Also, it seems, a rhetorical question, as easily answered as what makes tea, tea. I love both tea and essays. One nourishes my body, the other my soul. I consume both, savoring flavors and words without much thought. Tea was the robust, brown liquid I consumed in my grandmother’s kitchen. Essays were non-fiction prose I read in the afternoon.

My realization that there was more to tea than brown liquid began at Brown’s Hotel in London. “You must go,” friends said. “After all, Agatha Christie and Rudyard Kipling wrote there. The ambiance might rub off.” I skipped a week of lunches and used the money for a high tea reservation.

The Drawing Room where tea is served has wood paneling and cozy arm chairs. Classical music drifts across discreetly spaced small tables adorned with white linen tablecloths, silver tea sets, and three-tiered pedestals of finger sandwiches, scones and pastries.  A tuxedo-clad waiter greeted me with a gracious, “Good afternoon, Madam,” and handed me a heavy, white menu.

I opened it, anticipating the list would include my favorite. Instead, I was confronted with names of 25 teas. Black, yes, but none I recognized. The beverage I’d consumed for years was one blend in a sea of other blends, including oolong, white, herbal, and fruit. All teas, just not ones I knew.

My journey to define the essay has been similarly humbling. Google “essay,” and you’ll come up with a potpourri of answers. My favorite is Wikipedia’s: “the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story.” 

Marriam Webster calls it “a short piece of writing on a particular subject.” 

Some sources insisted the essay is a genre, others that it is merely a “categorization.” 

Most agree essays are non-fiction, prose, and subdivided into two flavors, formal and informal.

Formal Essay

Here I turn to William Harmon’s A Handbook on Literature, 12^th edition, which defines a formal essay as “a moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic,” characterized by “seriousness of purpose, dignity, logical organization,” where “literary effect is secondary to serious purpose.”

My English breakfast tea is akin to the formal essay. Strong, stout, nothing personal or tampered with. No individual opinion. Research data, clearly presented, using agreed upon convention.

I am fairly certain I can recognize a formal essay when I meet one. I’ve written my share of 5-paragraph essays in high school, tedious pieces with a thesis, three paragraphs (each with topic sentence, supporting detail, and concluding sentence), followed by a conclusion supporting the thesis. Neat, tidy, and not the focus of this column.

Informal Essay or Personal Essay?

Things got trickier when I looked for a definition of “informal essay.” Harmon says these essays are characterized by “the personal element,” and “freedom from stiffness and affection.” 

Here, the reader is guided by a narrator who is intimate. The prose is conversational. Personal views and opinions are expressed.

That seemed clear, except most other references I consulted treat “informal essay” and “personal essay” as synonyms. 

Perhaps structure was the defining characteristic? Down the rabbit hole I went, and discovered definitions for 15 different categories of informal essay. With utmost respect to the splitters, the 15 all stem from argumentative, expository, or narrative essay.

Personal Essay or Journalism?

This led to another rabbit hole. Was journalism just another form of essay? 

Alison Hill’s excellent piece in Writer’s Digest was most helpful. She notes that journalistic reporting is “focused on the outside world and other people, objectively observing and reporting on who’s doing what, when, how, and why.” Personal essays, however, turn the spotlight the other way, toward the writer.

So personal essays can be considered a form of journalism, like opinion pieces.

Saying almost everything about almost anything

As I dove deeper into the “what makes an essay an essay” rabbit hole, I began to feel a bit like the Mad Hatter. 

Master essayist Aldous Huxley, in his preface to Collected Essays, says “…the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.”

By that measure, almost any nonfiction prose counts as an essay. I read on. The best essays, according to Huxley, are built around three frames: personal and autobiographical, objective and factual, and abstract universal. Could those frames help me differentiate an essay from mere writing?

As a test, I explored Brian Doyle’s masterful “Joyas Voladoras.” The essay, published 15 years ago in The American Scholar, remains a must read for essayists. Doyle begins with three full paragraphs of detail about the flight, mating and migration of hummingbirds. At the end of the third paragraph, embedded with details about heart beats and metabolism, he moves from discussing a tiny bird to abstract and universal discussion of life and death. In the fourth paragraph, he moves back to detail, describing heart chambers, before moving back to universal “we.” Almost as an afterthought, in paragraph six, the “we” becomes personal and autobiographical, memories of a father making pancakes for his children.

