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

Picture

Sam Cha


​​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre



1.

Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press 2016) is a book that I love. Because I love it, it’s hard to write about. Any love is hard to write, as the Elizabethans knew very well with their icy-hots and their lively deaths, because love is or exists in a tension or flux between knowledge (that which can be conveyed in words) and mystery (that which cannot be conveyed in words); between speech and silence; between that which falls, failing, into sense, and that towards which all senses only dimly point. (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a kind of lover’s discourse, perhaps more so than Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.) And that difficulty’s multiplied when you’re writing about writing that you love. Because writing itself is always in tension between what can and can’t be said, what can and can’t be known. Writing itself is a kind of love, and so writing about love always undermines itself.

    Nevertheless:

    Unbearable Splendor is a small red-covered book. From beginning to acknowledgements page it is 119 pages long. On the red cover there is/are:
  1. the outline of a labyrinth, drawn in white;
  2. nine circles, printed on the cover so that they appear to go over and under the lines of the labyrinth. They’re arranged so that it looks like you’d hooked a finger into the center of a set of nine concentric rings and dragged them up, so that part of the top edge of the smallest circle now barely protrudes above the top edge of the largest, forming a shape that suggests a truncated cone: a topographic map of Dante’s nine-circled hell, or perhaps of the Tower of Babel. Or, alternately, it could be a schematic of Dante’s nine-spheres of heaven;
  3. on either side of the top edge of the smallest circle, two collections of arcs that look like horns, which, when coupled with the outline of the labyrinth, transforms the nine circles into the head of the Minotaur;
  4. the title of the book, printed inside the smallest circle, or infernal tier, or floor of Babel, or heavenly sphere, taking the place of, variously, Satan, the white rose of the heavenly choir, the zenith of human ambition, the impact crater of the wrath of god, the face of the Minotaur;
  5. the author’s name, printed at the bottom of the cover, near the entrance / exit of the labyrinth.

“Sun Yung Shin” is how her name’s written there. But on Facebook, recently, she’s changed the spelling of her name (in accordance with the Revised Romanization system, which was approved by the Korean Ministry of Culture in 2000) to “Seonyeong Shin.”

This doubling of the author’s name is coincidental but emblematic, because Unbearable Splendor is a book that’s obsessed with dualities, with doublings, with doppelgängers, with layered, palimpsestic contradictions.[1] It opens with one. A black hole, despite the name, is “anything but empty space,” says one of the epigraphs to the first piece in the book, “Valley, Uncanny.” What seems to be an absence is in fact a surfeit of presence. “Valley, Uncanny” is itself double or uncanny, fitting neither here nor there, following, as it does, the dreamlike logic of a poem, with all of a poem’s obliqueness, ambiguities, redactions, silences—but moving visually like an essay, with long lines, paragraphs, graphs showing the curve of the uncanny valley, as plotted on the y-axis of familiarity and the x-axis of human likeness. “I was a hole,” says the speaker of the piece, with the verbal echo of “whole” hiding, unheimlich, just behind the “hole”; the hole making the whole hollow. “I brought it, myself,” she says, immediately breaking the whole/hole and herself into two, to “미국 mi guk ’beautiful country,’ America, the United States”—a list of names for the US that gives the lie to the easy unity of “United.” Later on in the piece the speaker’s two-year-old self and her adult self meet. Later still the speaker reflects on her “performance of childhood,” as a two-year-old Korean child adopted by American parents; in her memory she becomes a “robot, / a creature of industry / a tool with a perfect face and perfect thoughts,” like a reverse Galatea, becoming effigy; becoming, in order to be accepted as human, inhuman. In “The Other Asterion, or, The Minotaur’s Sacrifice,” a short story that is a riff on a story by Borges, the narrator, who guards the Minotaur Asterion in his labyrinth, gradually becomes the Minotaur, and the Minotaur/narrator, who has been disposing of the human sacrifices offered to him every nine years, submits humbly to Theseus’s sword. “Orphan: The Plural Form,” a meditation on the etymologies of the words “orphan” and “adoptee,” segues into fractured lyrics that address, or speak for, Antigone, which in turn segues into “The Limit Case,” an essay about Antigone as cyborg, a lá Donna Haraway, “a machine pretending to be a disobedient girl [...] excessive [...] eternal [...] hybrid of life and death.” Faced with the unknowability of the past, not knowing their date of birth or the name of their birth parents, the “we” of “Exactly Like You,” a long prose-poem slash memoir slash found-poetry piece, invents possible origins for themselves: “perhaps our father and mother were people from the north [...] perhaps [...]we were the fourth child, one too many [...] perhaps our mother was raped by a taxi driver [...] perhaps our parents were involved in an extramartial affair [...] perhaps our father died.” Caught in the labyrinth of radical doubt, the speaker(s) respond(s), not with a cogito, but with a cogitamus: the “I” splintering into many, who coalesce or coagulate, Minotaur-like, into a many-natured, many-historied “we.” “We are a copy and an original,” they say: “nameless, and renamed.”

