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

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Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna
​

​The Essay in Parts



Eudora Welty explained in The Eye of the Story that a composition first comes to her as a shape, a shape that wants to be filled in.  It is hard to describe this experience, but that is what happens to me, too.  When I feel the urge, which I resist as long as possible, to write an essay it comes to me not as a phrase or an image, but as a shape with a feeling attached that I haul around with me long before the first words come to mind.  I can feel its heft.  The essay arrives as a whole, and my task as a writer is to fill in the parts.  I hope, of course, that it ends up being more than that, exceeding my expectations, but if it is ever to get beyond an amorphous cloud in my mind, it must at least be the sum of its parts. 

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1. The Beginning (SH)

Aristotle said that every composition has a beginning, middle, and an end.  It was not hard, apparently, to be brilliant 2,500 years ago, but what he said next is brilliant: each part has different characteristics because it has a different function.  The first thing to remember is that the beginning is a choice.  Life is one continuous stream of time offering no beginnings or ends except as we make them.  We don’t discover the beginning after a long search, we choose it.

I could have begun by saying that Ana Maria e-mailed me during the winter about collaborating on a talk called “The Essay in Parts” in which we would divvy up for discussion ten parts of the essay, and I immediately wrote back: “Let’s do it.”  The parts we eventually settled on were beginning, scene, white space, allusion, dialogue, echo, theme, bridge, penultimate moment, and ending.  I could have mentioned that it is an honor for us to be with so many other fine presenters and participants who love narrative nonfiction, and I could have added as well a thank you to Joe Mackall, Dan Lehman, and Sarah Wells and all of the others involved with River Teeth for setting up this lovely conference and inviting us to come, which is all true.  Yes, I could have started there, but that is largely background information that is better tucked in after the introduction, so I didn’t.

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 Instead I chose to begin with the opposite of our premise—the whole—and back into the essay from there.  It’s good to sneak up on a topic from its antonym, and I liked beginning with the whole because I was pretty sure I would return to it before we were done, which brings me to the next important thing to remember about the beginning:  it points into the essay to come.  It opens a door on other events by giving us a clue that the essay is headed somewhere.  It doesn’t necessarily say where it is headed.  That would be getting ahead of itself.  But it offers the reader confidence that the author has read the end of the essay and that it will—thank goodness!—end for the reader as well.

So the beginning is a choice that looks ahead into the composition, but the most important thing about the beginning of an essay is that it is thematically charged.  The theme is the idea of the essay, the author’s comment on life.  The beginning generally does not announce the theme, but it is, after many rewrites, fully aware of the ideas behind the essay, and the language that the author chooses in the opening paragraphs sends out signals that set up the idea and give clues to its nature.  Let me illustrate the point by referring to the first paragraph of “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin, an essay that begins with a death and birth happening on the same day:

On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died.  On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born.  Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century.  A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem.  On the morning of the third of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. (5780)
The theme of Baldwin’s essay—a point that he will not reveal until he too has shattered glass out of rage—is that the fury he feels is entirely justified, but in the end it is also self-defeating.  “It was necessary to hold onto things that mattered,” Baldwin writes as he approaches the end of the essay.  “The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction” (603).   So, everything that matters on the last page of the essay is hinted at in the beginning: the dead man, the child, and, of course, Baldwin himself, the young man who is struggling to “keep his own heart free of hatred and despair” (604). In the end, the essay charges Baldwin to live in this contradiction, but even though he reveals this theme in the final pages, he signals it in his opening paragraph with the crunch of car tires over broken glass.
​

2. The Scene (AMS)

A scene, of course, is action that occurs entirely in one place at one time. It’s sometimes described as cinematic, as though it could be viewed through a camera lens. I come from a fiction background where the rule was always scene, scene, scene, show, show, show, so I’m sometimes surprised by how many nonfiction writers don’t think in scenes; some claim they’ve never tried to write one. (I’m not sure I believe them.) But then, the contrarian in me thinks: well, maybe you don’t have to. Plenty of very fine essays are built on summary narration. Tony Earley’s “Somehow Form a Family,” for example, is largely about the things he “used to” do, the TV shows he “would watch” every Saturday. Other essays have no real narrative at all. Think of Christopher Hitchens’ argumentation or Wendell Berry’s description or lyric essays that juxtapose images or objects or snippets. Still, scenes can be useful, and maybe even crucial. Here’s why: a scene is like an invitation. You’re inviting the reader to enter the story without taking a long detour through the filter of your mind. 


