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

Picture

Wes Jamison

​

“You Are Absent”: The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction



Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

In reality, I don
’t know you, I’ve never seen you. —Octavio Paz, “Before Sleep”

​You are the entire world. —Marguerite Duras,
The Atlantic Man
When Walt Whitman writes, “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (52.10), it’s easy to intuit that he spoke through the pages and words and ink to every person who opens and reads any one of countless copies of his book. But I am also able to intuit that he meant exactly my boot-soles, whether I wore boots or not. His was not the first text I read that used second-person point of view, but it was the first in which my subjectivity was suddenly in relation to an author—or an author’s persona. It was my first love affair with a celebrity and the first time I was in dialogue with the dead.

Such is the power of you: to contract us into an act of communication. In nonfiction, we frequently interpret, and subsequently dismiss, second-person, or, more properly you, as the recipient of an epistolary. This is completely justified and anticipated: some of us are avid letter writers, and it is not unlikely that most of us have read posthumously published letters or transcripts of speeches. But consider how much we occlude when we stop ourselves from analyzing or interpreting beyond finding the name or antecedent of the you and their relationship to the speaker or use that as a means of discrediting other interpretations. Despite this power and its hold on a reader’s actual person, there is little work that does more than mention the presence of you. Those who do analyze it admit the difficulty: Evgenia Iliopoulou is a pioneer in her narratological approach to second person in Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling. Rather than approaching it as simply a point of view, a genre, or a convention or aberration, she approaches the point of view as a technique (224) that reflects liminal narrative circumstances (7) with various “poetic and rhetorical connotations” (14). Iliopoulou observes a virtual dearth of theory on the phenomenon (224, 247) and so has no choice but to pull from disparate disciplines to explore how it functions. And that is part of the difficulty in discussing you: developing a language for a theory at the interstices of many others. The first problem, she argues, is how to define what we even mean when we say second person.

Cognitively, person “exists in a language if it is possible to make a distinction between at least two of the basic principles/participants in a speech act” (35). For a linguistic take, Iliopoulou follows Émile Benveniste’s claim in “Subjectivity in Language” that person is the “condition of dialogue” by which “reciprocally I becomes you” (224). That is, person is a deictic category that “encodes” the participants: second person is relative to the speaker, that first person (Iliopoulou 34). But deictic references shift: “the grammatical role of the (second) person is concrete in the utterance [but] shifts with the input-output system of the utterance” (34). That makes these pronouns only indices, “placeholders in the text that may apply to different people at different times” (42). Like the apostrophe, letters are written in second person precisely because the addressees are not present. In I’m Really Into You, Kathy Acker highlights this in an aside: “Strange, trying to translate an understanding of communication premised on your presence into one premised on yr absence—writing” (21). Iliopoulou explains that apostrophe addresses the inaccessible or absent (58, 230), and its you always implies a “double audience” of the text: the audience of the primary text and a separate audience as an addressee of the apostrophe (60).

​But while a cognitive approach suggests that person creates a distinction based on inclusion and exclusion by changing “the degree of remoteness of the non-participant” (36), Benveniste claims that the reciprocal nature of the second person refuses any notion of otherness (235). Meanwhile, some, like Anna Kilbort, take a more spatial approach, defining person as “the degree of remoteness relative to a speech act participant according to which the person reflects the meeting of these two poles in a more generalized concept” (Iliopoulou 37), which we are more likely to call psychic distance.

The analysis of the phenomenon, however, remains incomplete. Even after cobbling together disparate discourses, Iliopoulou only provides close readings of this technique in four French and German texts: Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster, Butor’s La Modification, Perec’s Un homme qui dort, and Alchinger’s Spiegelgeschichte. She is aware of the limitations in her study and calls for further analysis of the phenomenon in English, where the “ludic possibilities” (225) are greater because of the embedded or inherent general (read as singular or plural and ungendered) form of you.

