THE CURIOUS WRITER
© 2005
Bruce Ballenger
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Writing a personal essay is often like seeing an old picture of yourself. It thrusts you back into a
particular time and place, but at the same time you see yourself from a certain distance, bringing
knowledge and understanding to past events that you didn’t have when they occurred. This publicity photograph of my mother, brother, and me in the 1950s returns me to that world and at
the same time I see what I couldn’t have seen then: a time when fathers were often missing from
the picture while working mothers, like mine, had to move gracefully from family to job, proving
themselves at both.
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Writing a Personal
Essay
WRITING ABOUT EXPERIENCE
Certain subjects demand to be “essayed.” Some years ago, for example, I was invited to serve on a panel at a national conference of writing teachers that would look at what it might mean to be men teaching men. At question was whether we, as male teachers, had noticed
anything about the kind of topics male composition students chose
when invited to write about their personal experiences and how we
reacted to those topics. At first, I was flattered by the invitation. My
fellow panelists were among the top scholars in the field and I was
just finishing my doctorate. Then I panicked. This was a potentially
explosive subject that I had a range of feelings about, some of which I
thought might insult some of my former male students. The worst
thing, however, was that I really didn’t know what I wanted to say,
and I was very reluctant to make an argument—the usual way of
forming an academic paper—that I wasn’t sure I believed. Fortunately, I had recently embraced a form of inquiry that seemed to accommodate my confusion and conflicted feelings: the personal essay.
As a form, the personal essay places the writer at center stage.
This doesn’t mean that once there the writer’s responsibility is to
pour out her secrets, share her pain, or confess her sins. Some essays
do have these confessional qualities, but more often they do not. Yet a
personal essayist, no matter what the subject of his or her essay, is
still exposed. There is no hiding behind the pronoun “one,” as in “one
might think” or “one often feels,” no lurking in the shadows of the
passive voice: “This paper will argue. . . .” The personal essay is first
person territory.
In this sense, the personal essay is much like a photographic selfportrait. Like a picture, a good personal essay tells the truth, or it
What You’ll Learn in
This Chapter
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How personal essays
can help you with
academic writing.
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What distinguishes a
personal essay from
other forms.
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How to write a
sketch.
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Why a confusing
topic may be better
than one you have
all figured out.
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Questions for
revising personal
essays.
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tells a truth about the writer/subject, and it often captures the writer at a
particular moment of time. Therefore, the experience of taking a self-portrait, or confronting an old picture of oneself taken by someone else, can
create the feeling of exposure that writing a personal essay often does.
But it does more. When we gaze at ourselves in a photograph we often
see it as yanked from a larger story about ourselves, stories that thread
their way through our lives and give us ideas about who we were and who
we are. This is what the personal essay demands of us: We must somehow
present ourselves truthfully and measure our past against the present. In
other words, when we hold a photograph of ourselves we know more than
the person we see there knew, and as writers of the personal essay, we
must share that knowledge and understanding with readers.
MOTIVES FOR WRITING A PERSONAL ESSAY
The essai was a term first coined by the sixteenth century French nobleman Michel de Montaigne, a man who had lived through occurrences of the
plague, the bloody civil war between French Catholics and Protestants,
and his own ill health. These were tumultuous and uncertain times when
old social orders and intellectual traditions were under assault, and it
proved to be ideal ferment for the essay. The French verb “essaier” means
to attempt or to try, and the essay became an opportunity for Montaigne to
work out his thoughts about war, the education of children, the evils of
doctors, and the importance of pleasure. The personal essay tradition inspired by Montaigne is probably unlike the essays you are familiar with in
school. The school essay is often formulaic—a five paragraph theme, or
thesis-example paper—while the personal essay is an open-ended form
that allows for uncertainty and inconclusiveness. It is more about the
process of coming to know than presenting what you know. The personal
essay attempts to find out rather than to prove.
It is an ideal form of inquiry if your purpose is exploratory rather than
argumentative, and if you’re particularly interested in working out the
possible relationships between your subject and yourself. Because the personal essay is openly subjective, the writer can’t hide. The intruding I confronts the writer with the same questions, over and over again: Why does
this matter to me? What do I make of it? How does this change the way I
think of myself and the way I see the world? Because of this, one of the
principal dangers of the personal essay is that it becomes narcissistic; it
goes on and on about what the writer thinks and feels, and the reader is
left with that nagging question—So what? The personal essayist must always find some way to hitch the particulars of her experience to something
larger—an idea, a theme, or even a feeling that readers might share.
On the other hand, one of the prime rhetorical advantages of the personal essay is its subjectivity. Because it is written with openness and honesty, the essay is often a very intimate form, inviting the reader to share in
Features of the Form
the writer’s often-concealed world. In the personal essay, we often get to
see the face sweating under the mask. Honesty is one of the essay’s primary virtues, and because the form allows for uncertainty and confusion,
the writer doesn’t need to pretend that she has the answer, or that he
knows more than he lets on about his subject.
PERSONAL ESSAYS AND ACADEMIC WRITING
In some ways, the personal essay might seem like a dramatic departure
from the kind of academic writing you’ve done in other classes. Openly subjective and sometimes tentative in its conclusions, the personal essay is a
relatively open form that is not predictably structured like much academic
writing. Additionally, the tone of the personal essay is conversational, even
intimate, rather than impersonal and removed. If your sociology or economics professor will never ask for a personal essay, why bother to write
one in your composition class?
It’s a fair question. While the pleasures of personal essay writing can
be significant, and reason alone to write essays, there are other important
reasons to practice the form. The most obvious is that the essay, more than
any other form, gives you an opportunity to use exploring as a method of
inquiry, and to practice those habits of mind that are so important to academic inquiry: suspending judgment, tolerating ambiguity, and using questions to challenge easy assumptions.
But the purpose of writing personal essays in your composition class
goes beyond this. For one thing, the essay emphasizes the process of coming to know about yourself and your subject, exposing your reasoning and
the ways you use knowledge to get at the truth of things. Reflecting on
these things in a personal essay can tell you a lot about how you think. The
dialectical thinking required by the personal essay—the movement back
and forth between critical and creative thinking—should also prove to be a
useful mental exercise for a range of academic situations. Finally, much of
what you are asked to write in college depends on your willingness to step
forward and express a belief, make an assertion, or pose a relevant question. The personal essay is a form that puts the writer in the spotlight. You
can’t hide in the wings, concealed in the shadow of other people’s opinions
or someone else’s findings. What you think is what the essay is all about.
FEATURES OF THE FORM
There are many different kinds of personal essays, of course, but there are
certain conventions that are present in most of them. Keep these in mind
as you read the professional essays that follow. Which of the conventions
below seem present? Can you detect any others?
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• Personal essays are usually written in the first person. There is no
pretense of scientific objectivity in personal essays. What makes
them work is the tension between the subject and the writer as the
writer reaches for new understandings.
• The subject of the essay is often commonplace. Although essayists
sometimes write about dramatic things, they most often are interested in the drama of everyday life. Fine essays have been published,
for example, about hats, houseflies, and summer lakes. The essayist’s
thoughts about such things may catapult her beyond the ordinary,
but the topic is often humble.
• Narrative is often the primary method of development. Personal es-
says often tell two kinds of stories—they relate narratives of the
writer’s experiences and observations, and they tell the story of the
writer’s thinking about what those experiences and observations
might mean.
• The thesis can be implicit, and it frequently emerges late, rather than
at the beginning, of the essay. In some ways, the personal essay is the
most literary of the academic forms—it tells stories, relies heavily on
details, it shows and tells. As a result, the meaning of an essay can be
implied rather than stated directly, and because essays are often
used to describe the process of coming to know something, insight is
usually earned later rather than at the beginning of the telling.
• Of the four sources of information, the personal essay relies on memory
and observation most of all. Because of the subjectivity of the essay,
the writer often reports what has happened to her as a means to account for what happens. However, interview and research can enrich a
personal essay by challenging the writer to consider other voices and
other information (see Chapter 11, “Writing a Research Essay”).
• The essay often mimics the dialectical process that helped the writer
compose it, shifting back and forth from the then and now, what happened to what happens, and showing and telling. Because the essay,
more than any other form of inquiry, often focuses on the process of
coming to know, essays themselves often capture this process in action.
See if you can see evidence of this movement in the essays that follow.
P E R S O N A L E S S AY
Most of us know the work of George Orwell (born Eric Blair) from his novels, particularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he also was a prolific journalist
and essayist. Many of his best-known essays recount his experiences as a member
of the Indian Imperial Police for the British colonial government in Burma; he
wrote the essay that follows retrospectively about that time in his life.
Personal Essay
Orwell is an interesting personal essayist because he had strong feelings
about two things: writing style and politics. These concerns come together in his
famous essay, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in which Orwell rails
against the pretentiousness and lack of precision of modern prose, and particularly the poisoning of the language by political jargon. Orwell wrote that “political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from
Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell’s prescription for good writing, which is exemplified in “A Hanging,”
turns on the virtues of simplicity: Never use a long word when a short one will
do, if it is possible to cut a word always cut it, and avoid stale language and
overused metaphors. He also urged writers to avoid meaningless abstractions
and to focus on “pictures and sensations” that bring those abstractions to life.
Lurking behind the narrative you’re about to read, one that is rich with such pictures and sensations, Orwell makes a point that certainly might have been explained more generally. But would it have been as effective that way? (Actually,
“A Hanging” could easily be classified as an argumentative essay, highlighting
how difficult it is to neatly place a piece of writing in a specific genre.)
Personal essays are often structured to mimic the thinking process that led
to their creation, the back and forth from the mountain of reflection to the sea
of experience, from telling to showing, from what happens to what happened.
That movement is quite obvious in “A Hanging.” Can you see it?
A HANGING
George Orwell
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow
tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard.We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small
animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare
within except for a plank bed and a pot for drinking water. In some of them
brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped
round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the
next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny
wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick,
sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache
of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and
getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed
bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They
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crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It
was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as
though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated
from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing
apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his
head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a gray toothbrush moustache
and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The
man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?”
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily
prepared.The hangman iss waiting.We shall proceed.”
“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this
job’s over.”
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the
prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him,
gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting
him.The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when
we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or
warning. A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale,
half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could
stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner and, jumping up, tried to lick his
face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily.
“Catch it, someone!”
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it
danced and gamboled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the
game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone
the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed
from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on
incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several
minutes before someone managed to catch the dog.Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining
and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of
the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound
Personal Essay
arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never
straightens his knees.At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of
hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet
gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he
stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the
puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short
when it is in full tide.This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive.
All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery.
His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was
falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow
gravel and the gray walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—
reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two
minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one
world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the
prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like
three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a
crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a gray-haired convict in the
white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us
with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders,
gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led half pushed him to the
gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder.Then the hangman climbed up
and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away.The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows.And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began
crying out to his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
not urgent and fearful like a prayer or cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell.The dog answered the sound with a whine.The
hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour
bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the
cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes
seemed to pass.The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on,
“Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant.The superintendent, his head
on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was
counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number—fifty, perhaps, or a
hundred. Everyone had changed color.The Indians had gone gray like bad cof-
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fee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed,
hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another second
of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over,
stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind.Throwing up his head he
made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped
immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short,
barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the
weeds, looking timorously out at us.We went round the gallows to inspect the
prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downward,
very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare brown
body; it oscillated slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed
out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath.The moody look had
gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist watch. “Eight minutes past eight.Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and
conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of
the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into
the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of
warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast.They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with
buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene,
after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was
done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once
everyone began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded toward the way we had
come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend [he meant the dead
man] when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of
his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire
my new silver case, sir? From the boxwalah, two rupees eight annas, Classy
European style.”
Several people laughed—at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously: “Well, sir,
all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It was all finished—flick!
like that. It iss not always so—oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor
wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prissoner’s legs to ensure
decease. Most disagreeable!”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.