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 Essays that depend on scenes take different forms. Some are a series of scenes like Baldwin’s “Notes from a Native Son,” others are more like a puzzle of scenes like “Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard. Some use a single scene as a frame, so the essay becomes something like a sandwich, where one scene (the bread) opens the essay, then things meander away—to back story or reportage or rumination (the peanut butter or bologna or avocado and sprouts)—before returning to end in the same scene (the bread). The sandwich is a perfect form for short essays for the back page of a magazine (the ones for which you actually get paid.) And some sandwiches are multi-layered like a club sandwich: scene, meander, scene, meander, scene. 

Some very fine essays consist of one scene and one scene only. One of my favorites is “First” by Ryan Van Meter. Written in preset tense from the point of view of a five year-old boy, it’s infused with immediacy. Here’s how it opens: “Ben and I are sitting side by side in the very back of his mother’s station wagon. We face glowing white headlights of cars following us, our sneakers pressed against the back hatch door” (5). You can see it, can’t you? Reading those sentences feels as though you’re sitting with those boys. From there, Van Meter uses all the familiar tools of the fiction writer: setting description, pacing, character development, but the heart of the action lies in simple dialogue. Ryan says to Ben “I love you,” and Ben replies “I love you, too,” and Ryan asks if Ben will marry him. This doesn’t fly with the parents in the front seat. Ryan turns to face his mother who has turned to face him.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” she says. “Boys don’t marry other boys. Only boys and girls get married to each other.”

In that moment, everything changes for young Ryan. The essay ends in the same place and time, but nothing will ever be the same.

 “No one speaks for the rest of the ride. We all just sit and wait and watch our own views of the road—the parents see what is ahead of us while the only thing I can look at is what we have just left behind.”

In “First” as in fiction, the action—what actually happens—causes the narrator to change. It clearly instigates the reflection. But that’s not true in all essays. Sometimes a scene is the manifestation of the reflection, the illustration of it, or simply the setting for it, as in “Notes from a Native Son.” The scene where Baldwin attends his father’s funeral, a scene which goes on for four pages, is an example of one where nothing dramatic happens. His father’s casket is open, and his mother is holding his newborn sister when he reflects:  “Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man” (601). 

The funeral doesn’t cause the reflection, but the scene invites us in, allowing us to experience the reflection more directly. From there, Baldwin will step out of the church and into the race riot in Harlem, with no white space at all, which brings us to …

3. White Space (SH)

Books may reside as magical wholes in our minds, but as we write them—and read them—we take them in sections, usually divided by white space, and an awareness of what the spaces say makes us better readers and better writers.  Bob Root has done ground-breaking work on the segmented essay including a marvelous short piece called “This Is What the Spaces Say.”  You can find these essays in his book The Nonfictionist’s Guide, the finest textbook on the philosophy and practice of nonfiction that I know.  So what do the spaces say?  “In this interval of silence,” Bob explains, “hold onto what you have just heard; prepare yourself to hear something different; ponder the ways these separatenesses are part of the whole” (86).  The spaces deliver their messages in three steps:  1) we absorb the section that we have just read as a unit of meaning in itself, 2)  we prepare our minds for something new, and 3) we hunt out connections between the section just written and the whole.  “The segmented essay is like an oratorio or a concerto,” Bob writes.  “The spaces…can be allegro non troppo, allegro appassionato, andante, allegretto grazioso” (86).  He then goes on to compare the segmented essay to a medieval altar piece in sections, a movie with blackouts and fades, and finally to the pause before an epiphany in spiritual moments.  He argues compellingly that “in our own time the most significant development in the nature of nonfiction may well be the use of space as an element of composition.”

I would like to add my own metaphor.  To me, it is most like changing gears in a car.  Each time we shift up or down we go through Bob’s three steps:  the registering of something separate as we disengage the gears, the anticipation of something new as we hover between gears, and the sense of moving forward toward a goal when we reengage at a new level of intensity.

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Roger Rosenblatt’s memoir, Making Toast, is written in a series of short sections  separated by spaces.  They enact a tug of war between hope for the future represented by his grandchildren, and an unremitting and agonizing grief caused by the death of his daughter, the young mother of these children.  In one section we learn that the children, Jessie and Sammy, have brought home excellent report cards.  When Rosenblatt and Ginny read the reports they realize that the teachers feel “tenderness” for the grandchildren not because of what the children have been going through after their mother’s death, but “because of who they are.” Mommy would “be so proud,” they tell them (118).

