ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 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)
  • 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)
      • 1.2 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)
        • Bruce 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)
        • Anthony 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)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
6.2

Picture

George H. Jensen

Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”



​In To Show and To Tell, Phillip Lopate writes that “the still-evolving pedagogy of nonfiction” often lapses into “fiction envy.” Instructors, adopting advice they learned when they were in fiction classes, say, “Put everything into scenes” (4-5). In other words, “show, don’t tell.” Lopate argues that, while creative nonfiction does use some of the techniques of fiction, we should also recognize that the personal essay and memoir are distinct forms of nonfiction. I agree with Lopate that personal essays are different than fiction, yet if we are going to move beyond simply adopting the pedagogy of fiction in our nonfiction courses, we will need an expanded terminology more suited to the kind of moves that writers of nonfiction make and a theory that helps students to explain where such moves might take them.
​
What the showing and telling dichotomy embodies is a dialectic between events, the once-occurring experiences we try to capture in scenes, and the stories that are told around scenes. In “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Foucault shares his thoughts about Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du sens, a work that counters Platonic idealism by injecting it with the event:
Logique du sens causes us to reflect on matters that philosophy has neglected for many centuries: the event (assimilated in a concept, from which we vainly attempted to extract in the form of a fact, verifying a proposition, of actual experience, a modality of the subject, of concreteness, the empirical content of history); and the phantasm (reduced in the name of reality and situated at the extremity, the pathological pole of a normative sequence; perception-image-memory-illusion). After all, what most urgently needs thought in this century, if not the event and the phantasm. (italics in original, no question mark in original, 180)
​Foucault (summarizing Deleuze’s argument) describes the event (the experience that is shaped into scenes) with words or phrases that indicate a connection with reality: fact, actual experience, concreteness, the empirical content of history. In contrast, Foucault describes phantasm as an abstracted reality (simulacrum and copy; an abstract world, the self, and God as represented by “sphere, circle, and a center”) and even set narratives (“a normative sequence”). Following Deleuze’s lead, Foucault does not so much want to eliminate phantasm (a term that bears some negative connotations and seems at odds with nonfiction) as much as play it against the event, as a dialectic. In other words, he wants to inject the event into phantasm to ground and interrogate it, in short, to ground and critique Platonic ideals.

If we equate “event” with scene and “phantasm” with narrative, we can begin to discuss the importance of a dialectic between “showing” and “telling” that can examine some of our assumptions about narrative. Are some kinds of narratives more true and more likely to facilitate personal growth? How does narrative fix identity and transform identity? Are there times in our lives when it is more important to fix our identity and times when we need to transform it? Ultimately, does narrative harm or heal? Or, is it like pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus, both medicine and poison?
​
Cheryl Strayed published “The Love of My Life” in The Sun in 2002, before she wrote either Torch (2006), a novel, or Wild (2012), a memoir, all on the subject of her mother’s early death. As should become apparent, Strayed is doing more than scenes in this essay. She moves through a number of kinds of narration (scenes, recurrent time, backstories, fast narration, counter-narrative, and meta-narrative) as well a number of kinds of reflection (reflection on scenes, reflection on recurrent time, and reflection on historical/cultural norms). As I map Strayed’s moves within this essay, I will refer to the sections by paragraph numbers, which readers will need to add to the original text if they wish to follow the analysis section by section.


Scenes

​Strayed begins “The Love of My Life” with a scene, which can be defined as the narration and crafting of a once-occurrent event (¶s 1-13). The scene begins:
​            The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.
            “Yes,” I said.
            “I thought so,” he said slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I rolled the rings around on my fingers. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother’s. I’d taken hers off her hand after she died. It was nothing fancy: sterling silver, thick and braided.
            “You look like the kind of girl who has a cat.”
​The opening scene—fully mimetic, with description, action, characters, and dialogue—makes for an effective opening. The unveiling in the first line—we could call it a confession—draws the reader in with a hint of eroticism, but that is soon dispelled. Within a few lines, readers become concerned for her safety, almost pleading with her to stay in the café, but she follows the man out, as if moving without volition. The man and Cheryl kiss, the man bites her lip, she screams, he pushes her away, and says, “You’re not mature.”  He leaves. The action in the scene is singular, occurring only once in this precise way, unlike Strayed’s treatment of the affairs that follow, a pattern connected to Cheryl’s grief.

