THE CURIOUS WRITER - Higher Education | Pearson variations in final published form. Visit to contact your local Allyn & Bacon/Longman representative. THE CURIOUS WRITER Writing a personal

Bruce Ballenger

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THE CURIOUS WRITER

Writing a personal essay is often like seeing an old picture of yourself. It thrusts you back into aparticular time and place, but at the same time you see yourself from a certain distance, bringingknowledge and understanding to past events that you didn’t have when they occurred. This pub-licity photograph of my mother, brother, and me in the 1950s returns me to that world and atthe same time I see what I couldn’t have seen then: a time when fathers were often missing fromthe picture while working mothers, like mine, had to move gracefully from family to job, provingthemselves at both.

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Writing a PersonalEssay

WRITING ABOUT EXPERIENCE

Certain subjects demand to be “essayed.” Some years ago, for exam-ple, I was invited to serve on a panel at a national conference of writ-ing teachers that would look at what it might mean to be men teach-ing men. At question was whether we, as male teachers, had noticedanything about the kind of topics male composition students chosewhen invited to write about their personal experiences and how wereacted to those topics. At first, I was flattered by the invitation. Myfellow panelists were among the top scholars in the field and I wasjust finishing my doctorate. Then I panicked. This was a potentiallyexplosive subject that I had a range of feelings about, some of which Ithought might insult some of my former male students. The worstthing, 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 offorming an academic paper—that I wasn’t sure I believed. Fortu-nately, I had recently embraced a form of inquiry that seemed to ac-commodate 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 topour out her secrets, share her pain, or confess her sins. Some essaysdo have these confessional qualities, but more often they do not. Yet apersonal essayist, no matter what the subject of his or her essay, isstill exposed. There is no hiding behind the pronoun “one,” as in “onemight think” or “one often feels,” no lurking in the shadows of thepassive voice: “This paper will argue. . . .” The personal essay is firstperson territory.

In this sense, the personal essay is much like a photographic self-portrait. Like a picture, a good personal essay tells the truth, or it

4What You’ll Learn inThis Chapter

■ How personal essayscan help you withacademic writing.

■ What distinguishes apersonal essay fromother forms.

■ How to write asketch.

■ Why a confusingtopic may be betterthan one you haveall figured out.

■ Questions forrevising personalessays.

4 C H A P T E R 4 ■ Writing a Personal Essay

tells a truth about the writer/subject, and it often captures the writer at aparticular moment of time. Therefore, the experience of taking a self-por-trait, or confronting an old picture of oneself taken by someone else, cancreate the feeling of exposure that writing a personal essay often does.

But it does more. When we gaze at ourselves in a photograph we oftensee it as yanked from a larger story about ourselves, stories that threadtheir way through our lives and give us ideas about who we were and whowe are. This is what the personal essay demands of us: We must somehowpresent ourselves truthfully and measure our past against the present. Inother words, when we hold a photograph of ourselves we know more thanthe person we see there knew, and as writers of the personal essay, wemust 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 noble-man Michel de Montaigne, a man who had lived through occurrences of theplague, the bloody civil war between French Catholics and Protestants,and his own ill health. These were tumultuous and uncertain times whenold social orders and intellectual traditions were under assault, and itproved to be ideal ferment for the essay. The French verb “essaier” meansto attempt or to try, and the essay became an opportunity for Montaigne towork out his thoughts about war, the education of children, the evils ofdoctors, and the importance of pleasure. The personal essay tradition in-spired by Montaigne is probably unlike the essays you are familiar with inschool. The school essay is often formulaic—a five paragraph theme, orthesis-example paper—while the personal essay is an open-ended formthat allows for uncertainty and inconclusiveness. It is more about theprocess of coming to know than presenting what you know. The personalessay attempts to find out rather than to prove.

It is an ideal form of inquiry if your purpose is exploratory rather thanargumentative, and if you’re particularly interested in working out thepossible relationships between your subject and yourself. Because the per-sonal essay is openly subjective, the writer can’t hide. The intruding I con-fronts the writer with the same questions, over and over again: Why doesthis matter to me? What do I make of it? How does this change the way Ithink of myself and the way I see the world? Because of this, one of theprincipal dangers of the personal essay is that it becomes narcissistic; itgoes on and on about what the writer thinks and feels, and the reader isleft with that nagging question—So what? The personal essayist must al-ways find some way to hitch the particulars of her experience to somethinglarger—an idea, a theme, or even a feeling that readers might share.

