Kimberly Hirsh

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.

🔖 Read Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot​ | Against the Contemporary American Essay by Jackson Arn.

Timely, given my own musings on essays. There’s a lot of fun to be had in this anti-essay essay.

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.

I haven’t felt like writing a long blog post for the post couple of weeks. Maybe tomorrow. I’m reading a lot though & that has made me really happy. I’m also drinking a lot of smoothies and eating a lot of oatmeal. I hope that’s enough of an update for now. Stay safe, friends!

Currently reading: Ninth House (Alex Stern Book 1) by Leigh Bardugo 📚

Currently reading: Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (CultureAmerica) by Kelly J. Baker 📚

Finished reading: King Of Scars by Leigh Bardugo 📚

I love it so much. Nikolai, Zoya, and Nina have always been my faves so it felt a little like Leigh Bardugo wrote this book just for me.

Finished reading: Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia by Kelly J. Baker 📚

Highly recommend. Baker’s writing is always incisive and accessible. She’s one the writers that inspires me to want to keep writing.

🔖 Read The Holes We Live With by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.

I think my hole is named in the Encanto song “Surface Pressure”:

I’m pretty surе I’m worthless if I can’t be of servicе

Dana has a lightsaber now.

[Image description: An 18 inch doll holds an appropriately scaled lightsaber.]