (2.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
        • Christian Exoo & Sydney Fallon, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to ​First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (2.1)
    • Special Conference Issue
    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
1.1

Picture

Andy Harper
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The Joke's On Me: 
The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative



The narrator of Mark Twain’s 1879 essay, “A Presidential Candidate,” sets out to make of himself a prime Presidential candidate by telling the reader in advance everything awful about himself, reasoning that his opponents “will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard before” (3). The narrator eschews arrogance by exaggerating his negative traits and dastardly deeds to the point of absurdity, finally translating his uneasiness among poor people into a platform that advocates feeding the American working class to cannibals. In the end, this is not a personal reflection on the part of the narrator but a condemnation of the American political process and its fascination with detecting scandal. But Twain uses self-deprecating humor to get his point across clearly and amicably, without offending or isolating the reader.

Much of the personal nonfiction genre is characterized by a search for truth, and both honesty and confession must be employed along the way. To do so, the nonfiction writer often employs such literary devices as plot, setting, and characterization that are often considered the realm of fiction. At the heart of this endeavor is humor: no literary component demands reader engagement in quite the same way. Humor initiates a conversation and establishes a relationship with the reader. Self-deprecating humor, more specifically, invites the reader to truth, pain, and a good laugh. Of the many forms of humor employed by essayists and memoirists, self-deprecating humor is particularly useful for its ability to draw readers in, avoid arrogance and self-pity, and build character. Writers like David Sedaris, Nora Ephron, Ian Frazier, and Veronica Geng draw readers in with their uproarious personal stories and observations. Some of the bestselling books on Amazon are written by comedians and TV humorists like Tina Fey and Billy Crystal. These authors take part in a tradition that reaches back to Montaigne’s 1580 Essais and includes the likes of Mark Twain, George Orwell, James Thurber, and Francine Prose. Among those writers who have helped to shape the voice of humor in personal nonfiction, those featured in The New Yorker have made some of the more prominent contributions in modern literary history.

Certainly The New Yorker’s role in the development of humorous nonfiction is tied to its role in the development of humor writing in general. Much of the writing found in The New Yorker and other collections of humor occupies a space between fiction and nonfiction. Mark Twain’s “A Presidential Candidate” is a good example—here is the familiar Twain persona, but the wild claims he makes in this piece don’t stand up in the face of a biographical inquiry. He’s being facetious in more or less the same way as George S. Kaufman in “Annoy Kaufman, Inc.” Neither of these works is factual, but they both occupy the gray space of the nonfiction-fiction divide. Humor writing is made up of many shades of gray, producing what could practically be considered a hybrid genre. The craft of humor, particularly the craft of self-deprecating humor, is employed in more or less the same ways by stand-up comedians, sitcom writers, memoirists, and essayists. This style of humor can be used by the full spectrum of writers from celebrity comics to creators of what might be considered “literary nonfiction”—Tina Fey, Spalding Gray, David Sedaris, Erica Jong, E. B. White, Mark Twain, and Montaigne—and all, indeed, are worth studying.

In their introduction to Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker, editors David Remnick and Henry Finder attribute the invention of a particularly New Yorker brand of humor to E. B. White and James Thurber (xvi). While White was a “master of the understatement” (xvi), Thurber introduced “Little Man” humor to the magazine in 1927, which played on characters’ incompetence (xvi). When the narrator is crafted as “Little Man,” the result is self-deprecating humor. David Sedaris is known for employing this type of humor in his stories, portraying himself, in the words of Marge Piercy and Ira Wood, as “the world’s most ineffectual patsy, doormat to the world” (202). For example, in Sedaris’ story, “The Learning Curve,” (included in his collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day) he tells of his time leading a writing workshop, where he faced difficulty establishing authority and gaining the respect of his students:    
Whenever I felt in danger of losing my authority, I would cross the room and either open or close the door. A student needed to ask permission before regulating the temperature or noise level, but I could do so whenever I liked. It was the only activity sure to remind me that I was in charge, and I took full advantage of it.

"There he goes again," my students would whisper. "What's up with him and that door?" (86-7).
Sedaris’ narrative voice is endearing and funny because he wears his doubts and anxieties, flaws and failures right on his sleeve. His humor functions similarly to the ubiquitous comic banana peel, relying prominently upon his consistently getting tripped up on his inadequacies and falling flat.

