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
8.2

Picture

Marya Hornbacher

​
Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form



Part 1: A Woman’s Place

(A too-loud clot of WRITERS at a too-small table in a too-warm hotel bar. Lights up on COLLEAGUE and WOMAN WRITER. In a tone that drapes its patronization in syntax as subtle as a rhino sweeping past in a gauzy evening shrug, COLLEAGUE starts in.)
    COLLEAGUE: You’re an extremely independent woman.
    WOMAN WRITER: As opposed to what?

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, or the fifth, or the tenth; it was just the first time I blurted out what I always thought. We’d been discussing our current projects; I’d mentioned an extended period of research that had involved, among other forays, a road trip from Minneapolis to Oklahoma City to Fort Wayne. The trip, like most of mine, was undertaken for entirely practical reasons: I was doing research for a book, I had sources in several cities, those cities were close, or close enough, in the grand scheme of American geography, that I could drive from one to the next and spare myself the cost of flights and rental cars, live on gas station food, stay in cheap motels, and stretch my research funding out a few more months. When you “follow the story” for a living, all questions regarding logistics, preference, and personal taste are answered by the First Law of Freelancer Economics: Assume you will never get paid.

Why this struck my colleague as so independent that it warranted both an adjectival superlative and a reference to my gender was unclear. It wasn’t exactly a daredevil maneuver, posed no great risk to life and limb, resulted in good data and a one-off essay, and, at least as far as small talk went, involved no real danger, other than being seen and thought out of place in the world.

I have been itinerant for most of my life, and for a long time it didn’t strike me as odd. I understood it to be a fundamental characteristic of who I am and how I live, but not one of particular note. Self-awareness, I think, inheres as much in an awareness of ways in which one is utterly unremarkable as in the ways one believes oneself to be “unique;” perhaps that’s why I was well into my 40s before I realized other people saw my peripatetic way of life as curious, or perhaps indicative of some underlying trait—whether asset or flaw still seems to be up for debate. The questions are always the same: Don’t you get scared? Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you get bored? And as I’ve gotten older, another question has frequently snuck in: Aren’t you ever going to settle down?

The correct answers to these questions, I’ve learned, are not the ones I give; I’ve also learned that the line of questioning itself tells me more about the interrogator’s own position in the world than it ever reveals about mine. The very premise of the inquiry is gendered, both overtly and covertly so. In a totally unscientific survey of my male-presenting colleagues, I’ve ascertained that when they’re traveling solo on assignment, strangers do not give them the Sad Face™ and ask, sotto voce, if they get lonely or scared. More subtly, the questions assume that there is another kind of life available to me as a woman, a life that naturally would be preferable to me because I am a woman, a life that, however surprisingly, does not involve fear, loneliness, or boredom (all feelings that, as a woman, it’s assumed I must wish to avoid). It seems these colleagues of mine are allowed to live and work largely unhindered by the assumption that at some unspecified future date (when they grow up, perhaps?) they will stop this madcap driving about and settle into their assigned—fixed, domestic, familial—place.

I’m not the only single woman I know, nor the only female-identified single writer—and here it may be worth noting an increasing preference for the term “solo” over “single,” since the latter word seems to function as a red-herring alert, given its colloquial association with words like “available” (for purchase? for hire?) and “looking” (for our misplaced keys? our purpose in life? our missing parts?)—nor am I even the only lady writer of a certain age who is single by choice; I’m by no means a rare breed. But that element of choice, and its correlate processes of deliberation, intention, decision, and design, are critical to the subject of my inquiry in this piece.

Like any other nonfiction project, this one began with a question: why does everybody seem to think my habit of wandering around and writing stuff down is weird? As habits go, it seems reasonable enough; and there’s certainly a long, rich, and fairly well-established literary tradition of people doing exactly that. The language of that tradition had long since infiltrated not just literary and cinematic parlance but common use; from the Hero’s Journey to every varietal of epic, odyssey, and narrative quest, from On the Road to Wild, from Bill and Ted to Thelma and Louise, the narrative of wandering off—which provides an almost irresistibly seamless structure, to say nothing of motive, momentum, character, warrant, and voice—is deeply embedded in both literary and popular consciousness.

That it also describes the way I live, which is largely a function of my line of work, seemed incidental to me until I was struck with a one-two punch of a plan: I would write two things. The first would be a collection of loosely linked essays written from the road—travel essays, sort of, but less the glossy-mag place-based wow-cool-town-what-jewel-toned-scenery-and-quirky-locals sort of thing than a sustained narrative about the specifically American iconography of movement, which is inextricably linked to the American mythology of individualism. Turn those things over, of course, and you’re looking at a cultural self-concept, an iconography, and a literary and cinematic history that are fundamentally delusional in nature; you’re looking at the colonialist underpinnings of not just the American mythos but of the country itself, in both historical and present-day fact. I wanted to write about the specific relationship that I have with that iconography and that mythology—a relationship that is both a de facto participation in and a resistance to them both, and which is complicated by the fact that I am a woman, and I travel alone. The second would be a critical overview of what I’d mentally started calling “solitude narratives” by women, in which I would examine the ways in which women wrote about the experience of being alone.

