I think it’s the circling that makes so many of us writers swoon.  In workshop, when someone’s piece of writing came full circle to a theme or an image referenced in the beginning, we often smiled and nodded, and maybe even emitted a collective, satisfied Ahhhh — because coming full circle feels like the completion of a puzzle, a picture fully revealed.  Yes, we think, now we understand what the author is trying to say. The metaphors are clear because the circuit has been closed, its symmetry complete, revealing a simple, wholesome “Oh.” We get it now, the dots have been connected.

It’s been a few weeks now since the recent oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara — and as ecologically tragic as the accident has been in and of itself, what makes this spill so interesting is the fact that it’s a repeated incident, an echo of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that inspired the first Earth Day protests, which (along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) spawned modern-day environmental regulation.  And yet, after 46 years and the birth of the environmental movement, enough oil has been spilled in our waters to demote that original Santa Barbara oil spill to only the third-worst in U.S. history (behind the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills, respectively).  And of late, as if lifted from some eco-Shakespearean tragedy: a large-scale spill of the very same substance, occurring in the very same place. Here we are again, looking at another generation of oil-coated sea animals, thick black ribbons reaching for the shore. Do you see it?  Full circle.

It occurs to me now that Earth Day is an essay, one that aims to wrestle this issue of what we keep doing to our home and ourselves.  An essay that attempts to examine greed, addiction, complacency, and regret.  An essay that asks of us: how does our behavior reflect our relationship with the planet, and are we ever going to change?

I’ll be the first to admit: the Earth Day essay we’ve written so far has some lovely traits: rich imagery, an inspired message, a seasonal rhythm that motivates many of us to be thankful and care for the earth at least once a year. But let’s face it: the fact that this story has come full-circle doesn’t make it good.

If I were workshopping this story, I might even say that Earth Day is a shallow essay, its moves predictable, its tagline trite. It’s an essay that started strong, had all the elements of a good story: a central problem, conflict, emotion, tragedy — but has become too riddled with gimmicks and pageantry to provide much of any revelation at all. It’s a Hallmark greeting on a Facebook page, a marble circling the drain.

One of the things they tell you when you write essays is that your narrator must experience a change during the course of the story.  That there must be some kind of transformation in the wrestling, some kind of a-ha moment that emerges before the writing ends. And to make sure we considered and incorporated that self-reflection into our work, one of our mentors would encourage us to respond to the following prompt within the context of our story: “I used to believe_______. Now I believe _________.”

I guess that’s why our Earth Day story falls flat. You can see that nothing much has changed, that our narrative is missing the self-reflection it should have.  We used to believe that unrestrained production and consumption of fossil fuels was sustainable.  And now, judging from the full circle illustrated by the latest Santa Barbara event, it seems that’s still what we believe.

Honest self-reflection is one of the most difficult tasks asked of creative nonfiction writers.  It requires blinders to hide those who would judge and ridicule, the ability to write through the hard place of self incrimination.  We have all kinds of excuses for avoiding this challenging aspect of our work: that the people we care about won’t love us anymore, that we don’t want to hurt or disappoint the ones we love.  But there is a bone-ache in quietly shouldering a mother’s or a country’s addiction, a sickness in silently bearing one’s guilt and responsibility for enabling the destructive behavior.  Too many of us wait to tell the truth until after the person involved with the malady has died. But in this case, the ailing one is our planet — by then, it’ll be too late to circle back.

Photo credit: Michael A. Mariant/Associated Press, www.mashable.com

The post Earth Day is an Essay appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

In the MFA program, the essay is essential — the Swiss Army knife of form, empowering a writer to tackle all manner of subjects through all manner of style.  One can whittle and maim, uncork spirits or cut out a heart.  It is safe and unsafe, something with which you might even trust a child, but not without first explaining the danger of what can happen with its misuse.  For a creative nonfiction writer, the essay is a rite of passage, like the overnight field trip in the fifth grade — sleep-away camp, where you’re forced to confront and explore all the wonders and anxieties of your newly expanded world.