Some call Doyle’s piece a nature essay. Some call it a science essay. Some say it is persuasive, others claim it is personal. In the end, all anyone agrees on is that it is an essay.

And perhaps that is definition enough.

Kamm Prongay is a writer and veterinarian whose essays intertwine science, nature, people, and place. A child of the South, raised in the Pacific Northwest, Kamm spent time at sea as a Naval Surface Warfare Officer before coming ashore to pursue veterinary school, clinical practice, teaching and research. Kamm lives with her wife, Liz, and two curious cats in Portland, Oregon.

You can find her on her website.

The post What Makes an Essay an Essay? appeared first on DIY MFA.

Charlie Jane is the author of the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. 

Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. 

Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

In this episode Charlie Jane Anders and I discuss:

• What makes something an “idea” versus a “story” and how to tell the difference.
• How to keep short stories contained while making them rich and deep.
• Why she believes endings are hard and what she does to cross the finish line.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Charlie Jane Anders 

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy released in April 2021, along with the short story Even Greater Mistakes and the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

Even Greater Mistakes

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

Never Say You Can’t Survive

From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read.

The world is on fire.

So tell your story.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Even Greater Mistakes and Never Say You Can’t Survive, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 390

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 390: Idea to Premise to Story: Crafting a Dynamic Short Story – Interview with Charlie Jane Anders appeared first on DIY MFA.

Marcus is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. 

Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change.

This led him to become a writer and to found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

On a more personal note, Marcus is a word nerd. He is part of our community, and when he reached out to share that he would be publishing his first collection of essays—Readying to Rise—I knew we had to have him on the show.

In this episode ​​Marcus Harrison Green and I discuss:

• How he achieved a unity of voice as he put together his debut essay collection.
• The importance of looking honestly at ourselves and how that can make society better.
• Why he loves living the life of the writer and what it allows him to do in the world.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Marcus Harrison Green

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

Readying to Rise

Social justice is an ideal. It’s not a reality. And while there are moments that make it feel tantalizingly close, the moment that follows often punts it right back to the far distance. Growing up black in south Seattle, journalist and essayist Marcus Harrison Green has a keen sense of exactly where and how things break down. From his own experience in the classroom and at the hands of police to his fierce dissection of the racism baked into media and journalism, Green makes poetry of the clarity that comes after long reflection.

In this collection, Green bears sharp witness to the Black Lives Matter movement, his own journey into and out of religious faith, his grandmother’s lessons, his battle with bipolar disorder, human mortality, blatant hypocrisy, and much more.

He shines a light on what hurts the most deeply in us: not only the brutal injustice of a world built by the powerful for the powerful but the close proximity of that brutality to a persistent kernel of hope.

Yet because there is hope, there is conviction. Green never falters in the knowledge that the struggle itself is something to tie ourselves to and define ourselves by. With astute analyses, evocative imagery, profound empathy, and the ability to laugh at it all, these essays, even with their collective weight, leave us much lighter than they found us.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 384

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 384: Writing Personal Essays with Honesty, Authenticity, and Hope – Interview with Marcus Harrison Green appeared first on DIY MFA.

But no, our published pieces are captive to the amber of time, words that were written can’t be unwritten. Your writing is out there naked in the world colliding with the viewpoints, critiques, and skepticism of others. 

Returning written words to your imagination isn’t an option, but embracing those words is, no matter how imperfect you might perceive them. An essay collection just might make for the perfect embrace.

More than just an exercise in self-aggrandizement, or a nonfiction writer’s greatest hits, an essay collection can trigger reflection, contemplation, and self and societal assessment in a reader. Essential ingredients for both individual and social betterment. 

No, not everyone’s essay collection will have the might of Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard, but, of course, not everyone is Toni Morrison. But your resurrected work can provide readers with a unique way of looking at their life, this world, and the people they inhabit it with. 

But choosing exactly what to include out of your massive archive of writing can provide a unique challenge. What stays and what goes? How do you organize it all? And will any of it still resonate with readers after all this time? 