We are in third gear here, gliding through a level suburb of the memoir at a pace that feels effortless, when the writer brings us to white space—that hovering between gears which could go either way—and, realizing that the uphill road of the next section requires that we face a hard truth, he downshifts to this:

On December 6, Ginny and I visit the cemetery by ourselves. We go on a Saturday… The temperature is in the low thirties, the cemetery deserted, the pines laden with shadows. When we stand together in the familiar place, neither of us weeps. We stare at the earth. I lick two fingers and wipe bird droppings from a corner of the marker. Ginny has brought a small bunch of flowers for the cone. We say nothing, and remain standing for five minutes, perhaps ten. “Tell me when you are ready to leave,” I say. Ginny turns away and says, “Now.” (118-119)
If the section about the proud teachers pulled us toward the future and hope, the white space said not so fast.  Spaces bind together our scraps of experience with an airy nothing, but they are indispensable.  To reader and writer they say ponder, anticipate change, and connect.

4. The Allusion (AMS)

When I taught composition in the early 1990s, the comp director always encouraged us to talk to students about joining “the larger conversation.”  The students didn’t know what the hell that meant. I’m not sure I knew what the hell that meant. But, over time, sitting alone writing essays at my desk, I learned that, in large part, my audience consists of all the readers and writers in my head, and sometimes I want to bounce my ideas off something they already know, like a backboard. So it was that a couple decades after teaching composition, I found myself trying to explain the “larger conversation” to MFA students, urging them to make an allusion, any allusion, because their essays were beginning to seem a little insular, verging on solipsistic. The students looked skeptical, so I combed through my books and found that, for example, in Best American Essays 2013, 20 of 26 essays discuss some object of culture: books, most often, or articles or movies, sometimes a TV show or a pop song. Still, when I suggested “the allusion” to Steve Harvey as one of these ten essay parts, he said something appropriately humble like “why don’t you do that one, since I don’t quite get it.” But he does get it! Every example you see below comes from his work. The first two come from his terrific collection A Geometry of Lilies. 

Allusions can be illustrations of a larger idea. In “Kid Talk,” an essay about how kids are fearless verbal innovators, Steve references Theodore Roethke, Richard Rodriguez, and Henry David Thoreau, among others. What’s great about these allusions is they’re infused, like the best of allusions, with commentary and personality. Here’s one: “Kid talk survives the condescension of Art Linkletter, the intellectualizing of Lewis Carroll…” (Harvey 22). Later, when discussing Thoreau, he admits, “Some of my favorite [writers] have lost all but a trace of kid-talking eloquence” (Harvey 27). He goes on from there to describe the trace that remains.

A single allusion can be the subject of an essay, the one backboard that all ideas get bounced off. “Endless Imitation” centers on the play Annie, which Steve’s daughter is acting in. The essay is not actually about Annie, it’s about one nuclear family, and in some ways, nothing can be more insular than that, but the allusion lets everyone in who’s ever seen the play or movie… even people like me who can’t stand Annie.  An allusion can provide the framework for an essay. In the “The Book of Knowledge”—which first appeared in River Teeth and later in Best American Essays--Steve uses The Book of Knowledge, itself, this ten volume set of encyclopedia-type books he had as a kid, filled with questions about the world and their answers, as a frame for exploring what’s unknown, unknowable, even unfathomable. 

Perhaps the single most vexing question for essayists considering making allusions is: What about allusions readers may not get? References that are too time-sensitive or too esoteric, too pop culture or too high culture? Is it okay to use them? I say yes. Sort of. In “Frame of Reference,” a recent piece for The New Yorker, John McPhee urges “durability” in allusions, but admits that even that definition is shifty. A better solution is good writing, he concludes. If you, for example, describe someone as looking “like Tom Cruise,” McPhee argues that you’re asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you, but if you describe the person vividly, with concrete details, then toss in the Tom Cruise bit as in the punchline, well, okay. Roxane Gay has made a career of addressing very time-sensitive topics from reality TV to the Sandusky scandal with timeless arguments. Will people still read her work years from now? I hope so. I believe so.