I defined my terms as such: a narrative of solitude was narrative nonfiction in which the author wrote, in the first or third person, about being alone. Literary works that were religious in nature, which in many cases involved solitary experience (such as meditation, prayer, or retreat), but for which the condition of solitude was either a) not experienced as absolute, due to a theistic framework and the presence, at least textually, of a relationship with a deistic figure, or b) was not a central concern, lay outside the scope of my inquiry. My focus was on the relationship—in some cases oblique, in others almost dialectical—between the narrator and the experience of solitude itself. The authors share an awareness of the fact that they are, to some degree and for some span of time, without human companionship. The absence of others is palpable in these works; the authors are often acutely aware that they must navigate the presence—whether one sees it as condition, character, setting, or state—of solitude itself.
​
The first part—essays about, from, and on the road—went ok. The second turned out to be harder than it looked.
__________
As I dug through the annals of American literature looking for nonfiction narratives of solitude by women—for precedent, perhaps, or proof—I found myself wondering lots of things: for starters, where were they? Where was the body of critical work on the form? Where was the taxonomy of types and subtypes I’d assumed were a mere JSTOR search away? No dice. Instead, I found unpublished diaries by pioneer women, a few written accounts of polar expeditions by women (none of them American) who had accompanied male teams, various apocrypha, and the handful of full-length narratives that I’ve come to see as the precursors to a genre that has yet to be defined or explored. I began to realize that the narrative history of women’s solitude has yet to be written, for the simple reason that women have not historically had the means to—or been allowed to—live solitary lives.

While narratives of solitude have enormous breadth of scope in some ways, they also share at least three core characteristics: the foregrounding of solitude as a literary subject in itself; the use of the first-person voice, and the correlate presence of narrative persona; and the centrality of physical place and/or movement through space to the work as a whole.

The emergence of solitude as a literary subject follows, historically, its emergence as a psychological concept. In this article, I provide only a broad overview of that movement in order to establish the tradition of literary attempts to define, describe, and perhaps navigate the experience of solitude from the classical era to the present.

I explore two core characteristics of solitude narratives that are directly inflected and complicated by the gender of the author, both in concept and in practice. One of these is the centrality of place and territory. Narratives of solitude share an extraordinary depth of focus on the natural landscape, often employing exhaustive, detailed description; I argue that this authorial habit may be reflective of a Hegelian impulse to name, to record, to catalogue, and in some ways to claim or master the phenomenal world within these spaces of adventure or retreat.

The second characteristic of solitude narratives that I explore in detail is the use of the first-person point of view, and by extension the construction of a specifically gendered narrative persona. The first-person speaker—the I-persona—may be as mythic and idealized as the cultural history from which he is derived; the narrator, many contemporary authors would argue, is a character formed at the intersection of authorial imagination and the author’s projection of self. The American canon was largely written by a class and race of men whose freedom was assumed and nearly absolute. The cultural mythos upon which American writers draw—and the literary tradition by which we are created and which in turn we create—show the imprimatur of those authors even now. When that mythology is peopled by characters who are categorically distinct from the reader, and further, when that reader’s existence is denied within the heuristic logic of the myth, and the maintenance of the mythos relies upon a purposeful denial of the reader’s difference (Otherness), the reader must choose between wresting herself out of her own subjectivity and into the imagined position of Self, or rejecting the entire premise of the myth.
​
Finally, I examine practical questions of nonfiction craft that I encounter—some of them repeatedly—in writing from a position of solitude, and about the influence of solitude on my writing life. These questions—how does one write of a woman’s solitude? Is there need, or warrant, or room, for such a narrative at this time? Is there meaning to be made from the way a woman perceives, traverses, and understands the social and physical landscapes of a place, and is it materially different from the meaning drawn from those experiences as they are chronicled by men? How might a woman trace the influence, on both herself and her work, of the fictions, delusions, myths, and indeed the facts, of American life?


Part 2—The Literary Origins of Solitude

You    who I don’t know       I don’t know how to talk to you


The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
To wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices--
                
                —Jean Valentine
The literary history of solitude narratives has evolved along two paths, each with its own history, intention, and formal traditions: the religious narrative of solitude, and the naturalist.

The first turns its attention inward, mapping the metaphysical terrain of spiritual experience, typically taking the narrative form of a search for or an encounter with a Judeo-Christian God. The second, which follows in the long tradition of the explorer narrative (which in turn follows from an even older tradition of explorers’ and naturalists’ diaries, letters, and journals, as well as ships’ logs), turns its perspective outward, observing and detailing the phenomenal world. The two types, however, are linked by both their formal and textual similarities, and, more loosely, by the philosophic premises from which they set out.
​
Writing that explores the religious pursuit of solitude carries a different intention than does the non-theistic solitude narrative, or at least it seems to at first glance. Religious solitaries, as they even now call themselves, ultimately seek an emptying out of self, or kenosis (self-outpouring), that is intended to make way for a mystical union with God. In a typical passage describing this desire, the nineteenth century contemplative monk Charles de Foucauld writes in a letter to an aspiring ascetic that one must
cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as though to leave all the room free for God alone…It is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (cit. Maitland 191)
By contrast, solitude narratives that are not overtly religious, or that do not take religious questions or religious experience as an end in themselves, turn instead to a search for something one might call transcendent, or at least meaningful, in the physical world. In the late eighteenth century, there was a boom in the popularity of such solitude narratives, most of which were written by explorers, pioneers, prospectors, and lone adventurers.
​
These early explorer narratives evolved ultimately into the nature writing of the modern period and into the present day, which has gradually transitioned away from a preoccupation with discovering, conquering, and possessing the natural world, and toward encountering, observing, and describing it. These writers sought ownership not in the sense that the material world was overtly seen as property or commodity, but in the Hegelian sense; the commodity, the desired quantity, the thing of value that the seeker would possess was not physical object but knowledge, not phenomena but phenomenological experience. In these works, the writer attempts to obtain mastery and, perhaps, ownership of what he sees by giving it a name. “Through naming comes knowing,” writes Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. He continues:
We grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name—hension, prehension, apprehension, And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains—those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone monoliths—and it is we who are lost. (256-57)
Solitude narratives, by their nature, require a singular, solitary, speaker; they are predicated upon the concept of the existence of self. In literary iconography, this manifests first in the form of the Romantic individual, and eventually, in the form of the American individualist. But before either of those figures could be sketched onto the page, the idea of self as distinct from society, and the possibility of a self with agency choosing to separate from society, and ultimately the concept of solitude at all, had to emerge.
__________
The first classical writings that explicitly explore solitude as a valuable human condition—rather than as merely the condition to which one defaults in the absence of other humans—come from China. In roughly the sixth century B.C.E, two predominant philosophies of an ethical life developed—Confucianism and Taoism—and while both philosophies held that serenity and self-confidence were essential to the good life, they parted ways on the question of how those qualities were to be obtained. Confucianism understood the basic human virtue to be jen, or the expression of one’s humanity through doing right by one’s fellow human. Confucius held that knowledge was to “know man,” and wisdom was to “attend to the welfare of the people.” This ethical system was inherently social in nature, and drew on the clearly defined, highly reciprocal nature of social relations present in traditional Chinese society (trans. Lau 429).