Personal Essay
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall,
clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out.You will scarcely
credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg.
We reasoned with him. ‘My dear fellow,’ we said, ‘think of all the pain and
trouble you are causing to us!’ But no, he would not listen! Ach, he was very
troublesome.”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the
superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have
a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car.We could
do with it.”
We went through the big double gates of the prison into the road. “Pulling
at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud
chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’ anecdote
seemed extraordinarily funny.We all had a drink together, native and European
alike, quite amicably.The dead man was a hundred yards away.
[1931]
INQUIRING INTO THE ESSAY
Throughout The Curious Writer, I’ll invite you to respond to readings such
as Orwell’s “A Hanging,” using questions based on the four methods of inquiry discussed in Chapter 3. The questions below, therefore, encourage
you to explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect to discover and shape what
you think about the reading. If you’re using a double-entry journal, use
these questions to prompt writing on the right page of your notebook. Use
the opposing left page to collect passages, details, and quotations from the
reading that you think might be important.
1. Begin by openly exploring your reaction to “A Hanging.” Fastwrite for
five minutes but begin by focusing on a particular line or passage from
the essay that you found puzzling, significant, or potentially important. Ask yourself questions to keep your pen and your mind moving.
2. Choose a line or passage from the essay (perhaps the one you began
with in the previous question) that you think gets to the heart of
Orwell’s purpose in the essay. Compose an explanation of why you
think this passage is significant.
3. Orwell is making an evaluation in “A Hanging,” although the essay
initially just seems like an interesting story. What is his claim? Is it
convincing? What reasons and evidence does he provide to support
it? Is Orwell’s approach in this essay more effective in making his
point than a more conventional argument might have been? Why?
4. Reflect on how “A Hanging” seems to conform to the features of
the personal essay described earlier. In what ways does it depart
from them?
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P E R S O N A L E S S AY
It is impossible to avoid the tentacles of fashion. As much as I spurn what’s
trendy, my decision to wear an old pair of topsiders rather than the intricate
leather Italian-made sandals my wife bought me is a decision. I act against fashion in the deliberate ways that some people act to keep up with it. It is not, by
the way, a character flaw to want to be fashionable; it just takes more effort than
I’m willing to give.
But there is a time in nearly everyone’s life—usually when we are children or
adolescents—when we simply must have something because everyone else
does. For Barbara Kingsolver, it was white go-go boots. Remembering this desire
becomes an occasion for Kingsolver to reflect on her own entanglements with
fashion, and particularly how she might respond when her own daughter wants
the 1990s equivalent of go-go boots. Like most personal essays, this one tells
stories but it never strays from larger questions about conformity, identity, and
parenting.
LIFE WITHOUT GO-GO BOOTS
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fashion nearly wrecked my life. I grew up beyond its pale, convinced that
this would stunt me in some irreparable way. I don’t think it has, but for a long
time it was touch and go.
We lived in the country, in the middle of an alfalfa field; we had no immediate access to Bobbie Brooks sweaters. I went to school in the hand-medowns of a cousin three years older. She had excellent fashion sense, but during the three-year lag her every sleek outfit turned to a pumpkin. In fifth
grade, when girls were wearing straight shifts with buttons down the front, I
wore pastel shirtwaists with cap sleeves and a multitude of built-in petticoats.
My black lace-up oxfords, which my parents perceived to have orthopedic
value, carried their own weight in the spectacle. I suspected people noticed,
and I knew it for sure on the day Billy Stamps announced to the lunch line:
“Make way for the Bride of Frankenstein.”
I suffered quietly, casting an ever-hopeful eye on my eighth-grade cousin
whose button-front shifts someday would be mine. But by the time I was an
eighth grader, everyone with an iota of social position wore polka-dot shirts
and miniskirts. For Christmas, I begged for go-go boots. The rest of my life
would be endurable if I had a pair of those white, calf-high confections with
the little black heels. My mother, though always inscrutable near Christmas,
Personal Essay
seemed sympathetic; there was hope. Never mind that those little black heels
are like skate blades in inclement weather. I would walk on air.
On Christmas morning I received white rubber boots with treads like a
pair of Michelins. My mother loved me, but had missed the point.
In high school I took matters into my own hands. I learned to sew. I contrived to make an apple-green polyester jumpsuit that was supremely fashionable for about two months. Since it took me forty days and forty nights to
make the thing, my moment of glory was brief. I learned what my mother had
been trying to tell me all along: high fashion has the shelf life of potato salad.
And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
Once I left home and went to college I was on my own, fashion-wise, having bypassed my cousin in stature and capped the arrangement off by moving
to another state. But I found I still had to reckon with life’s limited choices.
After classes I worked variously as a house cleaner, typesetter, and artists’
model. I could spend my wages on trendy apparel (which would be useless to
me in any of my jobs, particularly the latter), or on the lesser gratifications of
food and textbooks. It was a tough call, but I opted for education. This was
Indiana and it was cold; when it wasn’t cold, it was rainy. I bought an army
surplus overcoat, with zip-out lining, that reached my ankles, and I found in
my parents’ attic a green pith helmet. I became a known figure on campus.
Fortunately, this was the era in which army boots were a fashion option for coeds.And besides, who knew? Maybe under all that all-weather olive drab was a
Bobbie Brooks sweater. My social life picked right up.
As an adult, I made two hugely fortuitous choices in the women’s-wear
department: first, I moved out West, where the buffalo roam and hardly anyone is ever arrested for being unstylish. Second, I became a novelist. Artists
(also mathematicians and geniuses) are greatly indulged by society when it
comes to matters of grooming. If we happen to look like an unmade bed, it’s
presumed we’re preoccupied with plot devices or unifying theories or things
of that ilk.
Even so, when I was invited to attend an important author event on the
East Coast, a friend took me in hand.
“Writers are supposed to be eccentric,” I wailed.
My friend, one of the people who loves me best in the world, replied:
“Barbara, you’re not eccentric, you’re an anachronism,” and marched me
down to an exclusive clothing shop.
It was a very small store; I nearly hyperventilated. “ You could liquidate the
stock here and feed an African nation for a year,” I whispered. But under pressure I bought a suit, and wore it to the important author function. For three
hours of my life I was precisely in vogue.
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Since then it has reigned over my closet from its dry-cleaner bag, feeling
unhappy and out of place, I am sure, a silk ambassador assigned to a flannel republic. Even if I go to a chichi restaurant, the suit stays home. I’m always afraid
I’ll spill something on it; I’d be too nervous to enjoy myself. It turns out I
would rather converse than make a statement.
Now, there is fashion, and there is style. The latter, I’ve found, will serve,
and costs less. Style is mostly a matter of acting as if you know very well what
you look like, thanks, and are just delighted about it. It also requires consistency.A friend of mine wears buckskin moccasins every day of her life. She has
daytime and evening moccasins. This works fine in Arizona, but when my
friend fell in love with a Tasmanian geologist and prepared to move to a rain
forest, I worried. Moccasins instantaneously decompose in wet weather. But I
should have known, my friend has sense. She bought clear plastic galoshes to
button over her moccasins, and writes me that she’s happy.
I favor cowboy boots. I don’t do high heels, because you never know when
you might actually have to get somewhere, and most other entries in the
ladies-shoes category look to me like Ol’ Dixie and Ol’ Dobbin trying to
sneak into the Derby, trailing their plow. Cowboy boots aren’t trying.They say,
“I’m no pump, and furthermore, so what?” That characterizes my whole uniform, in fact: oversized flannel shirts, jeans or cotton leggings, and cowboy
boots when weather permits. In summer I lean toward dresses that make contact with the body (if at all) only on the shiatsu acupressure points; maybe also
a Panama hat; and sneakers. I am happy.
I’m also a parent, which of course calls into question every decision
one ever believes one has made for the last time. Can I raise my daughter as
a raiment renegade? At present she couldn’t care less. Maybe obsessions
skip a generation. She was blessed with two older cousins whose sturdy
hand-me-downs she has worn from birth, with relish. If she wasn’t entirely
a fashion plate, she also escaped being typecast. For her first two years she
had no appreciable hair, to which parents can clamp those plastic barrettes
that are gender dead giveaways. So when I took her to the park in cousin
Ashley’s dresses, strangers commented on her blue eyes and lovely complexion; when she wore Andrew’s playsuits emblazoned with trucks and
airplanes (why is it we only decorate our boys with modes of transportation?), people always commented on how strong and alert my child was—
and what’s his name?
This interests me. I also know it can’t last. She’s in school now, and I’m
very quickly remembering what school is about: two parts ABCs to fifty parts
Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind? She still rejects
stereotypes, with extraordinary good humor. She has a dress-up collection to
Personal Essay
die for, gleaned from Goodwill and her grandparents’ world travels, and likely
as not will show up to dinner wearing harem pants, bunny ears, a glitter-bra
over her T-shirt, wooden shoes, and a fez. But underneath it all, she’s only human. I have a feeling the day might come when my daughter will beg to be a
slave of conventional fashion.
I’m inclined to resist, if it happens. To press on her the larger truths I finally absorbed from my own wise parents: that she can find her own path.That
she will be more valued for inward individuality than outward conformity.
That a world plagued by poverty can ill afford the planned obsolescence of
haute couture.
But a small corner of my heart still harbors the Bride of Frankenstein,
eleven years of age, haunting me in her brogues and petticoats.Always and forever, the ghosts of past anguish compel us to live through our children. If my
daughter ever asks for the nineties equivalent of go-go boots, I’ll cave in.
Maybe I’ll also buy her some of those clear plastic galoshes to button over
them on inclement days.
INQUIRING INTO THE ESSAY
Explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect on Kingsolver’s “Life Without Go-Go
Boots.”
1. Explore your own experiences with fashion. Perhaps begin, as
Kingsolver did in her essay, by fastwriting about the first fashionable piece of clothing you longed to have. Or focus on your own memories of the fashion trends that swept around and through you when
you were younger. Write for seven minutes.
2. Explain where in “Life Without Go-Go Boots” ascends the mountain
of reflection, and collectively what do these ideas say about conformity, identity, fashion, or parenting? In other words, what does
Kingsolver seem to be saying in this essay?
3. Some view fashion consciousness as a sign of superficiality. Using
evidence from Kingsolver’s essay and other sources including your
own observations, make an evaluation of the role of fashion in your
life and, in a larger sense, American culture.
4. Did you like reading this essay? Why? What specifically were some
of the qualities of “Life Without Go-Go Boots” that you found compelling or interesting? What does this say about your own tastes as
a reader? Did you dislike the piece? Can you be specific about why
and what it says about your reading tastes? Since we are required to
read many kinds of texts, particularly in college, is it possible to
change your tastes in reading? How?
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P E R S O N A L E S S AY
The essay that follows shows what Bailey White, a Georgia elementary school
teacher and commentator on National Public Radio, does with the personal essay. She writes with charm and grace about little things often linked to her
southern life and heritage. Don’t be fooled, however; there is a fierce intelligence behind what seem to be simple essays. “Forbidden Things” is a piece that
ponders White’s reaction to the ubiquitous signs of warning often encountered
in public places. Who might be responsible for them, she wonders, and what is
he like?
As you read “Forbidden Things,” consider which of the features of the personal essay listed earlier seem present in Bailey’s work. In particular, is there an
implicit theme in this essay, and if so, what might it be? What is Bailey trying to
say here about warning signs?
FORBIDDEN THINGS
Bailey White
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I was leaning over the little railing, looking down into the Devil’s
Millhopper, an interesting geological formation and the focal point of a Florida
state park. Waterfalls plunge 120 feet down into a bowl-shaped sinkhole;
maidenhair ferns and moss grow in little crevices along the steep, sloping sides
of the gorge; and a beautiful mist rises up.
