The Personal Hazards of a Personal Essay

I have been writing personal essays for years, but also been getting rejection letters for years, so I was thrilled to get an acceptance last week from the Morning News. I wrote this essay, "The Debt" for a 48-hour magazine competition, where they give you a topic, in this case debt, and you have 24 hours to submit something. They take the next 24 hours to compile, edit, and lay out the magazine.

I didn't get accepted to that, but I was happy with the piece I wrote from a literary perspective. It was about money I had loaned my ex boyfriend for a move across country, and because I wrote it so fast and because I had a topic for which I couldn't think of any other material, I didn't censor myself the way I usually do. It's a big debate in the nonfiction world about how much you worry about the people you write about, and what kind of privacy you owe them and whether you should let them read the piece before you publish it. "No apologies" is the first rule of writing, said a friend recently, but I usually fall heavily to the other side. Other people have a right to privacy, and I usually work hard to be sensitive to that.

In this case I wasn't. I had a couple of people read the essay, and I asked them how the "characters" of my ex boyfriend and current boyfriend came off. "Fine," my readers said. "I see that this is a complicated, nuanced situation, and everyone in the story seems reasonable."

I submitted the story to the Morning News, and let's be honest, I have been rejected so many times I didn't really think this would be any different, so I probably didn't think about the ramifications publishing a fairly personal story as much as I should have. But I got an email a couple days later saying they wanted it. Great! I spent a significant amount of time on some areas the editor wanted more information on, and sent it in. It went up yesterday.

Then there were two issues: 1) the magazine put a somewhat lurid sounding title and blurb on it, which pointed the reader toward thinking my ex boyfriend was a real jerk who was taking advantage of me and 2) I realized I had written my ex boyfriend to be a bit of a jerk who was taking advantage of me. He and I have both done less-than-generous things to each other, and it was true that he hadn't paid me back what I loaned him, but that wasn't the point of the essay at all. Some people saw what I meant them to see---that this was a painful and complicated situation. Others saw what I had (I admit) showed them---the deadbeat jerk. Or, they saw their own ex boyfriends or their own debtors, and magnified the character with that lens.

Once you have published something, it is out of your hands, and your readers will make it their own. This essay resonated with people, both in the way I wanted it to (what do you do with a serious longtime love that has ended) and in ways I very much didn't (take that guy to small claims court!). On one hand, the passionate replies I received in the comments section and personally are a great testament to a successful piece, and I'm deeply moved by them. But on the other, I feel mortifyingly exposed, and feel that have done a disservice to the people I wrote about.

Some of you will say (and have said), you're an idiot. You wrote about your personal business, so what are you whining about? I suppose it was naive, and thoughtless, or maybe I rightly sacrificed to my craft. I don't know. I thought about asking the editors to take it down, but that's hard too, since I'm a writer, and trying to make it as a creative nonfiction writer, and it's the deep personal conflict that makes this piece successful.

I don't really have a summary here, except to apologize to anyone I hurt with writing, this time or any time. And I'm very interested in thoughts on this topic.

Longform.org

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging very much is that there aren't that many solid personal essays online, and its hard to discuss something with you when you haven't read it. Most of my favorite essays are in magazines that you need subscription for to read online or that aren't online at all, like many literary magazines or book collections. Blogs have become a font for mini essays, but they are by nature short, and so less meandering and ruminative and personal.

I just found this site (via Slate.com) called Longform.com.. Here's the description: "Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser."

Looks like they have a variety of stuff from straight nonfiction and reporting to personal essay. I'll let you know if I see anything especially good.

Malcolm Gladwell: Overdrive

You know how every month on the cover of Glamour and Marie Claire it says "25 Sex Tips!" or "Lose Weight!" and on the Oprah and Martha Stewart Magazines it says "Get Organized!" and "Be Happier!" and after a few months of falling for it and buying the magazine you realize that every single lose-weight article says to exercise and eat better, and every single get-organized article says reduce your possessions and buy a shoe rack, and now you don't have to buy the magazine, you can just guess at the contents.

(As a sidenote, this is also the problem with many eHow.com articles---you polish you shoes by buying polish and using a cloth to apply it; you rent an apartment by visiting several apartments in your price range and picking your favorite, etc.)

In general, I don't want to read things where I can guess what the author will say in advance---I want to be surprised, at least a little bit. Now I talk a lot on this blog about how essays are about a mind in action, and the easiest way to see that mind work is by watching the author's opinion change or her ideas develop over the course of a piece of writing. In Malcolm Gladwell's book review of "Overhaul," a book by the guy who was appointed to oversee the federal bailout of General Motors, Gladwell has a thesis right from the beginning, which we get in classic five-paragraph-essay style at the end of the first paragraph:

The result is fascinating—although perhaps not entirely in the ways that its author intended.

But what Gladwell goes on to say about author Steven Rattner and the book and about General Motors is quite surprising, which is to say interesting. In true essayistic fashion, there is more than meets the eye; not only is this is a book review that is secretly an essay, it is an essay ostensibly about Overhaul and General Mills that is really about the private-equity model, which buys falling apart companies, patches them up, and sells them off for a profit. And maybe it wasn't even about that, but about the self-absorption and confidence that a person has to have to take on a job that has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake---a storyline that isn't surprising in itself, but is surprising because of where we found it.

Essay: Killing the Thetan

Someone just told me about a blog on religious issues called "Killing the Buddha." The first thing I read on it was an article called "Killing the Thetan," by J. C. Hallman about the recent New Yorker article on Paul Haggis and Scientology. The thing that interested me about "Killing the Thetan" is the emphasis on Hallman's process of analyzing the story, which is a nice example of a mind at work. Here's where this really hit me:

I realized there was a larger problem. When, as the writer of a piece about religion, you get too caught up in trying to color things one way or the other, when your allegiance to documented (and fact-checkable—this is The New Yorker, after all) facts takes precedence over everything else, you become blind to your own assumptions. A glaring surprise: “The Apostate” tosses around the world “cult” quite freely, and never even suggests what it might mean by the word. The piece relies on its own assumptions, and its readers’. In other words, there’s really no larger canvas that “The Apostate” seems to want to consider. It’s not going to tell us anything about cults, or religions, or, ultimately, people. It’s just a long news story.

Any time you say "I realized. . . ." there's a mind turning corners, tracking down a lead. And then there's a nice natural mystery set up (What?? What did you realize?) which creates built-in interest for the reader.

Some of the article is a bit messy and confusing, but I'd rather have a mess than a straightforward and unprobing piece.

Poem: In the Waiting Room

I love the poem In the Waiting Room, by Elizabeth Bishop, published in the 1970s. I don't really get it though. I mean I could get through an English exam with some analysis about the realization of the Other and of separation between oneself and others (notice my cultural studies-ish capitalization distinction there!) and a dash of gender/bodies/pain/social waiting, etc., but really, I just don't feel like I get it.

The reason I bring it up here, other than to bring it to your attention if you haven't come across it yet, is to talk about its essayistic quality of watching a mind process things. The narrator is a child, and has a child's blunt and and keen observations coupled with the cloudiness of mind that we all have, whether due to immaturity, or fear, or bias, or lack of information. This girl is curious, and questioning, and she doesn't come to any real answer to her questions, any more than I can answer what this poem means to me.

