I’ve recently picked up a copy of Robert Bruce’s biography, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude and, oh my, the love letters sent from Bell to Mabel Hubbard have left me breathless. (Chapter 15, if like me you wish to skip ahead.) Bell spent years giving elocution lessons to Mabel, left deaf after a bout of scarlet fever. Amidst his private lessons and experiments with the telephone, he began to write Mabel of his feelings for her. It’s a longish story, and one I’ll let you discover for yourself, but I’ve found some of his handwritten letters to her in the national archive.

A few particularly delicious excerpts: “You do not know–you cannot guess–how much I love you…I wish to amend my life for you.” And, upon learning of her reservations: “I shall not trouble you any more…if you still think of me as you do now, I shall try to be happy in my work.” And again: “Nature has made me what I am and it is not my fault that I have such strong feelings. I can restrain them but I cannot prevent them from arising.” And then, after marriage: “I am afraid of the distance between us — for something tells me that you care less for me…when I am far away…You have grown into my heart my darling…” Oh my, oh my.

I recommend viewing the archive yourself (Library of Congress), where the letters have been typed up and are thus easier to read. Though they are indeed pretty just to see: where the ink fell thick; the way in which the script leans forward suggesting speed; how Bell signs off, your own; the way he rotates the page and fills space. There is something immediate about a handwritten letter: the way the body of the writer cannot be extracted from what it written: the letter, an extension of a self: a self in the fire of a moment, reaching and thinking and forlorn and still somehow hopeful.

Still at the thrilling AWP, I just left a panel featuring the writers Stephen Elliott, Nick Flynn and Ander Monson, introduced by Graywolf editor, Jeffrey Shotts. Eula Biss, notably the only woman scheduled to speak at the panel, was snowed in in Chicago, alas.

Anyway, in looking over my notes from the panel, I think the ideas and language employed in the discussion relate to visual creativity in important ways. The panel was titled To Tell You the Truth: Strategies in New Nonfiction. While the panelists did (do) discuss art, all comments about drawing or design are my own. Here are my notes, by author.

Introduction (Jeffrey Shotts)
Nonfiction moves beyond reportage into the territory of tangents, dead-ends, errancy and wonder. Just because an essay is pursuing something, doesn’t mean what it’s arrived at is what it’s gained; the form is an alternative to judgment. A question we need to ask ourselves is: do we read nonfiction to experience art or to learn information? An essay, an illustration, a design is fixed in time and space and artifact; the essay is thinking, frozen. A virtual space the viewer/reader can inhabit for a while.

Stephen Elliott
Strategy, part of the title of the panel, implies we as creatives know where we’re going; but strategy only enters the process after the thing is written or made. A filter is a critical utility in order to determine feedback that is helpful from that which isn’t. This relates to aesthetic vision; without a personal vision, you cannot write, cannot make. There are three reasons a person will read a memoir:

1. Perfect/beautiful/really nice sentences.
2. Tension.
   This is built while maintaining story and character and narrative. Themes that digress from the narrative can only emerge if enough tension is built. The self is the thing around which the tension and everything else exists.
3. Honesty.
   This is not about not lying. Lying requires intent but honesty is bordered by self-knowledge…in order to write honestly, you have to evaluate yourself intensely, honestly.

The reader is the most important person, needs to be the first concern of the author. By making characters singular (e.g. only good or only bad), you’re hiding something from the reader. By worrying about someone’s feelings, you’re putting something ahead of the reader. In illustration, when you follow someone else’s vision, the inauthenticity of the pursuit is apparent to the viewer. This cannot happen.

Stephen ended gloriously, “I don’t know. I just came up with this.”

Nick Flynn
People hear what they want to hear. They project their needs and desires and lives onto your work. So one of our functions is to create a screen that others can project onto in order to make meaning from their experiences. We are not writing from the soul; instead, we need to uncover our deeper purpose. Why do we cling to the stories we’ve told ourselves? What is behind them? What do the stories hide? The stories are important only as a threshold to cross. Here is the formula (to which he then said, a la Van Wilder, “Write this down.”:

1. Hear the stories you tell yourself about yourself. The stories you always tell.
2. Start with a random image and discover its meaning.
3. Ask yourself what you think you know and how long you’ve known it.
4. Let the story lose its thread and push further into the unknown.
5. The point where language breaks down is a useful edge, revealing to us the space between the familiar and the unknown.