These are questions I was forced to answer while gathering the essays that comprise my collection, Readying to Rise. Hopefully my hard earned knowledge can assist you with building your own essay collection. 

1. Embrace the Past

Reencountering old writing can be scary, in no small part because you’ve hopefully evolved as a person, writer, and thinker since you put the final punctuation mark on a months or years-old essay. 

A friend says old writing can be like bumping into an ex. You’re different and so are they, but no matter how the relationship ended, whether you wish it had concluded differently or not, you have to make peace that you made an impression upon their life, and they yours.  

You were who you were during that time period. And that is completely okay. Chances are, the thoughts, experiences, and interpretation of events then still ring true to someone encountering a similar circumstance that you previously wrote about. One person’s past is another’s present, afterall. 

Maybe you would’ve even drastically changed things had you written the same piece today. But remember writing is like Virgina Madsen’s description of wine in her monologue from the movie Sideways: I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Don’t deprive readers of the taste of your past work, the work you were uniquely able to craft on a singular day, just because your own tastes have evolved. 

2. Make Order Out of Chaos

Most of your work was probably intended to live as stand alone pieces without regard to potentially being bound together one day in a single essay collection.

This means you have to go about the business of organizing disjointed columns or essays into something that a) makes it look like you knew what you were doing all along and b) doesn’t completely jar the reader’s sensibilities. Going from a scarthing piece on FEMA’s missteps following Hurricane Katrina to a musing on overcoming severe halitosis probably isn’t the best sequencing. 

Once you’ve identified all the pieces you found fit to reprint, you want to ensure that you’ve categorized them under comprehensible themes. They don’t necessarily have to be grouped by a concrete topic (e.g. politics, culture, art, etc.) but a reader should be able to implicitly understand why an essay was placed where it was.

I originally chose to group my essays under three categories: Tribulations, Trials, and Triumphs that corresponded with essays dealing with my mental health struggles. I eventually decided it would be better to sort them chronologically. 

You shouldn’t try to shoehorn a piece into a category. If you have enough pieces that seem out of place, there’s nothing wrong with simply creating a new category called Random!

3. Pick That Which Endures 

With an essay collection what’s old is new again. A piece you wrote five years ago about the destigmitizatizing mental health in professional sports may now have new relevance given the recent stances of athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. Likewise, a profile you wrote about an Afghanistan War veteran’s return home a decade ago might provide an illuminating insight into the recently concluded conflict. 

In both cases, it’s not only that each story has a renewed news peg, it’s that each story deals with underlying issues that will be ongoing long after your book is planted on someone’s self: The normalization of discussing mental health in the workplace, and America’s role in conflicts abroad. 

You want to do your best to ensure that what you’ve selected can add to those continuing conversations. 

4. Your Vulnerability is Someone Else’s Strength

My favorite writer, James Baldwin, once said that a primary reason he wrote was so that long after he’d departed, hopefully someone who was looking through the wreckage of the past for words of inspiration, comfort, and affirmation might find refuge in his work.

Black, gay, and atheist at a time when just one of those identities would invite scorn, prejudice, and even death, he left a goldmine of words for others to find who dealt with racism, homophobia, bigotry, and alienation. 

Writing about your life’s struggles is never easy, especially when you might still be dealing with those struggles.

However, resharing them in the form of your essay collection can potentially make a difference in someone’s life. It can allow them to know that they are not isolated in their experiences. Your words can make someone feel like their life is seen, heard, felt, and potentially rescue them from a dark place.

Add your words to what people might find when they rummage through the past. 

5. Take Stock

You’ve spent years writing. You’ve persisted through criticism, negatively, doubt, and frustration to arrive at a body of work that you should be proud of. While others waited for the muse to strike, you set your butt down solidly in your chair and produced. 

Was everything you wrote Nobel laureate worthy? Of course not.

But in all your writing, you’ve surely crafted something that has the potential to uplift someone, change their bullheaded beliefs, increase their empathy, or just put a smile on their face after a particularly craptastic day. 

The fact that you amassed enough work that can be bound into a collection is an achievement worthy of celebration. It also means that your work as a writer most likely matters to someone, whether dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, but who cares.