I stood there, gazing down, and feeling a reverence for these spectacles of
the natural world. I felt the slow sweep of geologic time. I felt the remnants of
the spiritual significance this place had had for the Indians who lived here for
thousands of years. I felt the wonder and awe of the first European explorers
of Florida looking down into this chasm for the first time.
Then another feeling crept over me, a deep, almost atavistic longing. It
was the urge to throw something down into the Devil’s Millhopper. I looked
around. A stone or a stick would do, but what I really wanted was a piece of
food, the nibbled end of a hotdog bun or a wedge of chocolate cake without
the icing.Then I noticed the sign, one of those tastefully unobtrusive state park
signs:
DO NOT THROW FOOD OR TRASH IN GORGE
4
It was 4:00 A.M. I was at the Los Angeles, California, bus station, my nextto-last stop on a dreary transcontinental bus trip—three days and three nights
on a Greyhound bus. My back ached, my knees ached, my head ached. Ever
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since El Paso, Texas, my seatmate had been an old man who chain-smoked
Marlboro cigarettes and sucked and slobbered over a perpetual ham sandwich
that kept oozing out of a greasy crumple of waxed paper.
I longed for a bath in my own bathtub, and then a deep sleep in my own
bed, stretched out full-length between clean sheets. But, I thought, pushing
open the door of the bus station bathroom, if I just wash my feet and my hair I
will be all right. I lined up my soap, my washrag, and my little bottle of shampoo on the back of the sink and took off my shoes and socks. Ahh, I thought.
Then I saw the sign on the mirror:
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DO NOT WASH HAIR OR FEET IN SINK
A few weeks ago I went into our little downtown restaurant and saw that
it had replaced its tired old salad bar with a gorgeous saltwater aquarium with
sea anemones, chunks of living coral, and big slow-moving colorful fish with
faces I could almost recognize. I spent my whole lunchtime staring into that
tank, mesmerized by the fish as they gracefully looped and glided, sending the
tentacles of the sea anemones into slow twirls and fanning out the tall grasses.
When I finished my sandwich I noticed that there were a couple of crumbs
left on my plate, just the size to pinch between thumb and finger. Oh, I thought,
to pinch up those crumbs and dip my fingers down into the water, breaking
through the smooth surface into the coolness and silence of that peaceful
world. One of the fish would make a looping turn, his odd exophrhalmic eyes
would rotate slowly in their sockets and fix upon the crumbs in my fingers.
Then he would angle up, and I would feel for just one exquisite instant those
thorny fish lips rasping across my fingertips. With rising delight and anticipation, I pinched up a crumb, two crumbs. I scrabbled across the plastic top of the
tank, found the little door, lifted it open—and then I saw the sign:
DO NOT FEED THE FISH
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*
WE PROHIBIT CLIMBING IN ANY MANNER
FROM OR ALONG THE CANYON RIM
DO NOT PICK FLOWERS
NO SMOKING EATING OR DRINKING
NO SWINGING FROM VINES IN TREES
NO PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC IN WOODS
NO FISHING
*
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NO SWIMMING
NO TRESPASSING
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Don’t get me wrong; I approve of these prohibitions. Imagine the nasty
mess in the bottom of the Devil’s Millhopper if every self-indulgent tourist
threw a piece of food into the sinkhole. Imagine the puddles on the floor and
the plumbing complications in the Los Angeles bus station if every weary
trans-continental washed her hair and feet in the sink. Imagine the deadly
scum of grease on the surface of that saltwater aquarium if every fish-dazed
diner fed the catalufa his last mayonnaise-coated crumbs.
But sometimes I wonder:Who makes up these necessary and useful rules,
and how does he know so well the deep and touching urges of human beings
to pick flowers, walk in the woods, climb canyon walls, swing from vines, and
feed already well-nourished animals? I imagine with distaste a mean, sour,
silent little man skulking around in public places, watching us furtively with
squinny eyes while scribbling on his pad with a gnawed pencil. In national
parks he disguises himself as a tourist in reflective sunglasses and plaid
Bermuda shorts. “Bryce Canyon,” he notes with a smirk, “Urinating on
hoodoos and off cliffs.” In zoos he wears khaki and lurks in the shadows, hiding
behind a bag of peanuts. ‘Touching giraffe’s tongue through fence wire. . . .
Feeling camel’s hump,” he scribbles.
At night he goes home, and in his stark white/workshop, illuminated with
fluorescent lights, he makes those signs. Rounded letters routed out of boards
for the parks: “We Prohibit. . . ., No . . ., and No. . .” Spiky green on white
zoos: “Do Not, Not Allowed, . . . Is.” And-we-mean-it black and white for
commercial establishments: “Absolutely NO . . ., Are Required,We Forbid. . .
I imagine, one night, as he works late stacking and bundling signs for the
next day’s delivery, the tendril of a grapevine creeps in at his window. When
his back is turned, its pale nose will gently nudge around him.
“No Touching!” he will admonish.
But with a clutch and a snatch the vine will retract, and he will find himself yanked through the night sky above a central Florida state park.
“Do Not, Swing from Vines!” he will shriek.
And with that, the vine will untwine and drop him into the vortex of a
limpid spring.
“No Swimming!” he will sputter as the dark, icy water closes over his head.
As he sinks, strange, pale-colored fish will swim up and cock their eyes at him.
“Do Not Feed the Fish,” he will squeak. But, slowly and precisely, the fish
will angle up, move in, and then, all over, he will feel the pick pick pick of
those prickly lips.
Personal Essay
INQUIRING INTO THE ESSAY
Use the four methods of inquiry—exploring, explaining, evaluating, and
reflecting—to think through writing about White’s essay and to analyze
her approach.
1. An appeal of the personal essay is its focus on experiences or feelings the reader and writer share. We all, for example, have feelings
about rules. In your notebook, begin a fastwrite that explores your
own experiences and observations about “forbidden things.” Begin
by remembering a time when you consciously broke the rules.
Describe what happened in detail. Skip a line, and write about another moment of dutifully following the rules, and maybe having
complicated feelings about it. As you look back on these, how do you
feel about them?
2. Remember the aphorism to “show, and don’t tell” that is often given
to fiction writers? Essays, unlike some short stories, generally show
and tell, moving from the sea to the mountain and back again. Can
you detect that movement in this essay? Where? Explain what you
noticed about when and where the essay shifts from narration to reflection.
3. Is everything, even a story like this one, an evaluation? Is Bailey
White attempting to convince the reader of something? If so, what?
What is her central claim and what evidence does she offer to support it?
4. Create a graph of your interest in this essay, as shown in Figure 4.1.
Put the paragraph numbers on the horizontal axis and your level of
interest, scored from 1 to 5 (with 5 being highest interest and 1 lowest
5
4
X
3
X
X
X
X
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1
X
X
X
X
X
1
2
X
X
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X
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FIGURE 4.1 An example of a graph of reader interest. The horizontal axis lists paragraph numbers and the vertical axis lists the level of interest.
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interest), on the vertical axis. Plot the graph and compare your graph
with others in the class. Discuss which paragraphs seemed to generate the highest and lowest levels of reader interest. What are the particular qualities of each? Reflect on what your own graph says about
you as a reader.
P E R S O N A L E S S AY
America is a nation of immigrants, and their stories often haunt their children.
Judith Ortiz Cofer moved from Puerto Rico as a child with her family in the mid1950s to a barrio in Paterson, New Jersey. There she became both part of and
witness to a familiar narrative, that of the outsider who finds herself wedged between two worlds, two cultures, and two longings: the desire to return “home”
and the desire to feel at home in the new place. While this is a story most immigrants know well, it is also a deeply personal one, shaded by particular places,
prejudices, and patterns.
Cofer tells her story in an unusual way—it weaves together two separate narratives, each told simultaneously, and divides the essay into sections. Contemporary
personal essays frequently use a collage or segmented structure, and they do it for
many reasons. In “Silent Dancing,” for example, Cofer exploits the juxtaposition of
her story of living in Paterson as a child with an account of a home movie where
the silent revelers—all relatives and friends—pose for the camera. Told together,
the two stories create a tension that is brittle with meaning. Which world do the
people in the home movie inhabit—the old one or the new one? How does Cofer’s
own story compare with the one that is implied in the film? Do both narratives imply the same idea about cultural conflict and assimilation?
SILENT DANCING
Judith Ortiz Cofer
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We have a home movie of this party. Several times my mother and I have watched it together, and I have asked questions about the silent revelers coming in and out of focus. It
is grainy and of short duration, but it’s a great visual aid to my memory of life at that
time. And it is in color—the only complete scene in color I can recall from those years.
2
We lived in Puerto Rico until my brother was born in 1954. Soon after, because of economic pressures on our growing family, my father joined the
United States Navy. He was assigned to duty on a ship in Brooklyn Yard—a
place of cement and steel that was to be his home base in the States until his
retirement more than twenty years later. He left the Island first, alone, going
to New York City and tracking down his uncle who lived with his family across
Personal Essay
the Hudson River in Paterson, New Jersey.There my father found a tiny apartment in a huge tenement that had once housed Jewish families but was just being taken over and transformed by Puerto Ricans, overflowing from New York
City. In 1955 he sent for us. My mother was only twenty years old, I was not
quite three, and my brother was a toddler when we arrived at El Building, as
the place had been christened by its newest residents.
My memories of life in Paterson during those first few years are all in
shades of gray. Maybe I was too young to absorb vivid colors and details, or to
discriminate between the slate blue of the winter sky and the darker hues of
the snow-bearing clouds, but that single color washes over the whole period.
The building we lived in was gray, as were the streets, filled with slush the first
few months of my life there.The coat my father had bought for me was similar
in color and too big; it sat heavily on my thin frame.
I do remember the way the heater pipes banged and rattled, startling all of
us out of sleep until we got so used to the sound that we automatically shut it
out or raised our voices above the racket. The hiss from the valve punctuated
my sleep (which has always been fitful) like a nonhuman presence in the
room—a dragon sleeping at the entrance of my childhood. But the pipes were
also a connection to all the other lives being lived around us. Having come
from a house designed for a single family back in Puerto Rico—my mother’s
extended-family home—it was curious to know that strangers lived under our
floor and above our heads, and that the heater pipe went through everyone’s
apartment. (My first spanking in Paterson came as a result of playing tunes on
the pipes in my room to see if there would be an answer.) My mother was as
new to this concept of beehive life as I was, but she had been given strict orders by my father to keep the doors locked, the noise down, ourselves to ourselves.
It seems that Father had learned some painful lessons about prejudice
while searching for an apartment in Paterson. Not until years later did I hear
how much resistance he had encountered with landlords who were panicking
at the influx of Latinos into a neighborhood that had been Jewish for a couple
of generations. It made no difference that it was the American phenomenon of
ethnic turnover which was changing the urban core of Paterson, and that the
human flood could not be held back with an accusing finger.
“You Cuban?” one man had asked my father, pointing at his name tag on
the navy uniform—even though my father had the fair skin and light brown
hair of his northern Spanish background, and the name Ortiz is as common in
Puerto Rico as Johnson is in the United States.
“No,” my father had answered, looking past the finger into his adversary’s
angry eyes. “I’m Puerto Rican.”
“Same shit.” And the door closed.
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9
My father could have passed as European, but we couldn’t. My brother
and I both have our mother’s black hair and olive skin, and so we lived in El
Building and visited our great-uncle and his fair children on the next block. It
was their private joke that they were the German branch of the family. Not
many years later that area too would be mainly Puerto Rican. It was as if the
heart of the city map were being gradually colored brown—café con leche
brown. Our color.
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The movie opens with a sweep of the living room. It is “typical” immigrant Puerto Rican
decor for the time: the sofa and chairs are square and hard-looking, upholstered in
bright colors (blue and yellow in this instance) and covered with the transparent plastic
that furniture salesmen then were so adept at convincing women to buy.The linoleum on
the floor is light blue; where it had been subjected to spike heels, as it was in most places,
there were dime-size indentations all over it that cannot be seen in this movie.The room
is full of people dressed up: dark suits for the men, red dresses for the women.When I have
asked my mother why most of the women are in red that night, she has shrugged and
said,“I don’t remember. Just a coincidence.” She doesn’t have my obsession for assigning
symbolism to everything.