I also like the ending of this poem, as it goes from heady, massive, disorienting ideas back into the grounding specifics of time and place: Worcester, Feb. 5, 1918. Although, of course, there is a war on, and what can be more a source of questioning and disorientation than that.


In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

An Essay on the Essay

This 2002 Poets&Writers essay on the essay form by a Lousiana journalist named Michael Depp isn't particularly exciting, but it's a solid analysis of what the essay is with quotes by some major current essayists.

Here's an excerpt that pretty much nails it:

So what occasions the essay? If a writer has no surefire argument to make, no point to sway the reader toward, why flaunt personal vacillations in print? Why not leave the questions and doubts to the rough draft rather than give them life?

For Richard Rodriguez, the attraction is the essay's public rehearsal of ideas. . . . "For me, the drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life."

Let's Edit!

Hi Everyone,

A lot of writers or would-be writers are interested in how people edit. Some writers edit as they go, and some, like me, write a huge gush of junk and then go and do heavy cleanup. But no matter your method of arriving at a good first draft, you will pretty much always need a further edit.

Having a good external editor is an incredible and rare luxury, so in most cases you're own your own. In this case you really need to set the piece aside for as long as you can and take it back up with a fresh eye. If you have a deadline, you might only get an hour or two away from it, but in this case I want to look at something I wrote in grad school about 4 years ago. I like it, but it needs a serious edit. There's a chunk near the end that feels exotic, in the geological sense; there are some rhythmic clunks; and it feels a little bit shallower than it should given the underlying situation.

Below is the draft. The next post will have the edit.

The Draft:

It so happens that Elkhart, Indiana is about halfway between my parent’s home (Virginia) and school (Minnesota). It also happens that my paternal grandfather lives in an assisted living home in Elkhart, and that I can find absolutely no reason not to visit him on my drive from to the other. I stay overnight at my aunt’s house and together she and I drive over to Eastlake Terrace to meet my grandfather for breakfast.

“I sure wish you were staying for a couple of days,” says Grandpa. “You could help me buy a new CD player.” Half blind and deeply nostalgic, my grandfather has racks of Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, and Tony Bennett spilled out over his bureau, but his CD player has begun to shut off without warning, leaving him in a world both dark and silent.

“Well, we could go right now,” I say, really half joking.

“I’m ready,” he says.

We turn to my aunt. “Linda?”

Linda wavers.

To Linda, like much of my family, action is a great heaviness, and action that may result in spending money---no matter whose---carries a yacht anchor of lethargy.

“Let’s go.” I say. “Let’s do it.”

Linda suggests that buying a CD player will slow me down on my trip, which it will, but I am caught here between my turbulent past with my grandpa and my conscience; my wish to make Maryland before nightfall and my guilt for doing little to nothing for an old man in assisted living.

“No, it’s ok,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

We collect grandpa’s walker and wallet, turn out the lights, and he goes to turn off the CD which is miraculously still playing New York, New York. “Leave it,” I say. “Maybe it will be there for us when we get back.”

Going anywhere with the elderly is hard, I have learned. Linda pulls up to the curb at K Mart and deposits me and Grandpa, I collect the walker from the trunk and fold it open, Grandpa grasps it in fingers that shoot out every which way from the knuckles, and we head step by inching step to the electronics section at the back of the store. Grandpa is slightly awed by the size of K Mart. This is a new place to him. I know very little about electronics, but there are only a few CD player choices, one reason I’d rather come to a place like this than a more specialized one like Circuit City, even if there were one in Elkhart.

On the way here, in Linda’s tan Honda, Grandpa had said, “I guess I could buy any player I wanted, but I’d like to stay under $150. Do you think we could do that?” Despite, or perhaps because of, his monthly rent of over $2000, this is a major purchase for him. In fact the one we choose, which plays 5 CDs, a fantastic number in Grandpa’s eyes, is on sale for $80. We don’t have a cart, and this thing is heavy, so Grandpa insists I heave it onto the seat of his walker, which he pushes steadily to the checkout.

The few other K Mart shoppers flipping through racks and pushing carts of toilet paper and lawn care look at us. I wonder what they think---Making that old man carry your electronic equipment? Buying it for his granddaughter maybe? They could at least get a cart. We try to cram Grandpa and his walker through the check out aisle, and we finally succeed by folding and unfolding the walker, two clerks gaping at our gymnastics.

My grandfather’s other hobbies, apart from listening to his CDs and romancing the ladies ( he dumped the last one after she broke her hip and entered a nursing home) is bridge. He is a Life Master, but because of his blindness, his fellow players read out their cards play by play and he must keep it all up in his head; consequently his game has suffered. He has played at a major bridge tournament in every state except for Delaware and New Hampshire. Delaware and New Hampshire do not boast bridge communities large enough to very often move beyond the local chapter competitions. If Grandpa makes Delaware, he’ll work on New Hampshire to realize a dream. I imagine him dying right there in the Concord community center, slapping down his last trump card for a grand slam and declaring victory with his last breath. The New Hampshire paper reads: Man fulfills dream, uses heart to take trick.

But when he is not playing bridge (or romancing the healthier ladies) he is inviting anyone he can to come hear Glen Miller, Tony Martin, the lone tolerated woman, Ella Fitzgerald do their stuff, and they gladly accept, especially if there is gin or bourbon offered from the wet bar/ pharmacy----a liquor stash, sink, and repository for arthritis, cholesterol, and vitamin pills. My grandmother had once told me that in her youth, dancing was de rigueur, that live music wasn’t so expensive, wasn’t even a luxury. It was radios that were luxuries, and victrolas an absolute splurge.

Those guests will be happy to see us reenter East Lake Terrace, check ourselves in, pass a woman asleep in her chair, snoring, under a pastel painting of geraniums and cats. They will be happy to know that in Grandpa’s tiny apartment I have set up and hooked up his new machine, and transferred the old signs I had taped on the play and stop buttons to help Grandpa’s dimming eyes. I am about to put in the CDs, which I worry will be hard for Grandpa’s stiff hands to manage, but he shoos me off, reminding me that I’ve got a road to take, and it leads away from here.

* Note: my aunt's name has been changed for privacy, which I can be fanatical about when it comes to writing about others. We can discuss writing about people you know in another post.

On Interestingness

Today I asked someone at my company what they were working on that was interesting, and he said nothing really. He listed a few things and said, but those aren't very interesting.

"Then why do you work here?" I asked him. "Why not go get a more interesting job?"

(Let me just say that I'm lucky to work at a company where people are supposed to like their job because it's interesting. I know the majority of people in the world work to put food on the table, not for intellectual fulfillment.)

It turned out that I should have said, "What are you working on that is interesting TO YOU, regardless of whether you think it is interesting to others." Many people think that they are uninteresting or that their thoughts are uninteresting. Many people equate the word interesting with glamorous. But if you are interested in something, then it becomes interesting to other people.

In half the romantic movies in the world, the main character falls in love when they see the love interest light up about something---their dog, orphans, making boats in their garage. Listen, no one cares about people making boats in their garage. People fall in love because they love seeing someone else intensely interested.