But it is in Taoism that we find the earliest textual precedent for the idea of solitude as a virtue, even as a way of life. Though probably apocryphal, the figure of Lao-Tse is said to have composed the Tao te Ching, which is in many ways a manifesto of a solitary life. In this ethical system, all things social—status, organization, participation, relation—were seen as an impediment to the freedom and therefore the proper development of the individual. The Taoist holds that solitude is the healthiest condition for the human being, because it removes us from the warping influence of society and exposes us to the healing influence of nature. The highest good, in this philosophy, is humility, often symbolized by water in visual arts; water best expresses the principle of wu wei, the paradox of action without action.

The Tao te Ching gathers, in more poetic form than narrative, a fragmented group of ethical principles that had been in existence in China long before this text was created—the rejection of aggression, acquisitiveness, prosperity, and ambition, and the cultivation of humility, poverty, independence, and self-knowledge—and which would go on to inspire lives of solitude for thousands of years.

Roughly contemporaneous to this philosophical consideration of solitude in China, the Greeks were emerging from a Homeric culture in which the individual was defined, and valued, solely on the basis of the respect and honor he could win from society; the human was significant only insofar as she was seen, and praised, by the social world. Aristotle famously calls man a political animal, in the sense that Aristotle believed the human’s natural habitat was the polis, the community. He taught that humans could achieve their full potential only by working for the common good, and that the drive to do socwork for the larger benefit of society—was innate. Even early Greek religious observance was a communal activity; worship, ritual, and prayer were as social in nature as feast and war.

But the individual was poised to emerge. Those who practiced the cult of Orpheus, and later, the more intellectualized Pythagoreans, banded together into ascetic brotherhoods of continence, abstinence, and, in some cases, silence. These groups and their religious observances—particularly their withdrawal from society, and their insistence upon the individual’s duty to work toward his own salvation—provided the first religiously based ideological justification for solitude.

The tipping point came with Socrates, and the philosophical exploration Plato gives him in the Dialogues. Socrates was, granted, a voluble, argumentative, and highly sociable fellow, but he lived a largely ascetic life, claimed that his most valuable possession was his leisure, once said happily in the crowded marketplace, “How many things there are that I do not want!” and was fond of noting that to be content with little is to approach the divine. More pertinent to the question of solitude, however, is Socrates’ argument that the approval of society was not, and could not be, the only nor even the most important catalyst for human behavior or the measure of one’s worth; instead, Socrates argued—long before Emerson did—that conscience, not society, ought to be the driving force behind an ethical life. The wise man should not aim for the praise of the masses, Socrates said, but for autarkeia--self-sufficiency.

When Socrates died, his followers, later called the Cynics, including the most famous of them—Diogenes and his student Crates—carried his query to its logical conclusion: they rejected society outright. They claimed that—contrary to Aristotelian opinion—the polis was by no means the natural environment for the development of the individual; indeed, it was a corrosive, distorting force, and would be man’s downfall.

At about this time, in the first few centuries C.E., another philosophy was rapidly taking hold; Christianity and the Cynics found a common enemy in the Greco-Roman civilization. The emergence of the ascetic orders of early Christianity—especially the eremitic monks, often called the Desert Fathers—was a direct result of the Socratic rejection of society as a valid source of ethical standards. But where could one go to escape the warping influence of the polis? Into the desert, of course.

Here, at the historical (and probably geographic) intersection of Greco-Roman religious mythologies, Gnosticism, Judaism, and the early Christian Church, we find the bridge between ancient and modern ideas of solitude, society, and self.
​
The sayings of these desert fathers (and, later, the desert mothers) and the stories of their lives and deeds exist as apophthegmata, rather than as written works by a single author. The apophthegmata were collected towards the end of the fourth century, and they form the oldest record of early Christian monasticism that we have. It is clear, in these fragments and stories, that solitude was now seen as a valuable state unto itself, a recurrent subject of consideration and speech; no longer just an escape from society, or a negation of it, solitude instead is a presence that the eremitic must, in some ways, study, navigate, interrogate, and understand; this understanding is seen as a fundamental part of his spiritual development. In his study of several historical periods of eremitic life, Peter France writes,
For the Desert Fathers, solitude was not merely an escape from distractions; it was a teaching presence. To remain silent and alone is to be open to influences that are crowded out of an occupied life. These influences, some felt, were enough to bring about spiritual health. We may well have a duty to our fellow human beings, and good works are praiseworthy; but self-knowledge can only come through solitude. (26)
In one of the more famous sayings, a monk travels to Scete to ask for a word from Abba Moses. The famous Desert Father tells him, “Go and stay in your cell; your cell will teach you everything.”
__________
​Before I dive into contemporary narratives of solitude, I should look back at the rash of seventeenth and eighteenth-century American and British essays on solitude. As a group tackling a relatively new cultural concept, one that would further evolve post-Freud, these essayists appear as tiny figures trying to cast their net over a behemoth creature that can never be captured in its totality—an obvious example of the attempt, of course, is Emerson’s wonderfully titled essay “Experience” (hearkening back to Montaigne’s much earlier “Of Experience”). Even in discussion of what would perhaps be considered a “personal” subject such as solitude, many of the older essays are written from a vantage point of purported objectivity, examining their subject from the exterior, rather than writing with the interiority endemic to today’s personal essays.

