Kimberly Hirsh

In Austin Kleon’s paid newsletter post today, he asked his readers, to share how we begin.

I opened by saying, “I don’t know how I begin.” Then I proceeded to describe how I begin.

Because the biggest projects in my life have been scholarly writing projects, I thought about those. I thought about the most recent one, my dissertation, and the oldest one, my Master’s paper.

I realized that for both of these, I had a sunshine-soaked AHA! moment when I knew: this was the topic I was going to write about, this was the research I was going to do.

But then I thought about it, and that wasn’t the beginning for the dissertation. (It may have been for the Master’s paper. I don’t remember.)

In my PhD program, writing a comprehensive literature review that demonstrated our familiarity with the state of our research area was a major milestone. I went into this process with no clear research question or idea, just a set of topics that interested me. I don’t remember all of them, but they included makerspaces in libraries, gaming in libraries, and connected learning, among other things. I wrote two or three chapters of this lit review (one for each topic), flailing about, no research plan in mind, just getting familiar with the literature.

But this flailing was part of my process! I arrived at my dissertation topic by reading someone else’s dissertation and deciding to answer one of the questions she posed as a possibility for future research!

And yet, I had read her dissertation before that sun-soaked day.

What was different upon this reading?

What was different was that I had been living the night before, not working. (Work is a part of life but you know how it’s easy to forget to do all the parts of life that aren’t work? Or at least to berate yourself for not focusing on work all the time? If you’ve ever been a grad student, you know what I’m talking about.)

The night before my sun-soaked AHA!, I had gone to a concert. A video game concert. Where I saw cosplayers who inspired me. And it was putting together the dissertation I read with the inspiration I felt at that concert that led me to my dissertation topic: how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information.

So these are the ingredients in my process:

1. Read what other people have written, especially keeping an eye out for interesting questions that I might want to anwer. What do I read? Whatever seems interesting.
2. Do interesting things that aren’t work.
3. Sit in the sun and think.

If I skip any of these three steps, I struggle to begin.

Katy Peplin has a great Twitter thread on the difference between sharing your process with “This is how I do it” and “This is how you should do it.”

one thing i think about a lot as a coach and person:

there's a BIG difference between "this is how i did it" and "this is how it works best / this is how you should do it"

— Katy Peplin (@ThrivePhD) June 15, 2022

I try to write with the former attitude. Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega does this and it’s one of the things I most appreciate his writing.

I thought today I’d share one thing that address how I do it, wherein it = almost anything in life at all.

Piecemeal. In teeny, tiny fragments. I’ve written before about parenthood and kintsugi.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how I want to write more, and I had a thought about writing that was so good, I wanted to capture it. This happened in literally the one minute before M’s swim lesson started, so there I was on a deck chair by the pool with M basically in my lap (and he’s big, y’all, I love having him in my lap but it’s very different now), and took out my phone and typed out these words:

There will never be time to write. This is my life now. Prismatic. Fragmented. The bits inside a kaleidoscope. They make beautiful patterns and they can be arranged in new ways but they aren’t large. So how do I write in the fragments?

“How do I _______ in the fragments?” is the guiding question of my life. There is perpetually a giant pile of laundry at the foot of my bed. I do put the laundry away, but I put it away one item at a time, while I’m getting dressed and in between finding the things I want to wear on a given day.

I’m working on binding a little pamphlet-bound notebook for M. I fold a page here and there when I can.

This is how I get things done. It’s necessitated by two things: parenthood, which carries with it the eternal threat of interruption, and chronic illness, which means that while my mind loves and craves routine, my body disrupts my ability to stick to it.

So I live by this mantra: what I can, when I can.

And that’s how I get stuff done.

I’m still thinking about essays after reading Jackson Arn’s “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot​ | Against the Contemporary American Essay. Arn references other people’s writing about the essay without actually linking to that writing, but I have managed to track them down.

The essay, James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.”

This refers to James Wood’s Reality Effects, which discusses John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essays.

For Brian Dillon, such an authority on the essay that he authored a book called Essayism, it’s “unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed.”

The full title of Dillon’s book is Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Mary Cappello, one of the most respected essayists around, claims the essay is actually a “non-genre,” mutating too fast for diagnosis.