Remnick and Finder name “dementia praecox” humor as another of the magazine’s specialties—the ramblings of deranged or disturbed narrators (xvi). The “unreliable narrator” is an element well known to fiction writers, and the potential for humor is almost immediately apparent. When this tool is employed in nonfiction to paint the author himself as neurotic, the humor becomes charmingly self-deprecating. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Short Autobiography” certainly paints him as somewhat unhinged, boiling his life’s story down to a listing of alcoholic beverages by year imbibed, ending on the year the piece was written, 1929: “A feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced, and yet--‘Garçon, un Chablis-Mouton 1902, et pour commencer, une petite carafe de vin rosé. C’est ça—merci’” (193).

In the 1930s came the “humorous reminiscence” (xvi), in whose tradition writers might look back on embarrassing experiences or shortcomings, or else may look back on everyday aspects of childhood with humor generated by approaching such remembrances from a place of greater understanding or experience. George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys…” revisits his school days, adopting a childlike point of view while ruminating on society, the educational system, and coming of age:
At five or six, like many children, I had passed through a phase of sexuality. My friends were the plumber’s children up the road, and we used sometimes to play games of a vaguely erotic kind. One was called “playing at doctors,” and I remember getting a faint but definitely pleasant thrill from holding a toy trumpet, which was supposed to be a stethoscope, against a little girl’s belly. [...] Between roughly seven and fourteen, the whole subject seemed to me uninteresting and, when for some reason I was forced to think about it, disgusting (288).

The humorous reminiscence allows the writer to poke fun at his earlier self, and the reader gets to be in on the joke as well. Mix these three distinctly New Yorker styles of humor, and the result is a narrator reminiscing on his own incompetence, which is only one approach to self-deprecating humor.
​

Humor as Tool

​Self-deprecating humor, then, relies on the exploitation of something perceivably negative about the narrator. For example, irony can be used to affect an aloof arrogance that only thinly veils self-criticism, as Nancy Franklin does in her 1997 essay, “Take it from Me.” Franklin’s voice is authoritative with transparently false expertise as she doles out advice based on embarrassing failures: “For example, don’t wait until you’re forty to have nude pictures taken of yourself” (380). Exaggeration may also be employed to expand a flaw to absurd levels. Billy Crystal’s memoir, 700 Sundays, notes, “Jews bury very quickly. Very quickly. I had an uncle who was a narcoleptic, and he’d nod off and you’d hear digging. One summer they buried him five times!” (124-5).

Self-parody is a way of magnifying the narrator in order to make fun of himself. While parody is concerned with mimicking the style of another author, self-parody seeks to exaggerate an author’s own style. James Thurber is known for both styles: he parodied Salvador Dalí in his essay, “The Secret Life of James Thurber.” But in “The Notebooks of James Thurber,” he turns his own style on its head and presents us with a specimen of James Thurber writing about James Thurber writing about James Thurber. The piece begins with the author’s prediction that his letters will likely never be collected and published, then proceeds through his notebooks criticizing the entries as if presenting evidence to the prediction’s legitimacy. Even as Thurber criticizes the contents of his notebook, his very criticisms contain the same “deterrents” for which he denounces them. He lists said deterrents as “persistent illegibility, paucity of material, triviality of content, ambiguity of meaning, facetious approach, preponderance of juvenilia, and exasperating abbreviation” (211). While illegibility and abbreviation are not relevant, the overall essay is rather facetious, making much ado out of a dearth of largely inconsequential and juvenile material. The understanding that it is just such “flaws” which have ultimately made Thurber a successful essayist makes the piece all the more tongue-in-cheek. Furthermore, the verbosity with which Thurber discusses such silly matters is characteristic of his writing. 

While there are a number of reasons a writer may be drawn to the use of self-deprecating humor, the effect is still a route to the insight and truth common to nonfiction’s goals. For one, picking on someone else is incredibly tricky, and the writer may find it safer to be the butt of his or her own jokes. It is notable that the majority of self-deprecating humorists—from Michel de Montaigne, to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, to Spalding Gray and Woody Allen, to David Sedaris—tend to be white men. These writers, immersed in privilege, have few groups to turn to for comic fodder without quickly becoming offensive. By picking on themselves, they are able to discuss sensitive issues in a way that is palatable for both those who do and do not share their privilege.