The nature of this connection between Cheryl’s grief and her affairs deserves some comment. It does not meet cultural norms. If Cheryl cried incessantly or spent all day in bed, she would be grieving appropriately. Having affairs, not so much. Also, the connection between emotion and action is fuzzy and will take Strayed a while to understand. We could even say that it wasn’t a connection at all, but a portal, the ending of one phase of a life, the opening of another. At the end of the scene, Strayed says she has entered her “life as a slut,” which both sums up the scene and prepares readers for what follows. At the end of the scene, it is Strayed (the narrator, now further along in her healing, having completed her hike in 1995) who reflects back on the actions of Cheryl (the character and former self, as she existed between her mother’s death and the hike), creating a double-voiced narration that might be mimicked in fiction, but not fully captured. Readers are already thinking beyond Cheryl (the character) to the real person she represents and are fearful about what lies ahead for her. When Strayed (the narrator) ends the scene with “My life as a slut,” we know the embodied Cheryl Strayed is going to come through this—our concern for Cheryl is allayed.

This opening scene provides teachers with a number of topics to explore. Why did Strayed decide to begin with a scene? Are the other scenes in the essay strategically placed? In what ways does a scene go beyond—craft or aestheticize—the event, the facts of what actually happened? The teacher can even ask students to underline the facts of the scene and then discuss them one by one. When Strayed writes that the man has “skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it,” is this factual? If not, how has Strayed shaped the event as she created the scene? Does this mean that Strayed is fictionalizing the event? If so, does this mean the essay moves into a blurry area between fiction and nonfiction?

​In addition to this opening scene (¶s 1-13), Strayed includes five more scenes in the essay: a description of two acquaintances who died about the same time as her mother, which some might consider to be more anecdotes than scenes (¶s 31-33), her confession about having affairs to Mark, her husband, about two years after her mother’s death (¶s 42-45), undergoing an abortion, about three years after her mother’s death (¶s 52-57), not being able to write a paper in a college class and graduate on time, months after her mother’s death (¶ 59), and losing her mother’s diamond ring while swimming in a river (¶s 64-69). In total, only thirty-two of the seventy-two paragraphs in the essay are devoted to scenes. Students can learn a great deal about essay structure by identifying the scenes and then mapping what the author is doing in other sections. The class can even, as Bartholomae and Petrosky recommend in Fact, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, develop their own list of terms to describe the author’s moves.


​Fast Narration

​Fast narration relates a string of once-occurring events but without creating scenes. In her essay, Strayed includes two sections of fast narration. The first covers the year after her confession about having affairs to Mark, her husband (¶s 47-51); the second covers six months between her abortion and starting to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (¶s 62-63). The second section begins:
Mark and I had filed the papers for our divorce. My stepfather was going to marry the woman he’d started dating immediately after my mother died. I wanted to get out of Minnesota. I needed a new life and, unoriginally, I was going west to find it. I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail — a wilderness trail that runs along the backbone of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains, from Mexico to Canada. Rather, I decided to hike a large portion of it — from the Mojave Desert in California to the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. It would take me four months. I’d grown up in the country, done a good amount of camping, and taken a few weekend backpacking trips, but I had a lot to learn: how, for example, to read a topographical map, ford a river, handle an ice ax, navigate using a compass, and avoid being struck by lightning. Everyone who knew me thought that I was nuts. I proceeded anyway, researching, reading maps, dehydrating food and packing it into plastic bags and then into boxes that would be mailed at roughly two-week intervals to the ranger stations and post offices I’d occasionally pass near.
​While the sections of fast narration relate once-current events (such as, Strayed’s divorce), the events are not fully mimetic; they do not include description and dialogue. In the opening scene to the essay, Strayed spends thirteen paragraphs narrating one event that probably spanned less than five minutes. In the above section, Strayed narrates a series of events that covered about six months in a paragraph.

Fast narration is not simply a technique for shifting narrative speed, covering more ground, and creating a bridge between scenes; fast narration is actually more like montage in film. A montage captures an important transition, like a couple falling in love, and builds emotion, through both images and music. In this paragraph, Cheryl is moving from her old life (her family of origin and her marriage) toward a period of transition (her extended hike). As with montage, this section of fast narration builds emotion with a key sentence: “Everyone who knew me thought I was nuts.” After years of acting unconsciously, Strayed has begun to take control of her recovery. She is still breaking norms, but now she does so with a purpose. She has literally and metaphorically begun a journey.