It all means that you haven’t written in vain. And sometimes we all just need a testament to that.

Marcus Harrison Green is the author of Readying to Rise, the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on Facebook.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Crafting an Essay Collection People Will Read appeared first on DIY MFA.

Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 

• 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag
• 3 works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages)
• 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day).  

He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites—Art of the Personal Essay—and he’s the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. 

He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In this episode Phillip Lopate and I discuss:

• Why you need to have some things you haven’t worked out when you begin to write an essay.
• The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology.
• What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as  well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag; three works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages), 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies (Art of the Personal Essay, American Movie Critics, and Writing New York). He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American.

The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.

Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form.

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America–racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them–proved fruitful topics for America’s best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century–from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby–selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.

Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

If you decide to check out the books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links: The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 and The Contemporary American Essay where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 377

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 377: The Art of the American Essay Anthology – Interview with Phillip Lopate appeared first on DIY MFA.

Many of my favorite essay collections put a humorous spin on everyday life. I think finding the humor in the mundane is something we always need, but perhaps need a little bit more right now. Initially I thought this would be a pretty simple and straightforward assignment–pick five amazing collections of essays. Then I realized how hard it was to narrow it down to just five! So I hedged my bets on several of these.

Enjoy!

1) Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion. I love this woman. I named my cat Joan Didion and expect her to be called Joan Didion, not Joan. But that’s beside the point. Only not really because Didion is my favorite writer and she’s the first author I mention on this list.

This collection details Didion’s life in California during the 1960s. In her writing, she skillfully places herself front and center in the action, one of the first writers to begin doing so. Over her career, Didion has published several collections of essays and a few very powerful novels. I highly recommend her writing because she does a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of the setting she describes. 

2) Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of self-help columns written by Cheryl Strayed. These columns first appeared as Dear Sugar on therumpus.net with Strayed’s identity unknown to readers, though she eventually had a coming out party.

This collection is absolutely beautiful and at times utterly gut-wrenching. Through her columns as Dear Sugar, Strayed not only answers the questions posed to her, but also the question behind what is actually asked. She infuses these columns with very personal stories from her own life–unusual for an advice columnist. All the while, she advocates for something called radical empathy. Her writing here elevates what could be a simple, rote advice column into a true work of art.

3) How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran is hilarious. This book is a mixture of memoir and manifesto on what it is like to be a woman nowadays. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of how to be a woman in the world. She does a great job of dismantling the outdated view of feminists as man-haters and makes something that is widely accessible. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all version of feminism, but the important thing is to support one another along the way.

Moran has published two other collections of essays that run the gamut from pop culture to politics to current events and everything in between. She’s also published two fantastic novels that do such a great job of depicting the growing process from teen to adult that I sincerely wish they had been around when I was 15.

4) I Was Told There’d Be Cake

The thing I love most about Sloane Crosley’s writing is how relatable it is to my life (and I think the lives of all women who were children in the 1980s and 1990s). She is a master at putting a humorous take on everything from the mundane to the unfortunate to the genuinely funny. To give you a sense, the first essay opens with the sentence: “As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day,” then goes on to detail her secret (embarrassing) collection of ponies and what she believes it says about her.

5) Calypso

David Sedaris’s writing is pretty much a guaranteed laugh-out-loud for anyone with even a smidgen of a sense of humor. He is a master at putting a hilarious spin on life. At times, critics have claimed that his writing blurs the line between fact and fiction. To that, I say that sometimes you can’t let all of the facts get in the way of a good story. Very rarely are you able to entertain by telling things exactly as they happened; sometimes you need to add a good twist or good line to make the story worth repeating.

Sedaris has written a number of essay collections–all of which I highly recommend. Calypso just happens to be his most recently published. He’s also begun publishing his diaries, which are a very interesting read because they give you the backstory to some of his essays.

Bonus: I just can’t help myself, so here’s some other essay collections you should check out (in no particular order): Dead Girls by Alice Bolin, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, and Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit. I could go on and on–and I feel like I’m forgetting some very huge, very important collections–but I think this is a good starting point. Enjoy!