Self-hatred is both a motivation for the use of self-deprecating humor in personal narrative and a tool for finding commonality with readers. We do or say something stupid; we make a fool of ourselves; we make the same mistake again and again; we fail at something important to us; we hate the way we look; we feel defective and unworthy. For the humorist, there are lessons to be learned from such experiences. For instance, Tina Fey’s Bossypants includes a list of body parts for which she is “grateful,” of which each entry is negative and self-deprecating: “Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours” to “Wide-set knockers that aren’t so big but can be hoisted up once or twice a year for parades” (24).  The discussion, whether in writing or aloud, of one’s flaws suggests a certain amount of fixation on those flaws, presumably in the form of self-consciousness or resentment. While the features Fey zeroes in on to make fun of herself may have been a source of insecurity for her at one time, she is clearly comfortable enough with them now to shine a spotlight on them—and not just any spotlight, but a comic spotlight. So while self-loathing may form the seed that eventually grows into self-effacing humor, the use of such humor actually suggests confidence and courage on the part of the narrator and provides comic relief in discussions of low body image and other forms of self-hate.

In the fourteenth chapter of So You Want to Write, Marge Piercy and Ira Wood discuss humor writing as a survival technique, identifying humorists as mostly people who perceive themselves as “losers, physical outcasts, social misfits” (197). These might include fat kids, as Piercy and Wood suggest, individuals with disabilities, minorities such as women and African Americans, homosexuals, or anyone facing anxiety or self-consciousness. The idea is to be the butt of your own joke before you become the butt of someone else’s joke. Some of the essays in David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day poke fun at his high-pitched voice, lisp, and difficulty learning French, each of which made him feel alienated. Certainly, part of the process of survival includes battling that sense of alienation. After basic physiological needs, such as food and sleep, and security of body, health, resources, etc. on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs comes the sense of love and belonging. Writers, like all humans, strive for a sense of community, an assurance that they fit in or belong somewhere—it’s part of survival. Self-deprecating humor, therefore, can be used simply as a way to participate in community. This is the difference between being “laughed at” and being “laughed with.” Rather than being cast out and ridiculed, the writer becomes part of the conversation with readers who may have similar experiences.

Confession, essential to the honesty of personal narrative, is an important part of establishing the relationship of trust between writer and reader. “The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor,” writes Phillip Lopate; “some vulnerability is essential to the personal essay” (xxvi). In addition to building trust and closeness with the reader, full disclosure allows more room for jokes and sardonicism. Sedaris’ “Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist” spares none of the grotesqueries of drug addiction nor the absurdities of surrealist performance art. The rattling tale of his downward spiral is punctuated with laughs.
Hoping to get me off her back, my dealer introduced me to half a dozen hyperactive brainiacs who shared my taste for amphetamines and love of the word manifesto. Here, finally, was my group. The first meeting was tense, but I broke the ice by laying out a few lines of crystal and commenting on my host’s refreshing lack of furniture. His living room contained nothing but an enormous nest of human hair. [...] Other group members stored their bodily fluids in baby-food jars or wrote cryptic messages on packaged skirt steaks. Their artworks were known as “pieces,” a phrase I enthusiastically embraced. “Nice piece,” I’d say. In my eagerness to please, I accidentally complimented chipped baseboards and sacks of laundry waiting to be taken to the cleaners (47).
Sedaris mostly skips the commentary, laying out the details of the encounter rather baldly, and this treatment provides humor enough. The setting he paints is grim but bizarre. The anecdote at the end almost catches the reader off-guard, simultaneously cementing his understanding of the narrator’s surroundings and pulling him back enough to follow the plot forward.