Alice Meynell writes with pity, and in the third person plural, of those who are unable to find “the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind…a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty…the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how to wish” (18). William Hazlitt’s “On going on a journey” occupies a middle distance somewhere between a description of solitude in theory and in fact, a balancing point between the interior and exterior experience of the thing. While his language insists upon a greater remove of writer from reader, he sets out upon that journey on an affable, personable note: “I like solitude, when I give myself up to it,” he writes, and continues shortly that he must “absent [himself] from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself” (71-73).

Where Meynell and several of her contemporaries describe solitude as an ideal condition of the mind, Hazlitt often writes of its practical application: “I in a manner forget myself,” he writes in “On the love of life” (9), which, though it expresses the same notion, is very different from Meynell’s description of an “un-self-consciousness [that] is absolute: it is to the wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are curious…they are essentially alone" (17-18). This they of which she speaks is an abstraction in itself; she, as the author, stands apart and observes.
​
The common thread that runs through these essays is the depiction of modernity—which modernity is dependent on the essayist’s era—as insane. Curiously, this insanity is evoked more than it is described; while it is explicitly stated at points in nearly every one of these essays, the more striking fact is that most of the authors use sentence construction to evoke it. Meynell describes modernity using a repeated construction of semi-colons that give pause but do not stop the train of thought:
If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. It is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It is the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the street,”
with, she writes, “no hope of news” from their solitary minds (18).

While the tone of voice varies, when these solitary authors write about the thickly peopled world they’ve willingly left—from wariness to disdain to outright rejection—the very premise of secular accounts of solitude arises from a modern—specifically, a post-Enlightenment—sense of an identifiable, discrete self.

The character of Self—indeed, the very notion of a first-person narrator (“Call me Ishmael”)—is Western, and modern, at its core. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “the idea of individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core (European) values,” writes Sarah Maitland. Romanticism’s critique of the perceived falsity of the eighteenth century involved a sharp turn inward, as writers began to focus on the emotional and subjective experience of the individual. “That which was not divisible into further constituent parts,” Maitland writes, “was the self –the individual in whom innate human rights and self-authenticating emotions could reside” (232).

Solitude and silence—in fact, the entire idealized concept of Nature that was cultivated during the Romantic period—allowed the individual to “escape the coils of social convention and slip back into primal innocence so that he would be able to access his deepest emotions,” Maitland writes. “And so the Romantics sought out solitude and silence in order to ‘find themselves,’ just as the desert hermits sought out silence and solitude to ‘lose themselves” (18).
​
In Wordsworth’s 1850 poem “The Prelude,” written as the introduction to his never-completed philosophical epic The Recluse, the poet describes his escape from society as the portal to the natural self, and, by extension, to the source of poetry:
I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self…

Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That nature breathes among the hills and grooves
...thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst though intertwine for me
The passions that build up in our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things--
With life and nature
​
And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.
Stories of solitude—both religious and secular—are often recognizable as quest narratives, in which the speaker explores some given terrain, whether it is physical or metaphysical; and at the heart of the quest narrative is the character of the seeker. This character, in solitude narratives, is driven not by the medieval tropes of conquest or triumph (princess, dragon, kingdom, war), nor by the classical motivation (and recurrent structure) of voyage and return, but on an encounter with solitude itself.

The forward momentum that propels the seeker through the solitude narrative is a powerful longing for what theologian Martin Buber called the I/Thou encounter. This desire, expressed in some way in virtually every solitude narrative I have found, is a longing for an absolute clarity of vision, unmediated by the misperceptions we acquire as social beings, a desire for “pure” experience, unmitigated by worldly concerns.
​
Maitland argues that a clear distinction can be made between secular and spiritual solitudes, writing that “there [is] something profoundly different between the silence of the hermits and the silence of artists...[T]he two projects are, in a number of ways, inherently contradictory.” I don’t agree; I would argue that the choice of silence and solitude, whether made for spiritual or creative purposes, inevitably invites the altered perception associated with what we describe as mystical experience, and with what we call creative or intellectual inspiration. Maitland herself describes the heightened nature of experience that solitude engenders when she writes of the “extraordinary view of nothing” around her home on a moor in Galloway:
It isn’t ‘nothing,’ actually—it is cloud formations, and the different ways reed, rough grass, heather and bracken move in the wind, and the changing colours, not just through the year but through the days as the clouds alternate and shift—but in another sense…it is the huge nothing that pulls me into itself. I look at it, and with fewer things to look at I see better. (1-2)
The entire Transcendentalist project could be described as a concentrated effort to see and experience the world and its aspects more clearly. Thoreau’s journals, to say nothing of his more famous meditations on solitude, experience, and self, in Walden and other works, were shot through with this desire for an intimate, accurate experience of the world:   ​
In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean…But alone in the distant woods or fields…I come to myself, I once more feel grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are. (Journal, 1 July 1857)
And in an entirely different context, but stemming from the same narrative tradition, American explorer Richard Byrd writes of his choice to spend a solitary winter in the Antarctic:
I wanted to go for experience sake: one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste the peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they are…I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities by those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man’s laws but my own. (3-7)
But there is an intriguing complication embedded within every solitude narrative, one that goes to the heart of the enterprise of writing about solitude at all. One of the things that solitude narratives share—this may be tautological—is the assumption of a reader. The narrating character, however solitary he or she may be at the moment of inscription, is utilizing language; this is, by definition, a communicative act; the solitude narrative itself is a form of direct address. This implies, of course, an object of address: a reader, an audience, an ear. The act of inscribing reveals the assumption that the text that will be, could be, or is being read; this assumption in turn reveals an authorial awareness of authorship, of the made-ness of the text; and that awareness gives rise to these works’ narrative personae: the characterization of the first-person Self.


