Essay Club Reading and Resources
Essay Club 4 (May 30th, 2025)
Essay Club 3
Writing beyond the self: Using artifacts and research to uncover meaning and create energy
What is creative nonfiction writing but the shaping and reshaping of self against fact? You take a personal story and give it syntax, grammar, language, punctuation. The simple fact of putting it on paper reshapes it. But now you’ve got to give it context, associate meaning to it. So next to that personal story, you set a paragraph about apples, or condoms, or chickens, or gun violence. Suddenly, your personal story is reshaped by these new facts, and the facts of your personal story cut into the hard statistics of your paragraph about imported apples or the failure rate of condoms.
The facts are the glacier to the soft canyon of your own history. You see the history newly. You see the facts a little more softly. (Nicole Walker)
Craft: Dinty Moore: The River of Story Always Flows Forward
(1) The Hurricane Ride (Bernard Cooper)
In salt air and bright light, I watched my aunt revolve. Centrifugal force pressed her ample flesh against a padded wall. She screamed as the floor dropped slowly away, lipstick staining her teeth. But she stuck to the wall as if charged with static, and along with others, didn't fall. She was dressed in checks and dangling shoes, her black handbag clinging to her hip. The Hurricane Ride gathered speed. My aunt was hurtling, blurred. Her mouth became a long dark line. Her delirious eyes were multiplied. Checks and flesh turned diaphanous, her plump arms, gartered thighs. Her face dissolved, a trace of rouge.
I swore I saw through her for the rest of the day, despite her bulk and constant chatter, to the sea heaving beyond the boardwalk, tide absconding with the sand, waves cooling the last of the light. Even as we left, I saw the clam-shell ticket stand, the ornate seashore gate, through the vast glass of my aunt.
When does speed exceed the ability of our eyes to arrest and believe? If the axial rotation of the earth is 1,038 miles per hour, why does our planet look languid from space, as bejeweled as my aunt's favorite brooch? Photographs of our galaxy, careening through the universe at over a million miles per hour, aren't even as blurred as the local bus.
Momentum. Inertia. Gravity. Numbers and theories barrel beyond me. It's clear that people disappear, and things, and thoughts. Earth. Aunt Hurricane. Those words were written with the wish to keep them still. But they travel toward you at the speed of light. They are on the verge of vanishing.
(2) from "Getting the Hell out of Paradise" (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark)
" . . . Judeo-Christian culture's central story is of Paradise and the Fall. It is a story of perfection and of loss, and perhaps a deep sense of loss is contingent upon the belief in perfection. Conservatives rear-project narratives about how everyone used to be straight, god-fearing, decently clad and content with the nuclear family, narratives that any good reading of history undoes. Activists, even those who decry Judeo-Christian heritage as our own fall from grace, are as prone to tell the story of paradise, though their paradise might be matriarchal or vegan or the flip side of the technological utopia of classical socialism. And they compare the possible to perfection, again and again, finding fault with the former because of the latter. Paradise is imagined as a static place, as a place before or after history, after strife and eventfulness and change: the premise is that once perfection has arrived change is no longer necessary. This idea of perfection is also why people believe in saving, in going home, and in activism as crisis response rather than everyday practice.
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound except when we land on it.
Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it . . ."
(3) from "Shipwrecked" (Jenna Malamud Smith)
"IN THE DAYS immediately after my mother's death, as its reality slowly overtook my consciousness, I found myself recalling Robinson Crusoe. Not an association I would have anticipated, since the book holds little conscious meaning for me anymore. Yet there it was in my mind's eye — repeatedly, an indistinct image of a stranded, barefoot man, pant legs ripped at midcalf — straining, poling a raft back to his wrecked ship to gather provisions.
Crusoe, desolate and terrified, mercifully wave-tossed onto an island after a storm has sunk his ship, crawls up a tree to sleep the first night. He feels completely unprotected, and some large part of him expects to die before dawn - savaged by a ravenous beast or a hostile human. But when he awakes the next day, sun re-turned, water calm, he finds that the tide has delivered his lost vessel back from the depths and stranded it within reach. Like the storm-harried Crusoe, I found myself after her death mucking through strange, flickering, opposite states of mind where, at more than a few moments, a seemingly parallel grand confusion of terror and calm, desolation and thin hope, bereftness and bounty all commingled. I felt as rattled as any half-drowned jacktar, and like Crusoe I understood that my first labor was to salvage."
Essay Club 2
Essay Club 1
from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders (p. 162-3)
. . . When I was a kid I had this Hot Wheels set: lengths of plastic tracks, metal cars, a couple of battery-powered plastic "gas stations." Inside each station was a pair of spinning rubber wheels. The little car went in, then got shot out on the other side. If you arranged the gas stations right, you could urge a little car into one as you left for school and come back hours later to find the car still going around the track.
The reader is the little car. The writer's task is to place gas stations around the track so that the reader will keep reading and make it to the end of the story. What are those gas stations? Well, manifestations of writerly charm, basically. Anything that inclines the reader to keep going. Bursts of honesty, wit, powerful language, humor; a pithy description of a thing in the world that makes us really see it, a swath of dialogue that pulls us through it via its internal rhythm-every sentence is a potential little gas station.
The writer spends her whole artistic life trying to figure out what gas stations she is uniquely capable of making. What does she have that will propel the reader around the track? What does she do in real life when seeking a conversational boost of speed? How does she entertain a person, assure him of her affection, show him that she's listening? How does she seduce, persuade, console, distract? What ways has she found of being charming in the world, and what might the writing equivalent of these be? It would be nice if she could just go, "Oh, in real life, I do X," and then do X in her work—but it's trickier than that. She finds out what her unique writerly charms are only by feeling her way toward them through thousands of hours of work (and these may have an oblique relation to her "real" charms or even no relation at all). What she arrives at is not a credo but a set of impulses she gets in the habit of honoring.
Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here's the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?)