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
7.1

Picture

Steven Harvey

​
Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction



When I started my memoir The Book of Knowledge and Wonder about my mother, I could remember almost nothing about her—not even her face. I had a few vivid memories. In one I watch from behind as she, drink in hand, sways in front of the record console singing Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” holding out the notes and trying to sound good. In another, my dad sits on his haunches before my brother and me on a train ride into the night to deliver the impossible news that our mother has killed herself, his bare arms—large and muscular—reaching out of the sleeves of his suit and the cigarette smoke causing his left eye to squint.
​
All I had to do to put these memories on paper was follow the details. When I wrote about one of my parents’ shouting matches, I started with the sound of their voices, a cacophony that is always, I suspect, going on somewhere in the recesses of my unconscious mind. I described sitting hunched under the bed covers trying to escape the fury, unable to silence it, the blankets that made me feel safe also acting “like an echo chamber amplifying and distorting the low rumble until the roar, punctuated now and then with a slam or a crash, spilled over me.” When my parents suddenly stopped shouting, I tossed back the blankets, snuck out of my second floor bedroom, and peered between the balusters of the stairs, blinking at the fluorescent glare of the kitchen below. The memory ends in a visual image that is both eerie and unforgettable. “I can picture the tableau even now,” I wrote.
My dad, his sleeves rolled up facing a wall, my mother sitting bent over in a kitchen chair with her back to him, crying in gasps.
     “Oh no,” she says when she turns, mascara running down her cheek, and sees me running back upstairs.
     I see in memory the mascara, but not the face. How can that be? (26)
These vignettes glowed like photographs pinned to the dark backdrop of my mind. Lingering over them turned details of my past into luminous, resonant, nearly palpable objects of solitary contemplation yielding insights in the present. So, as I wrote this particular memory, I realized that the mascara mask revealing my mother’s agony, also hid her face and identity pointing to my real goal in the memoir: the woman behind the terror. Yes, there is the horror of my mother’s life which I had to tell, but there is also the woman, the wife, and the mother there—and I was determined to discover her as well.

Unfortunately you cannot write a memoir with four or five memories, and in my case the trauma of my mother’s suicide wiped clean all the rest. How could I write a memoir if I could not enter the past myself and experience the memories as my own? If we accept the definition of the lyric voice as the voice of discovery by the solitary mind, how can a writer summon detail sufficient for such discoveries from memories that are vague or worse, entirely forgotten?

I did have a shoebox full of letters from my mother to my grandmother that covered my childhood—a remarkable gift for any writer, but as I read them I wondered how I could make her details my own. Slowly, as I kept writing and experimenting, my memoir became a clinic in memory, and I discovered ways for the lyric voice to open more spaces for remembering as intense as the few memories that I could summon at will. If I could not remember details of an event well enough to write about it, I could uncover metonymies of the past—things, events, or ideas associated with it—that would allow me to triangulate on vague or forgotten memories. These techniques took me deep enough into the solitary state of the lyric mode to create writable memories more reliable in many ways than memory itself as I groped toward a fuller version of the woman behind the mascara mask.
​
They are techniques anyone can use, and I offer them here as a rough guide to the mnemonics of nonfiction for other writers to try.


