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.