I would characterize our attitude in creative nonfiction toward second person as dismissive—not necessarily negative, but lacking critical engagement. A generous explanation would be that, as in everyday communication, we take the phenomenon for granted. The exception is Kim Dana Kupperman’s You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person, which gives the phenomenon the attention it deserves. Kupperman determines there to be only three specific uses of you: disguising and/or distancing first person; the epistolary, including what Joan Connor calls “a postmodern breaking of frame,” (9) as in how Whitman communicates with his current and future readers; and the how-to, directed at a presumed actual audience (9-10). This characterization of the phenomenon suffers the same limitations that we encounter in, say, workshop, where we discuss it in the same way we would fiction: “as a means of reflecting apostrophe and multiple addressees; as a way to adopt a middle distance in special narrative circumstances; [or] as a mode to convey an ambiguous figure that invites multiple interpretations and readings” (228-9), and we neglect several of its effects which are specific to our genre.

Kupperman’s and our own more colloquial interpretations of you assume and prioritize a referential literature. We have been accustomed to interpreting truth as veracity or actuality, and so that is what we demand of language. But it is not the only option—not even in nonfiction. In fact, the difference between exophorically and endophorically referential texts neatly aligns with Barthes’ distinction between texts of pleasure, the readerly texts where our relationship to language is stable and “comfortable” (14), and of jouissance (bliss), the writerly texts characterized by a conflict in our relation to language.

These texts of bliss that discomfit and challenge the reader and her expectations of language are more technically designated autotelic, writerly, or literary texts. These, according to Brian Richardson, the Scholar in Residence at the University of Bologna, “have the greatest share of direct address to the actual reader and superimpose this onto a fictional character designated by ‘you’ that tends to be treated from an external perspective as if in the third person.” These are texts that, when they include the second person, bring its “features” and effects into relief, such as you being “alternately opposed to and fused with the reader—both the contracted and the actual reader” (qtd. in Iliopoulou 31). While such texts are given scholarly attention in fiction and poetry, when discussed in or as nonfiction, we again avoid analysis because we may categorize them as “lyric essays.” This means that even in these texts, the pronoun of address is dismissed, in this case, as adherence to some generic convention of the lyric essay.

In “Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context,” Joanna Eleftheriou claims that John D’Agata (via Deborah Tall)’s coining the term lyric essay [1] “gave writers” greater license to disorient and make their readers unstable by “push[ing] the boundary between the essay and prose poem” and that with it “readers were better equipped and likely to do the work of collaborating in meaning-making.” Unfortunately, it seems that the term has also given scholars the opportunity to avoid critical analysis. As was observed by Colin Rafferty, Chelsea Biondolillo, Brian Oliu, Christopher Cokinos, and Joni Tevis during AWP’s 2015 panel “Everyday Oddities: Natural Facts and the Lyric Essay”: “the lyric essay is deeply under theorized” (Assay Journal). The reason, Eleftheriou suggests, is the “you-know-it-when-you-see-it idea” of the lyric essay which “has diverted focus away from questions of form” or in this case elements such as the pronoun of address.
​
Many of these texts demand that readers “collaborate in meaning-making” by destabilizing our relation to language (like Barthes’ text of bliss) and so make their readers unstable and uncertain as subjects. These self-referential and destabilizing texts warrant further exploration, because they exploit the inherent deictic shift of our numberless and genderless pronoun, the ability to shift antecedents, to discomfit us, and the use of the implied you of the imperative mood to present readers with exophoric (real-world) impossibilities.
__________
A particularly illustrative extended apostrophe is Octavio Paz’s essay “Before Sleep,” which is addressed to a you that presumably refers to a personified sleep. Paz’s writing in this essay allows us to easily imagine no referent behind the you at all but instead imagine that the persona is equally speaking to and about the pronoun itself—writing to sleep but also about writing and the second person. If sleep is a state of consciousness that we may contract into being with the word you, then perhaps you, second person, as a concept, may be similarly contracted; or, better yet, maybe we learn here that you is also a state of consciousness. It is a liberal approach, I know, but consider this passage:
[T]o whom, if not to him, can I tell my stories? In effect—I’m not ashamed to say it and you shouldn’t blush—I have only you. You. Don’t think I want to arouse your compassion; I have merely uttered a truth, confirmed a fact and nothing more. And you, whom do you have? Are you to someone the way I am to you? Or, if you prefer, do you have someone the way I have you? (Paz 484)
The first question suggests both the need to talk, to “tell our stories,” but also the need to have an addressee: if not him, that is, then no one. To suggest that we “have only you” may be taken to indicate solitude, but this is not the case: in fact, no matter how many people we talk to, no matter who we talk to, they are always only you. The inverse, then, is also true, but Paz’s questions also hint at a certain instability of the addressee: particularly, if that object (opposite my subject) will necessarily become a subject. “But do you,” the persona asks, “tell the same things I tell you to a silent third, who in turn…? No, if you were an other, then who would I be? I repeat: who do you have?” (484-5). Paz seems to settle on a deictic inference that you refers only ever in context, and so, if the object becomes subject, a placeholder you still remains opposite my subject, even when no one is there. And in the case of apostrophe and, to an extent, the epistle, the very premise is, indeed, that no one is.