But in the literary marketplace, essay is the sweater vest, the SNL-spoof of NPR (Delicious Dish, anyone?).  At its best, it seems to be viewed as the narrow humor section of the bookstore, à la the great David Sedaris. At its worst: the faded, silk-flowered storefront in a dying Midwestern town.  No, we essayists are told, best to characterize your work as an autobiographical novel, a series of linked stories, or gonzo journalism if you can pull it off — something that might actually sell.

Except in recent months, I’ve noticed a change in the tide, or rather, what feels like a geologic shift: Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams is a summer blockbuster in both the independent and popular markets.  Her collection, featuring essays that examine human pain and how we handle one another’s pain, made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list (among other bestseller lists) this year, and has been noted by Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, and NPR as a book to watch out for — almost unheard of for this particular genre.

How has she done this?

Notwithstanding Jamison’s compelling topic, I think what we’re seeing is something bigger — something specific to the form.  Not just the essay, but the personal essay: the form that weaves personal narrative into its history and research and facts.  And personal story is the element with which Jamison has particular skill.  Her work speaks directly to us, bridges a connection through our shared vulnerabilities.  Like a camera in a documentary, she says: look at this person’s condition, now take a look at mine.  Feel what we feel, experience our stories, let them tingle with your own.  Then pull back and see how they fit the bigger puzzle.  In so doing, Jamison has made relevant our own little earthquakes.

Turns out our hunger for connection is greater than our desire to be entertained.

Or maybe it’s just our fatigue with the increasingly formulaic approach to literature.  Chick Lit.  Vampires.  50 Shades of Sex.  Maybe we are just weary from the staging that’s required of us in this reality TV culture: cultivating Twitter and Facebook perfection while our souls are tiring out.

Our souls are tiring out.

Jamison herself says, “When you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.”  That’s the power of the personal essay: its careful reconstruction and examination, even wrestling of something studied to weave a complex tapestry of people and places and experiences and desires — the threads of which readers will recognize from their own lives.  Recognize and lean in, because something about it thrums.  Awakens a familiar smell.

With the arrival of The Empathy Exams, I dare say the anxiety I feel about calling myself an essayist — even to an agent — has subsided, perhaps even evolved into something more like pride.

photo credits:

The Empathy Exams book cover courtesy of NPR.org

Sweater vest nerd image courtesy of derfmagazine.com

Leslie Jamison headshot by Colleen Kinder, image courtesy of publishersweekly.com

The post Making Essay Cool: The Power of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I once submitted an essay to a Famous Editor with a note that read “Enclosed is a lyric essay, blah, blah, blah…,” and he sent it back saying, “Yes, good, we’ll take it, etcetera, but shouldn’t ‘lyric’ be something someone else says about your essay?”

—Which reveals a common misconception about the lyric essay: that it is merely an ornamental device, a compliment to one’s writing, a label to which one’s work aspires, like “powerful” or “poetic.”  When in fact, the lyric essay is a thing, an intended form of essay that seeks to deepen the artistic experience of creative nonfiction, just like modern art and contemporary performance art movements seek to evolve their own forms of artistic expression.

For me, the lyric essay was like opening the door to the Secret Garden.  It was a place that provided permission and space for me to play and explore so I could discover my authentic narrative voice.  All great, but here was the problem: when I would share my lyric essays in workshops and writing circles, I noticed that people were often reluctant to critique, like they didn’t know whether to eat what I had served with a fork or with a spoon.

I love this quote from Brian Doyle’s “Playfulnessless,” in Vol. 15, No. 1 issue of River Teeth:

Thesis: the essay is the widest fattest most generous open glorious honest endlessly expandable form of committing prose not only because it cheerfully steals and hones all the other tools and talents of all other forms of art, and not only because it is admirably and brilliantly closest to not only the speaking voice but the maundering salty singing voices in our heads, but also because it is the most playful of forms, liable to hilarity and free association and startlement, without the filters and mannered disguises and stiff dignity of fiction and poetry and journalism, respectively. Discuss.