This is why we will read a whole John McPhee book on oranges, or a Mark Kurlansky book on salt, or an Anne Fadiman essay on ice cream. They are interested in this pedestrian topic and that interestedness is exciting to us.

Now Twitter and Facebook and many blogs have shown us that there are also many people who think they are interesting when they are not. You do have to be able to present your topic or point of view in an elegant way to pass your sense of interest to others. And you may also have read another post of mine where I say that you need to pick weird interesting things to write about, which may contradict what I'm saying here. Unusual details or perspective does help in making a piece of writing interesting, just like having the sentence-level skill of John McPhee helps. But just being interested in your subject will carry you an awfully long way. You will naturally find all the funny, noodley, interesting pieces in your topic because you view it with an interesting gaze, and because human nature is what it is, we the reader will follow that interested gaze down to its source.

Words I've Never Quite Understood

Random Post.

Here is a list of words I have never quite understood precisely what they mean:

godhead
hegemony
avatar (the pre-video game version)
liminal

Here is a list of words that I was never able to remember in the past, but have recently, after many encounters, got a handle on:

sartorial: having to do with tailoring or clothes
avuncular: uncle-like
peripatetic: itinerant, having to do with walking around

Now that I have them all written out, I notice that the second list of words are all more pedestrian than the ones that escape me. Which either says something about me and an inability to grasp abstract concepts, or about how the people using these terms haven't clearly nailed down the meanings or else use them in a very abstract way.

sidenote: Has anyone else seen a big rise in the use of "sartorial" lately? I think there's a trend happening.

Staying in the Moment

My favorite kind of writing to do is to stay in a moment, an iridescent, intensely imagistic moment, kind of like the ones Sari Fordham puts together (see my last post).

I haven't been writing much of my own stuff lately, and partly its because I'm busy at work, but I'm wondering if it's also because I haven't been experiencing many iridescent imagistic moments. I'm in New York, its hustly and exciting and hard to pause in; I'm racing around wearing out shoes and then shopping for replacements; there are so many friends to spend time with.

But I also deal with depression, and it's been pervasive lately, not enough to fell me or keep me from working at my job, but enough to put a thin film over everything. It takes away the intensity and momentousness of life, which, of course, affects the intensity of my moments.

If you're not sure what I mean, let's talk Twilight---the book series about teenagers and vampires. Twilight is so popular because brings back memories of those heady teenage days when hormones and looming adulthood and the newness of things made life tremendously intense; that time when if that boy would only touch my hand in the dark movie theater EVERYTHING WOULD BE PERFECT, and if he doesn't I'LL DIE, when everything mattered SO MUCH and NOTHING WOULD EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN.

I don't think I could handle feeling like that again(!), but I would like to inch towards it and feel some really good moments. And then I would like to capture them on paper. So here's to that happening very soon.

Sari Fordham: Ugandan Psalm

It's a bit more memoir than essay, but who's counting, eh? Here's a beautiful piece by Sari Fordham, another grad school colleague of mine, who can do with an image what Twyla Tharp does with a pair of legs.

http://www.cerisepress.com/02/05/ugandan-psalm

You'll see how Sari pauses in a moment and makes it so rich and deep and vivid. She's patient in her story telling. Let's look at the opening paragraph of the piece for technique:

Mornings we sit on the veranda, the three of us; for my father has long vanished into the reaching branches and tangle that surround our house, despite violent spats of slashing at the underbrush. He will reappear in the evening, a stack of papers under a looping arm. This is our world, this hill. It’s early, and the air is still cool. A breeze shifts the top branches of the bougainvillea. My mother looks outward, toward her tomato garden. There is a sole survivor, a pinkish fruit she has been thinking about plucking. Today or tomorrow, she is not sure, but she has been watching it ripen all week.

One of the big problems many writers have is their reliance on adjectives. A cluster of adjectives loses its meaning, and often you can suggest much more vividly by paring down. Sari uses adjectives, "reaching branches," "violent spats," "looping arm," but if you look again you'll see that she is much more focused on movement, both literal and temporal. They are sitting, then her father disappears, he slashes things, he reappears, the breeze is blowing. Sari doesn't tell you everything about this scene, she doesnt go into every plant, and color, and smell; she gives you the general idea, and she does it largely through action.

Other points to notice:

* Languid rhythm. Longer words, lots of comma usage, which mimics ebbing and flowing rather than full stops. I'm not 100% sure what a glottal stop is, but I'm guessing there aren't many here.

* Sari is writing a memoir from childhood, and this always creates weird point of view issues. See how she gets in the head of her mother, even though she couldn't know what the mother thinks? And I think Sari is 6 or 7 here, but she doesnt talk like a little kid. I think both choices work fine because Sari is a careful writer otherwise.

Take home exercise

Next time you are describing something or telling a story, try to stay in the moment for a bit. Don't rely on adjectives, but pick interesting details---what was happening around you, what the weather was like, what you were thinking about, what you were wearing. Don't go overboard though---our brains will fill in what you leave out, the same way it can tell that "Helo m frnd" means "Hello my friend." Try also to incorporate movement (action). Try to mimic the mood with your rhythm.

I wish I didn't have to do that

I just went to the gym (where I ran into my very nice coworker Ray---hi Ray!) and now I have to take a shower. I am sitting here wishing that I didn't have to do that---that I could magically become clean and so get on to the other many things I have to do. I also have to do my dishes from dinner. I wish I didn't have to do that either. In fact there are many things in life that I wish I didn't have to do: get a haircut, mop my floors, shop for a dress. I like the outcome of those things but not the process.

Then I started thinking: what about my job? Do I wish I didn't have to do the things I do at my job? Some of them yes---the annoying but necessary bits. But in the main I do my job because I like to do it. I like to solve problems. I like to neaten up chaos and track down answers. I like to translate technical concepts into orderly, clear English.

Then I started thinking about my dad, a theoretical mathematician. He may be the quintessential example of liking the process rather than the outcome. If a mathematical problem is solved, if a chunk of the mathematical existosphere is ironed out, it may be attractive or even interesting, but it isn't what floats his boat. Forgive the analogy, but it's almost like the stereotypical woman you slept with who no longer interests you. Maybe a better analogy would be a crossword puzzle: a filled in crossword puzzle isn't interesting at all.

If you've read any other bits of the blog, you'll know where this is going. An essay is the solving of the puzzle. It's the figuring things out. It's not the conclusion (clean dishes) that readers want, it's the process. (Or if it is the conclusion they want, they are darn interested in how that conclusion was reached.) That's why a good essay often starts with an open question, and leads to unexpected places. That's why an essay can end with "I don't know" and still be a success.

Random Book Recommendation: Our Man in Havana

If you haven't read Our Man in Havana, I recommend it so much. It's by Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Quiet American) and it's both a spy novel and hilarious. There's a vacuum cleaner; that alone should make you want to read it.

Graham Greene marked some of his books including this one as "Entertainments" which means they are less serious than the others. But the writing is still beautiful and nuanced, there's still a lot to chew on, including Havana in the 1950s. Plus we can't always be reading about beautiful women who die of consumption.