On the other hand, one of the prime rhetorical advantages of the per-sonal essay is its subjectivity. Because it is written with openness and hon-esty, the essay is often a very intimate form, inviting the reader to share in

Features of the Form 5

the writer’s often-concealed world. In the personal essay, we often get tosee the face sweating under the mask. Honesty is one of the essay’s pri-mary virtues, and because the form allows for uncertainty and confusion,the writer doesn’t need to pretend that she has the answer, or that heknows more than he lets on about his subject.

PERSONAL ESSAYS AND ACADEMIC WRITING

In some ways, the personal essay might seem like a dramatic departurefrom the kind of academic writing you’ve done in other classes. Openly sub-jective and sometimes tentative in its conclusions, the personal essay is arelatively open form that is not predictably structured like much academicwriting. Additionally, the tone of the personal essay is conversational, evenintimate, rather than impersonal and removed. If your sociology or eco-nomics professor will never ask for a personal essay, why bother to writeone in your composition class?

It’s a fair question. While the pleasures of personal essay writing canbe significant, and reason alone to write essays, there are other importantreasons to practice the form. The most obvious is that the essay, more thanany other form, gives you an opportunity to use exploring as a method ofinquiry, and to practice those habits of mind that are so important to acad-emic inquiry: suspending judgment, tolerating ambiguity, and using ques-tions to challenge easy assumptions.

But the purpose of writing personal essays in your composition classgoes beyond this. For one thing, the essay emphasizes the process of com-ing to know about yourself and your subject, exposing your reasoning andthe ways you use knowledge to get at the truth of things. Reflecting onthese things in a personal essay can tell you a lot about how you think. Thedialectical thinking required by the personal essay—the movement backand forth between critical and creative thinking—should also prove to be auseful mental exercise for a range of academic situations. Finally, much ofwhat you are asked to write in college depends on your willingness to stepforward and express a belief, make an assertion, or pose a relevant ques-tion. The personal essay is a form that puts the writer in the spotlight. Youcan’t hide in the wings, concealed in the shadow of other people’s opinionsor 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 arecertain conventions that are present in most of them. Keep these in mindas you read the professional essays that follow. Which of the conventionsbelow seem present? Can you detect any others?


• Personal essays are usually written in the first person. There is nopretense of scientific objectivity in personal essays. What makesthem work is the tension between the subject and the writer as thewriter reaches for new understandings.

• The subject of the essay is often commonplace. Although essayistssometimes write about dramatic things, they most often are inter-ested in the drama of everyday life. Fine essays have been published,for example, about hats, houseflies, and summer lakes. The essayist’sthoughts 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 thewriter’s experiences and observations, and they tell the story of thewriter’s thinking about what those experiences and observationsmight mean.

• The thesis can be implicit, and it frequently emerges late, rather thanat the beginning, of the essay. In some ways, the personal essay is themost literary of the academic forms—it tells stories, relies heavily ondetails, it shows and tells. As a result, the meaning of an essay can beimplied rather than stated directly, and because essays are oftenused to describe the process of coming to know something, insight isusually earned later rather than at the beginning of the telling.

• Of the four sources of information, the personal essay relies on memoryand observation most of all. Because of the subjectivity of the essay,the writer often reports what has happened to her as a means to ac-count for what happens. However, interview and research can enrich apersonal essay by challenging the writer to consider other voices andother information (see Chapter 11, “Writing a Research Essay”).

• The essay often mimics the dialectical process that helped the writercompose it, shifting back and forth from the then and now, what hap-pened to what happens, and showing and telling. Because the essay,more than any other form of inquiry, often focuses on the process ofcoming 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 A YMost of us know the work of George Orwell (born Eric Blair) from his novels, par-ticularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he also was a prolific journalistand essayist. Many of his best-known essays recount his experiences as a memberof the Indian Imperial Police for the British colonial government in Burma; hewrote the essay that follows retrospectively about that time in his life.

Personal Essay 7

Orwell is an interesting personal essayist because he had strong feelingsabout two things: writing style and politics. These concerns come together in hisfamous essay, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in which Orwell railsagainst the pretentiousness and lack of precision of modern prose, and particu-larly the poisoning of the language by political jargon. Orwell wrote that “politi-cal language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, fromConservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murderrespectable, 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 willdo, if it is possible to cut a word always cut it, and avoid stale language andoverused metaphors. He also urged writers to avoid meaningless abstractionsand 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 pic-tures and sensations, Orwell makes a point that certainly might have been ex-plained more generally. But would it have been as effective that way? (Actually,“A Hanging” could easily be classified as an argumentative essay, highlightinghow 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 ledto their creation, the back and forth from the mountain of reflection to the seaof 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 yellowtinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard.We were waiting out-side the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like smallanimal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite barewithin except for a plank bed and a pot for drinking water. In some of thembrown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets drapedround them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within thenext week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a punywisp 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 moustacheof a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him andgetting him ready for the gallows.Two of them stood by with rifles and fixedbayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his hand-cuffs 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, ca-ressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. Itwas like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the wa-ter. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, asthough he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floatedfrom the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standingapart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised hishead at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a gray toothbrush moustacheand a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “Theman 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 specta-cles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorilyprepared.The hangman iss waiting.We shall proceed.”