A common and often unfavorable instance of you appears as intrapsychic witnessing, that which Stanzel calls the “dramatized I” (qtd. in Iliopoulou 25), or standard second-person in a first-person perspective. That is, a you as a distanced self for a “narrator writing to a self that no longer exists” (Šukys). Kacandes describes this as “a form of self-talk where the character acts as witness to his or her own experience” and associates it with trauma narratives (qtd. in Iliopoulou 29). It is phenomenon in which language can move fluidly between first- and third-person perspectives and “repeatedly if briefly seems to include the reader as the object of the discourse” (Richardson qtd. in Iliopoulou 31), which seems to be the difference between being spoken to and having yourself described to you. While this “allows one to stand at a remove from painful events,” as Kupperman suggests, and thus from pain itself, the complaints reject subjectivity and agency in the action from the speaker and creates a distance that makes essaying in earnest more difficult.
​
Iliopoulou finds, however, that “[t]he second person [also] serves as a voice of objectivity and authenticity and reflects the aspiration to improve and amplify self-awareness” precisely because the subject is “disguised” and “the self [is] in hiding” (10). She explains that this may be accomplished when “a persona is made out of the authorial I that can be better analysed and observed from a distance” (49). Something Iliopoulou does not account for, though, is that when we write, we always have already created a persona available to analyze. So then perhaps a distance from the interrogated self or persona is expected in some regard, but that distance cannot be too great. Outright rejection of this doubly-removed version of self, then, is tempting, because it may protect us from the exploration and reflection necessary for quality essaying. I suspect, though, that the more we learn and theorize about trauma, or the more we acquaint ourselves with current theories, the more accepting of this we may become.
__________
​Perhaps the most common approach to you, both in reading and writing it, is as an imagined or hypothetical person or a person in a hypothetical or imagined space. This “fuse[s] a heterodiegetic depiction of an ever more specific individual with an imagined future of the reader, thus merging a third person perspective with a hypothetical ‘you’ that is the virtual equivalent of ‘one’” (Richardson qtd. in Iliopoulou 31). That is, this is a second person that doesn’t need to be, because it is effectively third person. This may sound like an act of careless or unconscious writing we’d correct in workshop, but in fact we see it often enough in quality essays by writers we would not describe as lazy at all.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Walking Tours” is a perfect example. He opens the essay didactically: “a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name” (99). This you could be a companion. Or an imagined companion, or an imagined reader who needs literal instruction on walking tours. Or it could be—. This you could be anyone, any general, unknown you. Except it cannot be the reader. We know this by contrast, because a you appears in direct relation to the I in a later aside: “And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they sang-and sand very ill—and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from around the corner” (101). That this you has a different relationship to the speaker than the other announces that there are multiple yous. Tense signals that the other you, the primary you, is just one: “you sit to smoke a pipe” (102), in the present tense not as a current action but as an any time or as a habit action; “you may” (103) and “perhaps you are left” (105) are in a mood that render the referent of the pronoun of no consequence since meaning is possibility rather than actuality. And even casual phrases, like the verbal tick “you see” (102) which has nothing to do with anyone physically seeing anything, signals that there is no person on the other end of that pronoun.