Other random books I love and somehow mentally group with this one:

Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Any P.G. Wodehouse (early 1900s lunatic British humor, the butler Jeeves, people named Gussie Fink-N0ttle that yell "what ho!")
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (So charming and somehow sad.)

These books are all big on plot

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (This dude sells his wife and child to a sailor in a bar in the opening pages! What more do you want in a plot?)
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (A little melodramatic and very anti-Semitic. Swashbuckling, though, and Robin Hood makes a guest appearance!)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

And final random recommendation for the night:

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day which is fabulous, but his The Unconsoled is also super. It starts out very disorientingly but once you get the hang of it, you will be boggled at how he nails dream-logic, where you're in your kitchen and you open the door and you are at work, and your third grade teacher is sewing the hat that you will wear for the meeting with the president that you just remembered you had. But much more serious and moving than that.

Beautiful Writing is Rare

I was in a bookstore today (Three Lives & Company in the West Village) looking for something to read. I grabbed a bunch of books at random and flipped through them, and what it reminded me is that even though there are millions of competent, even graceful, writers out there, there are very few knock-your-socks off stellar ones. That's one reason why classics are nice---they have been winnowed out by time.

I think that's an interesting thing to think about. 1) If you are a literary writer, your competition is not as great as you thought, because it is REALLY HARD to write consistently beautiful prose without being melodramatic or obnoxiously in love with your own words. 2) Because it is REALLY HARD to write this well, you (meaning me really) are probably not doing it.

I want to be a brilliant sentence-level writer, and occasionally I am, but usually I'm not. That's something I am working on.

A few randomly selected people who are really masters of it in fiction and nonfiction are:

Writing today:
Kazuo Ishiguro
Annie Proulx
Andrew Aciman (his essay Lavender is my all-time favorite.)
Patricia Hampl (full-disclosure--she was my prof)
John McPhee (Also my prof! I have been lucky.)

Past writers:
Vladimir Nabokov (possibly the best sentence-level writer ever)
George Eliot
Lewis Carroll
Whoever wrote Song of Solomon in the Bible

Example

One author whose writing I think is exceptionally beautiful is C.S. Lewis. Here's an excerpt from the Chronicles of Narnia where the character Puddleglum has just stomped out a magical fire that was putting him and his comrades in a trance. I want to point out the quick rhythm that matches the intensity of the situation, the mix of colloquial and sophisticated language, the fact that it uses pretty basic and accessible language, and just how generally nice it sounds. Try reading it aloud to yourself.

. . .the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. . . "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

BTW at the bookstore I ended up choosing, sort of at random, "A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living" which looks cute but not the Best Writing Ever, and a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories for the beautiful writing.

Essay without reflection that doesn't work

I just posted about a Lives column that doesn't have a lot of essayistic reflection, but that I think works. Now I want to tell you about a Lives column that doesn't have a lot of reflection that doesn't work.

What do I mean by "works"? It's when the writing is transformed from an anecdote into a experience, into something that you tell your friends about later, that makes you think about things that you haven't thought of before, or maybe just in a long time.

Another way of thinking about this might be: it mattered that THIS writer told this story. Many others could competently---even elegantly---narrate this series of events, but this writer added her special take or insight, and that made it unique.

In Night of 130 Teenagers I don't think this happens. Michael Kirikorian tells about a party he chaperoned for his girlfriend's teenage son, which predictably swelled in size due to uninvited guests and included a desperately drunk 15-year-old girl, and maybe unpredictably turned out to be pretty tame and harmless. But at the end I found myself saying, "so what?"

There are several ideas that are mentioned but then dropped. For example, at the beginning the writer says:

He said there were going to be about 70 kids attending, almost all of them from his private high school, where the tuition runs more than $20,000 a year. Not exactly my alma mater, Gardena High, if you read me.

and also mentions his history of being convicted for assault when younger and says he's not a typical chaperone. But he never follows up on that theme. He mentions that when he saw kids with beer and told them to take it back to their cars, they politely did so, which is an interesting detail, but he never makes any comment on that, explicitly or otherwise. The drunk 15-year-old girl gets home fine (she slept it off!) but there's no commentary on that either.

It's a story without any light shed on it, and I'm not sure why Kirikorian chose to write about it. The guy chaperoned a party, and it went OK. So what?

Essay without reflection that works

I talk often about the New York Times Lives/Modern Love columns because they are a good place to read new, often quite literary, essays. Lives is pretty short, and sometimes that means that there is a bit of "so what" in them, because the writer didn't really get around to saying much. In a recent one, Strangers on a Train by Marcia DeSanctis, the shortness works quite well.

It starts like this:

When I travel alone, my preference is to keep it that way. I’m not really one for chatting people up in hotel bars or for reeling out my anecdotes or listening to theirs. Which is why my heart sank, a few weeks ago, when a man entered my chamber just as the overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg departed the station.

She goes on to tell the story of awkwardly sharing a tiny sleeping car with Igor, a perfectly nice Russian man. She tells it well, but nothing terribly dramatic happens. Then, either by design or because of the short word count, there really isnt a lot of reflection or chatter, or talking directly to the reader about the ideas or feelings that this experience prompted in the writer. However, for me this essay works because the writer was skillful enough to imply those prompted thoughts and feelings between the lines.

For example:

Our dinner came. He ordered water, not beer, to drink. I was relieved and, I confess, surprised.

She didn't have to say "It was extremely awkward to be so physically close and isolated with a man, who could become amorous or belligerent." The detail of the beer says it for her.

The ending is the one part where I'm not really sure what she is trying to say, and I think many readers might have a "so what?" moment here.

In St. Petersburg, Igor held me as I negotiated the chasm between the train and the platform. I greeted a driver from my hotel and handed over my bags. I turned with my arms half open, to say goodbye to Igor. But he was already gone, disappeared into the crowd.

I think she is commenting on the oddness of being simultaneously so intimate and so distant/unconnected with a person. But I'm not sure. It doesn't matter to me though because for me her kind of wondering-but-still-analytical style and choice of detail make this essay resonate.

Final note:

Even though we talked about an essentially plotless moment here, stories---with plot and movement---always make for good reading, (as long as they fit into the larger narrative or idea.) So learn to write good stories!

Lost (the TV show) and Resonance

SPOILER ALERT. If you are a Lost fan and haven't seen the last season stop reading. Also stop if you havent read Wuthering Heights. And then go read Wuthering Heights right now.

I was a very dedicated Lost fan for its whole 5-year run until the last season, when it did exactly what we were all terrified it would---ended with no reasonable explanation for any of the last 5 seasons apart from the deus ex machina of all deus ex machinas of this stupid cave full of light that was somehow the source of good and evil in the world. Or something.

Arghghg.

So why am I writing about this here? Because the real reason I am angry at the story tellers behind Lost connects back to what E.M. Forester is famous for saying: ' "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot.'

This means that a plot has to have cause and effect. Hamlet acts crazy and gets everyone killed because he suspects his uncle of murdering his father. Jesus suffers a horrible death because he is the son of God. Jake Ryan notices Sam because she writes a note about him. There is a chain of events, not some collection of unrelated incidents that happen by chance.