An early attempt at this essay, in which I was trying to explain why Unbearable Splendor moves between poem and essay, between the lyric and the discursive, began with:                    
Poetry is about saying what cannot be said.

Since nothing can be said, this means that poetry is about saying nothing.
​

The end.

I still think that’s true.[2]

The lyric is about being a dying thing, about being something, a thinking feeling human mind, that is always just about to become nothing.

The lyric is about being.


And being is precisely what can’t be said.[3]

An essay, by way of contrast, is about trying to say something, about trying to make something happen. An essay essays, tries. To do.

If a poem is about trying to be something, while an essay is about trying to do something, and if you accept that this is a real difference, then a poem’s about being, about being-defined-by-death, while an essay’s about struggle, about trying to live. This contradiction—in impulse, in thrust—makes any combination of the two—any child, any “hybrid”—monstrous, like Shin’s Antigone, a “hybrid of life and death.”

If Unbearable Splendor is about becoming monstrous—about what it feels like to be a monster, about what it feels like to be torn and doubled and doubled up inside—which is a one way to think about being an immigrant, about having (at least) two heritages, two lines of descent, and if it’s talking about this in a form that is itself monstrous, doubled, hybrid, then the obvious thing to say is that it’s deploying this monstrous combination as a figure for the immigrant experience, or for Seonyeong / Sun Yung Shin’s specific immigrant experience. A torn form for the torn identity. [4]

But some of the pain is also the pain of being torn between genres, torn by the idea of genre, what Derrida calls the “law” of genre: “as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity.”

And: “the law is mad.”

To write an essay that is also a poem is, in this framework, to create a monster, our own little Frankensteined patchwork, strange hybrid of life and death,


        Shambling rot-seamed hulk always              lurching in opposite directions
        one mouth singing                                           while the other calls it liar
        one mouth fumbling for a lost word             the other drawling we speak English here
​

       (what an American mouth)                             (what a truly American thing to say)
a genre of trouble, of troubledness. Mad.

2.

Like this thing I’m writing right now, the thing that you’re reading, which started out as an attempt to talk about Unbearable Splendor and is now spinning off into something else, something I can’t quite see. Torn into sections. Diction and vocabulary veering back and forth.

This is an essay, supposedly. That’s the genre I’m working in/with, or simply working, the way one works metal or a seam of metal in a mine.

But as soon as I say that I’m filled with anxiety. You could say that I find the whole thing trying. How does genre even work, is what I want to know. And what, as a writer, do I get out of the whole thing? (Alternately: how do I get out of the whole thing?) Is there a genre that’s not troubled?[5] Is genre a material? A repository of material? A neighborhood? A climate? A prescription? An algorithm? A law? A set of commandments? A process? A formula? A nation? A family?

The best essay in the English language, by my lights, is a chapter in a novel. The chapter is “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The novel is Moby Dick. The second best essay is a poem by Anne Carson called “The Glass Essay.” Other essays that I love are also poems: “One Poem,” by Layli Long Soldier, and “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché, and “I Hoisted Them, Two Drug Dealers, I Guess That’s What They Were,” by Diane Seuss, and Eye of the Needle, by Fanny Howe. “On the Puppet Theatre,” by Heinrich Von Kleist, is an essay, arguably, but there’s nothing in it that’s not fiction. Derrida’s much more enjoyable to read when you read him as poetry. So’s Heidegger. (Neither of them are very good poets, though.) In 2015, right after Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was nominated for the National Book Award in poetry, you still couldn’t find it on the poetry bookshelf in the Harvard Bookstore. Instead, it was shelved with books of essays.


Sometimes I think that the idea of genre is mostly a guide for consumption. Consumption as purchase and use and reception, yes, but also consumption as ingestion. How to buy and how to read = how to cook; how to eat.