Part 3—Precursors and Possibilities

The hallmark of the narrative of solitude is its singular first-person voice. The narrating character and the story they tell—in which solitude itself is a primary focus—are starkly foregrounded, rather than woven into the context of a larger narrative web that involves other characters, stories, voices, and points of view. The dramatis personae of these works are but one name long, unless you count the frequent cameo appearance of an animal sidekick (usually a dog). Things exist only if and as they are perceived by the speaker. The speaker—who is at once the subject and the object of the authorial eye—has the power to name, and in this way to author, the world. This feeds the self-mythologizing nature of the first-person point of view; in these narratives, the speaker/storyteller/explorer attempts an a priori creation myth, inventing himself and the world as he goes.

The speaker and subject of the solitude narrative is cast in sharp relief against the backdrop of the larger world. Because of this, the narrative of solitude lacks at least one dimension that most works of nonfiction prose possess. Perspective is inevitably skewed; there is no way to maintain a sense of proportion; nothing is to scale. One minute the speaker looms cartoon-huge, and then the whole vast world reels up, massive and sudden, revealing the speaker as little more than a speck. The solitude narrative cannot escape—and at its best, it plumbs—the perceptual flaw endemic to the human mind: both collectively and as individuals, we cannot seem to maintain anything like a right relation to the world.

In American solitude narratives, as in many American novels, the speaker is often defined by characteristics we associate with the iconic (and, as such, metaphoric, and fictive), American figure of the individualist: self-reliance, bravery, independence of thought, freedom of movement, a purposeful lack of ties that bind. The American mythos is bound up in this character: the self-made man, explorer, mapper and namer of the furthest frontier.

Perhaps every culture has a mythology of itself, a narrative in which it stars and by which its character is defined. If so, the mythology upon which many American writers draw, and which they necessarily keep inventing, is a creation myth, one which posits a kind of a priori country, divorced from and unsullied by all the mythologies that precede it. In this mythology, the reader encounters, again and again, a character who is not so much a Self as a persona, a projection of cultural ideals: self-reliant, individualistic, independent, unfettered, entirely free. These ideals are ones that are, denotatively or connotatively, associated with masculinity; even their Latinate etymology fixes them as masculine, the antithesis of that which is dependent, contingent, or trapped.

The spaces and landscapes that have been assigned to women in literature are, by and large, bounded, enclosed, and, in not a few instances, locked; humble or grand, they are most commonly domestic spaces, their walls intended both to hold things in and keep things out. (A related line of inquiry, though outside the scope of this work, might more precisely break down the nature of those social spaces. Beyond the familiar domestic and, less commonly, professional spaces occupied by women in literature, one thinks also of institutional spaces, which have their own ethos, dictums, rights, assumptions, and laws, and where individual identity is collapsed not only into relational status but further obscured by externally imposed descriptors such as “patient,” “prisoner,” et al.) Furthermore, the spaces women have historically occupied—both in literature and in life—are almost entirely social spaces, places where their identity is collapsed with their social position and relational role, rather than defined by individual characteristics. Literature has also tended to assign gender to ways of existing in time and space. It could be argued that, conceptually, the body in motion is masculine (wild, untamable, independent, free), while the body at rest is feminine (domestic, tamed, fixed, in her place). One thinks of the laws of physics—a body in motion tends to stay in motion (entropy), while a body at rest tends to stay at rest (inertia).