Lost told a story, and it was beautiful and nuanced and layered. And then in the end game we're told that none of it was for any reason (other than magic) and not a lot of it (Walt? Aaron? Mr. Friendly?) had any effects either. Why were these people brought to this island at *this moment in time*, rather than, say, a year earlier or a year later? Totally unclear. Were there tons of groups of people brought to the island, and we followed this group because they turned out to be successful "candidates"? Totally unclear. Did all the strange events and people and behavior LEAD to anything or CAUSE anything? Um, maybe? Maybe it lead to the status quo?

Basically the reader wants to know why you are saying what you are saying---that's what turns an anecdote into a story. If I tell you about my crazy abusive neighbor whose ex girlfriend died in childbirth, and isnt it weird that their kids are now in love, that's an anecdote. If I tell you about two lovers torn apart by inner turmoil, fate, and whim, and whose fiery and destructive passion trickles down through two generations of people only to dissipate in the gentle love of a third generation, in a redemption caused by an intense and unsinkable humanity---that is a story.

The same thing applies to essays. The reader will ask, why are you telling us this? You don't have to spell it out or get all Aesop Fable on us, but there needs to be resonance. A sense that the sum is more than the parts. On this note my next post will compare two recent New York Times essays---one that I think really told a story, and the other one that left me thinking, ok that was mildly interesting, but so what?

The Essay That Didn't (Did?) Resolve Itself

Please excuse the long delay in posts.

Sometimes when you have an idea, you get in there to work on it and realize it's not that interesting or there isn't really that much to say. But usually when you tackle an idea that DOES prove interesting, and you generate lots of thoughts or images, or write up some nice anecdotes that fit in with it, or pontificate on some tangential thing, it all ends up in one complete package. Not a neat package maybe (more boring, usually, if it is) but a finished one that has some point or is about some bigger concept, or at least feels done.

I've been working on this essay about trains for months. It started out with the question of why I am so fascinated by certain romanticized images, and certain cliche, genre-ish stuff like Agatha Christie novels. I want familiarity in these cliches---I want to see the train snaking along the countryside, I want a narrow corridor where two youngish, attractive strangers pass each other in a strangely charged way en route to their berths in a pullman sleeper. I want dressing gowns, and Russians, and the promise of reaching Istanbul in a few days time.

It's all so canned, right? But why does it all fascinate me so much---that was the question.

Well I was going to say here that I have lots of content for the essay, but strangely couldn't find any ending. Or really what I mean is I couldn't find any larger points to make. Why do I care about trains? I didn't know---I didn't even have any ideas. And what's all these musings without some kind of insight to go along with it.

But while writing the above (like right then! During this very blog entry!) I got an idea that I think will work. So maybe the real point is that if going back to a piece of writing in your usual fashion doesn't help, try something different, like writing about your frustration. It's like cross training at the gym.

Caribou: Stephanie Johnson

One of my all-time favorite essays is the very beautiful "Caribou" by Stephanie Johnson. Stephanie is a poet, and poets often make great essayists because of their ear, observation, and sense of image.

This essay first appeared in 2005 in Dislocate, the literary magazine for the University of Minnesota. Usually I link to essays, but Dislocate doesn't have "Caribou" online, and while it is about 5000 words and the blog format isn't ideal, Stephanie kindly gave me her permission to post it here.

Notice two things in particular: 1) How calm and matter-of-fact the tone is, which contrasts with the theme of life and death and 2) The recurring words and themes that form an undercurrent throughout the piece.

You can read Stephanie's poems at http://www.stephanienjohnson.com/writing.

Caribou

From the observation tower I can see the entirety of the farm’s terrain, its customs, its discrepancies. Don is below me, clicking around on the four-wheeler, opening and closing double gates, delivering bags of feed to the reindeer and caribou. He fills the troughs with green feed pellets, hard mulch board kernels that look like gerbil food. Despite Alaska’s uninterrupted daylight, the sun doesn’t begin warming these grassy pastures until after 8am, so I wear a jacket and stocking cap.

Some mornings, like this one, I loiter around the farm, the Institute of Arctic Biology Large Animal Research Station in Fairbanks, where Don works full-time. I climb the rickety steps of the observation tower with white sheets of paper, a pen, a cup of hot chocolate. I sit on a broken yellow stool and write within view of Arctic farm life. I mostly watch—animals, people, trees, cloud shapes—and stiffen in the cool air. In early morning, the pastures are purple-tinted like cowry shells, and sandhill cranes stalk the back fields in flocks, scooping low, landing arch-winged amongst the musk ox bulls.

My favorite pen here holds caribou calves. They are curious creatures with thin, cinnamon stick legs. In the afternoons, I stand inside the pen, eager for one to approach. Usually it’s only a mother who comes near, looking for “caribou crack”—dried lichens picked by Station employees from the rocky outcrops on Esther or Murphy Dome. Lichens are natural tundra foods for barren ground caribou, but they don’t grow on the farm. The farm—it’s really a research slaughter station, but I ignore this thought while playing in the caribou pen, squatting down, hands in the dirt, wanting to touch the animal.

*

I’m fixated on a splotch of blood, thick red crust underneath white gauze and medical tape. I’ve cut my index finger while chopping carrots, and I can’t help myself from peeling back the bandage to see what hasn’t healed, mesmerized by the tiny flap where blood swells, a spill I wish my body would emulate—because it is day thirty-seven, thirty-seven days since my last period. August. And I might be, without planning it, pregnant.

Don says I’m not, says that he’d know instinctively, but his body has never waited for dark feminine bleeding. His body doesn’t erupt or sing in cycle like mine does; any emotional disturbance or a particular salient experience might punctuate the pace of my period. It’s a pattern decidedly colored by moon and earth, and between them—gravity. His body has never bled in this gravity-pattern.

Lately, I’ve been aware of the control my monthly cycle has over my ability to make decisions. Sometimes decisions are mere reflexes; other times I can’t decide anything. Right now, being somewhere in-flux—either occupied or unoccupied with child—I can’t measure my desire to hunt caribou on the North Slope with Don and our friend John Heimeral. We’ve been planning this hunting trip for months. I’m feeling weighted; this is a new burden, this waiting, and I must decide between going and staying.

*

Don and John are cleaning their rifles, and the cabin smells thinly of gun oil. We have no running water, and if I feel myself beginning to bleed, I’ll need to run to the outhouse to check. Normally, I would check for blood with a tissue, right here, but John doesn’t live with us in this one-room cabin; he’s not used to my habits, the comfort I feel with my own bodily fluids.

“Are you coming or not?” John asks. He looks up at me.

I’m washing a salad bowl, scraping a pan coated in sausage grease from breakfast, sinking my hands deep in warm wash water.

“John, I have no idea. I’m not sure yet.”

“Well, I need to start making a shopping list,” John says, tipping the rifle barrel up against his knee, still looking at me. It took him months before he could make eye contact with me while speaking. “I’ll buy enough food for you, in case you change your mind.”

John wears his crisp green medical scrubs. He’s a phlebotomist hoping to soon enter medical school. Between the three of us, he’s the perfectionist. Sometimes he teases me about being one of those “literary types,” someone who ignores facts and favors emotions. “So subjective,” he says. It’s been like this all summer, the three of us cooking meals together as a strange little family.