Consider: when Moby Dick was first published, critics didn’t know what to do with it. The book didn’t seem to fit into any of their categories. Was it a sober-minded novel? A romance, full of wild circumstance and supernatural intervention? Magazine articles with a frame-narrative? Was it a stirring tale of the high seas? A singularly bloody-minded repository of whaling best practices? Was it meant to be funny? Sacrilegious? Was it fiction? Was it fact? The reviewer for the London Britannia could only define it by what it wasn’t: “it is certainly neither a novel nor a romance,” they wrote. But then what was it? The reviewer for the London Athenaeum was offended by Moby Dick’s multifariousness, its polymorphousness, its promiscuity: “this is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact,” they wrote. (The book as bad drug, as a contaminated potion-poison; pharmakon.) Unlike the reviewer for the Britannia, however, the Athenaeum reviewer was able to place Moby Dick in a genre. Not a book-genre, though—a food-genre. Moby Dick was a salad. But not a good one (if indeed such a thing as a good salad existed for the reviewer). It was indicative of “bad tastes,” this “salad” of “ravings and scraps of useful knowledge flung together.” They didn’t like the recipe; it tasted bad; they wanted to send the salad back. No compliments to the chef.

​To be a salad in 1851 was to be invisible, unnamed. It was to be left off the menu. The heyday of salmagundi was long gone; the periodical named after that dish long shuttered. Lucien Olivier was ten years away from compounding his mixture of grouse, veal tongue, caviar, smoked duck, lettuce, crayfish tails, capers, and aioli—a salad that so captured the imaginations of rich Muscovites that its pale and Hellman-ed descendants, with their bologna and dill pickles, their hard-boiled eggs and cubed potatoes, are still be found on Russophone menus around the world. Auguste Escoffier was 4 years old; Waldorf-Astor was 3. The fathers of Caesar Cardini and Robert Cobb were zygotes. The New York Public Library’s website has a wonderful archive of menus from hotels and restaurants. A typical menu from a relatively tony, high-falutin’ establishment (the City Hotel, in Hartford) in 1851, the year Moby Dick was published, lists:

Mock Turtle Soup * Boiled Mutton Chops * Boiled Corn Beef * Boiled Chickens
Boiled Pork * Boiled Ham * Mutton Chops * Cold Roast Pork * Cold Roast Beef

Cold Tongue Sliced * Calves Feet Brown Butter * Boiled Rice * Boiled Hominy
Roast Beef * Roast Turkey * Roast Gosling * Roast Chickens * Pandowdy Pudding
Cream Sauce * Apple Pie * Mince Pie * Cream Puffs * Cake Flummery * Apples
​

No salad. They existed, of course—John Evelyn, who was a friend of Samuel Pepys, wrote a whole book (Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets) about salads that included not only recipes but also instructions for growing the ingredients from seed, and for designing gardens in order to maximise yield and flavor. (What is the genre of Acetaria?) But a Sweetgreen, in the 1850s, would have gone bankrupt in a matter of days.
​
​Genre as guide to consumption invites this kind of exclusion, this kind of invisibility. If you’re not recognizable, you’re inedible.


​3.

What if we were to imagine beyond the law of genre, the consumptive insanatorium of genre, the boiled-beef-and-flummery of genre, the border patrol of genre, the ICE, the iceberg, the sad salad iceberg wedge of genre?

If writing and love always exist in tension, in a Heraclitean flux between opposite poles, then writing and love are uncanny things. They are never at rest. Every country’s new, foreign, especially the ones that they call home. When we write, when we love, we are immigrants; we are migrating, we are caravans.

Immigrants and exiles are the perfect writers because we are at home in this state of not being at home; because we know this unknowing, because we have learned to unlearn, because we carry within us multiple versions of ourselves, multiple histories, whole nations, continents, oceans. We know the art of losing. (Elizabeth Bishop was an immigrant, too, in Brazil.) To be an immigrant is to learn to die many times, to be forced to, out of sheer hunger, to pick and choose the languages, the styles, the genres, to fall into, to fall with. It is to be made of contradictions; it is to revel in them. It is to make a carnival of your losses. Your presidents and pundits will natter on about winning, but what’s so great about winning? Winning’s for losers, for aging bone-spur bully boys thumping their upholstered chests. Losing’s the essential human art.