​Photographs: Still Replicas of the Past

I began by writing about photographs because they were the most obvious way to re-enter my past, though I found—like all of the techniques here—that their strength as a mnemonic was also their limitation. I certainly had an abundance of them, a wicker-basket full of stacked and banded and loose pictures along with mementoes from my mother’s school days. One picture of my brother and me with our mother on a sofa in particular caught my eye. Taken five years before her suicide she is thirty and at the height of her beauty, so I started with it.
​
My technique for writing about photographs was similar to the way I wrote about memories, but now I followed the details across a flat surface rather than in time. I let my eyes, guided by points of interest, go where they wanted to go: my brother Ron leaning into my mother—she has clearly just pulled his thumb from his puckered mouth—me under her arm leaning against her thigh, and ultimately her:
Her thick hair is pulled back from her face revealing high cheekbones, a long, thin nose, lips in a faint smile painted petal red, and dark, sultry eyes. The face is rounded and smooth, with no tension this time around the eyes. She wears a dark blouse with bright white buttons and sleeves rolled up to her elbows and looks healthy and athletic. (124)
Once again I am listing details just as I had done with the memory of my parents’ fight, creating anticipation, and I am both in and out of the scene—in it as the bright-faced boy on the sofa and out of it as the bald old man at the writing desk with a furrowed brow tracing the image with his finger.
​
What the picture offers, though, that a memory cannot, are precisely rendered details that the mind has forgotten such as the rumpled pillow at my mother’s feet, the fact that she is wearing scuffed shoes, and—above all—the ease of the bodies together which offers up a truth I had forgotten about my past: our family intimacy, and, ironically, the safety of home.
What moves me about the scene is how relaxed and comfortable we all are, our bodies tumbling together in a way that seems natural and easy. Even the pillow at her feet—a large, brown, shapeless thing with piping running along its seams—adds to the rumpled informality of the image. These are the comforts of the familiar. (124-125)
The coziness doesn’t last, though. As I looked harder at the photograph I noticed a toy balsa plane—a Guillow flyer—in the windowsill behind the sofa and recall that on the day of my mother’s death I was holding a Guillow flyer just like that one and spinning in the basement as the upstairs filled with grieving guests, and the picture, which had come to represent safety and security, began spinning out of control in my mind as well, which is of course the other truth about my family, the one that the picture cannot hold back for long. I still don’t remember my dad taking the picture but the process of writing about the photograph provoked a forgotten memory of the toy plane and offered insights into my family indicating the power of photographs as a writing tool for discovery.
​
Eventually, though, I realized that photographs have limitations and in many ways the pictures made me feel further removed from my mother and our past. I would lift one out of the basket, surprised by the details that the camera caught, details I could never remember: “my mother’s long thin calves, the elegant tapering of her wrists, and her high forehead when she pulled back her hair with bobby pins. The fact that she wore bobby pins.” Her cheeks in her youthful photographs appeared so smooth that I sometimes gave in to the urge to touch them, only to be surprised by the lifeless, glossy surface. Photos promised spontaneity, catching a curl out of place for example or fingers bent just so, but what they delivered was frozen and lifeless. “The curl was eternally out of place, the smile remained tacked on forever, and the hand at the end of that elegant wrist hung midair like a stiffened claw.” The images, I came to understand, were “lifeless mementos mori, tattered and creased souvenirs of our loss, filled with little more than the emotions that we bring to them and drained of the life of their subjects” (17).
Fortunately I found more tools in my writer’s toolbox.


​Art: The Human Vision

One of the letters written in the first year of my mother’s marriage had a line drawing on the envelope done in my father’s distinctive style. He had a knack for drawing quick, sketched likenesses of faces. This one, which showed my mother’s looking off to one side, troubled me. In it she looks elegant and pretty with wide eyes, an earring, and penciled eyebrows, but beneath the pleasant surface I sensed anxiety or concern. I held the envelope under a light to get a better look. “Both alert and detached in the drawing,” I wrote, “the face wears an expression that I find in many later photographs, but this appears to be the first time, and it comes from Dad’s hand like a relic in my care. It reveals a woman in conflict with herself.” When I set the drawing on the ledge beside my computer, I wondered. “When did that look enter their marriage” (54-55)?

Following a hunch, I covered the right side of the drawing with a piece of paper and studied her expression on the left. She looked happy—ebullient even—on this side of her face with her upwardly arched eyebrow and a slight smile on her lips. It is the expectant look of a young woman eager to take on the day. But when I lifted the page and covered the other side I saw a very different picture: “her expression becomes severe,” I wrote, “the eyebrow lowered, the smile crumbling at one edge, and the eye looking down and away with anxiety” (55). When I removed the piece of paper and gazed at the entire drawing I saw the two parts of my mother’s nature blended together into an inscrutable whole. The truth that my father captured in the drawing was that my mother was a woman in conflict with herself, and what I realized, looking at a work of art older than I, was that the truth of her emerging woe, worn on a face divided between knowledge and wonder, had been there from the beginning of their marriage, veiled but available for all to see. Imperfect as the drawing was, it opened up new possibilities for me in my attempt to know my mother.
​
Art, of course, is everywhere. All of us make art, decorating our living and working spaces. In addition, we surround ourselves with drawings, paintings, ornaments, souvenirs, and knickknacks. When we throw in utilitarian objects adorned with art such as lamps, china, stationery, and birthday cards, the list is endless. The art that we make and the art that we choose reveal who we are. Like a photograph, a work of art such as my father’s drawing, stays still for long and thoughtful contemplation, but in spirit it is mercurial. It may only be one person’s interpretation, and is less reliable in its rendering of details than a photo, but it is rich in interpretive possibilities offering insights and a depth of understanding often unintended by the artist. Above all, it is an invitation to the interior of the subject, a lyrical moment waiting to happen and a treasure trove for the writer.