This type of humor draws readers in by evoking the most universal and relatable feeling: embarrassment. Embarrassing stories, such as those found in actress Aisha Tyler’s Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation and in the work of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray, constitute one style of self-deprecating humor. Sedaris’ “Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?”, for example, is essentially a string of embarrassing fashion faux pas ranging from his discovering glasses just like his own “on the smug plastic face of Mrs. Beasley, a middle-aged doll featured on the 1960s television program Family Affair” (376) to his use of such products as a prosthetic butt and a “discreet” external catheter. Such stories provide readers with fun and entertainment, while establishing a bond of trust and understanding between the reader and the narrator.  In the first chapter of The Comic Toolbox, John Vorhaus writes, “When a clown catches a pie in the face, it’s truth and pain. You feel for the poor clown all covered in custard, and you also realize that it could have been you” (Jackson). Discussing this common experience is one way for the writer to commune with his readers and experience the aforementioned sense of belonging. David Sedaris’ “Big Boy” (from Me Talk Pretty One Day) is the excruciating story of his entering the restroom at a dinner party, where he is greeted by “the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life” (97), which he cannot manage to flush. Knowing that the next person to use the bathroom will know that he was in there, he frantically tries again and again to get the thing to flush, even as someone is knocking on the door. It’s funny and suspenseful because the reader can relate to the author’s embarrassment. The narrator’s frantic voice and mounting suspense really contribute to the humor here:    
“I’ll be out in a second!”

I scrambled for a plunger and used the handle to break the turd into manageable pieces, all the while thinking that it wasn’t fair, that this was technically not my job. Another flush and it still wouldn’t go down. Come on, pal. Let’s move it. While waiting for the tank to refill, I thought maybe I should wash my hair. It wasn’t dirty, but I needed some excuse to cover the amount of time I was spending in the bathroom. Quick, I thought. Do something. By now the other guests were probably thinking I was the type of person who uses dinner parties as an opportunity to defecate and catch up on my reading.

“Here I come. I’m just washing up” (99).
Sedaris really zeroes in on these moments in the bathroom with someone outside the door. He slows down enough to capture every ticking second, every action, every thought, and it’s great for building suspense. He applies the same methodology to crafting this scene that one might expect to see in a bomb diffusing. The purpose of this—and the effect—is to maximize cringe-worthiness for the reader.

But not all uncomfortable stories—like Sedaris’—are so easily defused. Self-deprecating humor plays a particular role in crafting the narrative of misfortune or tragedy. Not only does humor aid the writer as a technique in the telling of a difficult story, it also helps the writer to avoid an air of self-pity in dealing with those subjects. Erica Jong’s national bestseller, Seducing the Demon: Writing for my Life, cuts right to the bone, discussing Jong’s romantic woes and struggles with substance abuse. She has no trouble sharing her struggles, shortcomings, or embarrassing stories, but she balances heavy subjects with self-deprecating humor to remind readers it’s all in the past. In reference to her self-destructive partying days, she writes, “If it hadn’t been for two physicians at the party who walked me up and down and spooned coffee down my gullet, I might be dead” (117). The situation is dire, but she crafts the scene to be morbidly laughable. 

Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life, is another example of this technique. The narrative follows his trans-American childhood, throughout which he travels with his mother from place to place, most often in flight of his mother’s abusive boyfriends and husbands. In one scene, he attempts to explain to his brother an episode in which his step-father has hit him:
It took me a while to get the story out. The word mustard resists serious treatment, and as I described what had happened I began to fear that Geoffrey would find the episode ridiculous, so I made it sound worse than it had been.

Geoffrey listened without interrupting me. Once I was finished he said, “Let me get this straight. He hit you because of a little mustard?” (203)
Despite the gravity of the situation and the honesty with which Wolff treats it, there’s a hint of sardonicism in the telling. Mocking the situation and himself, Wolff eases the reader’s discomfort.
​

Humor and Characterization

The success of humor writing often hinges on the writer’s persona on the page, rather than on jokes. Writers like Nancy Franklin and James Thurber craft themselves as characters, in part, through their use of self-deprecating humor. In autobiographical writing, as Tim Jackson observes in his article, “Laughing through Life: Humor in Autobiographical Writing,” featured in Brevity, using characters’ flaws is not only important to developing those characters but also to crafting humor. A writer of personal narrative, therefore, must be able to find the humor in his own flaws and use it in presenting his character. Tina Fey writes about the obstacles presented by her own shortcomings during the days when 30 Rock was still in development:
A development deal means they pay you while you’re thinking, which is a pretty great deal, unless you’re like me and you feel constant anxiety that you haven’t thought of anything yet. (My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.) After a few months of getting money for nothing, I pitched NBC president of Primetime Development Kevin Reilly an idea about a cable news producer (me, presumably) who is forced to produce the show of a blowhard right-wing pundit (Alec Baldwin, if we could ever get him) to boost her network’s sagging ratings. Kevin Reilly said, “No, thank you.” All of a sudden this development deal thing didn’t seem so bad. If I could get turned down one or two more times, I could keep the development money but never have to make a show. But then I’d probably also never work again, and I have a very competitive and obedient nature, so…chin acne and rewrites (153).
Here, Fey presents the problem of her anxiety and lays out its effects on her work during the development deal; even as she reconsiders, “this development deal thing didn’t seem so bad,” we see her obsessing and worrying. She compounds the problem and brings understanding to it by revealing her “competitive and obedient nature.” However, even as Piercy and Wood warn against one-dimensional characters: “[f]ocusing merely on the obsession will give you nowhere to go with your story” (210), readers see other sides of Fey’s character—her creativity and entrepreneurship, even a peek at her working relationship with NBC president of Primetime Development Kevin Reilly. Even in writing about a particular obsession or flaw, an author must present multiple aspects of his characters’ lives—and his own. Fey dodges this danger, allowing the details of her obsessive nature only to supplement the greater narrative that is her development of 30 Rock.

