The essayist has made a friend

Sara Levine's essay, entitled "The Essayist Is Sorry for Your Loss", holds a wealth of quippy lines on Creative Nonfiction:

"In the midwest girls walk around in bright colored parkas and plastic boots to match."

"The Essayist gets drunk on language"

"Art is valued, ease is valued. Because the essay is pessimistic about everything but language."

I read this essay and feel like I have found a home in this genre, as small and sad as it may be among both the academic and the common-man. I didn't even know what Creative Nonfiction was until last spring. The only essay I had read/written had been entitled something like "Shakespeare's Tragic Hero" or "The American Dream in Of Mice and Men".

Then, I had to read things like Sara Levine's essay that challenged me to rethink this boxed in definition. I feel as though Levine's entire point is that essays are your brain's own little world to meander through, describing personal joy, problems, and conclusions on ...everything. Or nothing. They are what your brain wants them to be.

As a reader, we see personal essays as a little dip into the pond that is the 'self' another, which, frankly is exhilarating. It isn't like escaping into fiction, which is specifically apart from reality. It isn't like poetry, which is more like beams of light transcending your own experiences. The essay is something else.

I think that I, too, have fallen into the essay by accident. And it is exhilarating.

A poem for you today:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

I love everything about this poem. I love the title. I love the imagery. I love the syntax, punctuation, and diction. I love the theme of grief, and of loving life.

How do we go through what we do, and yet still decide to love life?

I have no suffered any specific or extreme crises/deaths in my life. I have not underwent catastrophes or poverty or war or chaos, even. But sometimes it's hard to stomach life. I guess that's what the thing is.

Number 6: I sit here and ponder in prison

I sit here and ponder

until the point of frustration has been surpassed

until my mind has spun around

to so many different places

that I don't even know where

I am anymore.

I sit here and ponder

everything about my life

at the Coffee House with some friends,

who are writers and dreamers like me,

and we drink coffee,

probably too much.

I sit here and ponder

about next week and the week after,

when I have three tests-

big ones-

and about when I will be beyond

Seward and Concordia University.

I sit here and ponder

the process of writing stuff,

for instance: Why am I writing this?

What will it become

and why am I using a

six-lined format?

I sit here and ponder

and slowly become embittered

by the lack of stories, anecdotes,

and matters of wisdom

that could be excised from my scalp

and smashed onto my paper.

I sit here and ponder

about the goal to regale

those literate crowds of somebodies.

this isn't "writer's block"-

this is my writer's prison and

I can't find the words to escape.

Rule Number Four: Just Don't Go There

I have a confession to make: I did not finish the story “Torch Song”.

Now, if you’ve read the story, you probably know why I didn’t finish reading it. You are also probably laughing at me right now, but I don’t care. Call me a prude or a square or a child, but I couldn’t finish it.

The writer of “Torch Song”, Charles Bowden, presents a fairly descriptive piece of writing that delves into the world of sex crimes, child molestation, rape, and, well, just sex, in general. It follows his experiences as a reporter, covering stories on some of the worst sex crimes imaginable (although I’d say all sex crimes are equally horrid) against both women and children.

I cannot stand these types of stories. They make me second guess every situation in which I am alone, every relationship I have with a man, and basically turn me into a paranoid-man-hating-woman-warrior. (Well, I guess I usually have the man-hating woman warrior persona, but these talk of these situations add the paranoid factor). I can’t even watch Law and Order: SVI (Special Victims Unit) because of this issue. It frightens me. I carry mace frequently.

But Charles Bowden doesn’t stop there. For some twisted, man reason, he decides to divulge all the details of his own sex life for the readers to get a little bit of a closer glimpse into his world. His world of sex and crime and even more sex. (Never did I think that I would write the word “sex” in this type of frequency for a class assignment. What would my mother think).

Let’s just say, Charles gets some. He gets some, a lot.

I wouldn’t care if he wrote that. If he changed the scene, right as he and his lady-friend are gettin’ friendly, to the next morning’s scrambled eggs--like they do on tv. Yes, this is the part where you call me a child and laugh. But hear me out, I have come a long way since college started, let me tell you. For instance, once, in eleventh grade, I got David Sedaris book Me Talk Pretty One Day out of the library. I had to stop reading it after seeing the F-word too many times. Maybe I’ve just heard devotions on Philippians 4:8 one too many times. All that Jesus talk has been affecting my education and intellectual reading. Still, I think Charles Bowden used the F-word too much in his essay too. Maybe he’s friends with David Sedaris.

Anyway, I guess I am still a little bit of a wuss when it comes to ‘things of this world’. I think that there is a time and a place for swearing in literature. I don’t believe in censorship. I know that sex is all over the place and, according to Professor Reek and in the right context, really great. But I do not want to read about it in my class assignments. I don’t care how old I am or Charles Bowden is. I am still a child. And Rule Number Four (“Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things”) needs to be remembered and followed, for goodness sake (pg. 62)!