5. The Dialogue (SH)

I am Socratic enough to believe that learning happens in dialogue, not monologue.  Other voices offer new words that open up possibilities for meaning for us.   I think of the smart aleck at the back of the class whose hand shoots into the air, and the way we in the class turn to that hand expectantly.  If the lecture is long enough that interruption is always welcome.  What is an interruption but another word for a breakthrough.

Here’s an example from Bernard Cooper’s essay about his father called “The Wind Did It.”  At this point in the essay Cooper tells us that his father has read Secrets of the Maya five times and longs to travel to Machu Picchu with Bernard.  Let me begin with a little bit of Cooper’s voice: 
[T]onight over dinner at Art’s Prime Rib, I ask my father if he would try to articulate just what it is about this particular civilization that intrigues him. For a moment he appears not to hear me and continues to blow on a spoonful of soup. Then he looks up. Thick glasses magnify his eyes. He pushes his French onion soup aside, places his palms on the table. (50)
This is the voice of the essayist, precise, thoughtful, the voice of complete sentences.  It uses words like “articulate” and draws pictures with details we see but often take for granted such as the thick glasses that magnify his father’s eyes.  It names names:  “French onion soup”; it appeals to several senses: “blow on a spoonful of soup.”  Lovely as it is though, it cries out for another voice.  Enter Bernard’s father, trying to answer his son’s question about the appeal of the Mayans:
“First of all,” he says, “they worshiped everything there was to worship, like, um, corn. . .” He drums his fingers, stumped. “You know—things. . . buildings. And they made contributions to the societies of today, like x-ray.”
     “X-ray?”
     “Yeah. Well, not x-ray. But they carved stone pictures of people’s insides. Pregnant women and where their babies would be, or just your average Mayas with lungs and livers. Now I’m not saying that these were actual x-rays as we know them, but you have to start somewhere, right? I mean, how’d they think of these things? Shirley MacLaine, the actress, the one who wrote that book Tree something.
     “Out on a Limb.”
​     My father snaps his fingers. “Limb, that’s it. Anyway, she thinks the Mayas and Aztecs and Incas were advanced people from another planet. I’m not saying I believe her, see, but it is food for thought. Boychik,” he adds, plucking a radish from a bowl of ice, “the world is full of unanswered questions.” (51)
This is definitely a breakthrough, one that raises the crucial issue in the essay:  our inarticulateness in the face of “unanswered questions” in a voice that ranges from “x-rays” to “Boychik” with an “um” thrown in.  Dialogue offers relief from the author’s authoritative voice.  When a lone voice is compelling—even mesmerizing as it can be with so many writers--an interruption is sometimes the only way for inarticulate truths to come crashing in.
​ 

6. The Echo (AMS)

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 We all know from studying literature to look for the reappearance of an object or image, one that represents a theme or a motif. But here I’m speaking more plainly, about repetition of a phrase or a snip of dialogue or sometimes a single word. Sometimes a word is repeated and gains new meaning each time. Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras” repeats the word “heart” 23 times in about 1,000 words as the essay moves from the heart of a hummingbird to the heart of a whale and finally, inevitably, to the human heart. In contrast, sometimes the meaning remains more or less static, but the repetition still serves a purpose. Eula Biss’ “The Pain Scale” uses the word “pain” more than 100 times in 3500 words, and it never changes meaning. Here’s a sample passage:

My father is a physician. He treats patients with cancer, who often suffer extreme pain. My father raised me to believe that most pain is minor. He was never impressed by my bleeding cuts or my weeping sores. In retrospect, neither am I.

Every time I go to the doctor and every time I visit the physical therapist, I am asked to rate my pain on a scale from zero to ten. This practice of quantifying pain was introduced by the hospice movement in the 1970s, with the goal of providing better care for patients who did not respond to curative treatment. (30)
Doesn’t that sound like pain feels? It won’t stop; it won’t go away. The repetition feels like throbbing.