This is a reference to Mary Cappello’s book Lecture. You can read the relevant excerpt at Literary Hub. I prefer Cappello’s full description:

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form. Nonfiction’s lost performative: the lecture. Cousin to the essay, or its precursor: that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.

Assemblage and discontinuity seem key to the essays I enjoy reading, so I appreciate Cappello pointing them out here.

Arn turns to the personal essay boom of the 2000s, especially the 2010s, and mentions other writers’ explanations for the personal essay’s popularity.

Vivian Gornick, writing in The Yale Review, traces it all the way back to her youth, via the waning of modernism and the rise of the Holocaust memoir; Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, suspects the feminism-inflected internet economies that helped make her a star.

Arn refers to Gornick’s The Power of Testimony and Tolentino’s The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over. Tolentino then cites Laura Bennett’s Slate piece, The First-Person Industrial Complex.

Bennett mentions “personal essay habitats” like “Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas.” Bennett says

First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.

Arn also mentions this, that the lack of money for publishing outlets to spend on funding writers’ experiences as fuel for writing makes the personal essay more appealing because everyone is an expert on their own experiences. Bennett goes on to discuss publications’ and editors’ potential exploitation of new writers who think they’re ready for a sensational personal essay to go public and only learn after the fact that they were not. These point to a more structural concern than much of Arn’s discussion of The Contemporary American Essay, which tends to focus on the ways individual writers engage in navel-gazing, write disconnected from broad sociopolitical issues like climate change and the impact of the Internet, and work so hard to be likable.

Bennett points to a gendered element to the personal essay boom, as well:

On its face, the personal-essay economy prizes inclusivity and openness; it often privileges the kinds of voices that don’t get mainstream attention. But it can be a dangerous force for the people who participate in it. And though the risks and exploitations of the first-person Internet are not gender-specific, many of these problems feel more acute for women. The reason—aside from the fact that the “confessional” essay as a form has historically attracted more women than men—is that so many of the outlets that are most hungry for quick freelancer copy, and have the lowest barriers to entry for publication, are still women’s interest sites.

While Tolentino asserted that the personal essay boom was over in 2017, Arn points out that most of the essays in The Contemporary American Essay are personal, constantly making “I” statements. They are also ambivalent, not just about the form of the essay itself, but about whatever they’re writing about. Arn catalogs several times the essayists use “perhaps” or “maybe,” seeming to hedge their bets in fear of upsetting anyone with a firm, declarative statement.

Reading all of the examples Arn pulls out from The Contemporary American Essay, I got the distinct feeling that these essayists were all just reading each others’ writing, going “AHA so THAT’s what an editor wants,” and then putting their own spin on it. It feels like they read the first few pages of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist but never got to the remixing part. The frequent use of etymology as an in-road to an essay, the perhapses and maybes - I haven’t read the book, but based on Arn’s description there is a sameness to the essays in it.

In the middle of the piece, Arn says

The Contemporary American Essay (let’s call it TCAE) is not the contemporary American essay. I hope not, anyway.

As I was sharing some of the most hilarious-to-me essay quotes with W., I realized that I read essays and most of them don’t make these moves. Yes, there are a fair number of Steven Hotdog essays in my reading, but each of them seems to make the Steven Hotdog format fresh. Why am I getting essays that don’t read this way?

I realized that it’s probably about my genre of choice. TCAE is all about literary nonfiction. This can be treated as a synonym for creative nonfiction, but I prefer to think of it as a subgenre, or a mode of writing. The writers are deliberately Writing Literature. The essays I read tend to be cultural criticism, usually about pop culture, or deft at connecting personal experience with shared experience. They are published in venues that have a specific focus rather than in general interest publications like Harper’s or The New Yorker. Instead, they’re in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, Tor.com, StarTrek.com. My favorites are often public writing by PhDs. These are the kind of things I want to write, too.

As often happens, I’ve come to the end of this blog post and am a bit deflated and lacking in a conclusion, so I’ll just point you to one of my favorite essays:

You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent by Rebecca Schuman

In which Dr. Schuman ruminates on the cool Gen X guy as he enters middle age, and how cool isn’t even a thing anymore.

That critique of the essay piece I read and linked yesterday has sent me down a rabbit hole of other writing about essays. I’ll put together a list of links soon; for reasons I don’t know the original piece at The Drift didn’t contain links or citations for the other pieces it references, but I have used my librarian skills to track them down.