“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till thisjob’s over.”

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of theprisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him,gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supportinghim.The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, whenwe had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order orwarning. A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knowswhence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud vol-ley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at find-ing 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 couldstop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner and, jumping up, tried to lick hisface. 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 itdanced and gamboled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of thegame. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stonethe dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoedfrom the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked onincuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was severalminutes before someone managed to catch the dog.Then we put my handker-chief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still strainingand whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back ofthe prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound

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Personal Essay 9

arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who neverstraightens his knees.At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock ofhair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wetgravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, hestepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to de-stroy a healthy, conscious man.When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid thepuddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life shortwhen 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 renew-ing 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 wasfalling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellowgravel and the gray walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking to-gether, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in twominutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, oneworld less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of theprison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection likethree sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and acrossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a gray-haired convict in thewhite uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted uswith 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 thegallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder.Then the hangman climbed upand fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away.The warders had formed in a rough cir-cle round the gallows.And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner begancrying 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, al-most like the tolling of a bell.The dog answered the sound with a whine.Thehangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flourbag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by thecloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutesseemed to pass.The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on,“Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant.The superintendent, his headon his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he wascounting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number—fifty, perhaps, or ahundred. 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 secondof 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 hemade a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence.The prisoner had van-ished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it gallopedimmediately 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 theweeds, looking timorously out at us.We went round the gallows to inspect theprisoner’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 brownbody; it oscillated slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backedout from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath.The moody look hadgone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist watch. “Eight min-utes past eight.Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered andconscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out ofthe gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, intothe big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command ofwarders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast.They squat-ted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders withbuckets 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 wasdone. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at onceeveryone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded toward the way we hadcome, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend [he meant the deadman] when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor ofhis cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admiremy new silver case, sir? From the boxwalah, two rupees eight annas, ClassyEuropean 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 doctorwass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prissoner’s legs to ensuredecease. Most disagreeable!”

“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.

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Personal Essay 11

“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 scarcelycredit, 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 andtrouble you are causing to us!’ But no, he would not listen! Ach, he was verytroublesome.”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even thesuperintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and havea drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car.We coulddo with it.”

We went through the big double gates of the prison into the road. “Pullingat his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loudchuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’ anecdoteseemed extraordinarily funny.We all had a drink together, native and Europeanalike, 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 suchas Orwell’s “A Hanging,” using questions based on the four methods of in-quiry discussed in Chapter 3. The questions below, therefore, encourageyou to explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect to discover and shape whatyou think about the reading. If you’re using a double-entry journal, usethese questions to prompt writing on the right page of your notebook. Usethe opposing left page to collect passages, details, and quotations from thereading that you think might be important.

1. Begin by openly exploring your reaction to “A Hanging.” Fastwrite forfive minutes but begin by focusing on a particular line or passage fromthe essay that you found puzzling, significant, or potentially impor-tant. Ask yourself questions to keep your pen and your mind moving.

2. Choose a line or passage from the essay (perhaps the one you beganwith in the previous question) that you think gets to the heart ofOrwell’s purpose in the essay. Compose an explanation of why youthink this passage is significant.

3. Orwell is making an evaluation in “A Hanging,” although the essayinitially just seems like an interesting story. What is his claim? Is itconvincing? What reasons and evidence does he provide to supportit? Is Orwell’s approach in this essay more effective in making hispoint than a more conventional argument might have been? Why?

4. Reflect on how “A Hanging” seems to conform to the features ofthe personal essay described earlier. In what ways does it departfrom them?

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P E R S O N A L E S S A YIt is impossible to avoid the tentacles of fashion. As much as I spurn what’strendy, my decision to wear an old pair of topsiders rather than the intricateleather Italian-made sandals my wife bought me is a decision. I act against fash-ion in the deliberate ways that some people act to keep up with it. It is not, bythe way, a character flaw to want to be fashionable; it just takes more effort thanI’m willing to give.