The story (the essay, the book, the illustration, the design) is not about what happens to us but how we perceive what happens to us. The process of making is more about what we don’t know, is more about discovering the hidden pattern beneath the world. Something happened; some things actually do happen. We need to come up against the reality of the world and perceive them.

Ander Monson
Essays are technologies are designed to handle infinity; they expand and allow us to expand into them, outward from them. They chip away at the stability of the self. What is interesting is the limitless; what is interesting are the limits. The interiors of our brains are the most readily available infinities. Look at Billy Idol’s album, Cyberpunk.

Album cover which came with a floppy disc and instructions to use with a color Macintosh. 1993.

This is a document of what we thought at one point the future might have been. In other words, this is a document of the way Idol’s brain worked at one point in time; it’s a mind we can enter into. The essay-the text, the form and the white space-are places to study, to imagine, to illuminate the dark spaces of our minds. Through essays (design, illustration), we illuminate the world around us, editing it down so facts and ideas get their own tiny spotlights.

From the Q & A
What are other ways to think about tension?

• Tension can be generated by: waiting for something to happen; between two people in a room (keep them in the room together as long as possible); syntax/diction; the tension between the unknown and the known and how it gets discovered; tension emerging from subject-switching and disconnection.

Any new mediums you’re using?

• The web, for Vanishing Point, is used to interact with the text, to undercut what’s happening in the book. There’s a critical element of play important [to the process of discovery]. The web pages constantly erode/modify/self-edit the original; in this way, the web is a performance. (Monson)




• The written word can be as fluid as the stuff on the web. It can contain a kind of archive of information uncontainable in the book. (Flynn)




• The Rumpus is a space in which creative energy is spent in writing emails. We pass along information (about the self, about the world) this way. As writers, we have a smaller audience but create deeper connections with them. That’s what this is about. (Elliott)

From my walk to the Metro station

Without further ado, here are some notes from one panel at the conference.

A photo proving I was at the panel, at least for the duration of the photo-taking.

Playing for Keeps: Intensity and Creativity in the Lyric Essay
Panelists: Steven Harvey, Kathryn Winograd, Robert Root (in absentia), Rebecca McClanahan

In a standing-room only space amidst a largely and perhaps notably female audience, a group of AWP-goers gathered to discuss the lyric essay: what the name means, what it is, what it might be. Here are my notes from the conversation, delineated by speaker.

Introduction (Steven Harvey)
The lyric essay was first named by Deborah Tall in 1994, then-editor of Seneca Review, in a note to John D’Agata. What she said was that he was looking for a form propelled not by information but by possibility of transformative experience. You are talking about the lyric, she’d said. Then Steven asked: but what does a definition matter? Rather, we should ask: when is a lyric essay good? The lyric is a license to experiment, to play with language but must always contain a sense of intensity, level of passion and intelligence. (Throughout the intro, names were dropped: Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, D’Agata and one affectionately named nay-sayer, Philip Lopate.)

13 Ways of Looking at the Lyric Essay in 15 Minutes (Rebecca McClanahan)

1. Something Like Music in My Head
   • - Not all music is melodic (atonal, minor key)
   • - Change a note or two and the essay is a different key
2. Beauty is as Beauty Does
   • - Subject need not be pretty poetic or musical or serious
   • - Humor is almost never discussed with lyricism
   • - Does not have to be large or on the surface important
   • - Absolute attention is prayer
3. Close Cover After Striking
   • - Need two or three elements to start something
4. Lyric Essay as Time Travel, or Move Fluidly In and Out of Time
   • - Elements of the essay existing on independent and colliding time tracks
5. How Many I’s Does It Take to Change an Essay
   • - Speaker as I
   • - The I might be absent at first
   • - There might be multiple variations on self (past, present)
6. Caution: Contents Under Pressure
   • - Every word matters
   • - What is the musical score running beneath essay
   • - Subject must fit its container
7. Say It Again, Sam
   • - Tone poems, repeating phrases/sounds/mantra
   • - Repeated loops or braids (In nebraska, ted)
8. Take a Breath
   • - Music only exists because of silence between the sounds
9. Right Here, Right Now
   • - Feeling of immediacy, of a mind is discovering its subject even as words appear on page
10. Ride the Train of Thought or Language All the Way to Meaning
    • - Language (leaps of thought), engine that pulls the train of meaning
    • - Balance between music and meaning
11. Imagine There’s a Heaven or Hell
    • - Speculate, wonder, imagine, the gift of perhaps
12. Go Ahead and Wear the Crazy Hat
    • - Be weird, idiosyncratic structure
    • - Hat alone isn’t enough; object of affection/true subject
13. Get Out While the Getting’s Good
    • - Endings as openings; allow reader to complete transaction; reader supplies final chord