And so I hate “hybrid.” I hate genre. I am not your mule. I will not swallow your condom-wrapped assumptions about what writing is; I will not smuggle them for you.

So-called “hybrid” writing is an immigrant mode, an exile’s mode. We write it for survival. Joyce was an immigrant and Nabokov and Stein. Su Dongpo, who was writing lyrical essays with rhymed prose and fragments of verse a thousand years ago in Song Dynasty China, was an exile in his own country. So was Usama Ibn Munqidh, who mentored Saladin in poetry and war, and wrote whole books that were combinations of memoir and anthology and annotated bibliography. So, for that matter, was Melville, wandering the terraqueous globe in his youth, exiled from the world of literature in his middle years, his writing desk gathering dust. Don’t even come at me with your Deleuze and Guattari and their hypothetical nomads, their criss-cross de- and re- territorializations like Salvador Dali tic-tac-toe. They were playing catch-up. They were playing. And a piffle for your flâneury. We have been roaming throughout the earth going back and forth, as it says in your scriptures, long before your Baudelaires made it fashionable or merely theoretical. (Satan was the original immigrant, the original flâneur.) There were travellers from foreign lands wandering lonely as clouds adrift and aloof and alienated through the streets and crowds of Ur and Uruk when Gilgamesh was flesh.

Some years ago a friend of mine, Lithuanian/Russian by way of Brooklyn, introduced me to a dish that she knew as “Korean carrot salad”; they’re very popular in Russia, she said. It was a little tub of shredded carrots she’d gotten from the Russian grocery. When I tasted them they were familiar but strange: sweet and salty and oiled and onioned the way I’d cook them to put into japchae, but with olive oil rather than sesame, and paprika and coriander and lemon instead of garlic and ginger and scallions and soy. Later I read that ethnic Koreans, during the Second World War, were forced to move from Manchuria into the desolate marches of the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs, for fear that they would spy for the Japanese. An estimated 40,000 died of exposure and starvation. The ones who survived wanted to make kimchi, but they didn’t have the right ingredients, and so they roamed the unfamiliar hills and meadows, they roamed the marketplaces where nobody spoke a word they could understand, the pitiless and arid towns and they picked, they sampled, they foraged, they bricolaged. For a taste that might, every now and then, remind them of their lost home. In my barren twenties, yearning for a taste of naengmyun, for thin buckwheat noodles with chilled beef broth and pickles and spicy marinated skate and hot chili paste, lost in Williamstown or Charlottesville or New Brunswick far from any Korean grocery, I hoarded Tabasco and Frank’s Red Hot and Taco Bell Fire Sauce and Sriracha to put on Japanese soba with Romaine lettuce and a hard-boiled egg.

The japchae that the “Korean” carrots remind me of is simply the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese 雜菜, or “mixed vegetables”: chop suey, here in the US, where Chinese immigrants mixed and matched local ingredients with a recipe from home. (A kind of salad, then.) “American Chop Suey” is a dish made with tomato sauce, ground beef, mushrooms, cheese, and macaroni. A macaronic language is a language that uses a mixture of languages; Dog-Latin, for instance, uses vernacular words mixed with Latin words, and Latin grammar; Wikipedia says the term derives from maccarone, or dumpling. Dumplings and pasta were transmitted, from their point of origin in China, to Europe, by nomadic traders and exiles. 18th century British “Maccaroni” were wealthy youths who had passed through Italy on the Grand Tour and affected a taste for pasta and Continental fashion and highfalutin’ Continental language; your Yankee Doodle, when he sticks a feather in his hat, is aping those British dandies aping Italian customs and food culture that comes all the way from China; he’s a macaroni of a maccaroni of a maccarone of a jiaozi, a mantou, a bao; and all our languages, ultimately, are thus macaronic, are immigrant things.

Most people enter the world of language once, as a child. That has always seemed to me to be the true fall from Eden. You go from being part of the world—from not knowing the difference between you and the world or any of the parts of the world—to having a name, to having to learn names, having to know difference, having to learn to be a self, having to learn to be lonely. Having to learn to die. When my children were four or so (they’re twins), we were coming back from the bus stop. We walked through the pedestrian walkway under the big concrete apartment building. It’s windy there; we used to pretend that that was the home of the wind, that we needed to be as quiet as we possibly could so that the wind wouldn’t wake up grumpy. Tiptoe through the tunnel holding our breath, and then run from the far end laughing. This time though. This time my daughter tugged on my hand, face angled down, and asked, in a strange squeezed-up voice: Dad? Does anybody survive?