This is likely explained by the constraint itself, because this type of non-person is also seen in Julio Cortázar’s “Instruction Manual.” Not only does the persona grammatically equate you with one, as in “You tackle a stairway face on…. To climb a staircase, one begins by lifting that part of the body located below and to the right” (529), but when that you appears alone, as the sole subject with no equivalent, it is without any kind of useful marker. For example, the you in “the only thing that will come is what you have already prepared and decided” (522) is attached to no information that helps us to determine a referent and, more importantly, teases us with an imagined past that we can only complete using our own antecedents. Which is to say, like Walt’s you, there is never anyone behind Cortázar’s or any other you except for when we attach ourselves to it.

It is easy to imagine how this type of you would not survive workshop: if you is equivalent to one, there’s no reason not to choose the pronoun with the more precise, literal meaning. But you has that effect of the double-address which makes it impossible for the reader not to feel referred to (Iliopoulou 60), and a writer can exploit that for mood. And this is the fourth way we interpret the second person, which has less to do with any theorizing of the phenomenon and much more to do with genre. Intimacy is one of the core conventions of the essay, and to this end, we may choose the intimacy of the direct address, like we find in the epistle. It can’t be ignored that the combination of direct address, imperative, and deictic adverbs (such as here, there, or now) amplifies the contemporaneity and actuality both of and for the addressee (perceived to be the reader) as a form of mise-en-scene (Iliopoulou 62-3).

You only ever has a general meaning in context, in a speech act or utterance, and as readers, we are not necessarily aware of the writer’s specific context in which those pronouns were first employed. Furthermore, we each encounter the pronouns in a different context, and so too when the same reader returns to the same text later. But what is always certain is that you is always in relation to an I—in fact must be. And embedded in the function of these pronouns is a reversibility, necessary so that any communication may continue (Benveniste 224-5, Iliopoulou 42).

This is most apparent when a narrative incorporates two bodies—when both the I and the you are physically present (and it is interesting how often the I is not physically present in these texts, despite it cognitively always being so). Richard Selzer’s “The Knife” is one such essay, notable perhaps because of how visceral that reversal is. We begin in third person, encountering the surgeon, our one, who “holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello” (708). This is not another example of one being equivalent to you, or vice versa. Here, the specific one (surgeon) has a different referent from the general (any) one, and the difference between the use of second and third person seems to be a question of agency: “one lies naked, blind; the other masked and gloved. One yields; the other does his will” (711). The first instance of second person refers to the surgeon: “You turn aside to wash your gloves,” and an equivalence is made to the third person immediately after: “one enters this temple doubly washed” (709). But Selzer switches referents as quickly as he switches the pronouns themselves. You is suddenly also the patient: “And what of that other, the patient, you…. Parts of you will be cut” (713). But the interest lies less in that a you has multiple, shifting referents and more in that the same is true of I, which is meant to have only one referent when written by a single author. When you is the surgeon, I is not; when you is the patient, I is the surgeon. So, despite the impossibility, the author is simultaneously subject and object.

Selzer introduces an intimacy that functions differently than does that of the epistle. Such a text suggests that intimacy has nothing to do with its connotations of friendship and affection; intimacy can just as often be discomfiting. While Iliopoulou does not explicitly discuss this effect, it is predicated by her explanation of gradation of subjectivity and identification. She claims that you “invites readers to engage more actively with the text as they are continuously accepting or rejecting identification with the narrative you and the role of addressee” (233) and follows Benveniste in claiming that the referent of you is inherently objectified (43-4). This would suggest that there is always an element of discomfort or unease in the English pronoun of address.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen utilizes this aspect to its full potential, although there is an interesting additional challenge: Rankine uses the language of those whom she interviewed: “I asked people who I knew, friends, other colleagues, to just tell me moments where they were going along in their day. And, suddenly, somebody said or did something that reduced them to their race. And so, I collected these stories, rewrote them, got to the heart of what I was trying to portray.” Sometimes, the lines were not rewritten, some “actually came from the person” she interviewed (Brown). Citizen’s persistent you ensures that a white reader perceives herself as present and responsible in racially motivated violence and microaggression. As Rankine explains in an interview with Meara Sharma, “the second person…disallowed the reader from knowing immediately how to position themselves…. And there are ways in which, if you say, ‘Oh, this happened to me,’ then the white body can say, ‘Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me.’ But if it says ‘you,’ that you is an apparent part of the encounter.” Rankine is obviously aware of how the second person interpolates in this way, despite a general lack of concrete referential markers of identity. Readers, she tells Sharma, assume the races and positions of participants based on context.