But there is a time in nearly everyone’s life—usually when we are children oradolescents—when we simply must have something because everyone elsedoes. For Barbara Kingsolver, it was white go-go boots. Remembering this desirebecomes an occasion for Kingsolver to reflect on her own entanglements withfashion, and particularly how she might respond when her own daughter wantsthe 1990s equivalent of go-go boots. Like most personal essays, this one tellsstories but it never strays from larger questions about conformity, identity, andparenting.

LIFE WITHOUT GO-GO BOOTS

Barbara Kingsolver

Fashion nearly wrecked my life. I grew up beyond its pale, convinced thatthis would stunt me in some irreparable way. I don’t think it has, but for a longtime it was touch and go.

We lived in the country, in the middle of an alfalfa field; we had no imme-diate access to Bobbie Brooks sweaters. I went to school in the hand-me-downs of a cousin three years older. She had excellent fashion sense, but dur-ing the three-year lag her every sleek outfit turned to a pumpkin. In fifthgrade, when girls were wearing straight shifts with buttons down the front, Iwore pastel shirtwaists with cap sleeves and a multitude of built-in petticoats.My black lace-up oxfords, which my parents perceived to have orthopedicvalue, 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 cousinwhose button-front shifts someday would be mine. But by the time I was aneighth grader, everyone with an iota of social position wore polka-dot shirtsand miniskirts. For Christmas, I begged for go-go boots. The rest of my lifewould be endurable if I had a pair of those white, calf-high confections withthe little black heels. My mother, though always inscrutable near Christmas,

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Personal Essay 13

seemed sympathetic; there was hope. Never mind that those little black heelsare like skate blades in inclement weather. I would walk on air.

On Christmas morning I received white rubber boots with treads like apair 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 con-trived to make an apple-green polyester jumpsuit that was supremely fashion-able for about two months. Since it took me forty days and forty nights tomake the thing, my moment of glory was brief. I learned what my mother hadbeen 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, hav-ing bypassed my cousin in stature and capped the arrangement off by movingto 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 tome in any of my jobs, particularly the latter), or on the lesser gratifications offood and textbooks. It was a tough call, but I opted for education. This wasIndiana and it was cold; when it wasn’t cold, it was rainy. I bought an armysurplus overcoat, with zip-out lining, that reached my ankles, and I found inmy 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 co-eds.And besides, who knew? Maybe under all that all-weather olive drab was aBobbie Brooks sweater. My social life picked right up.

As an adult, I made two hugely fortuitous choices in the women’s-weardepartment: first, I moved out West, where the buffalo roam and hardly any-one is ever arrested for being unstylish. Second, I became a novelist. Artists(also mathematicians and geniuses) are greatly indulged by society when itcomes to matters of grooming. If we happen to look like an unmade bed, it’spresumed we’re preoccupied with plot devices or unifying theories or thingsof that ilk.

Even so, when I was invited to attend an important author event on theEast 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 medown to an exclusive clothing shop.

It was a very small store; I nearly hyperventilated. “ You could liquidate thestock here and feed an African nation for a year,” I whispered. But under pres-sure I bought a suit, and wore it to the important author function. For threehours 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, feelingunhappy and out of place, I am sure, a silk ambassador assigned to a flannel re-public. Even if I go to a chichi restaurant, the suit stays home. I’m always afraidI’ll spill something on it; I’d be too nervous to enjoy myself. It turns out Iwould 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 whatyou look like, thanks, and are just delighted about it. It also requires consis-tency.A friend of mine wears buckskin moccasins every day of her life. She hasdaytime and evening moccasins. This works fine in Arizona, but when myfriend fell in love with a Tasmanian geologist and prepared to move to a rainforest, I worried. Moccasins instantaneously decompose in wet weather. But Ishould have known, my friend has sense. She bought clear plastic galoshes tobutton over her moccasins, and writes me that she’s happy.

I favor cowboy boots. I don’t do high heels, because you never know whenyou might actually have to get somewhere, and most other entries in theladies-shoes category look to me like Ol’ Dixie and Ol’ Dobbin trying tosneak 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 uni-form, in fact: oversized flannel shirts, jeans or cotton leggings, and cowboyboots when weather permits. In summer I lean toward dresses that make con-tact with the body (if at all) only on the shiatsu acupressure points; maybe alsoa Panama hat; and sneakers. I am happy.