Don sits on the floor next to John, quietly pulling apart the trigger mechanism of his 30.06, cleaning it with a Q-tip. He rarely speaks when he’s concentrating like this, but he lifts his head. Are you coming with me? his expression asks.

Both men are spacious with me, giving me room for thought, time enough to decide about the trip for myself. I can easily rationalize Don’s desire for me to accompany them, but John is trickier: he is somewhat sheepish around women, except that he’s grown comfortable with me; John and I have been running together all summer. He knows the way I think, athletically, but I’m more emotionally complex than he cares to recognize. I certainly couldn’t tell him that going hunting was a matter of how I feel about not menstruating.

“You should come. It’ll be fun.” John says, drizzling gun oil into a felt rag.

*

I’ve been thinking all morning about women in traditional Native Alaskan stories. Although they gut, clean, and skin the animals, a woman may never partake in the hunting activities. Nor would they mix hunting with childbearing. Bad luck, they’d say. And it might be true.

“Because my period’s late,” I say to Don when John is not around.

“Well, I need to know if you’re going, because John’s picking up food tonight. I’d like you come with us.”

“Well, I might stay here. Julie’s coming in for the weekend.”

I’ve just hung up the telephone with my friend Julie, an animal rights activist who says, “You don’t want to go hunting with those monsters anyway.” She’s visiting this weekend to care for good friend’s newborn baby. She’s asked if I’d like to celebrate the weekend with women, some sister time, she says. I consider her offer because I can’t rationalize going hunting if I am indeed pregnant, and if my period were to arrive during the hunt, perhaps my “luck” would prevent these men from taking their animals.

*

I have this memory of Don: no monster could care for animals this way.

At the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, Don washes his fingernails with a stern bristled brush. He scoots his shirt cuffs up with wet palms, crunches the flannel sleeves around his bent elbows. He’s preparing his hands for work.

Don handles the bodies of road-kill deer. Typically, Don and his boss butcher these animals for the wolves to eat. The Wolf Center is an educational institute, but most visitors to the Wolf Center will never witness this process. Shifting around the table where the animal lies, Don tugs and slices meat from the bone. This particular deer, like many others, throws off a mephitic odor, but Don’s facial expression doesn’t reveal disgust. During this instant, he loves this deer despite its road-kill-character, despite the dark coagulated blood that has pooled and settled unevenly over a broad band of her carcass, despite the body’s consistency—hard and rotten and cooled. Afterward, Don will greet children from various school groups. They will not recognize the connection between his hands and the knives, the deer and wolves.

He touches me with these hands.

*

Don pulls his truck into the driveway at 5:30pm. We live thirteen miles out of Fairbanks in the hills overlooking the Chena River Valley, right next to the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which runs 500 miles north to Prudhoe Bay. A quick walk through the woods behind the cabin leads to the pipeline’s private-trespassers-will-be-prosecuted property.

I often imagine disappearing on a Huck Fynn adventure—following the pipeline all the way to the salt sea and tundra land I’ve never visited. A trip like this, on foot, since a raft is impossible, would tangle the journeyer through mountains and valleys nearly uninhabited by humans. You could feel the stillness of open space, witness animals aggregating, and you’d never feel alone with the pipeline there—that steel reinforced reminder of man’s presence. You’d be tracing your psyche along one of Earth’s most recent physical scars, witnessing her chronic pain. Scar seeking.

In our pick-up truck, the caribou trip will take us on a similar route, 500 miles of Huck Finning.

I’ve been packing all day: two pairs of long-underwear, raingear, three pairs of socks and underwear, toothbrush, wool sweater, a small Ziploc bag of tampons (just in case), journal, camera. Don hops out of the truck, next to the cabin. I greet him at the front steps with my backpack.

“I’m going with you,” I say.

*

When Don and I first move to Fairbanks—as continuing college students—we are impoverished by tuition bills. I write letters to my parents, short synopses of my so-far experience with ridiculous titles like “Starving in Fairbanks,” “Frozen Dinners,” and “Ramen Noodles of the North.”

We at least have meat to eat, birds mostly, grouse or ptarmigan we’ve shot near the cabin. We keep a shotgun in the backseat of our Honda Civic. If there’s enough daylight, Don shoots birds on his way home from school. In the woods behind the cabin, I sometimes kill grouse with my longbow, a gentler method of seeking sustenance. Luckily, we have a freezer filled with salmon and halibut from our previous lives near the ocean in Southeast Alaska, and we buy basic products like spaghetti and soup mixes from the local Sam’s Club.

Sometimes I go through phases in which I feel a particular aversion to meat, usually one week before my period. During this time I eat very few animal products. That popular syndrome, PMS, really means Pass More Soy. So I sometimes eat chalk tasting soy bars in place of real meals. I might be in this phase now, while packing for our hunting trip. What this also signals: I can’t reason with killing a caribou; I’m too soft, emotionally pulpy. Yet, if it doesn’t feel right, if I’m pregnant, I won’t be able to pull the trigger. This much I know.

And I ache to see the tundra.

*

“Steph’s going to carry the 9mm,” Don tells John.

“Oh, that little pea-shooter. Great. Give it to Stephanie so she can practice bouncing pellets off a bear’s ass.”

At the shooting range I find the 9mm, although small, to be a respectable, and somewhat frightening weapon. I’ve never liked handguns, even unloaded ones. I recall the night I visited my brother in the hospital after he’d been pistol-whipped in the face. Across his forehead and left eye—the pressured stain of broken blood vessels, brackets of cracked skin where the pistol made direct contact. He was trying to break up a fight.

“She can carry it if she wants to, but we probably won’t see any bears. I don’t know. It’s just extra weight,” John says.

“I don’t mind,” I say.

Don remembers me at the shooting range this morning, how upset I was having pinched my other index finger under the barrel while cocking the pistol—all this hand damage. With his eyes he asks: Do you really want to carry it?

*

“How much do they weigh?” Michaela asks Don at the farm. Michaela is my surrogate daughter, the seven year-old child of a close friend. She is me as a child. Wild.

“Between at least 200 and 400 pounds,” Don says.

“That big? Bigger than you even?” She asks.

“Bigger than me even,” Don says.

When Michaela comes to the farm, we chase caribou calves together, nearly throwing ourselves into dung-filled dugouts. “She likes me,” Michaela screams when a calf dashes away from her. “I think they like us,” she shrieks again when we’ve cornered a mother and calf at the edge of the pen. We leave the farm with evidence of the closest proximity we could gain to the caribou: turds crusted on our shoes, our hands smelling of feed pellets.

Most of what I’ve learned about caribou comes from the research station. Like Michaela, I don’t know much but can imagine a lot. I can imagine them in herds of five thousand—the seasonal stampede of hooves. I can hear the collective crack-pop sound of their ankle joints creaking across the high tundra. I can imagine steam blown from their nostrils, winter and dark coming over them—turning their fur thick and transparent in the darkness. I can imagine the tangle of their antlers in the distance, unable to distinguish which one is male, which one female, they look so much alike.