This has me thinking about my own writing voice and what it is. I think it varies. Of course I have a standard academic writing voice, but I’m thinking for more personal writing. Mostly blogging.

I think I have two voices.

One is my Big Sister voice. This is vaguely didactic but not moralizing. It’s an attempt to be helpful. This is the voice I use when I write about my experiences as a doctoral student and tips for doing research.

The other voice is more lyrical, vaguely witchy even, and also fragmented. This is the stream-of-consciousness voice, the more vulnerable voice. This is the voice I use when I’m writing about my feelings.

These two voices add up to a fairly accurate representation of my headspace. Big Sister is when my mind is sharp, I’m feeling good about myself, and I believe I’ve got help to give. Fragmented dream voice is when I’ve got brain fog, when I’m feeling weak, or when I’m feeling woo woo.

I think they’re both valuable, though Big Sister voice is probably preferable for more audience-focused writing and fragmented dream voice for when I’m writing primarily for myself. For a while, I thought I should pick one and go all in on it, but now I’m happy to have these two different voices. They are both me, both verbal representations of my vibe.

What about you? Or your favorite writers? What kind of voices do they have?

Right now, I’m in awe of writers who can write something that feels scholarly and beautiful at the same time. Sarah Kendzior is great at this. Hiding in Plain Sight is a terrifying book, an important book, and a gorgeously written book. I don’t think I knew those could all line up before reading that. I think that’s the kind of voice I would like to develop. Maybe if I can get my two voices to play together I’ll be able to make it happen.

How does a person write an essay? I’ve been trying to figure out. The thing is, it’s a versatile form. So versatile, I can’t pin it down.

There are the essays they teach in grade school.

My eighth grade Language Arts teacher called the five paragraph essay a cheeseburger essay. I think she really liked Jimmy Buffett. This pop culture reference was not as hot in 1994 as you might imagine.

So there’s a basic format, cool cool cool. The cheeseburger essay is best for persuasive or argumentative writing, I think. In tenth grade, we had to write narrative essays. I wrote mine about the day I almost had to go on stage as Fern in a production of Charlotte’s Web where I had originally been cast as an Owl. I was really proud of this piece of writing. I included a ton of sensory detail. I probably have a copy of it in one of my juvenilia boxes. (Yes, of course I have juvenilia boxes, plural, for when I donate my papers somewhere. If you know me, you are not surprised by this at all. I am exactly the kind of person who would label the boxes full of her childhood writing “juvenilia” and move them from house to house rather than throwing them away.)

My tenth grade English teacher praised my essay but gave it something less than a perfect grade. When I asked her what was wrong with it, she said, “I just would have written it differently.”

I was incensed. She couldn’t have written it at all. She didn’t have the personal experience. This was, to my mind, extremely unhelpful feedback. How could I improve my writing if the problem was simply that I wrote it like myself?

In college, we wrote papers. These were mostly persuasive/argumentative or research-based. (Pssst, all great research-based writing has an argument. Wendy Laura Belcher’s book _Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks can help you figure out yours.)

I wrote about Furor and Pietas in the Aeneid. I wrote about the extended wine metaphor in Horace’s Ode 1.11, the source of the aphorism “Seize the day.” (The actual translation is “pluck the day.” Plucking the grapes is the first step in winemaking, but Horace uses it at the end of the poem. He begins the metaphor by saying we should strain the wine of life, arguably the end of the process, and works backward from there. I was really proud of this paper. It’s the result of my only all-nighter.) I wrote about the validity or lack thereof of AP testing. I wrote about the Takarazuka Revue.

Most of these papers got good grades but when I read them now, I cringe. Their arguments are weak. Their evidence is thin. But they were good enough for class.

But good enough for class isn’t the kind of essay I want to write anymore. I want to write essays that mean things. Preferably that connect pop culture with life in significant ways. Like my essay about the Star Trek episode “Peak Performance” and impostor syndrome.

The thing is, I really thrive with a model. So I’m looking at models for essays. And I’m reading excellent essays, by Sarah Ruhl, by Kelly J. Baker, by Jess Zimmerman. (Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters is probably the closest to the kind of writing I want to do.) By tons of other authors on Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Catapult.

They’re all different, which is fine. It means, though, that I have to build my own model by combining these, rather than just following one.

I need to Steal Like an Artist.