I’m also a parent, which of course calls into question every decisionone ever believes one has made for the last time. Can I raise my daughter asa raiment renegade? At present she couldn’t care less. Maybe obsessionsskip a generation. She was blessed with two older cousins whose sturdyhand-me-downs she has worn from birth, with relish. If she wasn’t entirelya fashion plate, she also escaped being typecast. For her first two years shehad no appreciable hair, to which parents can clamp those plastic barrettesthat are gender dead giveaways. So when I took her to the park in cousinAshley’s dresses, strangers commented on her blue eyes and lovely com-plexion; when she wore Andrew’s playsuits emblazoned with trucks andairplanes (why is it we only decorate our boys with modes of transporta-tion?), 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’mvery quickly remembering what school is about: two parts ABCs to fifty partsWhere Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind? She still rejectsstereotypes, with extraordinary good humor. She has a dress-up collection to

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die for, gleaned from Goodwill and her grandparents’ world travels, and likelyas not will show up to dinner wearing harem pants, bunny ears, a glitter-braover her T-shirt, wooden shoes, and a fez. But underneath it all, she’s only hu-man. I have a feeling the day might come when my daughter will beg to be aslave of conventional fashion.

I’m inclined to resist, if it happens. To press on her the larger truths I fi-nally absorbed from my own wise parents: that she can find her own path.Thatshe will be more valued for inward individuality than outward conformity.That a world plagued by poverty can ill afford the planned obsolescence ofhaute 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 for-ever, the ghosts of past anguish compel us to live through our children. If mydaughter 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 overthem on inclement days.


Explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect on Kingsolver’s “Life Without Go-GoBoots.”

1. Explore your own experiences with fashion. Perhaps begin, asKingsolver did in her essay, by fastwriting about the first fashion-able piece of clothing you longed to have. Or focus on your own mem-ories of the fashion trends that swept around and through you whenyou were younger. Write for seven minutes.

2. Explain where in “Life Without Go-Go Boots” ascends the mountainof reflection, and collectively what do these ideas say about confor-mity, identity, fashion, or parenting? In other words, what doesKingsolver seem to be saying in this essay?

3. Some view fashion consciousness as a sign of superficiality. Usingevidence from Kingsolver’s essay and other sources including yourown observations, make an evaluation of the role of fashion in yourlife and, in a larger sense, American culture.

4. Did you like reading this essay? Why? What specifically were someof the qualities of “Life Without Go-Go Boots” that you found com-pelling or interesting? What does this say about your own tastes asa reader? Did you dislike the piece? Can you be specific about whyand what it says about your reading tastes? Since we are required toread many kinds of texts, particularly in college, is it possible tochange your tastes in reading? How?

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P E R S O N A L E S S A YThe essay that follows shows what Bailey White, a Georgia elementary schoolteacher and commentator on National Public Radio, does with the personal es-say. She writes with charm and grace about little things often linked to hersouthern life and heritage. Don’t be fooled, however; there is a fierce intelli-gence behind what seem to be simple essays. “Forbidden Things” is a piece thatponders White’s reaction to the ubiquitous signs of warning often encounteredin public places. Who might be responsible for them, she wonders, and what ishe like?

As you read “Forbidden Things,” consider which of the features of the per-sonal essay listed earlier seem present in Bailey’s work. In particular, is there animplicit theme in this essay, and if so, what might it be? What is Bailey trying tosay here about warning signs?

FORBIDDEN THINGS

Bailey White

I was leaning over the little railing, looking down into the Devil’sMillhopper, an interesting geological formation and the focal point of a Floridastate park. Waterfalls plunge 120 feet down into a bowl-shaped sinkhole;maidenhair ferns and moss grow in little crevices along the steep, sloping sidesof the gorge; and a beautiful mist rises up.

I stood there, gazing down, and feeling a reverence for these spectacles ofthe natural world. I felt the slow sweep of geologic time. I felt the remnants ofthe spiritual significance this place had had for the Indians who lived here forthousands of years. I felt the wonder and awe of the first European explorersof Florida looking down into this chasm for the first time.

Then another feeling crept over me, a deep, almost atavistic longing. Itwas the urge to throw something down into the Devil’s Millhopper. I lookedaround. A stone or a stick would do, but what I really wanted was a piece offood, the nibbled end of a hotdog bun or a wedge of chocolate cake withoutthe icing.Then I noticed the sign, one of those tastefully unobtrusive state parksigns:

DO NOT THROW FOOD OR TRASH IN GORGE

It was 4:00 A.M. I was at the Los Angeles, California, bus station, my next-to-last stop on a dreary transcontinental bus trip—three days and three nightson 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-smokedMarlboro cigarettes and sucked and slobbered over a perpetual ham sandwichthat 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 ownbed, stretched out full-length between clean sheets. But, I thought, pushingopen the door of the bus station bathroom, if I just wash my feet and my hair Iwill be all right. I lined up my soap, my washrag, and my little bottle of sham-poo on the back of the sink and took off my shoes and socks. Ahh, I thought.Then I saw the sign on the mirror:

DO NOT WASH HAIR OR FEET IN SINK

A few weeks ago I went into our little downtown restaurant and saw thatit had replaced its tired old salad bar with a gorgeous saltwater aquarium withsea anemones, chunks of living coral, and big slow-moving colorful fish withfaces I could almost recognize. I spent my whole lunchtime staring into thattank, mesmerized by the fish as they gracefully looped and glided, sending thetentacles 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 crumbsleft 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, breakingthrough the smooth surface into the coolness and silence of that peacefulworld. One of the fish would make a looping turn, his odd exophrhalmic eyeswould 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 thosethorny fish lips rasping across my fingertips. With rising delight and anticipa-tion, I pinched up a crumb, two crumbs. I scrabbled across the plastic top of thetank, found the little door, lifted it open—and then I saw the sign:

DO NOT FEED THE FISH

* * * * * * * * * *

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

Don’t get me wrong; I approve of these prohibitions. Imagine the nastymess in the bottom of the Devil’s Millhopper if every self-indulgent touristthrew a piece of food into the sinkhole. Imagine the puddles on the floor andthe plumbing complications in the Los Angeles bus station if every wearytrans-continental washed her hair and feet in the sink. Imagine the deadlyscum of grease on the surface of that saltwater aquarium if every fish-dazeddiner 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 beingsto pick flowers, walk in the woods, climb canyon walls, swing from vines, andfeed already well-nourished animals? I imagine with distaste a mean, sour,silent little man skulking around in public places, watching us furtively withsquinny eyes while scribbling on his pad with a gnawed pencil. In nationalparks he disguises himself as a tourist in reflective sunglasses and plaidBermuda shorts. “Bryce Canyon,” he notes with a smirk, “Urinating onhoodoos and off cliffs.” In zoos he wears khaki and lurks in the shadows, hidingbehind 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 withfluorescent lights, he makes those signs. Rounded letters routed out of boardsfor the parks: “We Prohibit. . . ., No . . ., and No. . .” Spiky green on whitezoos: “Do Not, Not Allowed, . . . Is.” And-we-mean-it black and white forcommercial establishments: “Absolutely NO . . .,Are Required,We Forbid. . .

I imagine, one night, as he works late stacking and bundling signs for thenext day’s delivery, the tendril of a grapevine creeps in at his window. Whenhis 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 him-

self 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 ofthose prickly lips.

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Use the four methods of inquiry—exploring, explaining, evaluating, andreflecting—to think through writing about White’s essay and to analyzeher approach.

1. An appeal of the personal essay is its focus on experiences or feel-ings the reader and writer share. We all, for example, have feelingsabout rules. In your notebook, begin a fastwrite that explores yourown experiences and observations about “forbidden things.” Beginby remembering a time when you consciously broke the rules.Describe what happened in detail. Skip a line, and write about an-other moment of dutifully following the rules, and maybe havingcomplicated feelings about it. As you look back on these, how do youfeel about them?

2. Remember the aphorism to “show, and don’t tell” that is often givento fiction writers? Essays, unlike some short stories, generally showand tell, moving from the sea to the mountain and back again. Canyou detect that movement in this essay? Where? Explain what younoticed about when and where the essay shifts from narration to re-flection.

3. Is everything, even a story like this one, an evaluation? Is BaileyWhite attempting to convince the reader of something? If so, what?What is her central claim and what evidence does she offer to sup-port 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 ofinterest, scored from 1 to 5 (with 5 being highest interest and 1 lowest

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

X X

X

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X

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X X

X X

X

FIGURE 4.1 An example of a graph of reader interest. The horizontal axis lists para-graph numbers and the vertical axis lists the level of interest.


interest), on the vertical axis. Plot the graph and compare your graphwith others in the class. Discuss which paragraphs seemed to gener-ate the highest and lowest levels of reader interest. What are the par-ticular qualities of each? Reflect on what your own graph says aboutyou as a reader.

P E R S O N A L E S S A YAmerica 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 mid-1950s to a barrio in Paterson, New Jersey. There she became both part of andwitness to a familiar narrative, that of the outsider who finds herself wedged be-tween 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 immi-grants 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 narra-tives, each told simultaneously, and divides the essay into sections. Contemporarypersonal essays frequently use a collage or segmented structure, and they do it formany reasons. In “Silent Dancing,” for example, Cofer exploits the juxtaposition ofher story of living in Paterson as a child with an account of a home movie wherethe 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 thepeople in the home movie inhabit—the old one or the new one? How does Cofer’sown story compare with the one that is implied in the film? Do both narratives im-ply the same idea about cultural conflict and assimilation?