*

It’s 8pm on ice cream night. John brings the mini television up to our place because he can’t get ER in at his cabin. “Piss poor reception down there in the valley,” he says, dropping a half-gallon of vanilla-orange ice cream on the card table. ER is John’s favorite show. It airs at 10pm. The boys will fill the time between now and then with their steady talk.

Don originally met John at the Arctic Biology farm. Over bowls of ice cream, they both offer up an array of factual goodies about barren ground caribou.

“They’re migratory animals,” Don begins. “Rangifer arcticus, closely related to deer, moose, and elk. They generally move north in the summers to take advantage of the large amount of resources in the high arctic. Then in the fall, they migrate south for the rut.”

“They calve when they’re up north,” John says.

“Because of obvious reasons, they move south again,” Don says. “The snow gets pretty deep, and it becomes more difficult to find food. They simply can’t get around in the deep snow.”

“They’re ungulates,” John says, carving a boulder-sized ball of ice cream from the container.

“What the hell does that mean?” I say, giving John an ugly look.

“It means,” Don says, “they have four stomachs. They have a rumen—that’s what their stomach’s called—with four chambers.”

“Like a safety deposit box.”

“Well, it’s more like a grocery cart. Their mouths are the cart and the first chamber is the shopping bag—how you bring your groceries home with you. They eat when it’s safe; then, they store their food in their first stomach. Then, later on, they basically spit it back up and finish processing it. It’s like taking your groceries and cooking them at home,” Don explains.

“Where it’s safe,” I interrupt.

“Yes, where it’s safe,” Don says. He leaves his ice cream untouched. “Each stomach works like a filter, only allowing food particles of a certain size to enter. Things get pretty watery by the fourth stomach. That’s their digestive reality, a migratory stomach for a migratory animal.”

“If I had four stomachs, I’d probably eat myself to death,” John adds, laughing at himself. John is a cornball, while Don regards the seriousness of my inquiry.

I appreciate these caribou facts, but I can only absorb them vicariously through metaphor, and that’s why Don is careful to speak a language I can understand, can digest. I love the word chamber—a space between any two gates of a lock. It suggests privacy, ritual, intimacy. Heart chamber. Secret chamber. Digestive chamber. This man, he feeds me, keeps the chambers full.

And that other chamber—part of the gun barrel that receives the charge.

*

We pull over in the long dawn light not far from Pump Station One—roughly 450 miles north of Fairbanks. We park on the gravel road to the University’s Toolik Lake Remote Research Station after driving for 14 hours from Fairbanks in the single bench-seated Ford pick-up.

Startling landscape. No trees. No brush. Clean sweeping tundra. John throws down a small tarp and we pull our sleeping bags from the 30-gallon Rubbermade containers. It’s cold. I dress in every article of clothing I’ve brought with me.

I’ve been lying here for two hours, between the boys, and although I’m buried in my black sleeping bag, I can’t keep the light out. I haven’t slept at all, but Don is out, and John is gargling a snore. I push my head outside the sleeping bag, and although it’s below freezing, one slow mosquito circles my nose, my chin, seeking fuel, the feast of me. My blood.

*

To legally kill a caribou with a rifle on the North Slope, you have to be at least five miles from the nearest road. No all-terrain-vehicles. And there’s only one road.

Five miles doesn’t seem like much, but this is tundra hiking. John says that every step while hiking over tundra is a step shin-deep in water and sand. I wear heavy rubber boots, the only footwear I’ve brought with me.

We’ve driven to Pump Station One. I’m not exactly sure what happens at the “pump station,” but oil rigs are parked outside of the strange refinery complex. There are several large smoke stacks and various rusted out-buildings. I don’t see any people. To me, this fortress, a clatter of technological rubble, looks like an abandoned space station hidden between rolling red-blue mountains and the spiky peaks of the Brooks Range. It’s a purple-tinted world out here, the color of a vein very close to surface skin, and the pump station is unnatural: an intrusion.

Don and John have just refilled the truck’s gas tank from the red plastic containers of gasoline we brought with us. While there’s oil all around—the reason for the Haul Road’s existence—there are no petroleum products for sale past the ’66 parallel.

With the tailgate down, Don examines the terrain lines on the map for elevation like he would the valley between my ribcage and my navel. His face is in kissing proximity of the map. I wonder if his heart is racing.

As of now, I’m just along for the ride. This feels like a man’s adventure; any place we decide to climb into those mountains is fine with me. Let them make the decisions. Let them have whatever they want of this world.

*

John is a half-mile ahead of us. In moments he will disappear over the crest of the hill. He has already thrown down his orange shirt, a landmark, so that Don and I will not stray off course.

I walk slowly with Don. John and I carry all the camping gear because Don has the disadvantage of relying upon a prosthetic leg, and the weight of every step is gritty on his sole surviving kneecap. While he can carry a heavier load than both John and me, it all rides on his one good leg. And the other leg, the titanium one, carries the burden of a thirty thousand dollar price tag. So Don shoulders his rifle and a small bag with our day-gear.

As Don and I reach the top of the first hill, I leave him behind. There has been little talking throughout the hour, and I can see John in the distance. I have to keep my own pace through these tundra-tussocks and knee-deep quicksand puddles.

Because of the permafrost, because the ground is frozen all year, there is no way for the water to drain. It merely runs between hill and valley, to hill to valley. Tundra puddles: this is where we pee, refill our water bottles, wash our hands.

There are caribou ahead of us, on a distant slope, brown specks. I turn to see Don, several hundred yards behind me—waving—making the sign for “antler” with spread-open hands near the temples, signaling that he’s seen the caribou.

*

When I reach John, he is standing near his pack, eating a Snickers bar. Together we wait for Don, who is about a half-mile behind us. Peering through the riflescope we see caribou herded in the distance.

“We’ve got to be at least three miles in,” John says. The mileage is completely deceiving, without trees or shrubs or rocks; there is nothing out here to obstruct our vision.

When Don arrives we check the GPS. 3.1 miles from the road. We decide to continue for another .4 miles where we drop our gear, put up the tent, arrange our sleeping bags.

Five miles doesn’t seem like much. In the city, I can walk five miles in under two hours. On this soggy tundra, I’ve gone 3.5 miles in five hours. How to describe this movement: my legs are not thin or long enough; my stride is too short—four legs would help. It’s like hobbling 3.5 miles over layers and layers of wet foam mattresses, an unlikely situation. No wonder I have numb feet.

“Here’s what we should do,” John says. “It’s only 2 o’clock. Let’s put our tent up right here, then hike five miles out, see what we can get close to. If we shoot any caribou tonight, we’ll have lots of time tomorrow and Saturday to clean up and pack ‘em out.”

“Let’s do it,” Don says, sounding militaristic.

*

How I knew I had become a woman: at twenty-five, I began imagining Don everywhere, in fields and streams, and I would ache to be taken with child. I thought less about the erotic aspects of conception and more about the presence of child—inside me, held by me. “Don, I want to have a baby,” I’d said over and over.

This is the thought I’m trying to dislodge—that I might want to be pregnant—because the caribou are rumbling toward us and I have already loaded John’s rifle, propped it on my backpack, and I can see the males—their massive antlers—in my crosshairs, and John whispers, “Take your time, wait for your shot.” I swivel around, looking for the right bull. I’ve found him. He’s beautiful. He stops to graze, head down, only he’s too straight on. His body is hidden behind his head, but he’s turning, I see the kill spot, just behind his upper front leg, that soft fur patch where caramel turns cream-colored, and I pull, a breath in and out, then the trigger.