These assumptions are based on both cultural context and personal histories, of course, but also what Iliopoulou describes as “the continuous urge either to identify with the narrative you, or not” based on reading preference (243). It is a compulsion, then, to position ourselves as comfortably as possible, perhaps in spite of the discomfort of you, in a race or referent that is like our own [2]; but it means in this text that we assume a role present and responsible in the violence. A particularly urgent example of this comes in Chapter VI, which is comprised of scripts for “situation videos” created with John Lucas:
Then the pickup is beating the black object to the ground and the tire marks the crushed organs. Then the audio, I ran that nigger over, is itself a record-breaking hot June day in the twenty-first century…. In the circulating photo you are looking down. Were you dreaming of this day all the days of your youth? In the daydream did the pickup take you home? Was it a pickup fueling the road to I ran that nigger over?... And was the pickup constructing or exploding whiteness out of you? You are so sorry. You are angry, an explosive anger, an effective one: I ran that nigger over. (Rankine 94)
Here, the person opposite the speaker is positioned as eighteen-year-old Daryl Dedman who robbed, beat, and ran over forty-seven-year-old James Craig Anderson. You first appears in a question, literally soliciting engagement from the reader, and even these questions discomfit; but what appears to be the most uncomfortable moment is when the persona tells us—me, you—how we feel and what we were documented as saying. In this moment as in almost all the rest, you not only contracts readers into a narrative they did not experience but more specifically into “a role that’s not merely passive” (Iliopoulou 7).

Rankine also accomplishes this, although much less frequently, by using the imperative mood. In Chapter V, readers are told to, by any number of voices, “Stand where you are” (70), to “sit down. Sit here alongside” (71), to “Listen” (73). The reader is told to “Join me down here in nowhere” (72) which seems like an act more difficult to agree to. And the reader is commanded to “Drag that first person out the social death of history” (72), which is uncomfortable not because of how we are positioned, necessarily, but because I don’t think any one of us would know how to do that.

More so than any other occurrence of second person in essaying, the imperative mood challenges our assumptions of exophoric referentiality. It is an interesting aside, then, that our earliest occurrence of writing, and of nonfiction, if we follow John D’Agata’s claim (10-11), is written in the imperative. Zuisudra’s list of commands, however, does not challenge us the way that Cortazar’s “Instruction Manual” or Rankine’s Citizen do. Certain texts offer a reality crafted through this mood in which we cannot participate, despite our being interpolated into it. They are texts that command us, in our present moment—the present, when we are each only holding a book—to perform the impossible.

Barry Lopez’s essay, “The Raven,” begins self-referentially with a you in direct relation to an “I” who is aware of the constructedness of the forthcoming text: “I am going to have to start at the other end by telling you this” (23). Here, the reader is contracted into a relationship in a reality of the speaker’s own creation. That is to say, the rules we live by do not exist here. Because the text does not point at, does not refer to our reality. It refers only to itself.

A cursory glance will yield dozens of instances of being commanded to perform the impossible, but it comes to a head the moment when we “want to know more about the raven”:
[B]ury yourself in the desert so that you have a commanding view of the high basalt cliffs where he lives. Let only your eyes protrude. Do not blink—the movement will alert the raven to your continued presence. Wait until a generation of ravens has passed away. Of the new generation there will be at least one bird who will find you. He will see your eyes staring up out of the desert floor. The raven is cautious, but he is thorough. He will sense your peaceful intentions. Let him have the first word. Be careful: he will tell you he knows nothing. (Lopez 25)
Our failure to complete these tasks, to follow the persona’s commands is certain. For a reader to be able to immediately, or presently, pursue any action would mean that that reader would be already in that text, or that text’s reality. That means none of us. When an I tells a you to perform a task that cannot be done, who that you is doesn’t matter, because everyone can equally fail at doing that task. The task itself, then, has little to no referential bearing, because it was constructed as aware of its own fabrication. This means that we read the text without considering whether we can or should perform these actions. This you is not technically hypothetical or imagined, but it simply is not us—a you that does not refer to the only other participant in a speech act.