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. Though she’s fallen off the wagon as a writer, she’s hoping to return to writing essays (perhaps even a novel!) through her involvement with DIY MFA. She also teaches yoga part-time in Smalltown, Oklahoma, where she lives with her husband and their cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post #5onFri: Five Essay Collections to Check Out appeared first on DIY MFA.

My reading was – and still is – catholic (except I avoid anything dealing with westerns and politics). The joy of finding new topics and authors is why I pick books at random at bookstores and libraries. I rarely look at covers. I focus on titles and then delve into the book’s middle. I look for a glimpse into the book’s heart…and, too, the author’s mind.  This somewhat haphazard habit is how I discovered the beauty and mental muscularity of James Baldwin’s political essays. Yes, political essays. 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Essays

I blame that bit of off the rails behavior on an undergraduate composition class. Its entire focus was the essay. What could have been a drudge-worthy class full of dry scribbles was instead enlightening. In it, I discovered words’ power to solve problems, to educate, to change another’s mind, to clarify. The instructor, Dr. Sipiora, taught us how to sculpt our own words into powerful vehicles, essays.

But what is an essay? And what makes it so powerful? Merriam-Webster defines essay as a “literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view”. The term itself, essay – from the French essayer, “to attempt” or “to try” – encapsulates its aim to influence the reader. While an essay’s topic can be whatever subject a writer chooses, it will fall under the following types: analytical, argumentative, expository, or persuasive.

Analytical essays generally examine, analyze, and interpret. They tend toward academic subjects such as art, literature, and social or political events. Argumentative essays set out to prove the writer’s opinion, theory or statement is more credible than another’s. Many political essays tend to be framed as such. Expository essays have an explanatory bent. They are often written to explicate a particular issue, theme or idea. 

Persuasive essays aim to convince readers to adopt the writer’s position on an issue or point of view. The writer gives good or beneficial reasons for the reader to do so. 

Any and all of that influencing power within bounds. I believe much of an essay’s power comes from length. Essayist extraordinaire Roxane Gay, in discussing the preferred length of essays, opined: “[Essay length] varies. Sometimes an essay needs to be 700 words and sometimes, 7,000 words. 2,500 -­ 3,500 is a sweet spot.” 

Let Your Love Shine In

The success in writing essays lies in the writer’s love of her subject. One great example of this is Roxane Gay’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, Ask Roxane: Is It Too Late to Follow My Dreams? on Dec. 30, 2017.  It’s also a fantastic example of a persuasive essay. 

Gay fields letters from two writers of what she calls “a certain age.” Both writers ask a version of “Is it too late to follow my dream?” She answers first in recounting her own writing experiences.

Let’s Read: 

“I was incandescent with envy — so many breathless stories about people my age and often younger who were discovered by a hotshot agent, who sold a book for six or seven figures, who created a popular blog and parlayed that success into a full-time writing career. 

The writing world was passing me by. I was never going to be noticed. I was going to spend my life working mediocre jobs, writing in obscurity, and before long it was going to be too late. I was going to turn 30 and then 35 and after that, I couldn’t even speculate because I was either going to have a bestselling book by the age of 35 or my dream would be not merely deferred but dead, dead, dead.”

She tells them that even after she got some success, she still worried. The success she experienced didn’t look like what she had imagined. [An interesting aside, Gay was 38 when she sold her two books: Bad Feminist, a book of essays, and Untamed State, a novel.] Gay says that she wished, “I could have told myself when I was hopeless about my writing prospects is that I should have defined artistic success in ways that weren’t shaped by forces beyond my control.”

She follows this information with writing/writing industry realities. 

Let’s Read:

“Sometimes, success is getting a handful of words you don’t totally hate on the page. Sometimes success is working a full-time job to support your family and raising your kids and finding a way, over several years, to write and finish a novel. Sometimes it’s selling a book to a small press for 25 copies of your book and a vague promise of royalties you may never see. And sometimes, if you are very lucky, artistic success is marked by the glittery things so many of us yearn for — the big money deals, the critical accolades, the multicity book tours, the movie options.”