Sometimes a word appears only once at the start of an essay, and stands out so much, that like Chekhov’s gun, you know it’s going to appear again. Steve’s essay “The Nuclear Family” opens with “A witch cackles from my family tree” (9) but the essay isn’t about witches or even genealogy, so with a writer as skilled as Steve, you know this much: the word will echo at some point and take on new meaning. The essay meanders about, exploring rituals in the Harvey household, how Steve whistles “Dixie” on the day of the first snow, how he hangs up a wooden bird, a kid’s shop project, each time someone has a birthday. He’s told us all ritual is about loss, so we keep waiting and waiting for the witch to return, and it does near the end (but not at the very end, in the penultimate space, see #9)
There is, after all a sorcery in all this hocus-pocus of the everyday. Like a witch, I surround myself with owl, cat, and bat—beasts of nocturnal solidarity. Whistling “Dixie” is my incantation for another season and Birthday Bird is my eye-of-frog-and tail-of newt concoction for another year. With this witchcraft, I hope to untangle my life’s strings and fly by night. (16)

7. Theme (SH)

The personal essay is, for me, a way to think out loud about life’s imponderables.  Writers of fiction and poetry do this too, but not so directly.  They are busy creating experiences—making the page come alive in stunning language or engaging narratives.  “No ideas but in things,” is, generally, their motto, or that old workshop chestnut:  “Show don’t tell.”  But in the personal essay we have room to explain a thought.

Let me be quick to add, that many writers of essays and reflective memoirs do not explain their ideas.  Roger Rosenblatt, in Making Toast does not offer an explicit discussion of his grief.  Most of what he does is in the piecing together of detail, event, and dialogue in such a way that the full picture emerges.  So yes, we can do what the poets and fiction writers do if we like.  But we can also choose to explain an idea.  As Phillip Lopate writes in his craft book To Show and to Tell, part of the joy of reading an essay is to watch a writer think:  “What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it sets for itself” (6).

Some nonfiction writers are at their best when writing explicitly about themes.  I could give many examples from writers as diverse as Annie Dillard, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Mark Doty—who are doing the work of philosophers in an age when philosophy itself seems exhausted. I will choose David James Duncan, who created the phrase “river teeth” as the title for his third book, River Teeth:  Stories and Writings.  In the introduction he describes river teeth as the “series of cross-grained, pitch hardened masses” along a trunk that has fallen into a river.  These knots, that live long after the parent tree has rotted, are “relics” of a “river’s mind and blind artistry” (3).

But instead of leaving the matter there, Duncan explains his metaphor giving us a point- by-point commentary on his theme.  Let me reproduce some of what he says:
8. I’d like to piece together a metaphor:  our present-tense human experience, our lives in the inescapable present, are like living trees.  Our memory of experiences, our individual pasts are like trees fallen in a river.  The current in that river is the passing of time.  And a story—a good shared story—is a transference of nutrients from the old river log of memory into the eternal now of life… There are, however, small parts of every human past that resist this natural cycle:  there are hard, cross-grained whorls of memory that remain inexplicably lodged in us long after the straight-grained narrative material that housed them has washed away.  Most of these whorls are not stories, exactly: more often they’re self-contained moments of shock or of inordinate sympathy; moments of violence, uncaught dishonesty, tomfoolery; of mystical terror; lust; preposterous love; preposterous joy.  These are our “river teeth”—the time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone. (3-4)
Notice that this kind of commentary is thought, but not pure thought—which sets it apart from the airy emptiness of metaphysics.  It is thought grounded in experience, in the real world of knotty wood whorls held in the hand.  It is a relief in our age of images and ideologies to follow the solitary minds of essayists like Duncan willing to offer tentative assertions that they hold as true in context, a context that the essay itself generously supplies.

8. THE BRIDGE (AMS)

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 First let’s talk “bridge” in the musical sense. Think of a pop song that goes verse/ chorus, verse/chorus. When that gets too boring, a songwriter will add a bridge: “a contrasting section that prepares for the return to the original material,” according to Wikipedia. Usually the bridge has a significantly different melody so it breaks up the pattern and keeps listeners’ attention, and usually it lasts for eight bars, so it’s sometimes called “the middle eight.” Think of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. There’s a very distinct verse (“Almost heaven, West Virginia …”) and chorus (“Take me home, country roads, to the place I belong …”) pattern that’s interrupted about midway by a very different melody, the bridge (“I hear her voice in the morning hours she calls me. The radio reminds me of my home far away…”) before returning to the chorus to conclude. Essays can do the same thing. Say you’re following a predictable pattern: action/reflection, action/reflection. That can get every bit as dry as verse/chorus, verse/chorus, so a paragraph or three of some kind of “differentness” can add contrast and prepare the readers to return to the original material.