SILENT DANCING

Judith Ortiz Cofer

We have a home movie of this party. Several times my mother and I have watched it to-gether, and I have asked questions about the silent revelers coming in and out of focus. Itis grainy and of short duration, but it’s a great visual aid to my memory of life at thattime.And it is in color—the only complete scene in color I can recall from those years.

We lived in Puerto Rico until my brother was born in 1954. Soon after, be-cause of economic pressures on our growing family, my father joined theUnited States Navy. He was assigned to duty on a ship in Brooklyn Yard—aplace of cement and steel that was to be his home base in the States until hisretirement more than twenty years later. He left the Island first, alone, goingto New York City and tracking down his uncle who lived with his family across

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the Hudson River in Paterson, New Jersey.There my father found a tiny apart-ment in a huge tenement that had once housed Jewish families but was just be-ing taken over and transformed by Puerto Ricans, overflowing from New YorkCity. In 1955 he sent for us. My mother was only twenty years old, I was notquite three, and my brother was a toddler when we arrived at El Building, asthe place had been christened by its newest residents.

My memories of life in Paterson during those first few years are all inshades of gray. Maybe I was too young to absorb vivid colors and details, or todiscriminate between the slate blue of the winter sky and the darker hues ofthe 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 firstfew months of my life there.The coat my father had bought for me was similarin color and too big; it sat heavily on my thin frame.

I do remember the way the heater pipes banged and rattled, startling all ofus out of sleep until we got so used to the sound that we automatically shut itout or raised our voices above the racket.The hiss from the valve punctuatedmy sleep (which has always been fitful) like a nonhuman presence in theroom—a dragon sleeping at the entrance of my childhood. But the pipes werealso a connection to all the other lives being lived around us. Having comefrom a house designed for a single family back in Puerto Rico—my mother’sextended-family home—it was curious to know that strangers lived under ourfloor and above our heads, and that the heater pipe went through everyone’sapartment. (My first spanking in Paterson came as a result of playing tunes onthe pipes in my room to see if there would be an answer.) My mother was asnew to this concept of beehive life as I was, but she had been given strict or-ders by my father to keep the doors locked, the noise down, ourselves to our-selves.

It seems that Father had learned some painful lessons about prejudicewhile searching for an apartment in Paterson. Not until years later did I hearhow much resistance he had encountered with landlords who were panickingat the influx of Latinos into a neighborhood that had been Jewish for a coupleof generations. It made no difference that it was the American phenomenon ofethnic turnover which was changing the urban core of Paterson, and that thehuman flood could not be held back with an accusing finger.

“You Cuban?” one man had asked my father, pointing at his name tag onthe navy uniform—even though my father had the fair skin and light brownhair of his northern Spanish background, and the name Ortiz is as common inPuerto Rico as Johnson is in the United States.

“No,” my father had answered, looking past the finger into his adversary’sangry eyes. “I’m Puerto Rican.”

“Same shit.”And the door closed.

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My father could have passed as European, but we couldn’t. My brotherand I both have our mother’s black hair and olive skin, and so we lived in ElBuilding and visited our great-uncle and his fair children on the next block. Itwas their private joke that they were the German branch of the family. Notmany years later that area too would be mainly Puerto Rican. It was as if theheart of the city map were being gradually colored brown—café con lechebrown. Our color.

The movie opens with a sweep of the living room. It is “typical” immigrant Puerto Ricandecor for the time: the sofa and chairs are square and hard-looking, upholstered inbright colors (blue and yellow in this instance) and covered with the transparent plasticthat furniture salesmen then were so adept at convincing women to buy.The linoleum onthe 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 roomis full of people dressed up: dark suits for the men, red dresses for the women.When I haveasked my mother why most of the women are in red that night, she has shrugged andsaid,“I don’t remember. Just a coincidence.” She doesn’t have my obsession for assigningsymbolism to everything.

The three women in red sitting on the couch are my mother, my eighteen-year-oldcousin, and her brother’s girlfriend.The novia is just up from the Island,which is appar-ent in her body language. She sits up formally, her dress pulled over her knees. She is apretty girl, but her posture makes her look insecure, lost in her full-skirted dress, whichshe has carefully tucked around her to make room for my gorgeous cousin, her future sis-ter-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: themark of the new immigrant—something about the posture, the voice, or the humble de-meanor 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 lightenedwith peroxide around the bangs, and she is holding a cigarette expertly between her fin-gers, 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 yearsyounger than herself, is somewhere between the poles they represent in our culture.

