Beyond Perhapsing: “Split-Toning” Techniques for Speculation in Nonfiction
When I teach nonfiction, one of my favorite essays to reference is Lisa Knopp’s Brevity essay, “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction.” During my MFA program, Knopp’s essay was prominent in my thoughts as I learned how to read and write “invented” spaces—places where imagination and speculation must be added to flesh out meaning....
Invisible Partners
On my mother’s refrigerator in Chiang Mai, Thailand, are pictures from my high school dances in Chicago, when we lived in bi-level as a happy immigrant family—Homecoming, the Sweetheart’s Dance, Prom. There are so many photos of me you can barely see the surface of the fridge, just a hundred smiling faces of Ira with...
A Picture’s Worth: Learning from Looking at Photographs with Judith Kitchen
Four years ago I attended a class, “Worth 1,000 Words,” taught by essayist and critic Judith Kitchen, who passed away in fall 2014. At the time, Kitchen was finishing a book that had grown out of a collection of family photos, and she was interested in talking about how photographs and text relate on the...
Journey’s End
We, my extended family, lost our bungalows to a storm named Sandy, one knocked on its side off its cement blocks, one vanished, not a board, not a shingle left; it was raptured. We called them bungalows, the Big and the Little. My grandfather, an immigrant from Barbados, built the bungalows in the 1920s. The...
Interviewing Emily Dickinson
It’s not that I thought She might really be there, behind the tilting tombstone: Emily Dickinson December 10, 1830 Called Back May 15, 1886, not that I thought touching the stone might make up for something missing in me, some lack I might get back through this pilgrimage—ok, I’m lying—I wanted to touch her, wanted...
A Fiction Writer Takes Off Her Shoes
The day was a perfect idea of itself, of what a Saturday afternoon in late spring should be: the sun a buzzing yellow, red barns, white houses, a neat hem of highway skirting the Ohio hills. I should remember what they looked like, what point of sowing-raising-harvest was in motion. Perhaps the earth was a...
I Dream About the Apocalypse
My brother—a firefighter in real life—tries to organize us all, get us down into some echoing subterranean cavern that looks like the inside of a ship. Explosions rattle in my sternum, giant robots search the houses, wind flings fire this way and that. The end of everything. And I feel—relief. If I open my eyes...
Ignorance, Lies, Imagination and Subversion in the Writing of Memoir and the Personal Essay
I’ve long believed that much of the power of memoir and the personal essay comes from the fact that the writer allows the reader to stand alongside him or her, participating in events that have already happened and sharing space with the author’s sensibility. To make that possible, I tell my students, it can be...
Method and Mystery: Speculation in Narrative Art
I should say right off that what I think I’m doing as a literary artist is writing toward revelation, usually revelation of a personal sort, which may or may not be of use to my readers. I also must confess that “not knowing” comes way too naturally to me. Not only that, but I’m too...
On Being a Trucker
All the stuff I don’t have to say. How lucky I am. Like “I drive a truck of cheap perfume.” Of canned tomatoes, of cleaning supplies, I’m not sure it matters, or maybe it does in the trucking world: I drive tires vs. I drive milk. Oil vs. Seafood. Furniture. Toilets. A truck of cars....
White Lies
Arpi, a Lebanese girl who pronounced ask as ax no matter how many times the teacher corrected her, must have been delighted by the arrival of Connie, the new girl in our fifth grade class. Connie was albino, exceptionally white even by the ultra-Caucasian standards of our southern suburb. Only her eyelids had color: mouse-nose...
Duplex
The person on my voicemail was a man. His voice was high, higher than most men’s voices I’d heard before, and he spoke slowly, as if reading off of cue cards. I didn’t know when the call came in. My cell phone never rang. Rather, in that late morning, the phone vibrated, informing me of...
Julio At Large
I hadn’t known the girl very well, and rarely gave her much thought before she disappeared the summer between ninth and tenth grade, when my family lived in Buckhannon, West Virginia. We both had last names that started with the letter “B,” so we frequently had to sit next to each other in classes where...
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