​While we might think that student essayists need more practice writing scenes, they are often even less aware of the need to speed up narration, writing essays that give equal weight to all events and dully plod along. Thus, analyzing sections of fast narration can help students to make significant progress in telling stories. As when discussing scenes, it is important for teachers to point out that fast narration does more than just cover key events quickly; sections of fast narration also craft events in ways that convey mood or emotion. A discussion of montage in film as an opening to discussing fast narration often helps students to see the role of fast narration in building the emotional arc of the essay.


​Recurrent Time

​Recurrent time, which is sometimes signaled with the modal “would,” narrates patterns of behavior that occur over an extended period of time, often relating behavior that is habitual, driven by social norms, or what Virginia Woolf calls “non-being” (70). Strayed includes four sections of recurrent time: the effects of her mother’s diagnosis (¶s 14-16), her affairs (¶s 19-21), recurrent dreams after her mother’s death (¶s 28-29), and recurrent thoughts she experienced during her mourning, such as “I cannot continue to live” (¶ 60). The following quote conveys, in recurrent time, Cheryl’s string of affairs:
I did not deny. I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief. The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Formerly Gay Organic Farmer, the Quietly Perverse Poet, the Failing but Still Trying Massage Therapist, the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard, the Actually Pretty Famous Drummer Guy. Most of these people were men; some were women. With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed. I didn’t care about them or have orgasms. We didn’t have heart-to-heart talks. I asked them questions about their lives, and they told me everything and asked few questions in return; they knew nothing about me. Because of this, most of them believed they were falling instantly, madly in love with me. (¶ 16)
​All of the modes of time, the components of a narrative, can be used for different ends and need to be assessed in context. Here, recurrent time is used to summarize a habitual pattern that is not so much unconscious as it is unexamined. The lovers do not have names; they are only referenced with Homeric epithets, which further emphasizes Cheryl’s need to numb herself. The recurrent time, as used here, is also a way of establishing boundaries. As Strayed confesses her affairs to her readers, she does not go into detail. Fully mimetic scenes about one affair after another might be too intrusive, crossing over into voyeurism.

​Like fast narration, recurrent time covers an extended period of time quickly, and, if we valorize scenes, it would be easy to assume that the author is simply trying to move efficiently from one scene to the next, filling in gaps in the narration, glossing over less significant events. However, recurrent time typically examines patterns and habits, and it is useful to encourage students to evaluate the behavior described in sections like this. If much of our life is “nonbeing,” as Woolf says, is this a good thing? Do these patterns and habit work for us or against us? Should we attempt to be more mindful of the quotidian in our lives?


​Backstories

​Strayed includes only one long backstory in the essay (¶s 33-39). The narration of backstories can be slow, more like scenes, which might also be called flashbacks, or rapid, more like fast narration. In her essay, Strayed covers her mother’s past rather quickly. This is the second paragraph in the section:
My mother had become pregnant when she was nineteen and immediately married my father, a steelworker in western Pennsylvania when the steel plants were shutting down; a coal miner’s son born about the time that the coal was running out. After three children and nine years of misery, my mother left him. My father had recently moved us to a small town near Minneapolis in pursuit of a job prospect. When they divorced, he went back to Pennsylvania, but my mother stayed. She worked as a waitress and in a factory that made small plastic containers that would eventually hold toxic liquids. We lived in apartment complexes full of single mothers whose children sat on the edges of grocery-store parking lots. We received free government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and welfare checks.
​The different kinds of elements that make up a complex narrative serve some general function in and of themselves (if a story begins in media res, with a scene, then backstories are needed to provide exposition), but we also need to attend to how elements might play off of each other and where they occur in the plot or the emotional arc of a story. The backstory about Strayed’s mother—actually a backstory about Strayed’s relationship to her mother—is positioned about half way through the essay, after the opening scene where Cheryl leaves the restaurant with a nameless man, after she lists in recurrent time a string of affairs with men identified by epithets, and after she feels estranged from her husband. Until this point, we don’t even know much about Cheryl. Even though we have understood the depth of Cheryl’s grief, some readers might judge her for the affairs because they did not understand why Cheryl’s grief is so intense. In seven paragraphs, Strayed narrates her mother’s struggles and Cheryl’s dependence on her, which contextualizes and grounds Cheryl’s grief. A productive question about this backstory is why does it appear so late?

​Backstories provide an opportunity to discuss how good narratives break the simple chronology of events. While the backstory in this essay allows Strayed to begin with a dramatic scene that draws in the reader, it is, like most backstories, moveable. In other words, it could have appeared at a number of places in the essay, so why here? Where else could it appear? How would that affect our reading of the essay? The discussion of this section can lead to class exercises where students identity the elements of their essay that can be moved and experiment with moving them around. 