When a writer casts himself as the subject of a self-portrait, the reality is that readers must see the character (a.k.a. the narrator) in action in order to fully appreciate and understand him. “It’s often how an obsessive character interacts with the world that brings us pleasure,” write Piercy and Wood (210).  Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre,” paints Lopate as a curmudgeon, prone to discontent and hostility (716-7). Even while he criticizes hedonism, alcohol consumption, dinner parties, the present tense, and lovemaking, he takes some time in the discussion of each subject to make fun of himself. As he disparages dinner parties, their role in society, and those who attend them, dismissing the conversation as being “of a mind-numbing caliber” (722), he avoids coming off as haughty through his use of self-deprecation. First, he obviously includes himself among those on whom he passes judgment, simply because he is himself a guest at a dinner party. Second, he implies himself deficient, an outcast drowning “in an absolute torment of exclusion, too shy to speak up, or suspecting that when [he does his] contributions fail to carry the same weight as those of the others” (721). He is a type in his own analysis of the dinner party; despite the voice of idle observer, he is absolutely present in the society he critiques. Lopate notes the role of the Idler Figure as an element of the personal essay, writing, “As part of their ironic modesty, personal essayists frequently represent themselves as loafers or retirees, inactive and tangential to the marketplace” (xxxiii), the idea being that such narrators make their observations and criticisms from the outside. But, of course, they are not on the outside; they are getting their hands necessarily dirty in the topic they are discussing. The creative nonfiction writer’s tendency to represent himself as an outsider may be another way of denying expertise and thus building credibility as an everyman.

Self-deprecating humor is especially useful in for eschewing arrogance and balancing egotism, both dangers to writers of nonfiction. [Professor So-and-So] once observed that nonfiction writers just have to face the fact that it is arrogant to write nonfiction, that we all must be a little arrogant to write it. And then we have to work with that. And it is arrogant – expecting others to just listen to us and take our words, our thoughts and opinions, our experiences as authority. And self-deprecating humor is a way of facing that, and working with it. So privilege and characterization are irrelevant.  Lopate writes in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay that “it takes a fair amount of ego to discourse on one’s private affairs and offer judgments about life” (xxxi). Seeing, however, that that is the express purpose of personal narrative may offer some insight into why a writer might choose the genre in the first place. The famously self-effacing E. B. White writes, “I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist [...] I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egotistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates too great attention to my own life” (qtd. in Lopate xxxi). As White demonstrates in this observation, a little self-deprecation can balance out an appearance of self-importance on the author’s part. Indeed, the first several paragraphs of Montaigne’s “Of Books” are rather self-effacing, as he attempts to dispel any notions that he is remotely knowledgeable on the subject he is discussing:
I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less (46).
Though very highly educated, he modestly emphasized where his knowledge was lacking, even as he informed readers on a topic, reminding readers that you really must know quite a lot in order to understand how much you don’t know. His Essais begins with a note to the reader: “I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject” (2636). Quite often in his work, humor is generated when his modesty reaches absurdity.

