A few weeks ago I finished the spring issue of Fourth Genre, a literary journal of creative nonfiction. So much about this journal I love. Each issue includes a "Roundtable" discussion, variation, etc. This issue the Roundtable is the printed version of an AWP panel who each tried their hand at a version of Montaigne's "Of Thumbs" (to read, click http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/thumbs/) by rolling two dice to determine how they tweaked the original essay and wrote their own. Find a group of writers spanning from Dinty Moore to Brenda Miller to Patrick Madden and you know you'll find some great work. I even tried my own--and made it a journal option for my students next fall. Short essays fill me with joy. Playful short essays fill me with spiced joy.
Along with full-length book reviews, Fourth Genre also publishes Reader-to-Reader capsule reviews which care small celebrations of great reading. These allow a taste of good reading published at any time; they give just enough information that you wonder what else the book might contain. A tantalizing tactic. (I'm tempted to submit some of my own eventually.)
No collection is perfect. My interest varied in the essays collected here. All were obviously "good" and "publishable" but only a few felt lasting. Kim Dana Kupperman's "See Me Slant: Poetry Considers Her Mother" and the companion essay about writing that piece stand out to me as creative and playful explorations in persona and what can be considered "truth"--which is a concept that transcends genres like "nonfiction" or "fiction" (this is a concept some seem to struggle with...I don't get it. How many times have you grasped a moment of truth or revelation because of a fiction? It's probably happened this week. Considered our sundry analogies and parables and interpretations. This is one of the reasons I don't worry about whether scripture is literal or not--what matters is if it is true or not. That is my assessment of all writing: is it true--or not? If not, it won't be well done.) Here's a sampling of a favorite paragraph:
"My mother divided time into stanzas....At twilight we cleaned our pens, repaired the spines of books and my mother hummed a tune for the rising darkness....she rested her teacup on the table, leaned toward me, and told me things she knew. Like the true names of the birds. Or that each person I encountered would be as full of stories as the great library rumored to have stood at Alexandria. That she named me Poetry to keep her body alive, a fleshy dialogue across the ages" (Kupperman 112).
Other honorable mentions: Joan Marcus's piece, "Exalting the Weird" is lovely for its obvious struggle through an idea. No predetermined conclusion, even with conclusive statements at the end. Amy Hassinger's "On Pests" could be an interesting example on incorporating research into the personal. I may use it as an example with my fall students. What I most enjoy about the essay is that it points to humans as the greatest pests...and still embraces us. Geeta Kothari's "Flight" lingers with me, but it seems to be too constructed or something--simultaneously, when I finished reading, I couldn't figure out what was missing. Still can't. That's aggravating as a reader and writer. Still, it is a decent essay.
There are moments when I wish "publishable" could mean "perfect--don't worry about working on this again!" I can see why Montaigne continued to return to his essays; they are his thoughts, his meanderings. Scribbling them out once usually isn't enough. The questions that really absorb us/me can be lifelong obsessions. For the sake of my family, I wish I didn't write so much about them, but family and form are the topics that I can't get enough of--that I'll never figure out. What is order? Why do we attempt to create order? What if our family form doesn't work? Can you make it work? Then I face the difficulty that people may not care about my obsessions. Alas. Why share? Why not? The dilemma of writing is that the act and the product are both perpetual attempts.
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