The Essay

   For some reason I picked up a book featuring a collection of essays, part of the "Best American" series, annual publications from publishing house Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that whip together a compilation of what the editors consider to be among the best pieces of each year in fields that range from mysteries and short stories, to travel and sports writing.  Generally, the process is this: the editors (there's usually a regular one and a guest one) put out a notice for magazines to submit what they would consider their better published pieces from that year, with the magazines ranging from local small presses or recognized college publication, to the  large and established periodicals.  What results is generally anywhere from several hundred to over a thousand submissions, which the editors then pare down to somewhere between 25-30 for each book.  To date, I've dabbled in fields that I've thoroughly enjoyed because I'm interested in them, generally the Science & Nature series as well as the Travel Writing series; but have admittedly been surprised by the Sports Writing series, discovering that things I don't quite understand (say hockey, yachting, or boxing) can be presented in an engaging and even captivating way.  But the Essay Series?  Somehow, I kept zooming by those annual tomes as if they were simply text books on chemistry or toe nails or something...until one appeared at the library sale.

   Back in my days at school (in a galaxy far, far away, it would seem), the word essay was as common as it was dreaded, the teachers always giving you that assignment of writing a 500-word essay on Mongolian fly swatting or some such dribble; this generally meant two things, that 1) you would have to go to the library because you knew little or nothing about the subject (no Google or internet back then) and that 2) it was going to take you some time because everything had to be handwritten (no computers or voice typing existed; heck, the majority of us didn't even know how to use a typewriter, those old manual clickity-clack Royals and Underwoods, objects dear to the heart of actor Tom Hanks who recently published his own collections of stories about them, Uncommon Type).  So to us students, when you heard that word "essay," you knew that this would truly be homework and that there would be little room for escape.  That word has since faded into the sunset, perhaps now replaced by something like an Op-Ed or article or reflection (TIME magazine calls it The View, of which many are excellent, even at 500 words); it's a word that is difficult even for guest editor Susan Orlean to pin down: Is an essay a written inquiry?  A meditation?  A memoir?  Does it concern the outside world or just probe the writer's interior world?  Does it have a prescribed tone or is it absolutely individual -- a conversation between the writer and the reader, as idiosyncratic as any conversation might ever be?  As near as I can figure, an essay can be most of the above...essays take their tone and momentum from the explicit presence of the writer in them and the distinctiveness of each writer's perspective.  That makes essays definitely subjective -- not in the skewd, unfair sense of subjectivity, but in the sense that essays are conversations, and they should have all the nuances and attitude that any conversation has.

   So how different are the voices?  Here's sports writer Roger Angell reflecting back on a trip he took with his wife, her having passed away some seven years earlier at the time: These tales and name-droppings grow dim with repeating, and hearing them once again, in the fashion with which we stare into the too small black-and-white snapshots in a family album, we look into their corners and distant porches or mysterious windows in search of something more -- times of day, a day of the week, other names and other tones of voice, beyond recall.  What in the world did Evelyn and I talk about --beyond our adored but absent baby, I mean-- all those weeks and miles?  How did we survive the shriveling boredom of long days on the road, through landscapes relentlessly renewed and snatched away but never entered.  Conversation saved us, but I can't bring back a word now.  What books were we reading, what crisis were the French and British papers and the Paris Tribune full of each day?  What fears or sadness woke us up at night either or both of us, and made it hard to sleep again?  With effort, if I wait not too eagerly, I can sometimes bring back her voice.

   Or this from Paul Crenshaw on his telling of life as a child on a farm in tornado country: Some times it will stop raining when the funnel falls.  Sometimes the wind stops and the trees go still and the air settles on you as everything goes quiet.  Then, faint at first as the storm gathers speed, you can hear the force as it spins itself into existence, touching earth, whirling out into the day or night.  It sounds like rusted sirens, howling dogs, the call of a freight train, pushing speed and sound before it, lonely and forlorn on its midnight ride.  I've seen tornadoes drop from a clear blue sky.  I've seen barns and houses and fields wiped out, cattle thrown for a distance to lie in the rain bawling with broken legs.  Once I watched as a three-or-four-hundred-pound cut of sheet metal floated across the highway, touched down once, then lifted off again, light as air...I know the sound of storms, the low growl of thunder that means storms in the distance, the loud quick clap that means storms overhead.  I've blinked in the afterglow of forked lightning, watched flash lightning light the hills as night turns into day.  I've seen the remains of exploded houses, nothing left of the house but kindling, from when the tornado drops and the air pressure changes and the air inside the house has to get out.  I've seen storms come with no warning, boiling up out of a western sky rimmed with the red rays of the last sun, lightning flickering in the twilight, the air gone heavy and still.  I've seen them sweep through with hardly a ripple but the wind in your hair, passing to other places and other times.  I've huddled in hallways and bathtubs and cellars listening to tornadoes pass overhead, and when I see on television the remnants of a town destroyed by the force of storms, I always offer, however briefly, a thanks that it was not my people or my town.