I realized this consciously—though I’d been doing it unconsciously for years—when I was writing an essay called “Grace Behind Glass” about visiting a fish ladder at a dam and admiring the returning salmon. The essay went, essentially: watch the salmon/think about salmon, watch the salmon/think about salmon. That was not terribly interesting, so things were going poorly until I remembered an article I once read about runners in the former Soviet Union, how they gave the author hope for people in oppressive situations everywhere. Just like the salmon! There was my bridge. 

A bridge can be almost anything: a time leap, an anecdote, a bit of research, or an allusion. In Brenda Miller’s fabulous collection Blessing of the Animals, the bridge is almost always an allusion to a work of visual art. In “Knitted” she’s describing different experiences she’s had with knitting in her life as a way to explore her relationships with her mother and grandmother. Suddenly two thirds of the way in, she swerves off to discuss “The Lacemaker” a painting by Vermeer, before returning to the ending we’ve already anticipated: nowadays she appreciates knitting—and family—in a new way. A bridge works especially well in a one scene essay (the fish ladder essay is a one scene essay.) In Miller’s essay “Naked” she’s watching a naked woman through a gauze curtain. It’s a short essay, just seven paragraphs, but the fifth paragraph is all about photos by Spencer Tunick. Miller takes us for a moment away from the view in the window to a larger perspective before bringing us back.

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One interesting note about all the art-related “bridges” in Blessing of the Animals is that they create sly cohesion in the collection. Which brings us to the other connotation of bridge, the literal, nonmusical one. For years I worked on trail crews, and we built lots of bridges, many of them simple footlogs. When you’re stuck in an essay and you need to find a way across to the end, consider building a bridge. Sure, you could wade on through, staying with the same ideas, the same pattern. Or you can find some nearby material—it doesn’t have to be fancy—that will suffice.  From there, it’s easier than you may think: look for a level spot to set your sills and a level place to land … and go right across.

9. Penultimate Moment (SH)

Earlier I suggested that the shape of an essay forms in my mind long before I start writing it and that my task is to fill in the parts.  So what becomes of these shapes in our head?  In one of her final interviews, Judith Kitchen said the shape of fiction and nonfiction are very different and that “we should consider how genre affects structure a bit more.  We all have a ’shape’ of a [fictional] story in our heads,” she explains, “but often the essay does not have the same kind of ’climax’ and ’closure.’  Instead, it digresses, pushes past its ending into commentary, etc” (31).  I think that Judith reflects the majority view here.  Unlike fiction which is based on the reader’s expectations, the essay can assume its own shape based on the thinking process of the writer.  Such a view is liberating because it allows the essayist to discard conventions for organizing work and leads to greater experimentation in form.  To me, one of the most beautiful long meditative essays of our time is The Circus Train by Judith in which she consciously avoided climax and closure, so I take her point.

This view has led to some really self-indulgent and boring experimentation in nonfiction, so I would like to offer a minority view.   To me, we take great risks if we think that readers do not bring expectations of form to the nonfiction text, expectations that we blithely discard at our peril.  Whether it is a tragedy, a sonata, an epic poem, or a basketball game, the audience expects rising action that leads to a climax, and readers of essays are no different.  We can, as Judith does in her book, defy their expectations aware of the resistance we are creating, but we cannot ignore them.

I want to suggest, though, that following the conventional path of letting the essay rise to a climax at the penultimate moment—the moment just before the ending—can also be very effective.  The expectations in the reader’s mind can coincide with the shape that unfolds on the page, and there is nothing wrong with fulfilling these longings.

