Despite what we’re taught in workshops, the best personal essays are, on some level, our “entire existence crammed” into a limited number of pages. Not in terms of content, but it terms of voice and force, the layers of thinking, writing and living one has accumulated. (It strikes me that, experiencing a diagnosis of mortal illness, or perhaps I should say, the moment just after, one’s entire existence is crammed into, hones down to, one life-altering intake of breath). Everything we are, have been, everything we’ve experienced, comes to bear upon the current writing problem, doesn’t it? And each new essay builds upon it, like a process of geological deposition. As Wiman puts it, that first essay he published, though addressing multiple levels of experience, demanded another essay, and then another, and eventually a collection of essays, and a collection of poems, and a completely new direction for his writing and his life.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
A matter of life, death, and meaning …
…Essay Daily: Take One Daily and Call Me Every Morning: 12/18: Eva Saulitis on The Art of the Personal (Cancer) Essay. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Ah, I'm afraid I understand that "one life-altering intake of breath" moment. And so it goes.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with essays the spring from such moments, though, is the danger of self-pity -- and I refuse to fall into that wallow.