​Popular Culture: Shared Cultural Experiences

Writing is a creative combination of play and work, and I go at it almost every morning with the detachment and focus of a diamond cutter. There have been exceptions, though, and one happened when I wrote about my mother and me watching Mary Martin in Peter Pan singing “Distant Melody” on television. We watched it at least twice over several years and it was a favorite of my mother’s, a must-watch event with popcorn and sodas each time it came on.

To bring the song back I found a YouTube clip. Popular culture broadly defined has a long shelf life in the age of the Internet. Almost any event of cultural significance, such as the assassination of Kennedy or MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech” can be found, replayed, and vicariously relived triggering long-buried emotions. In Peter Pan, the character Wendy who has assumed the role of the mother of the lost boys of Neverland, asks Peter to sing a lullaby. Peter is reluctant at first but his mood softens when he repeats the word “lullaby” and smiles. Yes, he knows a lullaby, and as I sit watching my screen, pen in hand and pad nearby, I hear a lone oboe play and Mary Martin, as Peter, singing “Distant Melody.” It is a simple song with lyrics that are little more than a string of clichés beginning with “once upon a time,” but Martin’s performance is riveting. Usually when she plays Peter, she sings in the annoying, high-pitched whine of the well-known song “I’ve Gotta Crow,” but here she opens the lower registers of a woman’s voice, and the song, I discovered, lowering my pen and leaning toward the screen, “becomes the lullaby of a mother inside a lullaby sung by a boy.” As I looked and listened, some fifty years after the event, I realized “that the performance that my mother and I watched together was our story then and now” (123).
​
These discoveries came not from my memory of watching the show which remained vague in my mind, but in the details of the performance streaming into my study. When Martin milks words like “low” and “alone” to convey emotion I felt them, and when she says “all is well” and smiles, the assurance in her voice brought comfort to me, as if the impossible sentiment were true. “All the pretense that Mary Martin is a boy simply washes away as the actress’s face assumes a radiant expression of maternal love,” I wrote, because for a moment I felt a mother’s love. This was not the trickster Peter who protects the orphaned boys with guile. This is a mother who offers love as a balm for life’s losses, and there sitting in my office I felt that too—the loss and the balm—until the chimes at the end of the song struck a discordant chord. “The mother disappears, leaving a lost boy in her place,” I wrote later though at the time I had stopped taking notes, “as well as an old man watching alone with his fingers on the screen” (123-124).


​Many Ways Inward

Writing The Book of Knowledge and Wonder in the end became a study of ways to go inward to remember. Each prompt was partial, limited, but taken as a whole the memories they provoked formed a pattern: love and despair came mixed in my family. I suppose every work of personal prose teaches the writer how to go back by going inward, and I tried many methods in order to tease out the story. Here are a few more.

I bought a set of The Book of Knowledge from AbeBooks and sought out articles that I know my mother, who used the encyclopedia as a way of educating herself, must have read, sharing those words with her in retrospect. After my brother was born with crossed eyes, she became obsessed with the subject, so I read the section on eyes knowing that she would have read it too because this section with its scientific terminology and detailed diagrams was her torment and her solace and her companion on lonely nights. I inevitably came to the sentences that would have haunted her: “Our eyes and the eyes of other mammals move together. Both of them are always directed toward the thing they wish to see” (91). I imagine the sadness these words would have provoked in her—imagine it, get a glimpse of it which is the gift of lyric memory, even though I can only begin to know the feelings of dread they produced in her.