This is Not a Lyric Essay (Robert Root, read by Harvey)
The lyric essay might be considered as a kind of blurting of words: unplanned, spontaneous, first and final draft, charged. It has a kind of inadvertence. The lyric can be felt in the blood. Place is a lyric essay. Deborah Tall said of the lyric it partakes of the essay in its weight, in its desire to engage with facts, in its passion. The form is simultaneously essay and poem and music; attends language with precision and rigor but with a different vision from poetry about what it might achieve. The lyric is an entity in itself; embodies a sense of wholeness; is an essence; is not decorative. As Lia Purpura says: the form is a necessity of thought.

How Important White Space is in Poems and the Lyric Essay (Kathryn Winograd)
In a poem, white space is everything on the page unmarked. It has the power of juxtaposition; is the poet’s unspeakable; it is movement mapped out. Essays speak of the vertical movement of the essay (verticality through associative memory, descriptions); they contain intersections of consciousness and unconsciousness, of associations. For a poet, white space is what they cannot or will not say, it is their essential unsayable; that which is understood only on intuitive level. Beneath everything I am writing is absence. The ultimate tension in writing, in white space: what is written v. what is not.

Unmaking of the Made-Up Self (Steven Harvey)
Harvey found the lyric after becoming weary of his own voice. After he realized the self as top hat and cape of imagination. The lyric offers a breakdown of the persona, a kind of portal in which the self comes apart, in which the process of disintegration is seen. In the lyric, the voice is absorbed by subject matter and the self-assured persona is liberated. In Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, we witness an insistently low-key self, a weary voice in transformation. In this voice, the I is enlarged by becoming part of something bigger than itself; the self does not have the last word but blossoms, allows itself to be transformed by bumps and texts and countertexts and new information.

Let us begin with a chart that Alison Deming illustrates for all of her workshops.

A chart like this is certainly useful in a broad sense of understanding the context in which one is working. And we can use it as a point of departure here. However, problems persist, such as the question of philosophy (where does that fit into the chart and how has that genre shifted over time). And more importantly, what are the definitions of these categories? And note that I’ve elevated the personal essay, because it’s obviously superior, and lowered the historical biography, because those are boring. Anyway, it’s a starting point.

I wonder if the essay, an essay…a singular thing…can span in its lifetime all categories. Why not.

So, I first heard the term book-length essay spoken by the perpetually interesting, inquisitive, sexy John D’Agata with regard to his recent book, About a Mountain. It certainly seems accurate in the sense that the book moves quickly, as a mind, consistently building to something, incidentally providing copious amounts of information (cited in the endnotes) and weaving, in whispers, the personal narrative. Fine.

But I’ve also heard that narrative nonfiction is easier to sell to a publisher than a collection of essays. Is the book-length essay a selling point? Further, as Ander Monson notes, the idea of the collection fails to acknowledge the arrangement of the essays, the art of their assembly and the ordering principle/s around which they orbit (ie. their center, if an essay or anything can have a center). Does the essay, then, have to do with focus?

This week, I began reading D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay, which makes some interesting claims about what an essay is or should or might or must be:

The essay tries to replicate the activity of the mind.

A form that’s not propelled by information but one compelled instead by individual expression-by inquiry, by opinion, by wonder, by doubt.

The term essay derives from Middle French essai, a test, a trial, an experiment. The essay is the equivalent of a mind in rumination, performing as if improvisation; the reception of new ideas, the discover of unknowns, the encounter with the “other.”

D’Agata tells us that writing originated with Sumerians (also discussed in Proust and the Squid for accounting purposes. In other words: writing began with nonfiction. However, D’Agata says, he is examining the origins of the essay in search of art.

Lastly, again from Alison:
The exploration of a subject through the lens of the self, where the self is not the subject.

Thinking about the essay in these terms presents a logic which can extend to the [length of a] book, no? I guess then the question is about the limits of this idea. When does a book-length essay become a book of essays? Next, we shall bring the question of graphics into this thang.