The three women in red sitting on the couch are my mother, my eighteen-year-old
cousin, and her brother’s girlfriend.The novia is just up from the Island, which is apparent in her body language. She sits up formally, her dress pulled over her knees. She is a
pretty girl, but her posture makes her look insecure, lost in her full-skirted dress, which
she has carefully tucked around her to make room for my gorgeous cousin, her future sister-in-law. My cousin has grown up in Paterson and is in her last year of high school.
She doesn’t have a trace of what Puerto Ricans call la mancha (literally, the stain: the
mark of the new immigrant—something about the posture, the voice, or the humble demeanor that makes it obvious to everyone the person has just arrived on the mainland).
My cousin is wearing a tight, sequined, cocktail dress. Her brown hair has been lightened
with peroxide around the bangs, and she is holding a cigarette expertly between her fingers, bringing it up to her mouth in a sensuous arc of her arm as she talks animatedly.
My mother, who has come up to sit between the two women, both only a few years
younger than herself, is somewhere between the poles they represent in our culture.
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It became my father’s obsession to get out of the barrio, and thus we were
never permitted to form bonds with the place or with the people who lived
there.Yet El Building was a comfort to my mother, who never got over yearning for la isla. She felt surrounded by her language: the walls were thin, and
voices speaking and arguing in Spanish could be heard all day. Salsas blasted out
of radios, turned on early in the morning and left on for company. Women
seemed to cook rice and beans perpetually—the strong aroma of boiling red
kidney beans permeated the hallways.
Personal Essay
Though Father preferred that we do our grocery shopping at the supermarket when he came home on weekend leaves, my mother insisted that she
could cook only with products whose labels she could read. Consequently,
during the week I accompanied her and my little brother to La Bodega—a
hole-in-the-wall grocery store across the street from El Building. There we
squeezed down three narrow aisles jammed with various products. Goya and
Libby’s—those were the trademarks that were trusted by her mamá, so my
mother bought many cans of Goya beans, soups, and condiments, as well as little cans of Libby’s fruit juices for us. And she also bought Colgate toothpaste
and Palmolive soap. (The final e is pronounced in both these products in
Spanish, so for many years I believed that they were manufactured on the
Island. I remember my surprise at first hearing a commercial on television in
which “Colgate” rhymed with “ate.”) We always lingered at La Bodega, for it
was there that Mother breathed best, taking in the familiar aromas of the foods
she knew from Mamá’s kitchen. It was also there that she got to speak to the
other women of El Building without violating outright Father’s dictates against
fraternizing with our neighbors.
Yet Father did his best to make our “assimilation” painless. I can still see
him carrying a real Christmas tree up several flights of stairs to our apartment,
leaving a trail of aromatic pine. He carried it formally, as if it were a flag in a
parade.We were the only ones in El Building that I knew of who got presents
on both Christmas and día de Reyes, the day when the Three Kings brought gifts
to Christ and to Hispanic children.
Our supreme luxury in El Building was having our own television set. It
must have been a result of Father’s guilt feelings over the isolation he had imposed on us, but we were among the first in the barrio to have one. My
brother quickly became an avid watcher of Captain Kangaroo and Jungle Jim,
while I loved all the series showing families. By the time I started first grade, I
could have drawn a map of Middle America as exemplified by the lives of characters in Father Knows Best,The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons,
and (my favorite) Bachelor Father, where John Forsythe treated his adopted
teenage daughter like a princess because he was rich and had a Chinese houseboy to do everything for him. In truth, compared to our neighbors in El
Building, we were rich. My father’s navy check provided us with financial security and a standard of living that the factory workers envied.The only thing his
money could not buy us was a place to live away from the barrio—his greatest
wish, Mother’s greatest fear.
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In the home movie the men are shown next, sitting around a card table set up in one corner of the living room, playing dominoes.The clack of the ivory pieces was a familiar
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sound. I heard it in many houses on the Island and in many apartments in Paterson. In
Leave It to Beaver, the Cleavers played bridge in every other episode; in my childhood,
the men started every social occasion with a hotly debated round of dominoes. The
women would sit around and watch, but they never participated in the games.
Here and there you can see a small child. Children were always brought to parties
and, whenever they got sleepy, were put to bed in the host’s bedroom. Babysitting was a
concept unrecognized by the Puerto Rican women I knew: a responsible mother did not
leave her children with any stranger. And in a culture where children are not considered
intrusive, there was no need to leave the children at home.We went where our mother went.
Of my preschool years I have only impressions: the sharp bite of the wind in
December as we walked with our parents toward the brightly lit stores downtown; how I felt like a stuffed doll in my heavy coat, boots, and mittens; how
good it was to walk into the five-and-dime and sit at the counter drinking hot
chocolate. On Saturdays our whole family would walk downtown to shop at
the big department stores on Broadway. Mother bought all our clothes at
Penney’s and Sears, and she liked to buy her dresses at the women’s specialty
shops like Lerner’s and Diana’s. At some point we’d go into Woolworth’s and
sit at the soda fountain to eat.
We never ran into other Latinos at these stores or when eating out, and it
became clear to me only years later that the women from El Building shopped
mainly in other places—stores owned by other Puerto Ricans or by Jewish
merchants who had philosophically accepted our presence in the city and decided to make us their good customers, if not real neighbors and friends.
These establishments were located not downtown but in the blocks around
our street, and they were referred to generically as La Tienda, El Bazar, La
Bodega, La Botánica. Everyone knew what was meant. These were the stores
where your face did not turn a clerk to stone, where your money was as green
as anyone else’s.
One New Year’s Eve we were dressed up like child models in the Sears catalogue: my brother in a miniature man’s suit and bow tie, and I in black patentleather shoes and a frilly dress with several layers of crinoline underneath. My
mother wore a bright red dress that night, I remember, and spike heels; her
long black hair hung to her waist. Father, who usually wore his navy uniform
during his short visits home, had put on a dark civilian suit for the occasion:
we had been invited to his uncle’s house for a big celebration. Everyone was
excited because my mother’s brother Hernan—a bachelor who could indulge
himself with luxuries—had bought a home movie camera, which he would be
trying out that night.
Even the home movie cannot fill in the sensory details such a gathering
left imprinted in a child’s brain. The thick sweetness of women’s perfumes
Personal Essay
mixing with the ever-present smells of food cooking in the kitchen: meat and
plantain pasteles, as well as the ubiquitous rice dish made special with pigeon
peas—gandules—and seasoned with precious sofrito sent up from the Island by
somebody’s mother or smuggled in by a recent traveler. Sofrito was one of the
items that women hoarded, since it was hardly ever in stock at La Bodega. It
was the flavor of Puerto Rico.
The men drank Palo Viejo rum, and some of the younger ones got weepy.
The first time I saw a grown man cry was at a New Year’s Eve party: he had
been reminded of his mother by the smells in the kitchen. But what I remember most were the boiled pasteles, plantain or yucca rectangles stuffed with
corned beef or other meats, olives, and many other savory ingredients, all
wrapped in banana leaves. Everybody had to fish one out with a fork. There
was always a “trick” pastel—one without stuffing—and whoever got that one
was the “New Year’s Fool.”
There was also the music. Long-playing albums were treated like precious
china in these homes. Mexican recordings were popular, but the songs that
brought tears to my mother’s eyes were sung by the melancholy Daniel Santos,
whose life as a drug addict was the stuff of legend. Felipe Rodríguez was a particular favorite of couples, since he sang about faithless women and brokenhearted men.There is a snatch of one lyric that has stuck in my mind like a needle on a worn groove: De piedra ha de ser mi cama, de piedra la cabezera
. . . la mujer que a mi me quiera . . . ha de quererme de veras.Ay,Ay,Ay, corazón, porque no
amas . . . I must have heard it a thousand times since the idea of a bed made of
stone, and its connection to love, first troubled me with its disturbing images.
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The five-minute home movie ends with people dancing in a circle—the creative filmmaker must have set it up, so that all of them could file past him. It is
both comical and sad to watch silent dancing. Since there is no justification for
the absurd movements that music provides for some of us, people appear frantic, their faces embarrassingly intense. It’s as if you were watching sex.Yet for
years, I’ve had dreams in the form of this home movie. In a recurring scene,
familiar faces push themselves forward into my mind’s eye, plastering their
features into distorted close-ups. And I’m asking them: “Who is she? Who is
the old woman I don’t recognize? Is she an aunt? Somebody’s wife? Tell me
who she is.”
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“See the beauty mark on her cheek as big as a hill on the lunar landscape of
her face—well, that runs in the family. The women on your father’s side of the
family wrinkle early; it’s the price they pay for that fair skin.The young girl with
the green stain on her wedding dress is la novia—just up from the Island. See,
she lowers her eyes when she approaches the camera, as she’s supposed to.
Decent girls never look at you directly in the face. Humilde, humble, a girl
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should express humility in all her actions. She will make a good wife for your
cousin. He should consider himself lucky to have met her only weeks after she
arrived here. If he marries her quickly, she will make him a good Puerto
Rican–style wife; but if he waits too long, she will be corrupted by the city, just
like your cousin there.”
26
“She means me. I do what I want.This is not some primitive island I live on.
Do they expect me to wear a black mantilla on my head and go to mass every
day? Not me. I’m an American woman, and I will do as I please. I can type faster
than anyone in my senior class at Central High, and I’m going to be a secretary to
a lawyer when I graduate. I can pass for an American girl anywhere—I’ve tried
it. At least for Italian, anyway—I never speak Spanish in public. I hate these parties, but I wanted the dress. I look better than any of these humildes here. My life
is going to be different. I have an American boyfriend. He is older and has a car.
My parents don’t know it, but I sneak out of the house late at night sometimes to
be with him. If I marry him, even my name will be American. I hate rice and
beans—that’s what makes these women fat.”
27
“Your prima is pregnant by that man she’s been sneaking around with.Would
I lie to you? I’m your tiá política, your great-uncle’s common-law wife—the one
he abandoned on the Island to go marry your cousin’s mother. I was not invited
to this party, of course, but I came anyway. I came to tell you that story about
your cousin that you’ve always wanted to hear. Do you remember the comment
your mother made to a neighbor that has always haunted you? The only thing you
heard was your cousin’s name, and then you saw your mother pick up your doll
from the couch and say: ‘It was as big as this doll when they flushed it down the
toilet.’This image has bothered you for years, hasn’t it? You had nightmares about
babies being flushed down the toilet, and you wondered why anyone would do
such a horrible thing.You didn’t dare ask your mother about it. She would only
tell you that you had not heard her right, and yell at you for listening to adult
conversations. But later, when you were old enough to know about abortions,
you suspected.
“I am here to tell you that you were right. Your cousin was growing an
americanito in her belly when this movie was made. Soon after, she put something
long and pointy into her pretty self, thinking maybe she could get rid of the problem before breakfast and still make it to her first class at the high school. Well,
niña, her screams could be heard downtown.Your aunt, her mamá, who had been a
midwife on the Island, managed to pull the little thing out. Yes, they probably
flushed it down the toilet. What else could they do with it—give it a Christian
burial in a little white casket with blue bows and ribbons? Nobody wanted that
baby—least of all the father, a teacher at her school with a house in West Paterson
that he was filling with real children, and a wife who was a natural blonde.
“Girl, the scandal sent your uncle back to the bottle. And guess where your
cousin ended up? Irony of ironies. She was sent to a village in Puerto Rico to live
with a relative on her mother’s side: a place so far away from civilization that you
have to ride a mule to reach it. A real change in scenery. She found a man
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Personal Essay
there—women like that cannot live without male company—but believe me,
the men in Puerto Rico know how to put a saddle on a woman like her. La gringa,
they call her. Ha, ha, ha. La gringa is what she always wanted to be . . .”
