Emotional Pacing: Lessons in Writing a Trauma Memoir
Writing a memoir about childhood familial trauma has taken me into fraught storytelling territory. The narrative centers on growing up in the shadow of my maternal aunt’s murder that took place when my mother was pregnant with me. She kept her sister’s murder a closely guarded secret throughout my childhood. This aunt was my mother’s...
Consider the Platypus: Four Forms—Maybe—of the Lyric Essay
What is a lyric essay? Lyric comes from the late sixteenth century: from French lyrique or Latin lyricus, from Greek lurikos, from lura ‘lyre.’ To the ear, “lyre” and “liar” sound the same, which I resist because I do not condone lying in essays, lyric or otherwise. But mythology tells us that the origins of...
Writing as a Doorway to the Unknown in Ourselves
Dante’s often-quoted beginning of the Divine Comedy has the narrator arriving at a dark wood, unsure of which way to turn. To many writers and artists, Dante’s predicament is a familiar, disquieting, and essential starting place. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I write to reveal not what I know, but what I don’t know.” And of an...
Waxing Episodic: On Meg Tilly, Early Trauma and the Rise of the Fragmented Memoir
I have fallen for a thirty-year-old memoir. That fact that a memoir snagged me isn’t surprising. For all the genre’s pitfalls—the dogged self-reference, unmitigated earnestness and occasional fibbery—when a story is both well-told and true, its power is unparalleled. A good memoir can magnify silenced voices, shed light on overlooked places and connect us beyond...
Structure: Lifeblood of the Lyric Essay
Writing mostly poetry for the last two years, I had pretty much given up on prose. Until I met the lyric essay. It was as if I found myself a new lover. I was on a cloud-nine high: I didn’t have to write a tightly knitted argument required of a critical essay. I could loosely...
Inside the Box: On Queering the Fragment
To preserve the author’s preferred formatting, this Craft Essay is available here as a PDF document.
Vulnerability is Strength
The most important thing writing has taught me is this: the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. It sounds like bullshit. Here’s the thing: you can’t change the past, but if you can face it, both the present and the future will shift. And it’s...
Writing the Animal Other: Beyond Anthropomorphism
Some of my earliest writing advice was to beware anthropomorphism. Whenever an animal flew, stalked, or swam into an essay, I’d receive that warning at least once in any critique. Having come to writing in middle age after experiences as a naturalist, park ranger, field biologist, and graduate student of ecology, this happened often. Early...
Good Noticing: A Whole-Body Strategy
Several years ago, I took a beginning mindfulness class. It was held in a sad room in a hospital: no windows; buzzing fluorescent lights; uncomfortable plastic chairs. But I loved our instructor. She was probably in her late forties, with long russet hair and thick bangs that almost covered her eyes. When she sat in...
Here’s Looking at Me: Lessons in Memoir from Self-Portraiture
Conveying ourselves as characters on the page is tricky business, like expecting a butterfly to pin its own wings. As James Hall explains in The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History, when Montaigne put pen to paper, he referenced those who had put brush to canvas, citing King René of Anjou: “I saw…King Francis II being presented...
House as Home: Writing the Places That Raised Us
Childhood was rooms and doors, gaping lace in open windows, potted parsley in yellow kitchens, splintered floorboards, buckled carpets, the bug-zapper sound that the basement light made when your father pulled the string, and then that tube of violet light abuzz over his box of tools. Childhood was place as much as it was people,...
Odd Objects: In Praise of the Wunderkammer
No matter how abstract your topic, how intangible,your first step is to find things you can drop on your foot.—John Maguire The world is too big today, so I close my pandemic journal after I’ve made my notes for the day, and head to various mudlarking Twitter accounts, marveling at the clay pipes, Roman pottery,...
Writing in Persona: Language, Lipstick & a Mirror
My mother kept a large wicker basket, the size of a trunk, filled with what she called dress-up clothes. There was the red accordion-pleated organza dress my mother wore to prom, a couple pairs of what we called ‘princess’ shoes, a collapsible stovepipe top hat that my father had inherited from his father, pirate eye...
Run Your Essay into Shape, Dance or Drum It Free
Two months after I began an MFA program, deep in a pandemic winter, I fractured my ankle. “A chunk of bone came off when you tore the ligament,” said the emergency doc, looking at the CT scan. “No running for a few months,” said the physio. Excellent. Running is how I self-medicate out of low-level...
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