But the seeds of such a literary legacy are particularly evident in four books published by American women over the course of 20 years, running roughly from the high point of the first wave of feminism (early 1970s) through the high point of the second wave (mid-late 1990s). Interestingly, none of these books could even remotely be called “feminist” in nature; they do not take an advocate stance of any kind, instead maintaining a careful—and clearly intentional—silence on matters of gender. For that matter, it might be argued that not all of them are about Wordsworth’s “self-sufficing power of solitude,” either; the solitude these authors claim is much more limited than the lengthy, near-total isolation chronicled by Abbey in Desert Solitaire, or even Thoreau’s relatively sustained periods of solitude at Walden Pond. Indeed, there are distinct dusty traces of the era all over these books; of the four authors, two wrap their narratives up with nearly Shakespearean nuptial neatness by abandoning solitude in favor of love, and one is in a relationship that waxes and wanes over the course of the book.
​
Still—these were women writing about what was then, and perhaps still is today, a radical choice: to be away from society, on purpose, for reasons almost identical to that set forth by Thoreau: “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (58).
__________
May Sarton’s 1973 Journal of a Solitude is—or is drawn from—a journal the author kept during a year of living alone at a country home in Connecticut. During this year, she has frequent visitors, sends and receives a great deal of mail, goes into town most days, travels the country giving lectures and readings; hers is not solitude in any strict sense. This journal of solitary time, like those of both Thoreau and the contemporary contemplative monk Thomas Merton, allows the reader direct access, unmediated by literary devices, to the raw material of thought, the running commentary of mind considering mind. Sarton’s journal is not a literary masterwork, but its publication marks a new era for female authors (or, as they were still called, “lady writers”). The very idea that there was a readership for such a book—which records nothing more than an average woman’s day-to-day grappling with consciousness and creative practice—was radical in itself, as was the idea that such a woman might choose the company of herself, and her work, over society and its demands. This book, like Sarton’s other journals, stood as evidence—rather than argument—that women’s interior lives were meaningful; that, indeed, women had interior lives. As all writers of solitude do, Sarton states her intentions early on: “I have made an open place, a place for meditation… Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself” (1-2).
​
Five years later, ecologist and conservationist Anne LaBastille published Woodswoman, the first in her trilogy of accounts of living alone in the Adirondack Wilderness. These books are direct descendants of the eighteenth-century naturalist narrative, and the nature writing is lovely; the books are irrevocably dated, however, by the (probably editorial) decision to impose superfluous romantic subplots on otherwise beautiful descriptive accounts of the natural world and the extraordinary independence the author’s life requires. After she’s done away with the interruptive romantic interest (he goes to Alaska without her; he invited her, but didn’t propose), she settles into the naturalist’s lyrical rhythms of observation and description:
[M]y existence here has not been, and never will be, idyllic. Nature is too demanding for that. It requires constant response to the environment. I must adapt to its changes—the seasons, the vagaries of weather, wear and tear on house and land, the physical demands on my body, the sensuous pull on my senses. Despite these demands, I share a feeling of continuity, contentment, and oneness with the natural world, with life itself, in my surroundings of tall pines, clear lakes, flying squirrels, trailless peaks, shy deer, clean air, bullfrogs, black flies, and trilliums...Slipping over the star-strewn surface of Black Bear Lake, I’m gradually imbued with the ordered goodness of our earth. Its gentle, implacable push toward balance, regularity, homeostasis. This seeps into my soul as surely as sphagnum moss absorbs water. Surely the entire universe must be operating this way. (276)
Almost an aside: in 1981, Alice Koller published An Unknown Woman. I found it in a used bookstore in 1984 (I was 10) and, hungry for books with brave female leads, I devoured it. In my memory, it is the story of a woman so brave she spent a whole year in a windswept seaside cabin alone, but more importantly, a stunning philosophical treatise on the necessity of being ruthlessly independent, living on an island, and having a very good dog. Lost to the vagaries of memory include all other details, such as the actual storyline—the book is in fact about a bored, wildly successful, but still unmarried (!) woman nearing 40, who spends a brief winter on Nantucket, applying her doctorate in philosophy to a Socratic consideration of all the men she’s loved. When I returned to this text—which was obviously formative for me—I was stunned to think that my younger self could have seen something to admire in this (perhaps it was the dog?). I thumbed through my old copy—urgent underlinings, neat asterisks, tiny marginalia in my childhood cursive—and laughed out loud at one of the review blurbs, from the Charlotte Observer: “A woman’s Walden…Seldom has any writer written so compellingly about what it means to be a woman and of the importance of choices.” But I still like this, and I can see how a girl of that era might find it brave:
Earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other decorations go into the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau. All makeup goes into the medicine chest. What will I look like now that no one I know will see me? Can I dress without following anyone else’s rules?...Each thing I do during the course of a day is something I’ve been told to do, or taught to do. I have to replace all of it with what I choose to do. I have to learn how to choose one thing over another, one way of doing something over another way…..My stomach tightens. Want one thing more than another? What will I use as criterion? I don’t know. I know only that I have to uproot all of the old…Tear out every habit, every way of responding to people or to things. Or to ideas. Look at it without mercy and ask: Is this mine? Mine as the specific human being that I am. (20-21)
The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich’s 1985 collection of linked essays, is one of the finest solitude narratives ever written, easily as powerful as (and more beautifully crafted than) Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Like Abbey, she opens with a preface that sets out the reasons for her decision to go to, and then stay in, Wyoming, and tells us a little bit about the origins of the book: “Beginning in 1976…I had the experience of waking up not knowing where I was, whether I was a man or a woman, or which toothbrush was mine….but I wasn’t losing my grip. As Jim Bridger is reported to have said, ‘I wasn’t lost, I just didn’t know where I was for a few weeks.’....The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative” (ix-x).
​
A quiet, commanding storyteller, Ehrlich neither avoids nor confronts the question of a woman’s place in the world; the world is her place. She joins the ranch hands and the farmers in their work and life without pausing to explain her presence, either to the reader or to the characters scattered over the sparsely populated pages of this book. Her tone and her language are economical and understated, directly echoing rather than describing her environment:
     The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen…Sentence structure is shortened to the skin and bones of a thought. Descriptive words are dropped, even verbs; a cowboy looking over a corral full of horses will say to a wrangler, “Which one needs rode”? People hold back their thoughts. Language, so compressed, becomes metaphorical….
     I’ve spent hours riding to sheep camp at dawn in a pickup when nothing was said; eaten meals in the cookhouse when the only words spoken were a mumbled “Thank you, ma’am" at the end of dinner. The silence is profound. Instead of talking, we seem to share one eye. Keenly observed, the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. (6-7)
Similarly, the seasons are integrated into both the narrative structure and the narrative consciousness, functioning as a means by which Ehrlich navigates her vast terrain; the elements, water in particular, create both narrative and metaphorical structure for the work. She writes, “Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least—a fear of ‘dry spells,’ dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize.”
​
Unlike most narrators of solitude, Ehrlich’s authorial persona is not foregrounded, appearing at times to be deliberately de-centered or kept entirely out of the frame. This blurs the line between self and other, between internal and external landscapes, in a very literal sense:
The seasons are a Jacob’s ladder climbed by migrating elk and deer. Our ranch is one of their resting places. If I was leery about being an owner, a possessor of land, now I have to understand the ways in which the place possesses me. Mowing hayfields feels like mowing myself. I wake up mornings expecting to find my hair shorn. The pastures bend into me; the water I ushered over hard ground becomes one drink of grass. (90)
Ehrlich’s strategy, by which the speaker becomes a part of her environment, stands in stark contrast to the tropes and devices employed by the traditional solitude narrative. An innovative approach to first-person point of view—one of the core elements of the form—it also provides a point of departure for the critical consideration of another core element: the centrality of place to solitude narratives. Further, Ehrlich’s deliberate destabilization of the balance of power between the individual(ist) narrator and the physical and iconographic landscape of the American West can inform the framework for narratives of solitude still to come.
__________
The history of solitude narratives, American and otherwise, tilts ineluctably toward the idea of territory—of places, of spaces, of property, of natural resources, largely land or things drawn from or made possible by land. This is a tradition of work in which the narrative movement is predicated on conquest; it is a plot driven by the will to power over something, and often someone. The narrative is constructed of plot points in which the protagonist beats back resistance and overcomes obstacles on the path to his ultimate triumph over X, where X = places, people, phenomena. The drama, the tension, the reader’s engagement in the narrative at all, are predicated on the assumption that this will to power, this desire to conquer, is not merely valid, but the value of which is assumed to be both inherent and understood. In the American literary tradition, that value is embodied, writ large, given both agency and license, in the narrative character of the individualist.