I also returned to the scene, my childhood house in Deerfield, Illinois, first from my study using Google maps and later taking a train to the suburbs during a trip to Chicago with my wife. Walking from the train station we soon got past the Starbucks and Barnes and Noble shops built after I lived there to places I recognized: the Methodist church where I sang in the choir as a boy, my school, and the yard that our neighbor flooded each winter to make a skating rink. Suddenly there it was: the small split-level with a picture window that faces the street. I led Barbara to the side yard to show her the small garden where my mother and I planted pansies and returning to the picture window tried to imagine the interior of the house. “I think the stairs came down here,” I said pointing to the left side of the window. “I remember my dad coming down those stairs, suitcases banging. I think it was on that side of the room.” What I discovered, though, as I wrote about the trip to the house was that our story was no longer there. It was in me (188).

As a nonfiction writer, I am suspicious of long passages of dialogue in essays and memoir. Memories are not that accurate. But I do trust the single phrase or word that lodges in the mind, and such suggestive, unforgettable language can be used to reconstruct an entire scene. When I asked my stepmother to look through some photos of the past, she started talking about my mother, offering invaluable details about the way she died, but when she got to the end of her story she lifted her hand in the shape of a gun to her temple and said “bam.” I was upset and looked away. My wife, who was there flipping through some pictures, looked up briefly—first at my stepmother and then at me, making a face that showed concern, but my stepmother continued talking blithely. I realized that she did not share my sense of loss. What she remembered of the time was her love for my dad and their mutual loneliness. With the single word I could construct the entire scene of my wife, my stepmother, and me. Later I used the word ironically when I described the suicide itself.

All of these mnemonics served as a via negativa surrounding a subject they cannot capture. Evoking what they cannot say, they glowed with borrowed light, but in a sense that is true of all perception which is colored by the perceiver. They serve as a reminder that writing begins as longing for truth in a world of shades and appearances.

Even my dreams, odd and peculiar as they were when I wrote the memoir, became a way to recover the truth of my mother and relive her torment as vividly as any memory. Dreams and nightmares haunted the writing of the book. One night I had three particularly telling versions of the same dream each one more bizarre than the last. I was working on a section of the memoir about Dr. Jackman, an MD who offered marriage counseling to my parents during the first year of their marriage. His advice essentially added up to the need for them to have a baby: me. At the same time I was also struggling with a section of the memoir in which my mother—incorrectly as it turned out—believed she had contracted syphilis from my grandfather.

The result was a cascading nightmare. In the first version Dr. Jackman in a wool coat like the ones my grandfather—who was also a doctor—used to wear sits beside my mother. She wears a suit with a pencil skirt. I lift a bottle of bourbon like a phone receiver to ask a question. The doctor, saying the information is confidential, refuses to answer and my mother hands me a volume of The Book of Knowledge and says “Read your book, Stevie.” In the second version, my mother sits beside Dr. Jackman again, but she is wearing only her bra and panties and this time when I lift the bottle of bourbon to ask my question she drapes a bare arm over Jackman’s shoulder and says “play with your toys” and holds out a Guillow flyer (92-93, 96-97).
​
The last version is the most bizarre of all. As I lift the bottle of bourbon to ask my question I realize that Dr. Jackman is my grandfather. “My mother lies completely naked,” I write,
…with her head in his lap, facing up. Her white skin glows slightly and her breasts are girlish, standing up in small mounds. Her hair is in slight disarray as if a ribbon had been pulled from it and her black slip lies crumpled on the floor.
I notice a faint smell of buttered toast in the room.
When I ask my question, she says nothing.
Her eyes are closed.
I wake up feverish.
Incest? (100)
The facts, which I detail in the memoir, are complicated, but the truth is that there was no incest and in all likelihood no one in the family had syphilis. My mother’s fear was irrational. She was haunted by paranoia, and so for a time as I wrote, was I. My dreams took me directly to her nightmare.


​​The Written Word Remains: Letters

It turned out that the most important way for me to revive the memory of my mother was in her own words. Photographs, artwork, our shared popular culture, dreams, and a few unforgettable memories nudged the project along, but her words, written in her own cursive with the ink embedded like a stain on the page, was the mnemonic gift I needed most. When I wrote about them I could hear her voice not in the past, but in her present which made her come alive in the moment of my writing. At one point near the end of the book I paid tribute to them.
After my mother died I forgot the sensation of her touch and the sound of her voice. I could not hug a shadow. I could not fill her silence with my words […] I needed a voice, speaking in her present, not one whispering to posterity, a voice animated by the desire to capture the present for someone alive. That is the voice I heard in the letters. When I read them, I got to know her—for the first time, really—know her and miss her. Miss her, not some made up idea of her. The letters do not bring her back—I know the loss is permanent and irrevocable—but while I read them the pain, that had been nothing more than a dull throb, changed in character, becoming softer, more diffuse, and ardent, like heartache. (196)
Not everyone has a stack of letters to work with, of course, but jotted notes, grocery lists found curled in a drawer, names on the backs of photographs, even signed documents can bring the written word of the past into the present. Incorporating the written words of others turns a nonfiction project into a collaboration. As I constructed scenes from my mother’s letters, choosing her words with care and connecting them with my own thoughts, our words mingled in a conversation I needed and had waited nearly a lifetime to have. “I took my mother’s words into my mouth like milk,” I wrote, stunned and grateful at the end of the ordeal, “and fed our story” (199).