She ends with turning the writers’ view inward. She asks them to examine their own writing expectations and realities. Writing is not a zero-sum game. Gay reminds them that “[t]he literary flavor of the week did not get your book deal.” She leaves them with reality, one with an ever-open door for dreams:

“Write as well as you can, with as much heart as you can, whenever you can. Make sure there are people in your life who will have faith in your promise when you can’t. Get your writing in the world, ideally for the money you deserve because writing is work that deserves compensation. But do not worry about being closer to 50 or 65 or 83. Artistic success, in all its forms, is not merely the purview of the young. You are not a late bloomer. You are already blooming.” 

New and Different Worlds

If writing essays is new to you, take a look at the following anthologies, books, articles, and websites to learn about the technique and craft:

• The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Phillip Lopate – This anthology gives an overview of the personal essays from the ancient world to the 20th century.

• Best American Essays: This annual anthology series offers an overview of current essayists and the topics being discussed. It can easily serve as a practical primer for approaching essay writing.

• Collected Essays: James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison

• Crafting The Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction: Dinty W. Moore – A hands-on, creativity-expanding guide to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay.

• DIY MFA interview: Exploring Essay Writing: An Interview With Jayne English: My interview with Relief Journal essayist Jayne English on generating ideas and creating depth in essays.

• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit – “A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity.”

I’m long past my undergraduate years but I still choose most of my TBR list the same random albeit pointed way. I read books and essays that bring light to topics on which I’m woefully in the dark. I gravitate to authors who show vulnerability. I take heart from the idea they’re struggling with the same or similar things I battle and that we’ll get through them.

As a writer of essays, I try to bring the same things to the fore. In her Skillshare class intro, Roxane Gay says:

“One of the most interesting things that writing essays has shown me is that one person really can make a difference. When you write a good essay, people gravitate toward that work and they tend to start thinking about the world in new and different ways […].”

That’s the best any of us writers can do.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Essays appeared first on DIY MFA.

If we trace the history of the creative nonfiction essay to writers like Montaigne, who in the 15th century wrote about everything from friendship to death, it becomes clear that we read creative nonfiction to get inside the mind of a writer. A skilled writer can make disparate things seem connected, even the most commonplace of experiences. But that tends to be an issue when we’re all writing about the same life processes and situations.

How do we write about experiences that most people have with a unique angle? How do we find new ways to talk about things that have been talked about for thousands of years? Here are some words of advice for doing so.

Focus On The Details

Whether you’re writing about addiction, finding love, or living in New York, chances are it’s been covered already. Just take Leslie Jamison’s recent memoir The Recovering or Sloane Crosley’s essay collection Look Alive Out There, both 2018 releases. Still, there’s room for writers who have a unique take on an experience or who can, quite simply, write about something beautifully.

Part of writing about an experience is reflecting over it: Alexander Smith writes in On Writing Essays that “a quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit are all that the essayist requires to start business with.” Heather Thomson connects this to her own writing “recognizing that every experience, in some way, has the potential for meaning.”

Something that may help you write about a common experience is focusing on the details. What minute, concrete example can you focus on from a particular day in your life? How did your experience with the situation differ from what you always expected? Can you find an element of your experience that challenges a cultural narrative?

Find Your Connection

As you’ve undoubtedly read, keeping a journal is extremely helpful for a writer. It’s a safe space to experiment with storytelling and form as well as a private creative outlet that doesn’t demand revision or perfection. Sometimes writing it out for myself helps me determine if an experience holds deeper significance that could be explored in an essay. Starting with a short passage written for ourselves can be a helpful beginning point.

Something you always want to ask yourself when you’re writing is what significance it holds for you. Why do you feel compelled to write about this experience? Once you find that why, write more. Write as much as you can. What happens in early drafts is a lot of throat-clearing that can be revised or even cut. Keep writing to open up to vulnerability. Sometimes that is where we find our best words.

Read Essays and Books That Treat Similar Subject Matter

Want to write an autotheory memoir? Read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Interested in writing about your college years? Essays in Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness may help you generate ideas.

Use resources like Goodreads or websites like Literary Hub to find book criticism that makes it possible for you to find books within your genre or category.