The literary tradition of both the solitude narrative and the American road narrative rests on assumptions about the author’s positionality and status as “free” in the larger world. For example, the Green Book stands as a historical document that makes those assumptions clear by its very existence; in modifying and adapting a given form—the travel guide—for a specifically Black readership, it highlights the original form’s assumption that its audience would be white.

Every literary tradition, every genre, every form, carries with it the weight of cultural history and the connotative power of all that it assumes; the solitude narrative is not unique in reflecting, and in many ways perpetuating, the oppressive whitewashing of American literary history, as well as the class bias, heteronormativity, and misogyny. Necessarily, the act of writing from, toward, or and about an experience that lies outside the narrow confines of what was once, laughably, described as the “universal” experience—which is in fact the experience of a clear numeric minority of Americans: white men—raises, for the author, the question of how to confront that cultural history, whether to address that connotative weight. A response to those things, whether direct or oblique, is necessary; at the same time, an acknowledgement of the tradition’s limitations—which is also a de facto acknowledgement of the tradition’s importance, even if one’s effort is to write against it, or against aspects of its shaping force—may give them credence and power.

​In examining the history of solitude narratives, it’s critical to look not only at what lies within the frame of the genre—the texts, the authors, the tradition from which they emerge and upon which they draw. It may be more important, at this point, to think about all that is excluded, elided, and erased, all the historical facts that are pushed out of the frame. Any consideration of American literary work about the American landscape needs to also consider the history of this country’s relationship with territory, conquest, and ownership; critical and creative works about movement into, out of, and through that same space must also consider the author’s impetus, as well as their freedom of movement or lack thereof. And if we are to discuss key questions of craft in this form—particularly point of view, narrative persona, and narrative voice—there is no way, and no reason, to avoid addressing the role of the actual author’s embodied existence, not in the abstract but in fact.


​Part 4—Implications

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning



—Adrienne Rich
​Solitude narratives seem likely to become more common in the post-pandemic era. Not only will we see narratives about the experience of isolation due to pandemic and quarantine, this period is already marked by such a level of roiling global unrest—social, political, environmental, and economic—that I suspect it will give rise to a significant body of nonfiction examining both individual experiences of that unrest, and the role of the individual within society—and, perhaps, without.

The existing tradition of solitude narratives—particularly the subgenre of solitude writing by women, nascent as it may be—can inform the writing on solitude that will emerge in the coming years.     

Even (especially?) close on the heels of a period of isolation and confinement, the idea of solitude seems anathema to our hyper-social, hyper-attenuated sense of self. We are endlessly connected, we use the word “network” to describe both human and electronic interactions; we communicate constantly, using a huge array of media, generating an inconceivable amount of text and hypertext; we do not shut up, and even when we are alone—as increasingly we are, and report an escalating level of damage and distress from the effects—we are also never alone.

A recent piece in the New York Times acknowledges the growing role of solitude in many people’s lives, particularly in the wake of a global pandemic; Covid has had and will continue to have a significant impact on the nature of social interactions of every kind, limiting, disrupting, and in some cases eliminating the possibility of human companionship for periods of time. The article quotes Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College, as saying, “How we feel about time alone is largely dependent on whether we’ve chosen it.” It goes on: “People who pursue solitude of their own volition ‘tend to report that it feels full — like they’re full of ideas or thoughts or things to do,’ Dr. Thomas said. In this way, it’s distinct from loneliness, a negative state in which you’re ‘disconnected from other people and it feels empty.’”

That characteristic—choice—is also that which distinguishes “solitude from solitary,” as Abbey puts it in Desert Solitaire. The narrator finds himself strikingly, and unexpectedly, lonely; though he’d been alone for some time, he is overwhelmed by a terrorizing self-awareness, an awareness of, literally, himself—to scale. Whether it is solitude that plays games with perspective or, in fact, society that sets our sense of proportion and self-concept askew, the distinction—between what it means to have solitude versus to be solitary—is one with which more readers may be familiar now than once there were.

The aspect of choice goes some way to explain why people like me—already solo, often living in alone, however small and modest that meant our solitary spaces had to be, our days already filled with more silence than noise—found quarantine to be as jarring, and in many was disorienting, as everyone else. The solitude I had long chosen was replaced by enforced isolation; the silence I preferred was suddenly cacophonous; the option of vanishing at will from highly visible social spaces and returning to the pleasant invisibility I enjoyed within the cloister of my rooms was gone, leaving me aware that I was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost.

The factor of choice, which is what prevents each of these conditions from becoming, in an instant, its inverse, has implications for the solitude narratives we have yet to write. While it is not possible to write within or against a literary tradition without acknowledging the inherent limitations, fallacies, and flaws of that tradition, the sociocultural wreckage from which its authors arose and the equal or greater damage they left behind, it is also true that every literary tradition contains its own opposite; stored away in the structural foundations of every form are the tools required for tearing it down and, one hopes, building something new.

There are at least three expressions of the element of choice that might be drawn out in future narratives about the experience of being alone; each of these holds significant potential for not only creative production but also scholarly investigation and critical analysis, particularly for feminist and post-colonial writers and scholars:
  • Solitude vs. imposed/forced isolation
  • Active (act of) silence vs. being silenced
  • Elective “invisibility” (removing oneself from public/social spaces), vs. being erased.
The first distinction—solitude vs. isolation—is one with which many people are more familiar now than even a few years ago. Choosing to be alone is a categorically different experience—and arises from equally distinct causal factors—than having restrictions placed on one’s social access. Solitude is elective; isolation is imposed.