​The Voice of Discovery: Memory and Imagination

The ancient Greeks identified Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the mother of the muses, and they were right to single out memory rather than imagination as the source for inspiration in the arts and sciences, but—and here we come to the crux of the matter—memory is, in fact, a form of imagining, a way of creating a usable past, of dreaming up a past, in order to move into an uncertain future. Try it now. Remember something, anything, you did yesterday. Doesn’t the memory have the filmy, evanescent quality of a daydream?

Yesterday, I was repairing Adirondack chairs by replacing rotting pieces with the remains of a broken chair I stored under the house last year, and in my mind I see—but don’t really see, do I?—I conjure up the bubbled red paint of a rotted chair slat as I unscrew it from the frame. A memory like this one has a plastic quality to it. I can freeze it, holding the wood in my still hands, or slow it down, manipulating time as I watch myself toss aside the rotted slat that clonks on the concrete floor. I find metaphors, one of many devices supplied by the imagination, in the bubbling of the paint. And I have an attitude toward it—yuck, silverfish crawling out of the black rot! All of this imaginative work happens within the boundaries of a true account. Memory and imagination are not experienced as separate mental phenomena, but are on a continuum with thinking and dreaming.

I dream, therefore I was.
​
It is not surprising then that recent studies in the scene-construction theory of memory by British researchers Sinéad Mullaly and Eleanor Maguire, described in their monograph Memory, Imagination, and Predicting the Future, have found a connection between memory and imagination. “On the face of it, memory, imagination, and prediction seem to be distinct cognitive functions,” they write, but “evidence is emerging that they are not, suggesting intimate links in their underlying processes” (par 1). We do not have memories, their work suggests, we construct them, the imagination extrapolating on a kernel of the event by inevitably adding more detail and giving it all a larger, mind-shaped, context to create a coherent scene. Building memories this way, forging links between memory and imagination born apparently out of our need to anticipate the future in a dangerous world, explains the relief and subsequent delight heard in the voice of discovery in lyric prose despite the subject matter. Whether a writer like Virginia Woolf in Moments of Being is remembering a flower rooted in a circle of dirt or describing sexual abuse by her half-brother when she was a girl, the act of recreating a memory in words and “discovering what belongs to what,” she explains, “is the strongest pleasure known to me.” For her, making these connections uncovers “the hidden pattern” in everyday experience and reveals “that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (72). Perhaps “creative nonfiction” is the right term after all! Seeing these connections and watching them being made is why writers and readers turn to the genre in the first place.


​Dangers and Rewards

There be demons, I know, in the terra incognita at the far end of this kind of lonely remembrance, and I do not want to dismiss the dangers of following the lyrical voice of discovery into the past. Unlike my mother, I am not given to mental depression and did not descend into that dark hole while writing my memoir of her deteriorating mental state and ultimate suicide, but I did become frantic and obsessed, unable to concentrate on anything else, and for I time, as I admit here, I shared in my mother’s terrifying paranoia. I think all writers need to ask hard questions about their limits before plunging into a difficult topic from the past.
​
But, if the dangers are high, the rewards of self-discovery in writing intimately about the past are beyond measure, and, as I look back on the experience of writing the book, I suspect that I did not in the end have a choice. I delayed—yes, for five decades—but once I sat down with the shoebox full of her letters setting them in order and reading through them one at a time, I pushed all else aside and went to work.

Writing Prompts

With these prompts you can put some of the ideas in “Lyric Memory” into practice. They assume that you are writing about another person—your subject—in a memoir.