The old woman’s mouth becomes a cavernous black hole I fall into. And as I
fall, I can feel the reverberations of her laughter. I hear the echoes of her last
mocking words: la gringa, la gringa! And the conga line keeps moving silently
past me.There is no music in my dream for the dancers.
When Odysseus visits Hades to see the spirit of his mother, he makes an
offering of sacrificial blood, but since all the souls crave an audience with the
living, he has to listen to many of them before he can ask questions. I, too, have
to hear the dead and the forgotten speak in my dream.Those who are still part
of my life remain silent, going around and around in their dance. The others
keep pressing their faces forward to say things about the past.
My father’s uncle is last in line. He is dying of alcoholism, shrunken and
shriveled like a monkey, his face a mass of wrinkles and broken arteries. As he
comes closer I realize that in his features I can see my whole family. If you
were to stretch that rubbery flesh, you could find my father’s face, and deep
within that face—my own. I don’t want to look into those eyes ringed in purple. In a few years he will retreat into silence, and take a long, long time to
die. Move back,Tío, I tell him. I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Give the
dancers room to move. Soon it will be midnight.Who is the NewYear’s Fool this time?
INQUIRING INTO THE ESSAY
Explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect on Cofer’s “Silent Dancing.”
1. In the 1950s and 1960s, many saw America as a “melting pot.” The
idea then was that although we may have many different immigrant backgrounds, we should strive towards some common
“Americanism.” For some, this is still a powerful idea, but for others
the melting pot is a metaphor for cultural hegemony or even racial
prejudice, a demand that difference be ignored and erased rather
than celebrated. In your journal, write about your own feelings on
this controversy. Tell the story of a friend, a relative, a neighbor
who was an outsider. Tell about your own experience. What did it
mean to assimilate, and at what cost?
2. Because essays often have a delayed thesis, or have greater weight
toward the end, the final paragraphs often have particular significance. Explain the possible meanings of the last paragraph—and
particularly the last few lines—of “Silent Dancing.”
3. Does this essay make an evaluation, and if so, what is it asserting
about cultural assimilation in America during the 1950s and 1960s?
Is Cofers’ evaluation still relevant?
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4. One of the most common reasons students cite for liking a story is
that “they could relate to it.” Does that criterion apply here? Reflect
on whether it’s a standard you often use as a reader to judge the
value of something. What exactly does it mean to “relate to” a text?
SEEING THE FORM
FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON
In the striking self-portrait that follows, American photographer Frances
Benjamin Johnston represents herself in ways in which most nineteenth
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self-Portrait (1896)
Exercise 4.1
century woman wouldn’t dare. Her skirts are hiked up to her knees, she
holds a burning cigarette between her fingers, and clutches a beer mug on
her lap. Johnston carefully composed the picture to offer a very particular
version of herself. Photographic self-portraits like this one are similar to
personal essays in a number of respects. They often tell a story, and the
photographer, like the essayist, is a subject of the work, sometimes the
subject. We also consider a photograph to be “authentic.” We assume, for
instance, that this is the real Frances Benjamin Johnston, not someone
else’s impression or interpretation of her. When we read a personal essay,
a work of nonfiction, we also assume that the I of the essay is the author of
the piece, not some character or other invention.
As writers of personal essays, don’t we attempt to represent ourselves
as authentically and honestly as we can? Aren’t we basically trying to present verbal pictures of ourselves and our experiences? But how accurate
are these self-representations? And if the comparison between a self-portrait such as Johnston’s picture and the personal essay is an accurate one,
what does it imply about how we might write our own essays, but also how
we might read the personal essays of other people?
EXERCISE
4.1
Photographic Autobiography
STEP ONE: Find a picture of yourself, preferably from the past, or use a
camera and compose a self-portrait. The self-portrait shouldn’t be a random shot of your face, but a photograph that is composed to say something
about who you are. Choose an appropriate location or setting. Consider
what you’ll be doing in the picture. Decide whether the picture will be a
close-up or a long shot, including all or just part of you.
STEP TWO: Once you have a picture, set it before you and begin fastwriting using the following prompt: As I look at this picture, it makes me
think about _______. And then I think about ______________. And then . . .
And then . . .
Feel free to digress and tell a story about yourself, or about the moment captured in the photograph, or perhaps about that time in your life.
If you’re writing about a self-portrait, explain to yourself what you notice
in the photograph, and especially what it seems to be saying that you
might not have expected when you took the picture.
Stop and look at the image whenever you feel the urge to inspire more
writing.
STEP THREE: Now skip a few lines in your journal. Take a critical
stance for a moment and answer one of the following questions:
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What do I understand now about myself that I didn’t fully understand when this picture was taken?
■
What does this self-portrait say about me that I didn’t expect it to
say?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Your instructor may ask you to share
your photographs or some of the writing that emerged from this exercise.
In a full class or small groups consider the following questions:
■
Did you feel exposed sharing your pictures or your writing? Did this
make it harder to be honest about yourself?
■
What surprised you most about the process of doing the exercise?
■
Finding some reflective distance—moving away from the story you’re
telling to consider what it might mean—is an important part of writing
a personal essay. Did looking at the picture give you some new perspective on who you were or who you are? Was this distance easy to find?
■
THE WRITING PROCESS
■
INQUIRY PROJECT: Writing a Personal Essay
You’ll write a 1,000-word personal essay that explores some aspect of
your experience. Your instructor may provide additional details.
Choose your topic carefully. Because of the essay’s exploratory methods, the best topics are those that you want to write about not because you know what you think, but because you want to discover
what you think. The essay should have the following qualities:
■
It must do more than tell a story; there must be a purpose behind
telling the story that speaks in some way to someone else.
■
It should, ultimately, answer the So what? question.
■
Your essay should include some reflection to explain or speculate
about what you understand now about something that you didn’t
understand then.
■
It should be richly detailed. Seize opportunities to show what you
mean, rather than simply explain it.
Thinking About Subjects
When you are assigned a personal essay, it’s essential to embrace uncertainty and be willing to suspend judgment. This form of inquiry, more than
The Writing Process
any other, seems most useful when the writer has chosen a subject because
he doesn’t know what he wants to say about it. This is risky. Obviously,
one of the risks when you start out with uncertainty is that you might end
up that way, too; your draft may just seem to go nowhere. This is a problem, but it’s something that often can be addressed in revision. The key to
writing strong personal essays is accepting that first drafts might be real
stinkers. But there’s a payoff to this risk—the personal essay frequently
yields surprise and discovery. You may well find out what you didn’t know
you knew, and that is among the greatest pleasures of a writer.
As you play with the prompts that follow, then, be particularly vigilant
about pursuing subject matter that is confusing to you, that raises the hair
on the back of your neck, or just makes you say to yourself, “I’m not sure
what I think or feel about that.”
Generating Ideas
Begin exploring possible subjects by generating material in your notebook.
This should be an open-ended process, a chance to use your creative side by
jumping into the sea and swiming around without worrying too much
about making sense or trying to prejudge the value of the writing or the
subjects you generate. In a sense, this is an invitation to play around.
ONE STUDENT’S RESPONSE
MARGARET’S JOURNAL: LISTING QUESTIONS
Is my cat extremely unusual or can any cat be taught to walk and be as needy
and attached as her?
Does testosterone really make one more confident? Is there a correlation between high T and aggressiveness?
How did I once find Dr. Laura so compelling?
Why are women seldom loyal to each other? How are female friendships different from male ones? Can women and men be friends without an underlying
sexual tension?
Listing Prompts. Lists can be rich sources of triggering topics. Let them
grow freely, and when you’re ready, use an item as the focus of another list
or an episode of fastwriting. The following prompts should get you started.
1. Make a fast list of experiences you’ve had that you can’t forget.
Reach into all parts and times of your life.
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2. Make a list of questions that have always nagged you about the following: school, men or women, fast food, television, public restrooms, shoes, and sports.
Fastwriting Prompts. In the early stages of generating possible topics for an
essay, fastwriting can be invaluable, if you allow yourself to write “badly.”
Initially, don’t worry about staying focused; sometimes you find the best
triggering topics by ranging freely. Once you’ve tentatively settled on something, use a more focused fastwrite, trying to generate information and ideas
within the loose boundaries of your chosen topic. Here are some fastwriting
prompts that might yield useful discoveries for a personal essay:
1. Choose an item from any of the lists above as a prompt. Just start
fastwriting about the item; perhaps start with a story, a scene, a situation, a description. Just follow the writing to see where it leads.
2. Most of us quietly harbor dreams—we hope to be a professional
dancer, a good father, an activist, an Olympic luger, or a novelist.
Begin a fastwrite in which you explore your dreams. When the writing stalls, ask yourself questions: Where did this dream come from?
Do I still believe in it? What moments did it seem within reach? What
moments did it fade? Plunge into those moments.
3. What was the most confusing time in your life? Choose a moment or
scene that stands out in your memory from that time, and writing in
the present tense, describe what you see, hear, and do. After five
minutes, skip a line and choose another moment. Then another.
Make a collage.
Visual Prompts. Sometimes the best way to generate material is to see
what we think in something other than sentences. Boxes, lines, and arrows, charts, or even sketches can help us to see more of the landscape of a
subject, especially connections between fragments of information that
aren’t as obvious in prose. The clustering or mapping method is useful to
many writers early in the writing process as they try to discover a topic.
(See the “Inquiring into the Details” box that follows for more details on
how to create a cluster.) Figure 4.2 shows my cluster from the first prompt
below.
1. What objects would you most regret losing in a house fire? The answer would likely reveal something about your passions, your longings, even your regrets. Choose a most-treasured object as the core
for a cluster. Build a web of associations from it, returning back to
the detail in the core whenever a strand dies out. One of the wonderful complexities of being human is that we are sometimes deeply
conflicted (I’m not suggesting this is always fun). Pair two opposed
feelings that you consider typical of yourself. For example,
The Writing Process
1964
“I Want to Hold
Your Hand”
Beatles
45 rpm
8th Grade
Beatles
Rocky‘s Raiders
Frank Firestone
Photograph
Martin
Chris Field
Chris
Guitar
stand
stand
Green Bay, WI
open field
D-28
$465
escarpment
Dad
Jan
Norma
Mary Sherwin
Silvertone
Ruth Cook
Limestone running
to Niagra
the Guitar Gallery
Chicago
FIGURE 4.2 A cluster built around the one object I would most regret losing in a
house fire: my Martin guitar.
ambivalence/commitment, fear/risk taking, loneliness/sociable,
beautiful/ugly, composed/flaky, and so on. Use these paired words
as a core for a cluster.
2. Draw a long line on a piece of paper in your journal. This is your life.
Divide the line into segments that seem to describe what feels like
distinct times in your life. These may not necessarily correspond to
familiar age categories like adolescence or childhood. More likely,
the periods in your life will be associated with a place, a relationship, a dilemma, a job, a personal challenge, and so on, but since
this is a timeline, these periods will be chronological. Examine your
timeline, and as a fastwrite prompt, put two of these periods in your
life together. Explore what they had in common, particularly how
the earlier period might have shaped the later one. See Figure 4.3
for a sample timeline.
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Dad’s alcoholism
The Jan
years
The Montana period
Eco-freak
period
Political/
Karen
New
Hampshire
Professor
period
FIGURE 4.3 A sample timeline from my own life.
INQUIRING INTO THE DETAILS
CLUSTERING OR MAPPING
One of the virtues of clustering as a method of generating information is that it defies the more linear nature of writing, putting one
sentence after another in a chain of thought. When you make a cluster, there are multiple chains, each growing from a core word, phrase,
or idea. In Figure 4.2, I clustered the word “guitar.” I’m not just
thinking of any guitar, of course, but my 1969 Martin D-28 with
Brazilian rosewood and the ding on the front. This is the one object
I’d rescue from a fire.