Fit In Unique References

Something I’ve noticed about a lot of modern essays is that they tend to deftly integrate pop culture or obscure references. Invoking things related to but outside of your experience should never be forced, but sometimes our interactions with obscure academia, older texts, music, or even internet culture can enrich a narrative. While your personal essay should be driven by your voice and experiences, you’re more than welcome to quote others and consider their thinking next to your own.

Although writing an essay that incorporates the unexpected may seem daunting, it’s possible to write creatively about your experiences even if they are commonplace. Taking the time to practice your writing will always help you in your writing career.

Kayla Dean has written for publications like Electric Literature, Ploughshares online, Darling, and Bella Grace. She has an MA and BA in English. You can find her on Twitter@kayladeanwrites.

The post How To Write About Commonplace Experiences In Creative Nonfiction appeared first on DIY MFA.

Marilynne Robinson. Toure. Sarah Vowell.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Rebecca Solnit. Roxane Gay. These writers’ success — all expert essayists — reflect the truest picture of essays’ larger popularity.

Despite my reading preferences, I’m a little intimidated about writing the particular form. In search of essay writing encouragement, I asked Jayne English, a friend and columnist at Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, to demystify the process of writing essays.

Jayne, we’ve been friends for decades. We’ve also been poetry and prose critique partners off and on. I know you write articles, poetry, and currently, essays for Relief. Your Relief bio mentions some of your diverse publications.

How did you get started writing essays? Did your essay writing begin with Relief? How long have you written essays?

I was in a poetry workshop led by Bruce Kirby, who was the blog editor for Relief at the time. He suggested I submit a few essays to Relief for consideration. They published my first essay in 2014. I had been concentrating on poetry, so the prospect of writing even a 500-word essay every month sounded a little daunting, but I’m glad I accepted the challenge!

Your essays are meditative, layered, and eclectic. You weave threads of culture, news, art, and faith into a cohesive piece of writing. All the things, I feel, that make for great essays and great poetry. Do you think your poetry writing helps you in writing essays?

Writing poetry definitely benefits writing essays. Poetry helps you slow down and think about the movement and sound of words. It helps you think carefully about the meanings of the words you choose. I really like how the Old French and Late Latin blend the origins of “essay” to give the sense of “weighing,” which is how I would describe my essays. Writing, reading, and discussing poetry has really helped train my mind to weigh, to carefully consider, the ideas and concepts I’m writing about.

Do you write essays outside of your Relief column? Why do you think essays are important?

I try to write one essay or even a short story per month outside of writing for Relief. Writing for other journals, in other genres, challenges me to move out of my depth to hopefully become a stronger, more imaginative writer.

I used to write non-fiction articles which provided answers to questions about a particular topic. What I think is important about essays is that their scope goes beyond answering questions to raising them. It’s like Edward Hopper’s painting Cape Cod Morning. The subject stands at her window, sunlight slants into the room and across trees and grasses. She has probably seen this view a thousand times before. But this time she leans forward, looking intently out the window. Something unexpected has caught her attention. Essays are important because they captivate our thoughts making us lean forward to see something that may have been outside our window all along, but is now cast in a different light.

It’s this posture – this leaning in to curiosity, discovery, wonder – that I hope my essays elicit in the mind of the reader.

I hate to ask this but which form is your favorite — poetry or essay? Why or why not?

Writing essays seems to suit my thought processes at the moment, and I find it easier to weave themes together in a conversational format. My hope is that my essays are poetic – in sound, movement, metaphor, and in how they can transport a reader to an unexpected place and help them pull away from their world; what Coleridge called “the film of familiarity.”

You and I talk about writing and productivity often. We writers are quite harsh in judging our creative output. We both struggle with “writing slow” but I think I have a slightly different take on what makes a slow writer. I write a 700-word local library column which takes a week of thinking/planning/research and 2-3 days to write. A typical 800+-word DIY MFA article takes weeks of thinking/planning/research and about 5 days to write.

What’s your definition of writing slow?

For me, writing slow includes reading and writing together. As you mentioned, my writing usually weaves together something from different disciplines like art, music, literature. So while I’m writing about this idea that has captivated me I’m thinking, what is this like? As in poetry I begin to look for metaphors to help shed light on the concept.