Counter-Narrative

​A counter-narrative is when the author imagines how life might have taken a different route. In the following section, which occurs when Cheryl is at her emotional nadir (¶ 58), she thinks of a poster she stared at while having her abortion and mourns a lost life:
My mother had been dead for three years. I was twenty-five. I had intended, by this point in my life, to have a title of my own: The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. I had planned to be the kind of woman whose miniature photographed face was placed artfully into a poster of a Victorian mansion that future generations of women would concentrate on while their cervixes were forcefully dilated by the tip of a plastic tube about the size of a drinking straw and the beginnings of babies were sucked out of them. I wasn’t anywhere close. I was a pile of shit.
​This meta-narrative, which is a kind of reflection, contrasts Cheryl’s dreams to her reality in the wake of her mother’s death. It explores loss, not just the loss of her mother and a pregnancy, but loss of the might have been. As we hear the narrative voice of Strayed over the voice of Cheryl, who fantasizes about being a writer, parody emerges. Within narratives of transformation, parody allows the author to both identify with and distance herself from her former self.

The self-loathing that has been building since the beginning of the essay, but not directly narrated, the culmination of three years of destructive behavior—non-being, inauthenticity—is covered in a short paragraph. For readers who were bothered by Strayed reducing the men of her affairs to stereotypes, she here applies the same kind of epithet ironically to herself: The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. At this point, readers realize that all of the epithets that substitute for names are also condensed narrations that say something about cultural norms. They are a kind of phantasm, what Steve Almond calls “bad stories.” As we view “bad stories” backwards, as tableaux that must play out, they seem predetermined. A counter-narrative explores alternatives and opens the possibility of choice.

​The self-loathing in this paragraph, in strict chronological time, occurs three years after her mother’s death, when Cheryl is at her emotional low-point. Within the text, it is positioned toward the end of the essay, as Strayed moves toward a turning point, her hike as a search for meaning. Strayed has already presented glimpses of a later and more settled self, if only in the narrative voice, which makes it easier for readers to absorb this low-point without having it control their entire view of Cheryl. It would be difficult to read an entire essay in this emotional tone. Instead of dwelling on her emotional low, Strayed hits the mark, then quickly moves on. Parts of this passage (especially, “I was a pile of shit”) seem to come from early in her grieving process; they might have been written in an early draft or even pulled from a journal. Much of the healing that comes from writing about trauma and loss comes from retelling, writing more than once about the same trauma (Strayed’s essay, novel, and memoir) or revisions within a particular work, especially when the author layers the new emerging self (the self that is gaining some distance and perspective on the event) over the older self (who has not yet been able to separate from the immediate effects of the event). Healing begins when the author can both identify with the former self and her reflection on it, decentering, almost as if viewing another person (Jensen 94-102). Passages like this provide an opportunity to discuss how the evolution of identity can emerge in revision and how revision can be less a form of erasure and more like a palimpsest, new text superimposed on the still visible old text that preserves earlier thoughts, emotions, and identity, documenting the transformation of self. I also focus discussion on the phrase “I was a pile of shit.” If scenes are important because they present once-occurring events, is this sentence the emotional equivalent of a scene? Are there other moves writers of nonfiction can make that are like scenes, like including artefacts—letters, passages from diaries, photographs, videos? How might an expanded notion of scene help us to question simple narratives?


