ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 9.1 (Fall 2022)
    • 9.1 Articles >
      • Mark Houston, "Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of ​Social Justice Rhetoric in “The Sacred and the Superfund”" (9.1)
      • Ryan McIlvain, ""You Get to Decide What to Worship but Not What's Good": Rereading 'This Is Water'" (9.1)
      • Quincy Gray McMichael, "Laboring toward Leisure: The Characterization of Work in ​Maine’s Back-to-the-Land Memoirs" (9.1)
      • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
      • Emma Winsor Wood, "A Lovely Woman Tapers Off into a Fish: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais" (9.1)
    • 9.1 Conversations >
      • Philip Newman Lawton, "Rousseau's Wandering Mind" (9.1)
      • Claire Salinda, "Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in ​The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood" (9.1)
      • Hannah White, "“Which sounds bad and maybe was”: A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”" (9.1)
    • 9.1 Pedagogy >
      • Jessica Handler, "Your Turn" (9.1)
      • Sonya Huber, "Expressing Anger as a Positive Choice" (9.1)
      • Kozbi Simmons, "Literacy as Emancipation" (9.1)
      • Wally Suphap, "Writing and Teaching the Polemic" (9.1)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • Subject Index
    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 1.1 Articles >
        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
        • Andy Harper, "The Joke's On Me: The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative" (1.1)
        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
        • Brian Nerney, "John McCarten’s ‘Irish Sketches’: ​The New Yorker’s ‘Other Ireland’ in the Early Years of the Troubles, 1968-1974" (1.1)
        • Wendy Fontaine, "Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir" (1.1)
        • Scott Russell Morris, "The Idle Hours of Charles Doss, or ​The Essay As Freedom and Leisure" (1.1)
      • 1.1 Conversations >
        • Donald Morrill, "An Industrious Enchantment" (1.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Amazon Constellations" (1.1)
        • Derek Hinckley, "Fun Home: Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir" (1.1)
        • Interview with Melanie Hoffert
        • Interview with Kelly Daniels
      • 1.1 Pedagogy >
        • Robert Brooke, "Teaching: 'Rhetoric: The Essay'" (1.1)
        • Richard Louth, "In Brief: Autobiography and Life Writing" (1.1)
    • 1.2 (Spring 2015) >
      • 1.2 Articles >
        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
        • Diana Wilson, "Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay" (1.2)
        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Why the Worst Trips are the Best: The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff & Jonathan Franzen" (1.2)
        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
        • Catherine K. Buni, "Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Conversations >
        • Doug Carlson, "Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic" (1.2)
        • Patrick Madden, "Aliased Essayists" (1.2)
        • Beth Slattery, "Hello to All That" (1.2)
        • Interview with Michael Martone (1.2)
      • Spotlight >
        • Richard Louth, "The New Orleans Writing Marathon and the Writing World" (1.2)
        • Kelly Lock-McMillen, "Journey to the Center of a Writer's Block" (1.2)
        • Jeff Grinvalds, "Bringing It Back Home: The NOWM in My Classroom" (1.2)
        • Susan Martens, "Finding My Nonfiction Pedagogy Muse at the NOWM" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Steven Church, "The Blue Guide Project: Fresno" (1.2)
        • Stephanie Vanderslice, "From Wordstar to the Blogosphere and Beyond: ​A Digital Literacy and Teaching Narrative (Epiphany Included)" (1.2)
        • Jessica McCaughey, "That Snow Simply Didn’t Fall: How (and Why) to Frame the Personal Essay as a Critical Inquiry into Memory in the First-Year Writing Classroom" (1.2)
    • 2.1 (Fall 2015) >
      • Editor's Note2.1
      • 2.1 Articles >
        • Daniel Nester, "Straddling the Working Class Memoir" (2.1)
        • Sarah M. Wells, "The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: ​Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth" (2.1)
        • Chris Harding Thornton, "Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose" (2.1)
        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
        • Megan Culhane Galbraith, "Animals as Aperture: How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Conversations >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character" (2.1)
        • Tim Bascom, "As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay" (2.1)
        • Adrian Koesters, "Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir" (2.1)
        • Interview with Simmons Buntin (2.1)
        • Mike Puican, "Narrative Disruption in Memoir" (2.1)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
        • Crystal N. Fodrey, "Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship" (2.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
        • Christian Exoo & Sydney Fallon, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to ​First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (2.1)
    • Special Conference Issue
    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • Bruce Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Anthony Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
5.2

