Reading Essays

You see, the problem is that you’re not a writer…
CC-BY-SA Nina Paley

I read fiction. I make no bones about that.

I read the occasional memoir. I did a project on memoirs. But that was in college.

I read pages and pages of academic criticism. And many pages more. But that was also in college.

I started reading theatre. First Shakespeare, then Corneille, Racine, Molière, Hugo, Sartre and much more.

Long before, when I was reading Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie and J.K. Rowling, I started writing essays. I had no clue how they looked. I had no clue how they sounded. I’d read some of my mother’s essays and articles, but that was about it.

Through the years that followed, I moved on to Toni Morrison, Dickens, Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Margaret Atwood. And I kept writing essays.

Now, finally, I have begun to read essays. And finally, I have understood the true meaning of the writer as thief, searching constantly for shiny tricks and turns of phrase to carry away, hoard, reconfigure and sell.

I started with Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. My favorite thing about the book is its cover. Oh, the essays have punchy beginnings and, often, punchy endings. There are a few, just a few, which have that well-I-knew-that-but-I-just-didn’t-say-it feeling that the best essays often give me. But I see most of them as privileged whining. Still, I often learn best from the things with which I disagree deeply and fundamentally. I learned a lot from Meghan Daum. I learned that it takes a kind of bravery to put certain things in print. I learned that there’s value in writing unflinchingly about the unspeakable parts of the self. I learned that I will not write an essay thinking, “Even a bad reaction is a reaction.”

Now, I’m reading A Place to Live, Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s translation of selected essays by Natalia Ginzburg. It’s reopened my eyes to what drew me to nonfiction in the first place–the innovative turns of thought, the eye for odd details, the mind on the page. Ginzburg uses no lengthy words. Ginzburg writes simply, with deep feeling.

There’s room for the innovative. There’s room for the amusing. I enjoy writing innovatively and with humor. But I aim to write simply, with deep feeling.

That’s the most difficult, most vulnerable kind of writing to do.

A Writer’s Life?

Comic by xkcd.com

For a long time, I didn’t even call myself a writer. The title stank too much of the flannel-wearing, cigarette-smoking hipster who spent days holed up in a smoke-filled apartment, ignoring food and non-alcoholic beverages in favor of frenzied typing, churning out something that no one would understand anyway. I was just someone who liked to write.

And now, I’m going to start my MFA in approximately a week, I’m registered in a workshop in which, for the first time, I’m not being told what to write and I’m about to embark on what’s called a writer’s life.

Oh sure, I’ve submitted to magazines and journals and contests before. Just a couple of days ago, I received a rejection notice. I’ve been published and won prizes. I’ve written thousands of words each day for a prolonged period of time. I’ve struggled through writer’s block, edited a piece until I was sick of the sight of it and then kept editing. I’ve participated in many of the components of a writer’s life.

But there was always other stuff. There was theatre. There was sociology. There was academic writing. There was literature.

And now, there’s going to be writing and reading and, eventually, teaching writing. Specialization. Just what they told me grad school would be. And in spite of all the assurances I received at orientation that it was recommended, no, encouraged, that I take classes outside my discipline, the truth is that I have one, maybe two classes in which to exercise that latitude.

Most of the time, I’ll just be writing. I’ve been bemoaning the fact, for the last four years, that I never had time to write what wasn’t required of me. And now, I seem to be intimidated by the prospect of that time. I try to convince myself that this is like the pulse-pounding moments before going on stage, when I pace and try to breathe deeply, try to stay in character, waiting, waiting for my cue. Once I go on stage, in a rush of adrenaline, it’ll just be me and my fellow Nonfiction MFAs, the lights too bright to see beyond the first row of the audience. I’ll take a deep breath and I’ll plunge in. And when the lights are turned off and I’m out of costume, I’ll analyze our performance half to death until I stop myself and realize that the show is over and what happened happened.

And maybe I’ll sit down and do what I’m doing now–write myself into peace of mind.