He drops, and I hand the rifle to John. The whole herd is still there, more than a hundred animals, and they hardly notice us. I put my head down on the pack, forgive me, I’m so sorry. John fires off a shot. He misses the first time and shoots again. Don yells at us to stay down. Stay there, he shouts. Another shot. I see blood leap from a smaller bull’s back. And Don is running like a 50-yard dash sprinter with a stiff leg. Another shot. Don takes a second bull. Four animals down. John and I leave our packs at the base of the hill and run toward the herd. The caribou are all around. They move slowly into the mist that’s draping over us. John aims the rifle towards the bull I’ve taken, shoots him, in the head, to make certain that he’s passed. He has.

*

I am wrong about Don. He does know about bleeding. At eleven years-old, he nearly died from loss of blood, from the loss of his foot, shin, and kneecap— from his leg being severed by farm equipment.

I remember driving to the grocery store with Don’s mother. She tells me the entire story, her side of it—the bloodiest side of reality. I remember that she trembles in the passenger seat, throwing her arms out to properly gesticulate the experience.

“He was riding on the back of that tractor and big Don was cutting hay and of course the whole family was over just like they were everyday in the summer, all the cousins, and Don had no idea that Donny was on back of the tractor well then Donny’s pants got caught in the power takeoff and tugged his leg right down in there and Don didn’t notice until Donny had been twisted around a few times and the tractor didn’t seem to be running properly so Don stopped to see what was happening and you know Donny didn’t make a sound and there was blood everywhere and it didn’t take Don long to get Donny’s leg untwisted from the takeoff because there wasn’t much left then he picked Donny up and the next thing I knew I heard Erik come over the hill saying, ‘Get the truck, Donny’s hurt and dad’s carryin’ him up,’ and you know I started screaming because I didn’t know what was happening and then big Don ran over to the truck with Donny in his arms and there was blood everywhere and I could see Donny’s leg hanging loose so we jumped in the truck and I was screaming and driving and Donny’s head was in my lap and he kept saying, ‘Mom, don’t worry, everything’s fine, don’t worry Mom, it’ll be okay,’ and it’s a wonder we ever made it to the hospital.”

When the telling is over, she’s out of breath, near tears, and I’m sick to my stomach.

*

The herd moves on; the mist lifts momentarily. There’s quiet again, and we can see our tent in the far distance. The boys are smiling. John pulls out a small bag of toilet paper, paper reserved not for our asses, but for this moment. The photographic moment. I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting these men would rejoice this way.

John unrolls a wad of toilet paper in his hand and cleans the blood from around his caribou’s mouth. He resets the caribou’s tongue inside its jaw.

“Quick, let’s take pictures,” John says.

“What? Are you serious? I don’t want my photograph taken like this,” I say.

“This is what cameras are for,” John says, moving behind the animal.

“Stephanie, it’s just a photograph. You have to have your picture taken.” Don says.

“I can’t believe this. This is sick. I’ve never taken a picture of anything I’ve killed.”

“We don’t kill caribou everyday. This is a special day,” John says.

“And you’ve killed the biggest bull, Stephanie.” Don says. He’s right. All his uncles will oooh and aahhh over this fact; I’ll be accepted by all the men in Don’s life. Something straightens in me. I’ve been convinced.

“Okay,” I say. “But I’m not wiping off the blood, and leave his tongue hanging out. This is a dead animal; it should look like it’s dead.”

The truth I’ve concealed is that blood fascinates me. While Don and John are gutting open the other caribou, I’m on my hands and knees photographing the coagulated sea of blood. I’m capturing the violence here, crimes of subsistence, and there will be photographs and deep red stains on my pants to prove it.

*

Don and John disappear completely in the mist. They are somewhere up-slope from here, gutting their animals. John, I know, is already filling a black trash bag with meat—because we can’t drag the caribou for five miles. But I am turning circles around this animal; his deadness has such gravity that all I can do is orbit him. When the mist parts, I can see a mother and calf orbiting me only twenty yards away. What are they doing here? Waiting for this bull as I stand between them?

I’m becoming too cold. I call out for Don, Where are you? and I follow his voice. Lichens pattern the ground where I walk, stumbling towards the outline of John, who is surgically cleaning meat from the bone. He will be just like this in the operating room.

“You guys,” I shout. “I need to move around. I can’t hold the knife anymore.” The dense mist muffles all my syllables.

“Steph, I’ve got two full bags. You can haul them back to camp,” John says loudly in return.

“Okay, ‘cause I have to move around. I’m going to hurt myself with that knife—I can’t feel my fingers.”

“Steph, take the GPS with you, it’s in the front of my pack,” Don calls out. I cannot see him.

“Make sure you eat something before you go,” John says, standing up with two sagging trash bags filled with meat. “I’ll help you pack up.”

We load the pack, check the time; it’s 8:15pm.

He hoists the pack onto my shoulders. The weight comes down on me like a signpost driver; I feel permanently grounded here.

“You’ll be alright?” John asks.

“Yeah, I’ll be slow, but I’ll be alright.”

*

It takes me over two hours to reach camp. The mist is thinner down here, and I can see the mountains again. I stop. Hold my breath. Not a sound, except for my heartbeat in my ears. I wonder: how long will a footprint survive on the Tundra? Just walking here is like giving birth; leaving a stain that will last up to 30 years. A footprint that might outlive me.

The mother and calf return with several others. They circle and dash, pointing their noses, attempting to catch my scent. I think of Don’s mother watching her husband carry Don out of the field, bloodied. In that instant, she must have known him deep inside her. She must have, in her cells, remembered Don before he was born. I think of how her body traveled nine months to meet him, and what at first looked like death—the release of blood during labor—was really the beginning of the man that I love.

To kill an animal is to face a primal reaction; after I shot the caribou I felt fear, sorrow. Lichen was still pinched between his teeth. Blood wet his nose. I placed my hands on his abdomen, where he was beginning to swell. Fermentation in his rumen. I waited, thinking his black ball-bearing eyes would move. But they didn’t. I knew then that I wasn’t pregnant. I put my face down on his hot belly, against his ribcage. I cried into his fur.

Venue: Quotidiana

I recently discovered a website called Quotidiana that hosts a bunch of public-domain essays in an easy to browse format. It is run by a guy who teaches essay writing at BYU and who wanted to have a central online repository for the stuff he assigned to students and for his teaching portfolio.

It's got some interviews (some audio, some written) with contemporary essayists, but, as it says on the site, the most important content is:

an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current "creative nonfiction" trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not.

Having a degree in creative nonfiction, I take issue with the site-author's upturned nose there, but it's a great set of stuff here from Seneca to Mark Twain to Jerome K. Jerome (the hilariously named author of Three Men in a Boat) and a ton of people I've never heard of.

In my next post, I will take a look at G.K. Chesterton's On Lying in Bed, which is listed as one of the most popular essays on Quotidiana. (Right above "On Laziness.")