The essaying, then, in “The Raven” has very little to do with traditional notions of truth as relating to veracity or actuality. Without re-opening the truth in nonfiction debate, which I’d gladly leave to be discussed by David Lazar, David Shields, and John D’Agata, I will quickly state that this observation opens our genre to a number of texts we might not otherwise consider. This is fortunate, because perhaps the most famous texts of personal address are done under the guise of fiction by Marguerite Duras, who in one moment denies that her texts are autobiographical (65) and in the next that “the heart” of them is herself (75).

Duras claims that “behind [a book] there is no one” (75), and this seems true for many of the above texts. Hers are all akin to Paz’s in that we may always reinterpret the you not as a figure in the narrative but as the concept of the pronoun of address generally. But unlike the other texts here, hers seem to disavow the reader altogether, to deny that we could ever fill the shoes of this you. In The Atlantic Man, the persona tells us that “above all, you will forget this is you” (31), which, thanks to the dual deictic references and tense, could have any number of meanings; but, when she admits that you “will think about your own self” (35), she suggests that if this ever did or could refer to us, it does not any longer or perhaps never should.

Whether I will think about myself or am that future self who thinks about himself is unclear: “You are at once hidden and present…hidden from yourself, from all knowledge anyone could have of you” (53). No matter how, when, or as whom we position ourselves in this text, in relation to this pronoun, it is clear that we are vague at best and, as she tells us more explicitly, “You are absent” (40). And if we wanted to be dismissive, we could be by pointing out that impossibility—that if there is a reader, there is a person to occupy that space.
​
However, Duras seems to anticipate this line of thinking, which could be applied equally to any text that possesses this pronoun of address. Duras informs us that it is not just that you is absent; it is also that “your,” that is the possessive of you, not of the reader—“your absence has taken over, it has been photographed just as your presence was photographed” (40). For any one of these texts, then, despite the various effects of that pronoun, there is the additional understanding that you not only refers by positioning someone in that space; you also refers by simply pointing to that space, taken over by absence.


End Notes

[1] My use of the term here is only so that its effect on analysis of elements of writing such as the pronoun of address may be readily seen. As D’Agata tells it, the first mention of the lyric essay was actually referring to “the lyric” and what Tall described as “the lyric form of the essay” (D’Agata 10), which Eleftheriou rightly points out as being practically identical to our conceptions of literariness. The term lyric essay, though, has “fallen out of favor with a lot of the writers” who are known to champion the form and the editors of We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay (which, importantly, was published by Seneca Review) (6), because “everything…loved about ‘lyric essays’ was already represented in much of the essay’s past” (7). That is, as strange as it seems to point out, lyric essays are essays. Or, as David Lazar explains in “Queering the Essay,” “[c]alling the essay ‘lyrical’ or even ‘personal’ puts a generic leash on it, domesticates it under the guise of setting the essay onto to new territory” and that the irony of creating “’new’ forms like the lyric essay” make them “seem more taxonomically like other forms of literature, and therefore less queer,” which is also to say less literary than other forms of the essay. The term itself, then, seems to belie the very elements that make these texts writerly, literary, of bliss, and especially worth scholarly attention and theorization.

[2] I wish to highlight that this is a generalized human compulsion explained by mirroring, empathy, and unconscious bias. Iliopoulou bases this on the understanding that everyone who participates in a speech act, including reading a book, necessarily has to position herself as either subject or as object. And this is what Rankine is relying upon for the effect of her text. But of course readers have agency, and we may choose to position ourselves however we wish; that is part of our compulsion toward “comfort”: if we are discomfited by being contracted in one position, we choose to be contracted differently. More importantly, we use the shifting deictic of the pronoun to avoid discomfort.

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. 

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Wes Jamison's work appears in Essay Press, Diagram, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. After living twenty-some years in rural Ohio, he moved to Chicago to earn his MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College and is now a PhD candidate at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. ​

Related Works

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Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane
Assay 7.1 (Fall 2020)

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