Clusters are in code; each item in the web says more than it says,
at least to me, because I’m familiar with its meaning. You don’t have
that kind of knowledge, obviously, so my cluster wouldn’t say much to
you. Each strand suggests a story, an idea, or a feeling that I might
explore.
Typically, clustering is most useful at the beginning of the writing process as you test a possible subject and want to see its landscape of possibilities. I can see, for example, possible essays about not
only the significance of this guitar, but essays on the eighth grade,
my old friend Chris Field, and the natural history of limestone. The
best clusters are richly suggestive that way, but they’re only starting
places for more writing. How do you cluster?
1. Begin with a blank page in your journal. Choose a core word,
phrase, name, idea, detail, or question, write it in the middle of
the page and circle it.
2. Relax and focus on the core word or phrase, and when you feel
moved to do so, build a strand of associations from the core, circling and connecting each item. Write other details, names,
dates, place names, phrases, and so on—whatever comes to mind.
3. When a strand dies out, return to the core and begin another. Keep
clustering until the page looks like a web of associations. Doodle,
darkening lines and circles, if that helps you to relax and focus.
The Writing Process
4. When you feel the urge to write, stop clustering and use one of
the strands as a prompt for journal work.
Research Prompts. Things we hear, see, or read can be powerful prompts
for personal essays. Bailey White’s essay, for instance, was inspired by an
encounter with a sign at a Florida state park. It’s tempting to believe that
personal essays are always about the past, but just as often essayists are
firmly rooted in the present, commenting and pondering on the confusions
of contemporary life. In that sense, personal essayists are researchers, always on the lookout for material. Train your eye with one or more of the
following prompts.
1. Return to the list of questions you made in the earlier “Listing
Prompts” section. Choose one nagging question about any of the
subjects you were asked to consider and set aside time to explore it
by carefully observing them. Write down exactly what you see . . .
and what you think about it. (The double-entry notebook method is
particularly useful for this).
2. Newspaper “filler”—short stories often about odd or unusual
things—can be a wonderful source of inspiration for personal essays. Read your local paper for a few days, clipping these brief articles. Paste them in your journal and use them as prompts for fastwriting.
3. Although the Internet offers infinite opportunities for procrastination, with some focus it can also be a great source for jump-starting
ideas. What happened to your best friend from kindergarten? Type
her name into the Google search engine and find out. (Be sure to put
quotation marks around the person’s name for a faster search.)
Think about your favorite vacation—a search for “The Grand
Canyon” might help jog your memory. Or perhaps checking out the
“News of the Weird” on Yahoo! might remind you of your own childhood antics.
Judging What You Have
Generating may produce messy, incoherent writing that would earn you
bad grades in most classes. Its virtue, however, should be obvious by now:
“bad” writing gives a writer material to work with, and it’s always better to
work from abundance than scarcity. But if this material is going to go anywhere, it must be judged, shaped, and evaluated; the writer must emerge
from the sea of experience and use the vantage point that the mountain of
reflection offers to see the patterns on the waves.
The initial challenge in producing a first draft is clarifying your topic:
What are you really writing about? Later, you’ll confront the So what?
question: What are you trying to say about that topic? Don’t reject material
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too soon. Suspend judgment for a bit and work through the following questions as you scrutinize the material you’ve collected so far in your journal.
What’s Promising Material and What Isn’t? A good topic for a personal
essay need not be dramatic or profound; in fact, some of the most compelling essays are about quite ordinary things. But as you examine your
journal writing so far, consider the following:
• Abundance. What subject generated the most writing? Do you sense
there is much more to write about?
• Surprise. What material did you find most confusing in interesting
ways? Was there something that surprised you—perhaps a feeling you
didn’t expect to feel, or a memory that seems charged, or an observation that challenged your preconceptions?
• Confusion. What subject raises questions you’re not sure you can
answer easily? The personal essay is a mode of inquiry that permits
uncertainty, and even some inconclusiveness, so it lends itself to material that makes you wonder.
• Honesty. What subjects are you willing to write honestly about? The
personal nature of the personal essay often leads us to material that
may be uncomfortable or even private. However, you should not write
essays that make you feel overly vulnerable or unsafe; that stuff
should probably stay in your journal. Pursue subjects that you’re willing to share.
Questions about Purpose and Audience. Writing should be seen in a particular situation, addressing certain subjects, and serving certain purposes
for certain audiences. Knowledge about this rhetorical situation is really
the only way a writer can determine what makes a piece good. With openended forms like the essay, however, worrying too much about purpose and
audience too soon in the writing process can intrude on the development of
promising subjects. The essay, unlike other genres, directly challenges the
writer to work out her relationship with a subject, a process that takes
place in the open, with the reader as witness. At times, it’s a little like
dancing nearly naked on a table in a crowded restaurant. But initially, the
essayist is the essay’s most important audience. The writer’s motive is
straightforward: What do I want to understand about this that I don’t fully
understand now?
This personal motive will guide you in choosing a topic for your draft,
but before long, the rhetorical questions become more urgent. As you evaluate your journal writing and begin to draft your essay, consider these additional questions:
• Did your instructor provide guidelines for the personal essay assignment that might influence your treatment of the material? For
example, did she specify a certain audience for this draft or a cer-
The Writing Process
tain structure or approach for the essay? If so, will the material fit
those guidelines?
• Who is your audience? If your draft will be peer-reviewed how can
this subject be compelling to others in the class? Is it something they
would find interesting or relevant?
• Is there a particular question that drives your exploration of this subject? Can you make the question explicit as a way of focusing your
draft? For example, Why was I relieved when my father died? Or Why
is it true that men never ask directions, consult maps, or read instruction manuals?
Questions for Reflection. After you’ve generated enough material on your
topic, seize opportunities to get out of the sea of experience and up on the
mountain of reflection. You may do this as you’re writing in your journal,
thinking about your topic in the shower, or talking about it with friends.
Remember that this move to reflect is an essential part of the dialectical
thinking that helps writers make sense of things, going back and forth between what happened and what happens, between showing and telling,
and observations of and ideas about. In the personal essay, this movement
is not just something that occurs in a writer’s journal but often appears in
the finished essay; in some cases, a reader can clearly see in an essay this
movement between sea and mountain. If you need help getting out of the
water, questions are the best way to do it. Use one or more of the following
questions as prompts for thinking or writing in your journal.
• What do you understand now about this topic that you didn’t fully
understand when you began writing about it?
• What has surprised you most? Why?
• What seems to be the most important thing you’re trying to say so
far?
• Focus on how your thinking has changed about your topic. Finish this
seed sentence as many times as you can in your notebook: Once I
thought ___________, and now I think ___________.
• Quickly write a narrative of thought about your topic: When I began
writing about my father’s alcoholism, I thought I felt relieved when he
died. Then I decided that when he died some part of me died with him,
and then I realized that the real truth is . . . .
• Finish this sentence in your journal: As I look back on this, I realize
that . . . Follow that sentence with another, and another until you feel
there’s nothing more to say.
Writing the Sketch
It’s hard to say when it’s time to begin composing the draft, particularly with
open-ended forms such as the personal essay. Because the essay invites
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WRITING WITH COMPUTERS
CUTTING VERSUS DELETING
In revising your draft, your first reflex may be to delete the sentences and
paragraphs you want to replace. This is a perfectly acceptable strategy, but for
certain key passages, it may be to your advantage to use your word processor’s
cut and paste function to preserve the text you are replacing. You can cut the
material to be revised and paste it either at the end of your draft or in a
separate document created expressly to store such passages. The benefit of
doing this is that as you move forward with your draft you may eventually
want to reintroduce some of the material that you replaced earlier. If you
delete material outright, your options for recovering the material at a later
point are restricted to consulting a copy of the previous draft (which you
should always save as a separate file) or relying on your memory.
writers to tackle itchy, confusing subjects, and its mode of inquiry is largely
exploratory, it may seem as if you could stay in the shelter of your journal for
a long time. On the other hand, you might be uncomfortable with all the
time you’re spending with “bad” writing and rush to the draft too soon, before you have enough material. Working from abundance is particularly important when you’re using writing to discover, the essayist’s main motive.
Before you write a full draft, you’ll compose a sketch or two of what
seems to be the most promising material. A sketch is a brief treatment—
probably no more than 300 words—that is composed with a sense of audience but not necessarily a clear sense of a thesis, theme, or controlling idea
(see Chapter 1). One of the ways you want to use the sketch is to try out a
topic, attempting to clarify your purpose in writing about it. Later, you’ll
revise a sketch into a draft personal essay.
Your instructor may ask you to write several sketches using the most
promising material you’ve developed from the prompts. The following apply to all sketches.
• The sketch should have a tentative title. This is crucial because a title
can hint at a possible focus for the revision.
• The sketch should be approximately 300 to 500 words. The sketch is a
brief look at a topic that may later be developed into a longer essay.
• The sketch should be a relatively fast draft. Avoid the temptation to
spend a lot of time crafting your sketch. Fast drafts are easier to revise.
• The sketch may not have a clear purpose or theme. That’s what you
hope to discover by writing the sketch.
• The sketch should have a sense of audience. You’re writing your
sketch to be read by someone other than you. That means you need to
explain what may not be apparent to someone who doesn’t know you
or hasn’t had your experiences.
The Writing Process
• The sketch should be richly detailed. Personal essays, especially, rely
on detail to help the writer, and later, the reader, to see the possible
meanings of events or observations. Essayists are inductive, working
from particulars to ideas, starting in the sea and then moving to the
mountain and then back to the sea again. In early drafts especially,
it’s important to get down the details by drawing on all your senses:
what exactly was the color of the wallpaper, how exactly did the
beach smell at low tide, how exactly did the old man’s hand feel in
yours, what exactly did the immigration officer say?
S T U D E N T S K E T C H : “The Way I Remember”
A hundred years ago, death was relatively commonplace in most American communities. The infant mortality rate was high, and people—especially men—typically did not live into their seventies. In fact, the mortality rate from 1920 to
1973 for those twenty-five or younger in America declined an incredible 83 percent. Some call ours a death-free society because we are so insulated from its realities. Someone else cares for the bodies prior to cremation and burial, and
when we do see the dead, they are made to look as if they are alive.
All of this may help explain why we struggle so when death does visit us, as
it inevitably will. The difficulty of sorting through our feelings about the loss of a
family member or a friend makes it an excellent topic for a personal essay. The
form encourages writers to explore ambiguities and attempt to work out mysteries. In the student sketch that follows, Lana Kuchta does just that, trying to
think through the wisdom of the advice many of us have received when faced
with dying relatives: to remember them as they were, avoid seeing them as they
are. Like most sketches, this one doesn’t arrive at an answer to the writer’s questions. There is no theme or thesis yet. But it does tease out a great deal of specific information that Lana can work with later.
THE WAY I REMEMBER
Lana Kuchta
In the past months three people I knew fairly well have died. All of these
deaths were expected to some degree because the people had terminal illnesses. This whole thing is really hard for me to grasp right now—the sheer
volume of death surrounding me confuses me about how I feel about death
and these friends and how I should remember them. Invariably when we talk
about someone who is terminally ill, we say that we hope the person goes
quickly for their sake as well as the sake of their family. After all, no one wants
to have memories of a prolonged death.We want to remember the person as
they were before they got sick.
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I haven’t always felt this way. For a long time after my grandpa died, I was
angry that my family wouldn’t let me see him in the days before his death.
They had good reason for not wanting me to venture into that hospital room
where death hung like pea-soup fog over his bed. I was eight months pregnant
with my second son, Elliot. I was already dilated to 3.5 cm and Nora, the midwife, wanted me to wait a little longer before I had him. She felt that the stress
of my grandpa’s condition would send me into full-blown labor.