She meant: is death avoidable; does anybody survive living.

I was two people then, too. One of them wanted to say yes. The other one told the truth.

Both of them went home with their children, their crying daughter, their crestfallen son; their people. Their gens.

​And made them macaroni. And japchae. A mess of dumplings, with ketchup. ​
[1] I have also had more than one name, have been my own doppelgänger.
    When I was thirteen, I spent a year in school Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was an awful time for me. I felt like I couldn’t speak.
    I’d been living in Seoul since third grade, but that wasn’t the problem. I was bilingual because I’d spent five and a half years in Wisconsin as a small child, and because I read a lot of books in English and wore out the spine on my Penguin Classics paperback of Don Quixote and wore out the spine on my Signet Classics paperback of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with the silhouette of Jeremy Brett on the cover, and had at the time a memory for text that was, if not precisely eidetic, was close enough as made no difference, and because I watched a lot of Macgyver on AFKN (the Armed Forces Korea Network, for America soldiers stationed in Korea), and hummed the theme song to myself whenever I was trying to solve a problem.
    So the structure of the language, the shape of the sounds, the vagaries of English orthography (cacography?)—none of this was an issue. The issue was me, my body, the way I carried myself, the way I’d been trained to carry myself.
    For example, when a teacher calls on you in class, in Seoul circa 1987-1991, you’re supposed to stand up to speak. To do otherwise invites punishment from the teacher; punishment that, depending on the teacher, can range from verbal harassment to verbal abuse to stress positions to chalk whipped at your head to slaps to rulers to bamboo switches to poolcues to hockey sticks.
    So when Mr. Burke, one of the two eighth-grade teachers at Peabody Elementary, big and round and ruddy and crew-cut and all of thirty years old, called on me to introduce myself on my first day of school, I, small and plump and wearing a horizontal striped polo shirt from the Gap in the year of the Guns ’n Roses T-Shirt and straight-cut Levis in the year of the Kriss-Kross Sag and blue Adidas Torsion in the year of the Reebok Pump, I jumped up out of my chair with an alacrity born of years of training, the motion smooth and perfect and without a shadow of hesitation, like a punch that a kung-fu master has practiced tens of thousands of times, I stood with my chin up, back straight, ass clenched, shoulders open, heels touching each other, feet planted at a thirty degree angle, fists half-closed and resting on the seams of my pants, and said Hello! My name is Cha Seung! I’m from Korea! Cha is my last name, not my first! Seung is hard to pronounce, so I’d like to go by Sam!
    A moment of silence.
    Why is he standing up, I heard a girl whisper to another girl.
    How about, said a sandy-haired sociopath with pustules of acne glittering like carbuncles in his face, we call you Ralph? He stuck a finger down his throat and gagged.
    And everybody laughed.
    Including Mr. Burke, who, since he was all of thirty in 1991 or 1992, may still be teaching Social Studies somewhere, although I would like to think that he eventually found an occupation for which he was more suited. Like being a birthday clown. Or the tail-less donkey at the birthday party. Or the piñata.
    That was the first time I was Sam. Or, if you prefer, the first time I was me. There were a pair of us, then. How dreary to be somebody, to be somebodies, I want to say, which adds Emily for a third, and as soon as I have said that here’s Walt because the somebodies crowd and cluster and I have said I have said which invites Virginia in and here’s Johnny and here’s Jack Nicholson peering through the shattered door in the haunted house; I am multitudes, legions: you’ve taught me your tongue and my profit on it’s that I know how to quote.
[2] But perhaps it requires a bit of clarification.
What I mean when I say that poetry is about saying what can’t be said:

Poetry is about saying things. But because of that, poetry is the art of leaving things out. It leaves things out because not all things that we can be aware of are commensurate with language; i.e., not all things that we can wish to say can be said through language. Human language is confined to that subset of things that are human that can be spoken.

Things that can’t be said are hard to think about. And they are hard to remember. Because they are hard to think about and hard to remember, they are hard to think of as part of us, as part of what constitutes the person here and now being alive and aware.

And they are almost impossible to communicate to other people.

Because they are hard to think about and hard to remember and almost impossible to communicate, we tend to shove them off to the side. We forget that they are human things.