Unprompted Memories:  The Past Unbidden
Quickly make a list of memories with your subject. Look for events that took about 20 minutes to happen that come easily to mind. Be specific, not “first year of marriage” but “winning the stuffed bear at Coney Island.” Circle three. Choose one.   Make a new list of what happened in that memory and order it by assigning numbers. Write taking on each item on the list one at a time.

Photographs:  Still Replicas of Reality
Choose one photograph of your subject. Study it, making a list of details, especially ones you have not seen before. Assign numbers to the list and arrange it so that they lead to the most important discovery and write referring regularly to the photo. Be sure to include your thoughts about what the most important details suggest. Bring the section to an end by asking what you want to know that the photo cannot tell you.


Art:  The Human Vision
Ask a friend to read a passage you have written about your subject. She or he should choose an interesting phrase and draw a picture using the phrase as a caption. Your friend does not need to draw well, but should avoid using stick figures, being expressive and trying to capture the feeling as well as the image.

Retrieve the drawing and caption from your friend and feel free to talk about it together. Write the caption down as the title of a new section and write for fifteen minutes amplifying on the caption based on the drawing. Begin by describing the drawing, noting lineation, points of interest, and the expressive qualities of the lines. Where do your eyes go first, second, third? Try isolating certain sections. Consider these issues as you write: Does the choice of that caption surprise you? What feeling does the drawing suggest to you? What did the friend see that you did not? Does the drawing say more than the artist intended? Above all, what does the drawing teach you that you had not thought about before?


Popular Culture:  The Public Conversation
Make a list of shared cultural moments with your subject. These can be movies, plays, television shows, sporting events, political activities, concerts, art shows, religious holidays or ceremonies, and family events, but also moments from nature such as an eclipse, a blizzard, or watching the tsunami on TV. There are also intense, shared cultural moments:  the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr., the Columbine shooting, or the KKK rally in Charlottesville. Choose one you remember well. Make another list about the event. Order it. Write for fifteen minutes. After you finish find coverage of the event (or a similar event) on YouTube or scour the internet for photos and amplify or revise your passage.


Dreams: Subconscious Memory
Keep a dream diary, jotting down the content of the dream as soon as possible after you wake. If you have a dream about your subject, or events that inform your writing about your subject, use that as the prompt for a passage. Ask the same questions of the dream that you ask of the drawing, in particular this: what does the dream teach you that you had not thought about before?


Other Voices: Dialogue
Make a list of five words or phrases that you know your subject said.  Choose one and make a list of events around the word or phrase. Order it. Write creating a scene around those words using references to senses beyond sight, especially gestures.


Letters (etc.): The Written Word
Written artifacts by your subject—diaries, letters, notes, recipes, lists, or emails, including poems, songs, and other written creative works by your subject can be invaluable as ways into the subject’s mind. What matters to you, though, is what the words open up in your mind. What do the word choices suggest to you? What is the tone? What is being left unsaid? What does the handwriting, ink, or choice of stationery say? Avoid repeating big chunks of the letter. Instead, weave your words with the subject’s in a written conversation.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​

Picture
Steven Harvey's newest book is Folly Beach, a personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. He is also the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir about coming to terms with the suicide of his mother published by Ovenbird Books as part of the “Judith Kitchen Select” series. He has written three collections of personal essays and two of his essays have been selected for The Best American Essays Series: “The Book of Knowledge” in 2013 and “The Other Steve Harvey” in 2018. He is a contributing editor for River Teeth magazine and the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website designed to promote personal prose.

Related Works

Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna
The Essay in Parts
Assay 2.1 (Fall 2015)

Colleen Hennessy
Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction:
Abortion and Agency
Assay 7.1 (Fall 2020)

Philip Graham
The Shadow Knows
Assay 5.1 (Fall 2018)


Return to 7.1
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  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
    • 11.2 Articles >
      • Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)
      • Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Conversations >
      • Thomas Larson, "The Reader's Mental Ear" (Assay 11.2)
      • Patrick Madden, "An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle" (Assay 11.2)
      • Rhonda Waterhouse, "Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry” (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Pedagogy >
      • Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler, "Avoiding Empathy Fatigue: What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist" (Assay 11.2)
      • Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger, "Essayism in the Age of AI" (Assay 11.2)
      • Marco Wilkinson, "Exquisite Copse" (Assay 11.2)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • 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)
      • 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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