What Brian Doyle is talking about is the malleability of the essay as a form, the flexibility of the structure itself.  And that, to me, is what the lyric essay is all about: bucking tradition and playing with form, so that instead of the predictable circle-and-dive structure of a more traditional personal essay, the lyric essayist’s narrative “hawk” does something different and unexpected in its pursuit of the truth.

So what are the ways in which the lyric essayist essays?  In the Fall 1997 Special Edition of Seneca Review, in which The Lyric Essay was first defined, editors John D’Agata and Deborah Tall noted that this new hybrid form “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursive logic, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation.”  Meaning that the reader is invited into a the stream-of-consciousness view of the narrator’s essay process, rather than a constructed representation of the issue(s) they have already wrestled.

For me, the difference between a more traditional essay and a lyric essay is not unlike the difference between the realistic, still-life paintings of Norman Rockwell and the more contemporary art of Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock.  Rather than holding the reader’s hand along a guided trail of thought, the lyric essayist provides clues, using the juxtaposition of contrasting images or ideas to convey emotion or explore a theme.  The lyric essayist texturizes his or her prose with layers to convey the complexity of the content, presenting different threads, patterns of thought, and points of intersection.  It’s like walking on a path made of stepping stones — more fun than just walking on dirt.

And rather than being strictly disciplined in form and movement, formulaic in its positioning —like ballet or a 5-paragraph essay— the lyric essay is more organic in its movement, free to borrow devices and techniques from other genres and art forms to illustrate the quest for understanding.  Some traits:

1.    Experimentation with form:

•   Exclusion of linear, logical sequence — organized by themes other than chronology
•   Distilled language, use of poetic imagery and rhythmic sentences
•   Use of fragments and white space, section headings and numbers — taking shape with fragments assembled into mosaics or narrative strands woven into braids
•   Inhabiting other unexpected forms to tell a story (disguising)
•   Omission of smooth narrative transitions — movement involves associative leaps

2.    Uses the power of inference — more active reliance on reader’s intuition to complete the narrator’s thought

3.    Main craft element is the juxtaposition (or associative leaps between) language and imagery

Still, even with an understanding of its traits, many wonder how to go about critiquing the lyric essay.  And while I would no sooner advise someone on this than I would critiquing contemporary art or the mechanics of modern dance, I do think it’s fair to ask whether the piece works, whether it has succeeded in making a connection with a reader on an emotional level.  Of course, like any art form, critiquing a lyric essay is subjective, but I offer some questions to consider:

1.    What is the essay’s aesthetic appeal?  Visually? Rhythmically?
2.    Does the imagery in the piece work?
3.    Do the juxtapositions of imagery and language resonate? Do the contrasts “thrum”?
4.    Can the reader follow the organization and associative leaps between sections?
5.    Is the content best handled in lyric form, or does the construction seem “gimmicky”?
6.    Can the reader understand what the essay is about?  What issue(s) it wrestles?
7.    Is the reader left confused, or does the essay compel the reader to think or consider something new?

So.  These points may not clarify whether you should enjoy a lyric essay with a fork or a with spoon, but perhaps it will empower you to simply dive in with your heart.  Happy reading.

The post On the Lyric Essay appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Mary Heather Noble is the winner of the $10,000 first-place prize for Creative Nonfiction’s The Human Face of Sustainability essay contest, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Festival.

Mary Heather Noble’s prize-winning essay, “Acts of Courage,” uses a series of flashbacks from her youth and early scientific career to recall how cancer from contaminants intersected her life, unflinchingly using devastating statistics to show how carcinogens have so easily entered into daily life.