The second distinction—the choice to be silent vs. being silenced by external forces—is a long-standing and not infrequently contentious matter in critical inquiry. As it pertains to a future examination of solitude narratives, I am particularly interested in questions of whether silence must always be conceptualized as a binary act (e.g. silence as resistance/silencing as punishment, which assumes a prior and primary conversation or dialectic from which an individual is barred, against which her silence resists, or to which her silence responds). Further work is also warranted on how to navigate or perhaps redefine the concept of “silence;” this work might investigate the actual meaning of “silence” within solitude narratives, which are, by definition, linguistic acts, and whose very existence implies the possibility of a social dialectic by virtue of its assumption of a future reader for the work.

The third distinction—“invisibility,” or the decision to remove oneself from social spaces vs. being erased—seems rife with opportunities for a discussion of motive, impetus, and warrant in the solitude narrative; there are, for example, different motives behind “running away” and “running toward,” just as there are meaningful differences between separation and separatism, giving up society v. giving up on society. More broadly, the question of visibility, invisibility, and even the supposed possibility of “choice” is complicated in important ways by authorship: any given author’s ability to “choose” invisibility is contingent upon their position, and the limits placed upon on their mobility, within the social world.

​Each of these more subtle distinctions has implications for narratives of solitude. But the overarching question of choice—whether the author holds the power of choice, in any of these areas, or does not—determines the directionality and, ultimately the narrative movement of the book. The distinction shapes narrative structure, informs persona and tone, and often determines the outcome of the work. While any solitude narrative describes and traces an interior trajectory of some kind, one—the narrative of a chosen solitude—participates in the tradition of the quest narrative; its movement is forward, and its narrative momentum, its plot, is driven by a process of voluntary transformation and change. The choice to be alone gives rise to a narrative of interior discovery, often followed by a decision on the part of the narrator to make some kind of exterior change as well. The other—the narrative of solitude imposed—chronicles an unexpected, disruptive, and often unwelcome event. Its narrative movement is reflective, and often retrospective; the narrator experiences te period of solitude as exceptional, and as a loss. Narratives of (en)forced isolation may also include elements of discovery and change, but the distinction is palpable in the narrative character and the tone of the piece. Choice, again, is the element that creates the shift: is the author experiencing solitude willingly, voluntarily, with expectation, navigating what she encounters as she goes? Or is she forced to resist or reclaim the experience, struggling to maintain selfhood and sanity, and attempting to carve out and claim some aspect of experience as her own?
__________
Is it only solitude if you are well and truly isolated from the social world? With no people, no billboards, no books or papers or magazines, no crowded trains, no throng of bodies catching you up in its wake? Is it only true solitude if you are faced with the wild, whether hostile or indifferent, hard winters or droughts? Does solitude in a hotel count? Or is that too much of this world? Room service, the tightly made bed with white sheets, whether linens of 1000-thread count percale, or threadbare and riddled with bedbugs and cigarette holes. The anonymity; the averted gaze. The patterned carpet, the plastic drapes. Is it only solitude if it seems dangerous, even insurmountable? If there is some external force against which you must throw all your weight? What if there is nothing to fight? No clear threat to life and limb? What if it is not a matter of life or death? What if the crisis is not an encounter with danger, but an encounter with silence?

Which is not, on the face of it, even an encounter at all; in solitude, there is no Other with whom we can come face to face. There is only the raucous, clamoring self, the flotsam and jetsam and junk of which we mostly consist. Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun, spent three years in radical silence in the Himalayas. The only thing she ever said publicly about the experience was, “Well, it wasn’t boring.”
​
The very existence of the solitude narrative—the fact that people have for hundreds of years seen value not only in being solitary, but in writing about it—implies a certain human struggle with the experience of solitude itself. Using language to grapple with the nature of being alone requires that one imagine that one is not alone; one must cast oneself into some imagined future tense in which the first-person, experiencing, subjective self—the speaking, writing, communicating I—has been joined by a second person: the listener, the reader, the Other, the You.
Adam Faber writes,
​A time comes, ideally, when the child discovers the pleasures of her own solitude. One of the things that a child might do with this solitude is read. What kind of exchange goes on between a book and its reader? What can a book give us that a person can’t? One possible answer might be ‘the experience of a relationship in silence.’ (373-375)
That exchange between book/author/narrator/I—however one conceives of the creator of a given text—and the reader presents an ontological problem for the writer (and reader) of solitude narratives: what is solitude, if the reader is—imaginatively or in future fact—right there? What is the influence of that reader on what the author records? If there were no intended reader, might the author write in a different way? Or, in that case, would the author bother to write at all? If she did, whom would she address? Without a reader, does the author exist? Does the text? Or is the person formerly known as the author, deprived of pen and paper, laptop, iPad, Kindle, stylus, overly intelligent phone, et al, just a person sitting somewhere alone?
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​

Picture
Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist, essayist, novelist, poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. She is the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Logan Fellowship for social justice journalism, the Fountain House Humanitarian Award, and other distinctions. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her creative and critical writing appears regularly in publications including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, Crazyhorse, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, DIAGRAM, Arts & Letters, and many others. She is currently completing her sixth and seventh books, a work of longform journalism on sex and gender in American life and a collection of essays on solitude. 

Related Works

Jenny Spinner
The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History
Assay 3.1 (Fall 2016)
Kathryn Nuernberger
Writing Women’s Histories
Assay 8.1 (Fall 2021)
Jens Lloyd
Truthful Inadequacies:
Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of
Bashō’s Travel Sketches
Assay 6.2 (Spring 2020)

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  • 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
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    • 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)
      • 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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