To illustrate the idea I want to quote the penultimate moment of the essay “The Seam” in the essay collection Potluck by Ana Maria Spagna.  The essay is about the way a seam—a healing scar—can form over the divisions between us, a sense of connectedness that is most apt to manifest itself in life and death situations.  Here the situation is a plane crash in a lake in which people with very real differences show that they are united at the core.  The event could have come at any time in her essay, and chronologically belongs earlier in the piece, but Ana Maria adds intensity to the moving scene by choosing to place it at the penultimate moment, fulfilling our expectations with writing that is vivid, powerful and dramatic.  She saves the best, just as we expected, for next-to-last, and, since we had been waiting for this moment all along, we are willing let her slow the clock with lovely, haunting prose, taking us eerily into the fuselage of the downed plane to probe the nightmare at the heart of this essay:
They dove.  So many of them.  They saw the plane upside down and dove.  Thirty-eight-degree water, and our friends dove, fully clothed.  They performed CPR, some for the first time in their lives, on people they knew and loved, and they did it for two hours, on small boats skimming down the lake racing for civilization and waiting for paramedics to make a determination, even though they already knew.  Still, they could not stop.  Two bodies.  Two boats.  Twelve responders.  Some people prayed, and some did compressions; others just drove the boats.  Why?  Why did they do it?  Why does anyone do it?  Because it’s right or because it’s hard wired in the brain?  You do it without a thought:  you’re in the cold water, and you’re entering the fuselage, and there they are, the bodies.  One still belted upside down, pinned in place, one floating prone, and you can’t get them out, because you are too cold and you need breath, and it’s dark as hell, and for weeks you’ll stay up all night, sleepless, agonizing because you should have done more or you could have done it better, and there is no comfort.  All you know is that the edge is still there, the seam where life meets death, and how you behave on that seam is all reflex, and probably a measure of how you behaved the whole time. (172)

10. THE ENDING (AMS)

The no-no’s are familiar. Avoid summary. Avoid the tidy bow. To those I’d add one more, or maybe it’s a clarification, a specification: avoid reflection in the last paragraph. (“Don’t end on the high note,” one writing teacher used to tell me.) Try, instead, a penultimate reflection followed by a grounding scene. But beyond the rules, there’s the feel of a great ending. I hear an ending as a gradually slowing cadence. I experience a good ending like a good airplane landing: not so fast or abrupt that you drop from the sky, not so slow or gradual that you miss the runway.

Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras” is one of my very favorites. I can hardly read it without weeping. The essay is all about hearts, but here in the last sentence, we finally reach the human heart, and he could’ve used just one example or three, but the long litany creates the gradual slowing cadence that stabs you, yes, in the heart:
You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words “I have something to tell you,” a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. (30)
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An ending can also repeat an image or object or a line to create resonance. The first essay in my first book Now Go Home, titled “Wilderness, Homelessness and the Crosscut Saw,” is largely a one scene essay about cutting a log out of the trail with a crosscut saw—a very frustrating task—and it ends with the image of a (useless) painted crosscut saw on a restaurant wall: “With one last cup of coffee before I drive, I’ll look up at a crosscut saw mounted above the television at a local diner, a Vermont farmhouse painted over its rusty teeth. From where I sit, it will look exactly like hope.” 

In hindsight, I see that ending as a tad too tidy (I was new to the craft, and I can’t go back and revise now, one of the challenges/joys of endings in nonfiction.) It’s more effective, I think, to open things back up and speculate about the future.  At the end of Steve’s essay “The Old Surprises” he also repeats a line from the very opening of the essay: “Matt, Come see.” In the beginning, he was waking his son asleep in his tent to see the planets in alignment in the night sky. In the last paragraph he moves into future tense to imagine what may happen someday. It’s the subjunctive wrapped in the language of certainty, and I’ll end with it:

Tics by the pencil sharpener in the hall mark Matt’s growth to my height and away from me. He may always see in the mirror a cloudy image of all the old men in his sky, and become them as he becomes himself, but he will soon leave me behind and enter a world that is increasingly his, a world in which he will never be his own man except as I find it harder and harder to recognize myself in him. “Matt,” I will say one of those days, collapsing the generations in my delirious dream of stars in line and geese flying low across the evening sky. “Matt, come see!” The stranger by my bedside will lift his head in grief and be my son. (85)
Note: “The Essay in Parts” is based on a presentation that Steven Harvey and Ana Maria Spagna gave at the annual River Teeth Nonfiction Conference on Saturday, May 30, 2015. Click here for the video.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

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Photo Credit: Jill Christman
Steven Harvey is the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir published by Ovenbird Books as part of the “Judith Kitchen Select” series.   A section of the memoir appeared in The Best American Essays 2013 selected by Cheryl Strayed.  He is also the author of three books of personal essays. A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove and edited an anthology of essays written by men on middle age called In a Dark Wood.    He is a professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Young Harris College, a founding member of the nonfiction faculty in the Ashland University MFA program in creative writing, a senior editor for River Teeth magazine, and the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website designed to promote literary nonfiction.  You can learn more about Steve and his work at his author web site.


Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades. She’s the author of the memoir/history, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, two essay collections, Potluck and Now Go Home, and the forthcoming Reclaimers, a narrative triptych. She has twice been a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and her essays appear regularly in journals and magazines such as Orion, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, North American Review, and Ecotone. After working many years on backcountry trail crews, she now teaches nonfiction and serves as Assistant MFA Program Director for Whidbey Writers Workshop at Northwest Institute of Literary Arts.


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        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
      • 8.2 Pedagogy >
        • Liesel Hamilton, "How I Wish I’d Taught Frederick Douglass: An Examination of the Books and Conversations We Have in Classrooms" (8.2)
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "In the Room Where it Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom" (8.2)
        • Daniel Nester, "Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley’s Three Poles" (8.2)
    • 9.1 (Fall 2022) >
      • 9.1 Articles >
        • Mark Houston, "Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of ​Social Justice Rhetoric in “The Sacred and the Superfund”" (9.1)
        • Ryan McIlvain, ""You Get to Decide What to Worship but Not What's Good": Rereading 'This Is Water'" (9.1)
        • Quincy Gray McMichael, "Laboring toward Leisure: The Characterization of Work in ​Maine’s Back-to-the-Land Memoirs" (9.1)
        • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
        • Emma Winsor Wood, "A Lovely Woman Tapers Off into a Fish: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Conversations >
        • Philip Newman Lawton, "Rousseau's Wandering Mind" (9.1)
        • Claire Salinda, "Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in ​The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood" (9.1)
        • Hannah White, "“Which sounds bad and maybe was”: A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jessica Handler, "Your Turn" (9.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Expressing Anger as a Positive Choice" (9.1)
        • Kozbi Simmons, "Literacy as Emancipation" (9.1)
        • Wally Suphap, "Writing and Teaching the Polemic" (9.1)
    • 9.2 (Spring 2023) >
      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Amy Mackin, "A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives: Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jeannine Ouellette, "That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Conversations >
        • Blossom D'Souza, "The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet" (Assay 9.2)
        • Kyra Lisse, "Relentlist Women: On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux" (Assay 9.2)
        • William Kerwin,​ “Life as a Boneyard”: Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello, "The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian" (Assay 9.2)
        • Eamonn Wall, "A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Pedagogy >
        • Khem Aryal, "Beyond Lores: Linking Writers’ Self-Reports to Autoethnography" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: ​Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)
        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Late Night Thoughts on What Street Photography ​Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing" (Assay 9.2)
    • 10.1 (Fall 2023) >
      • 10.1 Articles >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
        • Anne Garwig, "Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the ​Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War" (Assay 10.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out" (Assay 10.1)
        • Kathryn Jones, "Conveying the Grief Experience: Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights" (Assay 10.1)
        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Conversations >
        • Beth Kephart, "On Reading Fast and Reading Slow" (Assay 10.1)
        • Mimi Schwartz, "The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Pedagogy >
        • Angie Chuang, "Dear(ly) Departed: ​Letter-Writing to Engage the Issue of Racialized Police Brutality" (Assay 10.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Where and How We Might Teach Hybrid: A Pedagogical Review of Kazim Ali’s Silver Road" (Assay 10.1)
    • 10.2 (Spring 2024) >
      • 10.2 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
        • Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": ​Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Conversations >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "On Difficulty" (Assay 10.2)
        • Thomas Larson, "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Pedagogy >
        • Amy Bonnaffons, "Writing from the Big Brain: ​An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education" (Assay 10.2)
        • Micah McCrary, "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom" (Assay 10.2)
        • Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
    • 11.1 (Fall 2024) >
      • 11.1 Articles >
        • Anna Nguyen, "A Question on Genre: The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed" (Assay 11.1)
        • Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Conversations >
        • Jehanne Dubrow, "The Essay's Volta" (Assay 11.1)
        • James Allen Hall, "Wholly Fragmented" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Spotlight >
        • Kim Hensley Owens & Yongzhi Miao, "Six Words is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment" (Assay 11.1)
        • Elizabeth Leahy, "Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability: Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center" (Assay 11.1)
        • Jennifer Stewart, "Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection" (Assay 11.1)
        • Katherine Fredlund, "Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Pedagogy >
        • Abby Manzella, "In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: ​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand" (Assay 11.1)
        • Peter Wayne Moe, "Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing" (Assay 11.1)
        • Gwen Niekamp, "The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ​in the CNF Classroom and Canon" (Assay 11.1)
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