Noble will be honored at the Sustainability Solutions Festival in Tempe, AZ, February 17-22.  The festival is a program within the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

“The idea of sustainability can mean many things to different people, but it is clear through Mary Heather Noble’s brilliant essay, as well as by each of our other finalists, that there is a deep, human connection to sustainability, regardless of definition,” said Patricia Reiter, director of the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

Read the full announcement at creativenonfiction.org and asunews.asu.edu.

The post $10,000 Sustainability Essay Prize Awarded appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Indeed, Earth Works presents itself almost like an academic text (especially opening with an essay about ‘the essay’), the writing within clearly demonstrating Sanders to be a master of the craft.  The cadence of his prose is smooth and soothing, the vocabulary intellectual and wise without being pretentious.  The transitions between his sections are fluid, with just the right pause, like a gulp of air before swimming another gentle lap.  And yet, despite the tenderness of the tone, Sanders is still able to evoke a sense of urgency and alarm in his message — particularly about the tendency of people to impose violence against the Earth and one another, the loss of wildness and nature, the erosion of our connection to our planet.   His essays convey a seriousness without hostility, a profound disappointment in, instead of anger at, our misguided animal selves.  Rather than the high-pitched, alarmist, melodramatic environmental writing that the general readership has learned to tune out, Sanders’ work patiently and consistently reminds us: we are a part of this Earth, and this Earth is part of us.  Do you see how we are failing it?  Do you see how we’re failing ourselves?

How does Sanders do this?  How does he convey the magnitude of what we face without raising his narrative voice?  And how does he demand accountability to our surroundings without invoking an accusing tone?  This literary craft blog post examines two particular craft elements that Sanders employs to heighten his environmental message: the use of unexpected contrast to shock the reader out of complacency, and the deliberate interchanging of natural images with human gestures and conditions to illustrate our parallel needs.

Use of Contrast in “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs”

In his essay, “At Play in the Paradise of Bombs,” Sanders awakens his readers to the harrowing losses of war and environmental decay by juxtaposing dissimilar words and images in his text.  The piece itself examines Sanders’ childhood move, in 1951, from Memphis, Tennessee to the Army Arsenal in Northeastern Ohio, where he and other children of Arsenal employees and military personnel grew up playing in the shadows of a munitions plant.  The very title of this piece jars us with an array of words that are not supposed to fit together: ‘play,’ ‘paradise,’ and ‘bombs’.   Sanders carries this ‘contrast’ theme throughout the essay, peppering the prose with opposing images and words to illuminate the irony of our society’s accepted norms: neighborhood and Arsenal, children playing near ammunition, boys mimicking war, wildlife sanctuary and poison.  Of military machinery, he writes:

…On the front porch of our Memphis home I had read GI Joe Comic books, and so I knew the names and shapes of these death-dealing engines.  In the gaudy cartoons the soldiers had seemed like two-legged chunks of pure glory, muttering speeches between bursts on their machine guns, clenching the pins of grenades between their dazzling teeth. (p. 13-14)

The coupling of ‘grenades’ with ‘dazzling teeth’ underscores the glorification of war evident in Sanders’ boyhood toys, and the contrast of his innocent proficiency with the terminology of “death-dealing engines” signals the reader to pause and think: Why is it okay for a child to know so much about killing machines?

The reality of war, of course, is bone-chilling, and Sanders writes about “a needle of dread” settling in upon seeing real tanks on the compound, and driving past “guard houses manned by actual soldiers.”  Rather than the cartoon images of men and glory, Sanders learned that the Arsenal was “a fenced wilderness devoted to the building and harboring of the instruments of death.” (p. 14)

— Which brings us to another contrast: ‘wilderness’ (abundant life) and ‘instruments of death.’  Here, Sanders juxtaposes his childhood exploration of the woods within the Arsenal’s fortress against the environmental consequences of weapons production.  He recalls:

Even where the army’s poisons had been dumped, nature did not give up.  In a remote corner of the Arsenal, on land that had been used as a Boy Scout camp before the war, the ground was so filthy with the discarded makings of bombs that not even the guards would do there.  But we children went, lured on by the scarlet warning signs: DANGER.  RESTRICTED AREA.  …In my bone marrow I carry traces of the poison from that graveyard of bombs, as we all carry a smidgen of radioactivity from every atomic blast.  Perhaps at this very moment one of those alien molecules, like a grain of sand in an oyster, is irritating some cell in my body, or in your body, to fashion a pearl of cancer. (p. 16)

The opposing forces of words like ‘poisons,’ ‘Boy Scout camp,’ and ‘discarded makings of bombs’ or ‘children’ and ‘DANGER’ instill immediate concern in the reader’s mind: This was a place where children were taught to appreciate and survive in nature, how could they have allowed it to become a toxic and dangerous dumping ground?  Sanders even uses contrasting images to dramatize the health risks of the Arsenal’s chemical releases: a pearl, a rare and cherished commodity, with cancer, an ever-increasing and dreaded fatal disease.

Sanders’ successful manipulation of contrasting words and images throughout this piece allows him to maintain a consistent narrative tone while startling the reader to a new awareness.  Like the eerie coupling of childhood innocence with demonic possession in a horror movie, this technique of pairing opposing forces in an essay can foster frightening revelations.

Comparison of Human Condition to Natural Rhythms in “The Force of Spirit”

The other craft technique that Sanders uses to nurture an environmental consciousness in his reader is his subtle, yet deliberate insertion of simile and metaphor into the prose to infer connection between the human condition and the natural world.  For instance, in “The Force of Spirit,” Sanders examines the concept of spirituality, pondering the force that wills people to live, the energy that can ripple over a landscape.  He describes the way his wife’s parents have aged and approached death, drawing comparisons with natural environmental rhythms to suggest that the “spirit” which drives our love of life is also the same force that makes rivers flow and seedlings burst through soil:

Ruth’s father, still able to get around fairly well back then, had just been to see Dessa in the special care unit, where patients suffering from various forms of dementia drifted about like husks blown by an idle breeze. (p. 239)

To say that [Ruth’s father] is dying makes it sound as though he’s doing something active, like singing or dancing, but really something is being done to him.  Life is leaving him.  From one visit to the next we can see it withdrawing, inch my inch, the way the tide retreating down a beach leaves behind dry sand. (p. 240)

The way Sanders compares ailing patients to “husks blown by an idle breeze,” and his dying father-in-law to a withdrawing ocean tide, implies an inherent connection of this human condition to the natural rhythm of the Earth.  And in so doing, the reader is compelled by extension, to consider the suffering or dying of a landscape to that of a fellow human being.  This inference is subtle, but real, and Sanders confirms this intention in his analysis:

…I want a name for the force that binds me to Ruth, to her parents, to my parents, to our children, to neighbors and friends, to the land and all its creatures.

The power is larger than life, although it contains life.  It is tougher than love, although it contains love.  It is akin to the power I sense in the lambs nudging the teats of their dams to bring down milk, in the raucous tumult of crows high in trees, in the splendor of leaves gorging on sun.  I recognize this force at work in children puzzling over a new fact, in grown-ups welcoming strangers, in our capacity, young and old, for laughter and kindness, for mercy and imagination.

…Whether we call that magnificent energy Spirit or Tao, Creator or God, Allah or Atman or some other holy name, or no name at all, makes little difference, so long as we honor it.  Wherever it flows — in person or place, in animal or plant or the whole of nature — we feel the pressure of the sacred, and that alone deserves our devotion.  (p. 242-243)

This union of human and Earth is the DNA of Sanders’ essays, and his interchanging of natural images with human emotions, gestures, and conditions is one of the signature traits in his outstanding body of work.

The post Inspiring Activism with a Soft Touch: Scott Russell Sanders’ Earth Works appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.