I saw my Grandpa for the last time on a Monday. He was in a lot of pain,
but the doctors hadn’t increased the pain medication yet. He was still himself
that day.We talked briefly about my job and the baby and Austin, my other son
who wasn’t quite a year old yet. It was hard for me to see him this way and as
we sat silently searching for things to say I counted contractions. I know he is
going to die soon; I can feel it, I hope that he will live long enough to meet the
baby I am carrying. He was tired and when a nurse came to do something, I
left and said I would see him in a couple of days. I didn’t mean to lie about this;
I really did expect that I would see him again. His condition worsened and no
one would let me into his room.They told me it was better for me to remember him the way he was.
And they were right, but even if they weren’t I don’t think the images that
would come to mind when I thought of my grandpa would be the last image I
have of him in the hospital. The last image of him I like to remember is just a
month or so before he went into the hospital. I am at his house for a visit. It is
July in Redding, California and every day that month was over 110 degrees.
My grandpa and grandma have air conditioning and it is just what my bloated
pregnant body needed. We sat in their living room with the big picture window that overlooked the Sacramento River. My grandpa plays with Austin on
the floor. Austin is crawling around, exploring, and pulling himself up on the
furniture. Grandpa tickles him and they both laugh.Watching them play on the
floor is nice, but I know that grandpa is sick again. The cancer is back and I
know it even though none of us know this yet. But I am happy to be sitting in
the air-conditioned house, watching grandpa play with my son.
I need to believe that it was better that I didn’t get to see him one last time
because it is all I have to hold onto now. Anything else is obviously too painful,
and I realize this as I write through blurry tears that threaten to roll down my
face and smear the inside of my glasses. I know my grandpa would hate this
public display of emotion. He was a no bullshit kind of guy and had a very low
tolerance for crying. I try to think about other things like the way he was always moving. His hands were always jingling the change in his pocket or he
was drumming his fingers on some piece of furniture. He was loud and opinionated, but it was a good thing.
The Writing Process
He showed that he had a passion for life and he wasn’t afraid to speak up
for what he believed in.
He was generous, but he expected you to work hard for what you had. He
wouldn’t just hand money over to you, but he would give you a low interest
loan with easy payback terms.
Just as l am now glad that I didn’t see him just before he died. There are
things about my life since he died that I’m glad he didn’t have to see. I’m glad
he didn’t know that my first marriage ended in a messy divorce.
It has been fourteen years since he died and four since my grandma died.
My uncle now lives in their house on the Sacramento River. I went back to
that house this summer for the first time since my grandma died. I was nervous about this. I didn’t know what to expect, what I would feel, what I would
say.The house was different, yet the same in so many ways.When the kids and
I got into the car, Austin said that it was weird being there because the house
still smells the same after four years.
In the end though I am glad to have the memories of change rattling in a
pocket, dirty jokes, Neapolitan ice cream, the river, the smell of cut lumber,
and all the other things that remind me of him.
Moving from Sketch to Draft
A sketch is often sketchy. It’s generally underdeveloped, sometimes giving
the writer just the barest outline of his or her subject. But as an early
draft, a sketch can be invaluable. It might hint at what the real subject is,
or what questions seem to be behind your inquiry into the subject. A sketch
might suggest a focus for the next draft, or simply a better lead. Learning
to read your sketches for such clues takes practice.
Evaluating Your Own Sketch. Initially, you’re the most important reader
of your own sketches. It’s likely that you’re in the best position to sense the
material’s promise because you understand the context from which it
sprang better than any reader can. What are the clues you should look for
in a sketch?
1. What surprised you? Might this discovery be the focus of the draft?
Chances are, if it surprised you, it will surprise your readers.
2. What is the most important line in the sketch? What makes it important? Might this line be a beginning for more fastwriting? Might
it be the theme or controlling idea of the draft?
3. What scene, moment, or situation is key to the story you’re telling?
Could this be the lead in the draft?
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Methods for Peer Review of Sketches
1. Choose a partner, exchange sketches, read, and comment both in writing
and through conversation.
2. Create a pile of sketches in the middle of the classroom. Everyone takes
one (not your own, obviously), provides written comments, returns it the
pile, and takes another. Repeat this until you’ve read and commented on
at least four sketches.
3. Share sketches online on the class Web site.
4. What’s your favorite part of the sketch? What would happen if you
cut it?
Questions for Peer Review. If you’ll be sharing your sketch with one or
more of your classmates, you’ll likely need most help with clarifying your
purpose and focus for a draft. It’s less helpful in these early stages to receive editorial comments about sentences, especially questions about
grammar and mechanics. Here are some useful questions that might guide
peer responses to your personal essay sketches.
• What does the writer seem to want to say but doesn’t quite say in the
sketch?
• What line appears most important to the meaning of the sketch, as
you understand it?
• What was most surprising about what the writer said or showed?
• What part of the story seems most important? What part might need
to be told and isn’t?
Reflecting on What You’ve Learned. Before you begin working on the
draft of your personal essay, take a few minutes in your journal to think
about your thinking. Finish the following sentence, and follow it in a fastwrite for at least five minutes. The thing that struck me most about writing
and sharing my sketch on ________________, was. . . . When you finish,
quickly complete the following sentences:
1. The real story I seem to be trying to tell is _________________.
2. So what? I’d answer that question by saying _________________.
3. The main thing I’m planning to do in the draft is _________________.
Research and Other Strategies:
Gathering More Information
You may be itching to move on with the draft. That’s understandable. If
everything has gone well so far, then your sketch has already given you a
sense of direction and some ideas about how to develop your topic. But remember the importance of that dialectical movement between sea and
The Writing Process
mountain, or collecting and composing. Now that you have a topic and a
tentative sense of purpose for your personal essay, journal work can be
even more valuable because it can be more focused. Before you begin composing the draft—or during that process—consider using the following
prompts to generate more information in your notebook:
• Explode a moment. Choose a scene or moment in the story or stories
you’re telling that seems particularly important to the meaning of the
essay. Re-enter that moment and fastwrite for a full seven minutes,
using all your senses and as much detail as you can muster.
• Make lists. Brainstorm a list of details, facts, or specifics about a moment, or scene, or observation. Make a list of other experiences that
seem connected to this one (see “Cluster” below).
• Research. Do some quick-and-dirty research that might bring in
other voices or more information that will deepen your consideration of the topic. For example, find out exactly how long that solar
eclipse was back in 1983, and whether it was in July as you seem to
remember. Interview a local expert on your topic. (For more information on where to look for information, see Chapter 12, “Research
Techniques”.) Do some background reading.
• Cluster. In your journal, try to move beyond narrating a single experience and discover other experiences, moments, or scenes that might
help you see important patterns. Use the list above of related experiences or observations, and fastwrite about those, or develop a cluster
that uses a key word, phrase, or theme as its core, and build a web of
associations. For example, let’s say your sketch is about your experience working with the poor in Chile. Have you had other encounters
with extreme wealth or extreme poverty? Can you describe them?
What do they reveal about your feelings or attitudes about poverty or
your reactions to what happened in Chile? See Figure 4.4.
My old neighborhood
in Chicago
Photo of Afghan
refugees
Poverty/Wealth
When my friend Chris
had to sell his house
J.R. Simplot‘s grand
house on the hill
FIGURE 4.4 The start of a cluster built around Poverty/Wealth.
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Composing the Draft
Some of my students get annoyed at all the “stuff” I encourage them to do
before they begin a first draft of a personal essay. In some cases, all the
journal work isn’t necessary; the writer very quickly gets a strong sense of
direction and feels ready to begin composing. But from the beginning I’ve
encouraged you to gravitate toward topics that you find confusing, and
with that kind of material exploratory writing is time well spent.
Remember, too, that journal writing counts as writing. It not only offers
the pleasures of surprise, but it can ultimately make the drafting process
more efficient by generating material that you won’t have to conjure up
during those long, painful periods of staring at the computer screen wondering what to say next. This front-end work may also help abbreviate the
end of the writing process—essentially, all this mountain and sea work in
your journal and sketches is revision (see Chapter 14 for more on prewriting as a method of revision).
As you begin drafting, keep in mind what you’ve learned from your
writing so far. For example,
• What is the question(s) that is behind your exploration of this topic?
• What do you understand now that you didn’t understand fully when
you started writing about it?
• How can you show and explain how you came to this understanding?
Methods of Development. How might you use some of the typical forms
of development to develop your subject?
Narrative. The backbone of the personal essay is often, but not always, narrative. Remember, however, that narrative can work in an essay
in at least three ways: (1) you tell an extended story of what happened, (2)
you tell one or more anecdotes or brief stories, or (3) you tell the story of
your thinking as you’ve come to understand something you didn’t understand before. Often a single essay uses all three types of narrative.
When we tell a story of what happened, we naturally begin at the beginning: “I awoke startled by the unearthly buzz of the alarm clock.” But
sometimes beginning at the beginning is the worst place to begin. (See
Chapter 14 for more about “leads.”) You should explicitly or implicitly establish your focus in the first few paragraphs, and opening the essay with
the first thing that happened may reveal nothing about your purpose. It
just establishes that you woke up. For example, note how Bailey White began her essay with an anecdote about leaning over the railing at a Florida
state park gazing with “awe and wonder” at Devil’s Millhopper, a gorge
that seemed charged with “spiritual significance” and a sense of timelessness. In contrast, a few paragraphs later, White reveals a less uplifting desire—she has the urge to throw “the nibbled end of a hotdog bun” down the
gorge. Within a few paragraphs, Bailey establishes the tension that will
The Writing Process
drive the piece: the conflict between what’s obviously responsible behavior
and our secret desires to do a little wrong.
Consider beginning your draft with an anecdote (like White’s) or the
part of the story you want to tell that best establishes your purpose in the
essay. If you’re writing about the needless destruction of a childhood haunt
by developers, then consider opening with the way the place looked after
the bulldozers were done with it.
Judith Ortiz Cofer’s essay illustrates how a personal essay can stitch
together not just one narrative but several stories, all of which are connected by the essay’s theme or question. Notice as well how the stories defy
chronology. Time in writing is nothing like real time. You can write pages
about something that happened in seven minutes, as George Orwell did in
“The Hanging,” or cover twenty years in a paragraph. You can ignore
chronology, as Bailey White did, if it serves your purpose, too. They key is
to tell your story or stories in ways that emphasize what’s important. Ask
yourself, What does the reader most need to know to understand my thinking and feelings about this topic? What should I show about what happened
that gives a reader a clear sense of what happens?
Using Evidence. How do you make your essay convincing, and even moving to an audience? It’s in the details. This is a form that thrives, like most
literary genres, on particularity: what exactly did it look like, what exactly
did she say, what exactly did it sound and smell like at that moment?
Evidence that gives a personal essay authority are details that make a
reader believe the writer can be trusted to observe keenly and to remember
accurately.
Remember the middle of Orwell’s essay, “The Hanging,” when he witnesses a young man on the way to the gallows? In typical fashion, Orwell
relies on understated details to dramatize his realization that he’d never
fully considered “what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.”
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the
prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms,
but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair
on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet
gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he
stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle.
After seeing a condemned man avoid a puddle, we’re prepared for
Orwell’s declaration that “cutting a life short when it is in full tide” is
“unspeakably wrong.” Without that memorable observation, we’re more
likely to dismiss Orwell’s statement about capital punishment as merely
opinion; details involve the reader in ways the mere explanation of feel-
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ings or ideas often doesn’t. We feel along with the writer, we are implicated in his experience.
As you draft your essay, remember the subtle power of details. Tell,
but always show, too.
Workshopping the Draft
If your draft is subject to peer review (see Chapter 15 for details on how to
organize workshop groups), think carefully about the kind of responses you
need from readers at this point in the process. In general, you should encourage comments that make you want to write again.
Reflecting on the Draft. To prepare for workshop, make an entry in your
journal that explores your feelings about the draft:
• What do you think worked?
• What do you think needs work?
