The Next American Essay Book

I would use this book in an Experimental Creative Nonfiction course for advanced writers. Highlights below.

From "The Raven" by Barry Lopez:

"The instrument will be black but no longer shiny, the back of it sheathed in armor plate and the underside padded like a wolf's foot....You will see that the talons are not as sharp as you might have suspected. They are made to grasp and hold fast, not to puncture. They are more like the jaws of a trap than a fistful of ice picks....He can weather a storm on a barren juniper limb; he can pick up and examine the crow's eye without breaking it" (25).

From Joan Didion's "The White Album":

In the essay, Didion uses her doctor's notes to inform the reader that she was a patient who "'experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical evaluation elicited no positive findings...The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress....Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted and bizarre....In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate in their task of controlling or containing an underlying psychotic process and are therefore in process of failure. The content of patient's responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level sophistication patient's response are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient's thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure" (49-50).

From Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse":

"The Crab Nebula, in the constellation Taurus, looks, through binoculars, like a smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploring. Light from its explosion first reached the earth in 1054; it was a supernova then, and so bright it shone in the daytime. Now it is not so bright, but it is still exploding. It expands at the rate of seventy million miles a day. It is interesting look through binoculars at something expanding seventy million miles a day. It does not budge. Its apparent size does not increase. Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanist have measure some ordinary lichen twice, at fifty-year intervals, without detaching any growth at all. And yet their cells divide' they live./ The small ring of light was like these things--like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion 4,200 light-years away: it was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything./ It had nothing to do with anything. The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far away, to keep the world alive. The white ring was not enough. It was feeble and worthless. It was as useless as a memory; it was as off kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory./ When you try your hardest to recall someone's face, or the look of a place, you see in your mind's eye some vague and terrible sight such as this. It is dark' it is insubstantial' it is all wrong./ The white ring and the saturated darkness made the earth and sky look as they must look in the memories of the careless dead. What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of the Yakima, and were alone in eternity. Empty space stoppered our eyes and mouths' we cared for nothing" (105).

The editor, on Emerson's discovery of the essay as the new literature he had been seeking:

"'Here everything is admissible--philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism--all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversations, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech" (252).

The editor, revealing a centuries-long distaste for genre-bending among critics:

"Moby Dick was especially dishonorable. Why? 'The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,' wrote the New York Globe in 1851" (279).

From Susan Griffin's "Red Shoes":

"Writing of his experience of torture, Jean Amery recalls that 'one never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may...call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity are destroyed when there is cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints.' It is this that is humiliating and, as Amery writes, 'The shame of destruction cannot be erased'" (309).

The editor, on genre:

The "essay's innate intoxication with the mathematics of language--the multiplication of data, evidence, argument--distinguishes the genre as much as it taboos it. Its occasional focus on the list as a formal device, for example, eschews the comforting narratives of fiction, the intimate lyricism of poetry, and the sensational admissions of memoir, allowing its writers to make art out of the gossip and noise and rubble and minutia that often get overlooked in literature, fashioning instead a baudy, relentless, user-unfriendly art that is not comforting, not intimate, not sensational at all, but suspicious, messy, and stubbornly unresolved" (317-8).

From Carole Maso's "The Intercession of Saints":

"The long bones of illness, her tuning forks" (399).

From Thalia Field's "A Therefore 1":

"A moth saw a flame and thought what it saw was its heart and it said, 'What is my heart doing over there, away from me?' And believing that it could not be whole without an organ it had never even used, the moth dove toward it, hoping to reabsorb it in open surgery, but instead there was a sound as empty as a lit match extinguished on water, and in an instant the heart that had stood away from the moth became the central unimagined ecstasy the moth couldn't live without" (415).

"In the mind, words are heard bone-dry without the benefit of breath" (420).

"In many ways we are as gothic as the thick illogical spaces between stars, between good ideas, between motel rooms" (421).

The editor, defining the lyric essay:

"The lyric essay inherits from the principal strands of nonfiction the makings of its own hybrid version of the form. It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay, and conflates them into a literary form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception. What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay what it takes is a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. The result of this ironic parentage is that lyric essays seek answers, yet seldom seem to find them. They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case, or may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet 'the other.' ...Facts, in these essays, are not clear-cut things. What is a lyric essay? It's an oxymoron: ...an argument that has no chance of proving anything" (436).