​Reflection

​On first read, “The Love of My Life” might seem to be more memoir than personal essay. It conveys a broad story; indeed, an outline of story that will be told in Wild is there, except for the hiking. Once, however, the sections of reflection are considered, we begin to see more affinities with the structure of a personal essay. Strayed includes one section that reflects on a pervious scene (¶ 46), one section that reflects on events told in recurrent time (¶ 17), and one section that reflects on her turning point (¶ 61). Five additional sections of reflection are more global, tying Cheryl’s mourning to cultural norms, including gender roles (¶s 18, 22, 25-27, 30, 40-41). We can see the interplay of events, reflection on events, and global reflection on cultural norms in a sequence that begins with recurrent time, as Strayed explains the effect of her mother’s death on her relationship to her husband:
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my husband Mark and I took an unspoken sexual hiatus. When she died seven weeks later, I couldn’t bear for Mark to touch me. His hands on my body made me weep. He went down on me in the gentlest of ways. He didn’t expect anything in return. He didn’t make me feel that I had to come. I would soak in a hot bath, and he would lean into it to touch me. He wanted to make me feel good, better. He loved me, and he had loved my mother. Mark and I were an insanely young, insanely happy, insanely in-love married couple. He wanted to help. No, no, no, I said, but then sometimes I relented. I closed my eyes and tried to relax.       I breathed deep and attempted to fake it. I rolled over on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to look at him. He fucked me and I sobbed uncontrollably.
            “Keep going,” I said to him. “Just finish.” But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He loved me. Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem.
            I wanted my mother. (¶ 14-16)
​While I have been sorting sections of the essay into a taxonomy, the sections are typically mixed. The last line of the second paragraph above (“Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem”) is reflective and begins the move toward the reflection that will occur in the next section, a reflection on this extended pattern of behavior:
We aren’t supposed to want our mothers that way, with the pining intensity of sexual love, but I did, and if I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t have anything. Most of all I couldn’t have pleasure, not even for a moment. I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over her death. To experience sexual joy, it seemed, would have been to negate that reality. And more, it would have been to betray my mother, to be disloyal to the person she had been to me: my hero, a single mother after she bravely left an unhealthy relationship with my father when I was five. She remarried when I was eleven. My stepfather had loved her and been a good husband to her for ten years, but shortly after she died, he’d fallen in love with someone else. His new girlfriend and her two daughters moved into my mother’s house, took her photos off the walls, erased her. I needed my stepfather to be the kind of man who would suffer for my mother, unable to go on, who would carry a torch. And if he wouldn’t do it, I would. (¶ 17)
​This reflection is more specific, directed at the events told in recurrent time, and personal, tied to Cheryl and her family. The section of reflection that follows is more global as it critiques social norms, including the commonly accepted five stages of grief:
​We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time. (¶ 18)
​Strayed moves from Cheryl’s behavior, to reflection on that behavior, to a critique of the values of her time and place. As Strayed steps out of the chronology of events, largely constructed in the reader’s mind, she critiques normative scripts (a kind of phantasm), the stages of grief and phrases like “let go of” and “move on from,” which are dialectically set against her experience, both as presented in scenes and recurrent time.

​For students to better understand the form of the personal essay, it is important to discuss the function of reflection, but students also benefit from recognizing different kinds of reflection, which are different modes of decentering the self. The reflection of the author on a former self is, as Robert Kegan has pointed out, an objectification of self: the subject of a previous developmental stage becomes the object of reflection in the current developmental phase (104). This kind of reflection is quite distinct from reflection that sets the author’s experience against cultural norms, even though both can effect a transformation of self. As teachers who are usually older and more mature than our students, we should also realize, as Kegan emphasizes, that the reflection of a twenty-year-old is qualitatively different than the reflection of a forty-year-old (73-110). For this reason, it is important to discuss the kind of reflection students find in each other’s essay and contrast that to what they find in published works, such as Strayed’s essay.