   My friend presented me with a book by Dan Brown, the most recent in his series of hidden history thrillers featuring his symbol-reading professor, Robert Langdon.  It was fiction (which I rarely read) but proved an entertaining escape of sorts; but more so it caused me to again wonder why I remained so uninterested in reading fiction all while enjoying the watching of fictional movies and series on Netflix and such?   Was there a difference? -- maybe the time involved?  Then came this essay (what??...another essay?) from National Book Award winner, Andrea Barrett: Who can say why we're drawn to one person, or one subject?...If novelists think, perhaps this is how we think: through a frenzy of methaphor-making and analogy-building, an accretion of meaningful images juxtaposed in ways that seem to us fruitful, although to someone else they might seem baffling...I read like that --I have always read like that-- because it's the only way I know to deeply inhabit a world other than the limited one of my own experience.  It's the way I sink into the hearts and minds of invented characters, who incarnate themselves in the odd intersections of apparently disparate fields, and who then, if I'm lucky, manage to understand and articulate what I cannot.  Reading, which gives me access to lives I haven't lived, am not living, probably won't live, is how I find my way to writing: in this case, how I found my way back to writing...I'm trying to shape a narrative that allows a reader to feel what it was like to be a particular person, or set of persons, caught in a particular situation at a particular place and time...I wanted what would help me not to tell but to show.

   Again, not my call on that old fiction vs. non-fiction debate, especially since I recognize that far more fiction books become best sellers compared to the non-fiction books on climate change or our expanding universe (much less those on the growth rate of elephant toe nails and other "fascinating facts");  even the romance and young-adult books outsell non-fiction...sigh!  But here were essays, and to my mind, pieces of writing that transported me away to another world or another life as well as any fictional story, to places and people I would perhaps never see but who actually do exist or did at one time.  Suddenly I was being given a peek into their memories and of having their worlds expand my own...and now there were editors doing the hard work of sifting through the zillions of manuscripts which were good enough to get published in national magazines, but not quite good enough to make it into the final cut for the book.  And these are annual editions so that two months from now, with the arrival of the new year, everything that was under consideration for 2018 will be slid off of the table and cleared...time to start reviewing the next batch of writings for the 2019 edition.

   Barrett goes on to write: Facts can help evoke emotion especially those that transmit texture, tonality, and sensual detail.  But facts can't drive a piece.  Research, no matter how compelling, may give me the bones of fiction but never the breath and the blood...Slowly I began to relearn something I'd once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion --that central element of fiction-- derives not from information or explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, form, structure, association, metaphor.  And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I'd once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion.  How the gathering of information can take the place of actual understanding...Do I mean to say that writers should look within or look without?  That they should write from experience, or from research, or from imagination?  Yes, I would say.  Not either/or, but all those things.  Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be.  Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without these foundations.  Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer's imagination works that way.  Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect, and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end.  But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us.  We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where our pictures form, and where it all begins.* 

   This year's collection of The Best American Essays begins this way (from the publisher's page): "The essay, like love, like life, is indefinable, but you know an essay when you see it, and you know a great one when you feel it, because it is concentrated life,” writes Hilton Als in his introduction.  Expertly guided by Als’s instinct and intellect, The Best American Essays 2018 showcases great essays as well as irresistibly eclectic ones.  Go undercover in North Korea, delve into the question of race in the novels of William Faulkner, hang out in the 1970s New York music scene, and take a family road trip cum art pilgrimage. These experiences and more immersive slices of concentrated life await. It and other Best American subject categories are available in most libraries, bookstores and online...


*Dan Brown's book, Origins, asks somewhat the same question...but it's fiction, after all.