Picture

Richard Hoffman
​
​
DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston



My relationship to Louise began long before we ever met, when her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work rocked my world and instigated a reckoning with myself. It was 1989 or 1990. The book belonged to my wife, the poet Kathleen Aguero, and I remember picking it up and becoming inexplicably angry, even at the title: How dare this writer suggest that a writer's work, especially a writer in the modernist pantheon, was still under the sway of childhood trauma? Never mind that I was writing about all those things: I was not writing about them as a survivor, I was writing about them as an artist: they were simply "material" from which I would craft the kind of lyric heartbreak that would open the gates of literature to me. (Later, a friend described this as putting gold leaf on a turd.) I was a working class kid trying hard to sneak past the gatekeepers by passing as the heir to the melancholy tradition, the canon comprised of sad white guys, which was the dominant aesthetic then, the one I'd been schooled in when I left home for college. Literature was a kind of Promised Land to me as a poor kid from a family afflicted by several species of tragedy, and as such it was a realm where the blood and shit and sperm and cruelty and violence and sneering and cursing of that life must never be allowed to intrude. I wanted so desperately to deal with the fact of the sexual violence in my boyhood and then "move on" to writing beautiful — and above all impressive things — that I found the book a threat. I even scoffed at it as not real criticism, not real biography, a book unconcerned with literature, which transcended such personal, domestic, and squalid concerns.

This preciosity, by the way, was exactly the position of the New York Times in their review of the book and was perhaps the first time that I saw clearly that "the gray lady" was in fact the guardian of a deeply conservative literary establishment, defensive, protective of power, especially male power.

But I found myself compelled to read the Woolf biography and it seemed unassailable to me. And it challenged nearly every notion I had been given about writing. Over the next few years, as I changed, often painfully, embracing the need to understand and integrate the traumas of my boyhood, I worked on taking all the writing I'd been doing for a decade — which was going to be a novel, which meant that it was going to be about someone else (ha!) and turning it into Half the House, a memoir I published in 1995. The point is that long before I met Louise or even read any of her other ferocious and incandescent work, I met her bravery, and it was inspiring and contagious.

Fast forward twenty years. Well, nineteen. My publisher has asked me to find a writer to provide the introduction to a Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Half the House. I email Louise, she agrees, and we arrange a phone call. We spoke for a long time, twice, on the phone. Both times I hung up thinking deeply about something she said.

Talking about the fact that Half the House resulted in the arrest, trial, and incarceration of the man who had raped me as a child (and, as it turned out some 400 other young boys) I sought to impress on Louise what a shock that had been, and that I had never harbored the intention to get even or seek retribution through the book. "I had no incendiary intent," I said, quoting myself from an essay I'd written about it, still wrapping myself in the flag of art for art's sake. I thought a long time about what Louise said then: "Whoever said you can't write to settle a score?"

In our second phone call, I mentioned that I had begun working on something new, what eventually became the memoir Love & Fury, and I was struggling with how to write about my family across four generations without repeating myself: how could I include necessary events from childhood that I'd already written about in the first book?

Louise (somewhat impatiently): "Whoever said you can't repeat yourself?"

Last year I Skyped into Edvidge's class to talk with them about memoir. Towards the end of the class, she brought up Louise (it was not long after her passing) and asked me if I could say what I got from her. I wasn't really prepared for the question, and looking back I suppose an answer might have included the lesson that history is with us, is right here, is where we live: something like what James Baldwin said, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." Louise worked all her life to spring that trap. Her work shows us that there aren't two kinds of history, personal history on the one hand, and the history of one's family and people on the other— there is only history, waiting to be known and understood by those living its consequences in the present. (I think of the many times Louise returned to the scene of swimming across Lake George next to her father's boat, and her growing understanding of the wartime trauma that informed that event and in fact infused all the years of her girlhood.)

I suppose I could have added that Louise's work demonstrates that writing does, in fact, heal: that this was not an act of faith on her part, this was something she knew from experience. What was an article of faith for her, the truth of which is evident in this gathering, is that it is not only the writer who experiences that healing — readers do as well, both individually and in community.

But staring at the trusting, open faces of Edi's students on my computer screen, my unprepared answer came easily: "She gave me permission," I said. "And I think she gave that same permission to many, many writers who felt inspired by her courage, her tenacious search for meaning in her life, our life, life. A permission to follow a line of inquiry wherever it might lead in trying to find meaning in the memory of our lives."

​I can imagine her right now: "Whoever said you need permission?"

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Richard Hoffman has published four volumes of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; and his new collection Noon until Night. His other books include the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, published in a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015 with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo, the 2014 memoir Love & Fury, and the story collection Interference and Other Stories. His work, both prose and verse, appears in print and online in such journals as Agni, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Consequence, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, Poetry, Witness, World Literature Today and elsewhere. He is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston, nonfiction editor at Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and an adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

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  • 9.1 (Fall 2022)
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        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
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        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
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      • Editor's Note
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        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
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        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
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        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
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        • 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)
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        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
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    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
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        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
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        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
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        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
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    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
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        • 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)
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        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • Bruce Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Anthony Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
      • 8.2 Pedagogy >
        • Liesel Hamilton, "How I Wish I’d Taught Frederick Douglass: An Examination of the Books and Conversations We Have in Classrooms" (8.2)
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "In the Room Where it Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom" (8.2)
        • Daniel Nester, "Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley’s Three Poles" (8.2)
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