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.

It had been an exhausting visit: I had just completed my final 10-day residency to earn my MFA from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program in Maine, and my husband and kids had made the trip across country to witness my graduation.  It was the first time we’d seen my mother-in-law since my father-in-law’s funeral, so it was an emotionally charged celebration.

We took our seats and promptly fell asleep as the other passengers shuffled their way down the narrow aisle.  I don’t know how long I’d been dozing, but from the outer perimeter of my consciousness, I heard a flight attendant say, “We’ve called the paramedics; they’ll be here shortly.”

— Which pulled me right from my dream-state and into the reality of the 25th row.  Two flight attendants hovered in the aisle by the row behind us, leaning in to attend to the gentleman sitting behind me.  He wasn’t well — not well at all.

“Here, sir, have some water.  Are you having any trouble breathing?”

I sat up and looked across the aisle at my husband, who was also starting to wake from the activity behind us.  Gav, I mouthed and pointed toward the row behind me.  Someone’s sick.

Of course, by sick, I was thinking something life-threatening, like a heart attack, which, given the recent events in our family, was not what my children needed to see.  PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod, please do NOT let this guy have a heart attack.

“Sir? The paramedics are coming, but our boarding is complete and we will need to make a quick decision about whether you’re okay to fly.  Are you feeling any better?”

The man spoke in broken English: yes, is better with water.

“Do you think you will be able to go, or do you think you’ll need to get off the plane?”

No, he said, we go.

— And not 15 seconds later, I heard the splash of the contents of his stomach hitting the back of my seat.  Then again.  And again.

Oh, he said, sorry.

Now, at this point, everyone is awake and alert and has passed the motion sickness bags from their own seat pockets toward him.  I tossed some baby wipes in his vicinity, but kept the vomit bags to myself in anticipation of the domino-effect to which I expected my children might succumb.  But this is not the point of my story.

The point of my story is this:  After the vomit in seat 25-E, after the man then ran to the back of the plane and got sick again in the bathroom that 250 other passengers were supposed to use during the 4-hour flight to Denver, after he and his travel partner were escorted from the plane by the paramedics and the ground crew spent an hour *sanitizing* the area while we all sat buckled into our seats, trying to distract ourselves with iPhones, iPods, and the sudoku puzzle in the back of Hemisphere magazine — after all that, the poor woman who had been sitting next to him when he erupted had to return to her seat so we could finally take off.  It was a sold-out flight.  There were no other seats available.  Nobody could have imagined an unluckier scenario.

Except that about an hour into the flight, while this woman sat as close to the edge of her aisle seat as her arm rest would allow (probably wondering what might have splattered onto her purse stuffed beneath the seat), a different man walked up from the back of the plane and asked if he could sit in one of the vacant seats in her row.

At first she was silent, probably as stunned as the rest of us were.  But then she said, “Uh, yeah, I guess, but you know what happened here, right?”

“Oh, yeah, I know.  That’s okay.”

“I mean they sanitized it, but…”

“Yeah, I know.  That’s okay.  It’s still better than my seat.”

— Which made me wonder: what in God’s name was happening in the back of the plane where he had been sitting that would prompt him to knowingly nestle into the H1N1 row behind me?  Whatever it was, it must’ve been brutal, because he slid in and grabbed the seatbelt that was probably still wet from the de-con…

Nearly a week after the trip, I still can’t shake my curiosity about the details of this guy’s circumstances.  I want to know about his story.  What was so bad about his situation?  Did he not understand the medical drama that had played out in the seat directly behind me?  Or was I, perhaps, overstating the risk of sitting in that seat because I had heard the splash, smelled the smell, seen the floor…

Regardless, being the literary geek that I am, I can’t help but see a lesson in the Vomit On A Plane episode: that all characters have their own motivations.  And that these motivations are best understood with some insight about their perspectives. 

I had made an assumption when I said that nobody could have imagined an unluckier scenario than being that woman who sat in the contaminated 25th row.  Because obviously, somebody did.  And now the story seems incomplete, unbalanced without a little exploration of that perspective.   

—Which is exactly what I’m thinking I need to do as I revisit some of my own work: explore my characters’ perspectives.  Try to understand why they’ve done the crazy things they’ve done.  Perhaps I’ll learn a little more about them.  Perhaps I’ll learn a little more about me.

The post Vomit On A Plane: A Lesson in Perspective appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.