Along the same lines as the self-effacing self-portrait, the “dementia praecox” focuses on building the character of the author as unhinged or unstable to comic effect. In his 1957 essay, “Annoy Kaufman, Inc.,” George S. Kaufman confides his suspicion of a staggeringly powerful worldwide conspiracy to inconvenience him in a variety of ways, each more elaborate than the last:
My next example may sound like a simple and inexpensive thing to manage, but it isn’t. It has to do with the engineer’s little boy, Danny. Danny is six years old. In fact, he has been six years old for the thirty-five years that I have been making overnight train journeys. (I suppose that, actually, they keep on having an engineer’s little boy born every year, but that takes planning.) Anyhow, for years and years Danny has been begging his father to let him run the locomotive some night. For years and years, his father has been saying no. Then, finally, the night comes. “Can I run the engine tonight, Daddy?” asks Danny, who is too young to know about “can” and “may.” And his father says, “Yes, Danny, boy. We have just got word that Kaufman will be on the train tonight, and he is very tired and needs a good night’s sleep, so you can run the engine.” So Danny runs the engine, the result being the neck-breaking stops and starts that keep me awake all night (294).
As he presents his evidence, it becomes wilder and wilder, going even so far to cite the influence of this organization in secretly having a clause added to the original text of the income-tax law (296). Thus, it becomes more and more clear that we have an unstable narrator on our hands.

While Tina Fey’s Bossypants certainly does not disappoint in terms of laugh-out-loud experiences, Fey’s narrator is flexible enough so as to deliver in more serious realms as well, such as Fey’s experiences of sexism in the workplace and her struggle to balance her career and parenthood. For example, during her pregnancy, Fey struggled with the pressure to breast-feed and her own physical and professional limitations, commenting, “If you choose not to love your baby enough to breast-feed, you can pump your milk using a breast pump. (This may be easier for the modern mom because it is an expensive appliance and we’re more comfortable with those than with babies)” (218). Fey eventually switches her baby to an all-formula diet, leading to overwhelming feelings of guilt and failure, which bubble up in her daily interactions:
I was defensive and grouchy whenever the topic came up. At a party with a friend who was successfully nursing her little boy, I watched her husband produce a bottle of pumped breast milk that was the size of a Big Gulp. It was more milk than I had produced in my whole seven weeks—I blame Entourage. As my friend’s husband fed the baby, he said offhandedly, “This stuff is liquid gold. You know it actually makes them smarter?” “Let’s set a date!” I screamed. “IQ test. Five years from today. My formula baby will crush your baby!” Thankfully, my mouth was so full of cake they could not understand me (219).
While Fey provides quality laugh-out-loud humor, she does ask not to be taken too lightly. Her anecdotes and funny takes on various subjects are what draw readers in and prevents her narrator from becoming preachy, but the experiences she draws from are significant. Her introduction to Bossypants promises insight on finding success as a woman in a male-dominated workplace and on effective child-rearing, and she certainly does not disappoint.

To take this further, self-deprecating humor can be beneficial to writers who aim to make a statement or provide some kind of social, cultural, or political commentary. One approach is simple self-reflection; Fey’s memoir is an example of this style. Montaigne’s writing, on the other hand, is not so much reflective as it is contemplative on individual subjects, contributing personal experiences to the discussion alongside formal learning. Mark Twain, whose writing is celebrated for its wry wit and self-effacing humor, wrote very controversially on a number of social and political topics. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn scorned slavery and racism, while The Gilded Age illuminated political corruption. He was smart about his approach to such themes, however, employing satire in many of his works and self-deprecation even more frequently.

Not all writing that incorporates humor is necessarily humor writing; the primary focus of humor writing is entertainment. But that doesn’t mean it should be taken lightly. Writers like David Sedaris and E. B. White use laughter to draw their audiences in and keep them hooked, often delivering the deeper message of their writing when the reader is least expecting it. Readers know they can turn to Sedaris or White or pick up a copy of Bossypants for a good laugh, but that’s not always what they may be looking for. Humor is used in many types of writing and is employed for a number of essential effects. Self-deprecating humor is a powerful tool for drawing readers in, avoiding arrogance and self-pity, and building character. It is a true giant in the genre, operating under diverse conditions to regularly produce successful literature.

Click here for a printable PDF with Works Cited.

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Andy Harper holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska-Omaha with a creative nonfiction emphasis, and he is a PhD Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Southern Illinois University. His work has been included in Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. His current projects include a place-based memoir in essays and a collection of humorous personal essays on awkwardness, anxiety, and the little quirks that make up daily life. He lives in Carbondale, Illinois.