We confuse them with the language of the world. The long slow sentences spoken by sunlight and gravity and heat, which comprise everything that is not human.

(But of course they also comprise that which is: we are not distinct from geological processes, the life and death of stars, the turning of galactic arms. We forget that.)
Poetry is an art that returns to us these nameless and silent things, these forgotten things, these almost incommunicable things, these almost inhuman things. Such as: love (not the concept, which we do have a name for, but the shape of, the sum of, all of the individual moments and awareness of those moments that comprise the experience of love, which is an infinity of names and names for that infinity of names) or the thingness of things or the true nature of time (i.e. that it does not exist).

When poetry does this properly, we feel it as an intrusion into our awareness of everything about the world that is not human, everything that transcends or underlies or subtends or parallels or diverges from the human, everything that we cannot bear or dare—what we used to (or still do) call, variously or simultaneously the divine, the infernal, the otherworld, the world-which-is-not-ours. Which is perhaps what the Neo-Platonists mean by pneuma, the breath of the world, which is spirit, the spirit that blows into every holt and heath the tender crop, in-spiring, inspir-ed, in-spirit, what you give back when you ex-spir, expire, the soul the ghost you give up, surrender, as Teresa of Avila surrendered, as the burning arrow jutting in the angel’s hand entered, the red wet plush of, the hot thrum of, her heart.

Poetry is about everything about the world that is not human, that we can’t experience directly, or, having experienced, will never be able to communicate. Which is to say: death. Which (since death is the limit of what we are, and since we are defined by our limits) is say: being.
[3]  “In every story I tell comes / a point where I can see no further. / I hate that point. It is why they / call storytellers blind—a taunt,” as Anne Carson says, in “Short Talk on Homo Sapiens.”
[4]  When Orpheus was torn to pieces, they say, the head of Orpheus floated down the river, singing. But whether the song from the torn mouth was also torn, they don’t say. Not in the fragments of the story that we have.
[5] Every definition of genre creates a blind spot.

(—if for instance we were to imagine genres as planets; if we were to consider, however unlikely or incongruous the thought, the attention of the prevailing culture as a light source, a Mordor-Eye, a kind of hooded and blinkered star that, like a lighthouse or flashlight sends light in only one particular direction; if we may imagine critics as intricate mechanisms of lens and prism and mirror and amplifier that serve to concentrate and intensify and focus the light of the culture into a kind of analytic laser; then we may imagine the planet Poetry swimming into the beam of any critic, Blahrold Hoom, let’s call them, strictly for euphony, and a face of Poetry lighting up, the mountains on the terminator in sharp relief, various colors visible only in the wavelengths of Hoom-light fluorescing, Hoom-light loving species thawing and waking up to their cyclical routines of anxiety and agon—and other colors flattened; delicate frost structures melting in Hoom-heat; and the other side of Poetry thrown into dark; the shadow cast by Poetry in the Hoom-light extending out into space like a long hourglassed phlange of black, endlessly, until it intersects the orbit of some other genre-planet, so that, for instance, on the planet of Journalism, Poetry may seem to be entirely in eclipse and the inhabitants of Journalism write article after article on the death of Art, the silence of the iambs—)

Since all genres are related, and equally unreal, every definition of any genre creates shadows that partially overlap with, or land smack-dab in, the heart of the domain of another genre, so that perhaps the capitol of Prose will be situated in a terra incognita of the map of the empire of Poems, and vice versa, until all of literature is a Ukraine or a Macedonia or and Afghanistan or an America of competing histories and boundaries and legal canons. Which is when a certain kind of reader will start building walls and issuing or denying visas and marking passports with jackboots or rubber stamps or RFID.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​

Picture
Sam Cha was born in Korea. He earned an MFA from UMass Boston. A winner of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a St. Botolph's Club Emerging Artists Grant, his work has appeared in apt, Anderbo, Better, Best New Poets, Boston Review, decomP, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Missouri Review, RHINO, and Toad. A very short chapbook, 5 Poems, is available from Damfino Press, and a very long chapbook, American Carnage, is available from Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. He's a poetry editor at Radius. He lives and writes in Cambridge, MA.



Related Works

Jen Soriano
Multiplicity from the Margins:
The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form
5.1 Articles

Meghan Buckley
[Creative] Nonfiction Novella:
Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place
5.1 Pedagogy

Joanna Eleftheriou
Is Genre Ever New?
Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context
4.1 Articles

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