Following the workshop session, do a follow-up entry in your notebook
that summarizes what you heard, what made sense and what didn’t, and
how you plan to approach the next draft. Your instructor may ask you to
share this information in a cover letter submitted with the revision.
Questions for Readers. There are many ways for a writer to structure responses to a draft. Some of them are discussed in detail in Chapter 15,
“The Writer’s Workshop.” The key is to find a way to get what you need at
this stage in the writing process that will be most helpful as you revise.
There are a few questions, however, that you might pose to your group
that are particularly relevant to the personal essay:
1. Is there a story I’m telling that I need to develop more? Is there a
story I’m not telling that I should?
2. What do you think is the real story? In other words, what idea or
theme is lurking beneath the accounts of my experiences and observations?
3. What seems the most important detail, the one that seems to say
more than it says, that reveals some important feeling, attitude, or
idea? What detail seems less important, less revealing?
4. Do I move too high on the mountain of reflection, saying what seems
obvious or overly abstract and general? If so, what questions do you
have about what I say that might get me to come down closer to the
sea, where I’m more likely to have better insights?
5. Do I explain things that are unnecessary to explain, that are better
told through showing rather than telling?
The Writing Process
Revising the Draft
I think revision is one of the most misunderstood aspects of writing. I recently surveyed about sixty advanced placement high school students and
most thought that revision mostly involved tinkering—maybe “fixing” a
sentence, running spellcheck, or adding a detail. Think about the word—
“re-vision”—which implies re-seeing. This is much more than tinkering; it
is an effort to discover new ways of understanding your topic, your questions, your thesis, and your own understandings. Another common misconception is that revision is something that only comes at the end of the writing process. In doing all the journal work you’ve already done a lot of
revision. You’ve circled your subject trying to discover a topic and what you
might say about it.
Personal essay drafts typically have some of the following problems:
• They don’t answer the So what? question. Are you telling a story but
don’t help your readers understand why you’re telling it?
• There is too much sea and not enough mountain. In other words, do
you reflect sufficiently in the draft, contributing your new understandings of what happened?
• There isn’t enough detail. Since personal essays often rely heavily on
narrative, they should show as well as tell. That is, help readers not
only understand the significance of your experiences but in some
small way experience those significant moments themselves.
GUIDE TO REVISION STRATEGIES
PART
PAGE
NUMBER
Unclear purpose
■ Not sure what the essay is about? Fails to answer the
So what question?
1
xx
Unclear thesis, theme, or main idea
■ Not sure what you’re trying to say?
2
xx
Lack of information or development
■ Needs more details; more showing and less telling?
3
xx
Disorganized
■ Doesn’t move logically or smoothly from paragraph to
paragraph?
4
xx
Unclear or awkward at the level of sentences and paragraphs
■ Does draft seem choppy or hard to follow at the level of
sentences or paragraphs?
5
xx
PROBLEMS
IN THE
DRAFT (CHAPTER 14)
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Refer to Chapter 14, “Revision Strategies,” for ideas addressing the
problems outlined on page 47 and how to revise your draft following your
workshop. Use the table on page 47 as a guide to the appropriate revision
strategies for your draft, but remember that a draft may present problems
in more than one category.
Polishing the Draft
After you’ve dealt with the more global issues in your draft—is it sufficiently focused, does it answer the So what? question, is it organized, and
so on—you must deal with the local issues. You’ve carved the stone into an
appealing figure but now you need to polish it. Are your paragraphs coherent? How do you manage transitions? Are your sentences fluent and concise? Are there any errors in spelling or syntax? Section 5 of Chapter 14
can help you focus on these issues.
Before you finish your draft, make certain that you’ve worked through
the following checklist:
❑
❑
❑
❑
❑
Every paragraph is about one thing.
The transitions between paragraphs aren’t abrupt.
The length of sentences varies in each paragraph.
Each sentence is concise. There are no unnecessary words or phrases.
You’ve checked grammar, particularly for verb agreement, run-on
sentences, unclear pronouns, and misused words (there/their,
where/were, and so on). (See the handbook for help with these grammar issues.)
❑ You’ve run your spellchecker and proofed your paper for misspelled
words.
S T U D E N T E S S AY
The personal essay that follows impressed me not only because it was eloquently
written and honest, but because of the way it worked through a question and
an idea. Too often we forget that it is some idea we want to mull over or question we want to explore that is the backbone of the personal essay. Telling a
story, or several stories, is often a part of a personal essay but those stories always are about something larger.
As you read “Holy Jealousy,” notice how dramatically former student
Micaela Fisher shifts from narration to exposition, from showing to telling, from
the sea to the mountain. Like George Orwell’s essay earlier in this chapter, these
movements are pretty obvious. One risk is telling too much and narrating too little; good narration often keeps a piece moving, while exposition tends to slow it
down. Consider what happens here.
Student Essay
HOLY JEALOUSY
Micaela Fisher
“Micaela, I want you to cultivate your friendship with him,” she assured
skeptical me, yet again. “I am not jealous of the relationship the two of you
share—I know it’s clean, and I support it. Please don’t hesitate in your friendship with him because of me.”
Why did it bother me that my friend so willingly sanctioned my new
friendship with her boyfriend? Why did it take me so long until I accepted that
she truly wasn’t jealous of the extensive time I spent with him? That she was
okay with our sharing racquetball, chess, music, theology, hugs, even while
she was away at school?
I wanted her to be jealous. Not because my relationship with him wasn’t
clean, but because theirs was a relationship I believed in. And I knew jealousy
needed to protect it.
Jealousy is not categorically evil. Envy is evil, and when we equate jealousy with envy, then it is quite wrong. But “jealousy” doesn’t really mean
“envy.” Envy is craving what belongs to someone else; jealousy is craving what
belongs to oneself. Envy is toxic, a destroyer of good things. Jealousy is a protector of the sacred.As my friend earnestly reiterated her lack of concern over
my intensifying friendship with her boyfriend, my instincts chorused their
own concerns: “Where is the jealousy, the guardian of this relationship? Who
will keep it sacred?” Jealousy in its proper place is born out of loving protection, and it is both an instinctive (emotional) mechanism for guarding the relationship and a deliberate act of aggression toward what would threaten it.The
jealousy reflex is intended to lead to removal of the threat.When it does so, it
is a good thing.
Jealousy can stem from insecurity, though when it does it is more accurately called envy, because it demands from another more than it rightfully
owns. Insecure jealousy is jealousy gone wrong, a corruption of a useful apparatus and a poison to a relationship. Insecurity always robs from others.
The marriage of my high school friend and her thirty-year-old husband is
a frightening example to me of insecure jealousy. William “protects” his wife
by requiring her to stay home all day every day with their two little boys. In
truth, it is his enormous insecurity that drives him to keep her sequestered
away from even women friends lest she discover companionship outside of
him. Perhaps I’m being too hard on him; yet it does make me shudder when a
twenty-one-year-old girl is so incredibly isolated that she becomes an unperson apart from her husband.William crosses the line.There is nothing healthy
or good about his “jealousy.” There is not anything good about a jealousy that
forces a person to be less than who she is.
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On the other extreme, a nominal commitment with no territorial patrolling whatsoever is not healthy either. A relationship in which each partner
is at liberty to roam without any sense of inhibition is a lifeless relationship, or
a strained one since one of the partners is probably suffering without using his
or her mechanism for jealousy. A relationship is by nature exclusive—“I like
you” means “I choose you from among all others”—and jealousy is a keeper of
the relationship.
I think my parents model a healthy amount of jealousy in their marriage.
My dad is sensitive and manly in a way that often thaws women, so he ends up
interacting with a lot of women, and my mom can be spunky in a way that
catches the eyes of some men. While neither of them seems to impose regimentation on the other, they are honest to each other about concerns that
come up in their interactions with the opposite sex. My dad told me about a
time when Mom was much younger and couldn’t see that a certain man had a
sexual interest in her and Dad told her he strongly preferred that she avoid the
man. He mentioned times she’s asked him not to spend much energy with certain women.The way they use jealousy seems to me the way its supposed to be
used—as a protector of the marriage, as a very loving thing, as a signal that
this person they love, the part of this person they own, is being stolen by
someone other and they won’t just quietly allow it.That’s jealousy.
Jealousy was missing in the relationship of my two friends. It seemed to
me a lack of honesty on their parts, and that bothered me. But in a dating relationship rather than a marriage, jealousy is a more complex machine—the
boundary lines are more difficult to define.There isn’t absolute commitment
as with the vows of marriage; there’s something that seems worthy of protection, but nothing justly inviolable. My friend did not own her boyfriend and
could not rationally restrict his interactions with me. Yet, theirs was not a
cavalier relationship; they’d been dating seriously for more than two years. It
was a relationship worthy of protection, I thought, and it wasn’t being properly defended.
The guy was my best friend at school. We debated theology and argued
philosophy and competed in everything from guitar performances to racquetball games. Our views on much of what we discussed were dissonant, but we
both loved to engage our minds in intellectual aerobics. We deserved each
other’s pedantry. He widened my world and I widened his, and we were very
close friends for a whole year.
The girl was gone to school; she and I exchanged letters and poetry,
both of us preferring old-fashioned correspondence to email and phone.
There was less tension in this friendship, but enough difference between us
Student Essay
for us to sharpen each other. She told me my friendship with him was good
for both of us and that it was something for which she was thankful. So I
trusted her on that; and she trusted me with him.They were two people that
I loved fiercely.
But people can sustain only so much intimacy. While the two of them
were trying to deepen their relationship, I was subtracting time and energy
from them both, I subconsciously listened for her to say, “Hey, Micaela, you’re
taking time from him that should belong to me.We need to draw some boundary lines here—my relationship with him is suffering and needs defending.”
She was reluctant to do so because jealousy seemed to her all insecure reaction. But I wanted to feel jealousy from her so that I could be sure theirs was a
protected relationship.
And eventually, it happened: jealousy kicked in.The exclusivity of their relationship was being violated by the energy invested in my friendship with him,
she felt, and boundaries were needed. I agreed. I lost my racquetball and chess
partner and my best school friend.That continues to pain me, but I know it was
a loving judgment that caused her to ask for exclusive space, and I was glad to
honor her request. I respect her jealousy and hope it extends to anyone who
might come close enough to threaten their allegiance to each other—without
it, their relationship is in continual danger of being diluted or undermined. I am
encouraged to watch the boundary lines of this relationship become distinct,
guarded, as my friends prepare for marriage. Jealousy has done its work.
Far from being categorically destructive, jealousy is a healthy response to
threats. The mechanism of jealousy should not be ignored. It is only through
jealousy, jealousy rooted in love, that the sacred remains holy.
EVALUATING THE ESSAY
Discuss or write about your response to Micaela Fisher’s essay using some
or all of the following questions.
1. What is the essay’s greatest strength? Is this something you’ve noticed in your own work, or the drafts of classmates?
2. Is the balance between exposition and narration, showing and
telling, handled well in “Holy Jealousy?” Does it read fairly quickly
or does it drag at points?
3. The essay uses line breaks between sections. What do you think of
this technique? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
4. What would you recommend to Fisher if she were to revise “Holy
Jealousy?”
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U S I N G W H AT Y O U H AV E L E A R N E D
My students often love writing personal essays. At its best, the genre is
a rare opportunity to reexamine our lives and better understand our experiences. The insights we earn are often reward enough, but what have
you learned in this assignment that you might apply in other writing
situations?
1. The personal essay you wrote relies heavily on narrative and personal experience. How might an ability to tell a good story, using
your experiences or the experiences of others, be a useful academic
skill? How might you use it to write a paper for another class?
2. The personal essay is a deeply subjective form which would seem to
put it at odds with formal academic writing which seems to strive
for “objectivity.” Are they at odds?
3. Based on your experience writing a personal essay, what do you
think are its most important qualities? If you were to write more
personal essays, what would you strive to do next time?