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On Very Short Books, Miniatures,
and Other Becomings
Assay 5.2 (Spring 2019)


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  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
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        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
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        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
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        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
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        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
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        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
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        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
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        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
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        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
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        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
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        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
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        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
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        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
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        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
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        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
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        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
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        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
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        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
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        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
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        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
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        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
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        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
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        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
      • 8.2 Pedagogy >
        • Liesel Hamilton, "How I Wish I’d Taught Frederick Douglass: An Examination of the Books and Conversations We Have in Classrooms" (8.2)
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "In the Room Where it Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom" (8.2)
        • Daniel Nester, "Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley’s Three Poles" (8.2)
    • 9.1 (Fall 2022) >
      • 9.1 Articles >
        • Mark Houston, "Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of ​Social Justice Rhetoric in “The Sacred and the Superfund”" (9.1)
        • Ryan McIlvain, ""You Get to Decide What to Worship but Not What's Good": Rereading 'This Is Water'" (9.1)
        • Quincy Gray McMichael, "Laboring toward Leisure: The Characterization of Work in ​Maine’s Back-to-the-Land Memoirs" (9.1)
        • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
        • Emma Winsor Wood, "A Lovely Woman Tapers Off into a Fish: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Conversations >
        • Philip Newman Lawton, "Rousseau's Wandering Mind" (9.1)
        • Claire Salinda, "Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in ​The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood" (9.1)
        • Hannah White, "“Which sounds bad and maybe was”: A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jessica Handler, "Your Turn" (9.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Expressing Anger as a Positive Choice" (9.1)
        • Kozbi Simmons, "Literacy as Emancipation" (9.1)
        • Wally Suphap, "Writing and Teaching the Polemic" (9.1)
    • 9.2 (Spring 2023) >
      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Amy Mackin, "A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives: Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jeannine Ouellette, "That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Conversations >
        • Blossom D'Souza, "The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet" (Assay 9.2)
        • Kyra Lisse, "Relentlist Women: On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux" (Assay 9.2)
        • William Kerwin,​ “Life as a Boneyard”: Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello, "The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian" (Assay 9.2)
        • Eamonn Wall, "A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Pedagogy >
        • Khem Aryal, "Beyond Lores: Linking Writers’ Self-Reports to Autoethnography" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: ​Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)
        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Late Night Thoughts on What Street Photography ​Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing" (Assay 9.2)
    • 10.1 (Fall 2023) >
      • 10.1 Articles >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
        • Anne Garwig, "Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the ​Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War" (Assay 10.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out" (Assay 10.1)
        • Kathryn Jones, "Conveying the Grief Experience: Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights" (Assay 10.1)
        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Conversations >
        • Beth Kephart, "On Reading Fast and Reading Slow" (Assay 10.1)
        • Mimi Schwartz, "The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Pedagogy >
        • Angie Chuang, "Dear(ly) Departed: ​Letter-Writing to Engage the Issue of Racialized Police Brutality" (Assay 10.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Where and How We Might Teach Hybrid: A Pedagogical Review of Kazim Ali’s Silver Road" (Assay 10.1)
    • 10.2 (Spring 2024) >
      • 10.2 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
        • Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": ​Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Conversations >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "On Difficulty" (Assay 10.2)
        • Thomas Larson, "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Pedagogy >
        • Amy Bonnaffons, "Writing from the Big Brain: ​An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education" (Assay 10.2)
        • Micah McCrary, "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom" (Assay 10.2)
        • Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
    • 11.1 (Fall 2024) >
      • 11.1 Articles >
        • Anna Nguyen, "A Question on Genre: The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed" (Assay 11.1)
        • Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Conversations >
        • Jehanne Dubrow, "The Essay's Volta" (Assay 11.1)
        • James Allen Hall, "Wholly Fragmented" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Spotlight >
        • Kim Hensley Owens & Yongzhi Miao, "Six Words is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment" (Assay 11.1)
        • Elizabeth Leahy, "Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability: Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center" (Assay 11.1)
        • Jennifer Stewart, "Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection" (Assay 11.1)
        • Katherine Fredlund, "Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Pedagogy >
        • Abby Manzella, "In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: ​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand" (Assay 11.1)
        • Peter Wayne Moe, "Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing" (Assay 11.1)
        • Gwen Niekamp, "The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ​in the CNF Classroom and Canon" (Assay 11.1)
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