​Metanarrative

​Strayed closes her essay with three paragraphs of metanarration, which is a kind of imagined reflection that contextualizes her entire essay. Lisa Knopp’s “Perhapsing” and Tessa Fontaine’s “The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction” are other ways to think about how an author constructs metanarrative. The section begins after she has swum in a river and lost her mother’s ring:
If this were fiction, what would happen next is that the woman would stand up and get into her truck and drive away. It wouldn’t matter that the woman had lost her mother’s wedding ring, even though it was gone to her forever, because the loss would mean something else entirely: that what was gone now was actually her sorrow and the shackles of grief that had held her down. And in this loss she would see, and the reader would know, that the woman had been in error all along. That, indeed, the love she’d had for her mother was too much love, really; too much love and also too much sorrow. She would realize this and get on with her life. There would be what happened in the story and also everything it stood for: the river, representing life’s constant changing; the tiny blue flowers, beauty; the spring air, rebirth. All of these symbols would collide and mean that the woman was actually lucky to have lost the ring, and not just to have lost it, but to have loved it, to have ached for it, and to have had it taken from her forever. The story would end, and you would know that she was the better for it. That she was wiser, stronger, more interesting, and, most of all, finally starting down her path to glory. I would show you the leaf when it unfurls in a single motion: the end of one thing, the beginning of another. And you would know the answers to all the questions without being told. Did she ever write that five-page paper about the guy who lost his nose? Did she ask Mark to marry her again? Did she stop sleeping with people who had titles instead of names? Did she manage to walk 1,638 miles? Did she get to work and become the Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer? You’d believe the answers to all these questions to be yes. I would have given you what you wanted then: to be a witness to a healing.
​Strayed begins the metanarrative section: “If this were fiction . . .” This essay was published in 2002, seven years after her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed would write Torch, a novel about grieving, published in 2006, and then Wild, a memoir about grieving, published in 2012. These three paragraphs seem to map the next ten years of Strayed’s life as a writer as well as map some of the differences between fiction and nonfiction, between personal essay and memoir. In the novel Torch, the narrator possesses what Bakhtin calls an excess of seeing (22-27). In a new preface written in 2012 for the paperback edition, Strayed wrote: “I don’t know precisely what it meant for my stepfather to lose his wife or for my siblings to lose their mother, but in Torch I tried very hard to know” (xv-xvi). Typical of third-person omniscient (imagined) narration, Strayed moves into the minds of characters, as in the following passage about Bruce, whose wife, Teresa, is dying of cancer: “He imagined her dying next month, in February, and then he pushed the idea immediately from his mind, scorched by it. He imagined her dying a year from now—a whole year, an entire blessed year—and it seemed so very far and it seemed that if he knew it were true, that she would live for one more year, he could bear it” (49). The author of nonfiction does not possess this kind of vision. Rather, the focus on “The Love of My Life” is clearly on Strayed’s interior. In Wild, Strayed’s focus is on plot and scenes. She does not pull back to critique rituals of mourning or gender roles. Rather, Strayed, as narrator, evaluates Cheryl’s experiences, but she stays close to the action. For example, after she loses one of her boots and her Bob Marley T-shirt, she writes: “Losing my boots was bad. But losing my Bob Marley T-shirt was worse. That shirt wasn’t just any shirt. It was, at least according to Pace, a sacred shirt that meant I walked with the spirits of animals, earth, and sky” (216). This is, arguably, a form of reflection, an interpretation of the significance of Cheryl’s experience, but Strayed doesn’t step out of narration to deal with abstract ideas. While this article does not allow for a detailed discussion of each work, Strayed’s three works on the loss of her mother provide a means of understanding how each form allows an author different paths for processing trauma. Even when focusing entirely on Strayed’s essay, teachers can pull in passages from Torch and Wild to spark a discussion about craft.


Conclusion

​The dialectic interplay between event and scene, event and social norms, event and phantasm or cultural metanarratives, connects the singular experience of an individual with something larger, a search for meaning. Writing about self, we often assume, is about understanding who we are, and so we lapse into discussions about whether or not the self is even knowable, which are not particularly productive. Instead of seeking self-knowledge, Kegan bases his developmental model on finding meaning in our lives:
Meaning . . . is the primary human motion, irreducible. It cannot be divorced from the body, from social experience, or from the very survival of the organism. Meaning depends on someone who recognizes you. Not meaning, by definition, is utterly lonely. Well-fed, warm, and free of disease, you may still perish is you cannot “mean.” (19)
​As a psychologist, Kegan does not focus on how writing and the options inherent within a genre contribute to this process. The essay is certainly much more than a linear narrative in chronological order, that is, a fixed and set story. By jumbling chronology, jumbling also linear thought, looking at herself—actually, multiple selves—from multiple perspectives, Strayed is opening herself to freedom, to the possibility of change, the opportunity to make choices that will create meaning. She owns, embraces, the singular, once-occurring events that she presents in scenes, critiques how the scenes are surrounded by phantasm, bad stories, and cultural norms, and reframes her experience. She writes herself into a new self, a new way of being with others, a new meaning. As Kegan says, “Our survival and development depend on our capacity to recruit the invested attention of others to us” (17).  
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George H. Jensen is a Professor with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, where he teaches courses in rhetorical theory and creative nonfiction. His books include Personality and the Teaching of Composition (with John K. DiTiberio, 1989), Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis (2000), and Identities Across Texts (2002). In addition these scholarly books, he has written Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family, which was published with Moon City Press in 2009. With James S. Baumlin, he is working on the final draft of The Ethics of Creative Nonfiction. With Heidi Skurat Harris, he is drafting a book on Norman Maclean’s revisions to “A River Runs through It.” His blog can be found at democracticvistas.com.



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  • 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)
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      • 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)
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      • 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)
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    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
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        • 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)
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        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
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        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
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        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
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        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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      • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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      • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
        • Bruce 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)
        • Anthony 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)
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