Metaphors in my essays have included gyroscopes to represent life’s frantic nature, reaching for beads of mercury as a way of looking at longing, and thinking about the Venus de Milo as a metaphor for beauty in brokenness.

I try to remind myself that writing speed doesn’t correlate with writing quality. If we writers focus on craft, quality will follow. With that in mind, do you have an essay you’re particularly proud of?

“Peeling Back the Layers” comes to mind, it’s about Bill Murray’s movie St. Vincent. It should have been just a sentimental movie, and while there were some elements of that, I was really pleased to see the movie venture into deeper themes. I loved watching the characters change as their lives intersected, or usually, collided.

In my reading for the essay, I came across a beautiful poem [“here rests”] by Lucille Clifton that really shed light on the change that was going on inside the characters. It’s not really just about the characters, though. It’s about what goes on in us as we watch them. The movie and the poetry are great examples of how art can help us develop as individuals as we come under its influence and live briefly in its story.

Jayne English is a blogger, essayist and poet. Her work has appeared in American Libraries, Saint Katherine Review, and Woman’s Touch among other magazines. She is smitten with poetry and often turns to poets to translate the language of life into “motes/of gold moving/from shadow to shadow.” An archive of Jayne English’s essays can be found at Relief.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Exploring Essay Writing: An Interview With Jayne English appeared first on DIY MFA.

So glad you could be here with me for this awesome episode of DIY MFA Radio.

Today, I’m talking to pop culture and sci-fi guru, Ryan Britt, talking about his new book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read, And Other Geeky Truths. Listen in to hear us geek out about life, literature, and all things nerdy. 

In this episode Ryan and I discuss:

• The differences between writing for and reading online vs. writing and reading a book
• What it actually means to be a geek in this day and age
• Why being a geek is a good thing, especially if you’re a writer

Plus, Ryan’s #1 tip for writers.

Don’t forget, if you want to dig deeper, join me for a “Stop Dreaming, Start Doing” workshop on January 12 at 8pm ET. Sign up at DIYMFA.com/openhouse.

Also, winter enrollment for DIY MFA 101 now open. Learn more at DIYMFA.com/DIYMFA101

Resources:

About Ryan Britt

If the ghost of Marshall McLuhan were to merge with Chuck Klosterman, you’d have essayist Ryan Britt. Ryan has never met a monster, alien, wizard or superhero that didn’t require further discussion, and in his book he answers questions you’ve probably never thought to ask (but now that he’s brought them up, you’re probably wondering about them too). In his book, he tackles topics like: Does anyone in the Star Wars universe read books? Is Pete Best the Bilbo to Ringo Starr’s Frodo? And, what ever happened to Biff Tannen’s parents? If you’re a geek like me (and even if you’re not) you’re going to get a kick out of this entertaining manifesto for modern geekdom.

But seriously, Ryan has written for The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Awl, VICE and The Morning News and is a consulting editor for Story. He was the staff writer for the Hugo Award-winning web magazine Tor.com, where he remains a contributor.

About LUKE SKYWALKER CAN’T READ

Britt recounts personal stories of coming of age amid the influence of 80s and 90s pop culture; how he learned to take his interests seriously from a big box store manager he nicknames Captain Space Pirate because of he was reminiscent of Harrison Ford; how his first “the birds and the bees” conversation came from asking his father about the pictures in an Omni magazine article entitled “Tyrannosaurus Sex: A Love Tail”; and how his next lesson in sex was from watching Jane Fonda in Barbarella, which quickly evolved into a life-changing epiphany.

Britt’s thoughtful and fun meditations on everything sci-fi and pop culture spins insights on what many of us have not known about our favorite stuff. He shows us how monster movies are just romantic comedies with commitment issues, claims nobody should get mad about super hero remakes, and argues that killer robots are probably harmless authenticity-seeking hipsters. Luke Skywalker Can’t Read tears down the wall between hardcore sci-fi readers and the mainstream, making it perfect both for cosplayers, or those who haven’t worn a costume since grade school.

To learn more about Ryan you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter, or visit his website.

Link to Episode 76

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, leave a review, and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available. Also, if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please share!

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome.

The post Episode 76: Life, Literature, and Everything Geeky – Interview with Ryan Britt appeared first on DIY MFA.