It became my father’s obsession to get out of the barrio, and thus we werenever permitted to form bonds with the place or with the people who livedthere.Yet El Building was a comfort to my mother, who never got over yearn-ing for la isla. She felt surrounded by her language: the walls were thin, andvoices speaking and arguing in Spanish could be heard all day. Salsas blasted outof radios, turned on early in the morning and left on for company. Womenseemed to cook rice and beans perpetually—the strong aroma of boiling redkidney beans permeated the hallways.

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Personal Essay 23

Though Father preferred that we do our grocery shopping at the super-market when he came home on weekend leaves, my mother insisted that shecould cook only with products whose labels she could read. Consequently,during the week I accompanied her and my little brother to La Bodega—ahole-in-the-wall grocery store across the street from El Building. There wesqueezed down three narrow aisles jammed with various products. Goya andLibby’s—those were the trademarks that were trusted by her mamá, so mymother bought many cans of Goya beans, soups, and condiments, as well as lit-tle cans of Libby’s fruit juices for us. And she also bought Colgate toothpasteand Palmolive soap. (The final e is pronounced in both these products inSpanish, so for many years I believed that they were manufactured on theIsland. I remember my surprise at first hearing a commercial on television inwhich “Colgate” rhymed with “ate.”) We always lingered at La Bodega, for itwas there that Mother breathed best, taking in the familiar aromas of the foodsshe knew from Mamá’s kitchen. It was also there that she got to speak to theother women of El Building without violating outright Father’s dictates againstfraternizing with our neighbors.

Yet Father did his best to make our “assimilation” painless. I can still seehim 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 aparade.We were the only ones in El Building that I knew of who got presentson both Christmas and día de Reyes, the day when the Three Kings brought giftsto Christ and to Hispanic children.

Our supreme luxury in El Building was having our own television set. Itmust have been a result of Father’s guilt feelings over the isolation he had im-posed on us, but we were among the first in the barrio to have one. Mybrother 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, Icould have drawn a map of Middle America as exemplified by the lives of char-acters 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 adoptedteenage daughter like a princess because he was rich and had a Chinese house-boy to do everything for him. In truth, compared to our neighbors in ElBuilding, we were rich. My father’s navy check provided us with financial secu-rity and a standard of living that the factory workers envied.The only thing hismoney could not buy us was a place to live away from the barrio—his greatestwish, Mother’s greatest fear.

In the home movie the men are shown next, sitting around a card table set up in one cor-ner 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. InLeave 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. Thewomen 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 partiesand, whenever they got sleepy, were put to bed in the host’s bedroom. Babysitting was aconcept unrecognized by the Puerto Rican women I knew: a responsible mother did notleave her children with any stranger. And in a culture where children are not consideredintrusive, 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 inDecember as we walked with our parents toward the brightly lit stores down-town; how I felt like a stuffed doll in my heavy coat, boots, and mittens; howgood it was to walk into the five-and-dime and sit at the counter drinking hotchocolate. On Saturdays our whole family would walk downtown to shop atthe big department stores on Broadway. Mother bought all our clothes atPenney’s and Sears, and she liked to buy her dresses at the women’s specialtyshops like Lerner’s and Diana’s. At some point we’d go into Woolworth’s andsit at the soda fountain to eat.

We never ran into other Latinos at these stores or when eating out, and itbecame clear to me only years later that the women from El Building shoppedmainly in other places—stores owned by other Puerto Ricans or by Jewishmerchants who had philosophically accepted our presence in the city and de-cided to make us their good customers, if not real neighbors and friends.These establishments were located not downtown but in the blocks aroundour street, and they were referred to generically as La Tienda, El Bazar, LaBodega, La Botánica. Everyone knew what was meant. These were the storeswhere your face did not turn a clerk to stone, where your money was as greenas anyone else’s.

One New Year’s Eve we were dressed up like child models in the Sears cata-logue: my brother in a miniature man’s suit and bow tie, and I in black patent-leather shoes and a frilly dress with several layers of crinoline underneath. Mymother wore a bright red dress that night, I remember, and spike heels; herlong black hair hung to her waist. Father, who usually wore his navy uniformduring 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 wasexcited because my mother’s brother Hernan—a bachelor who could indulgehimself with luxuries—had bought a home movie camera, which he would betrying out that night.

Even the home movie cannot fill in the sensory details such a gatheringleft imprinted in a child’s brain. The thick sweetness of women’s perfumes

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mixing with the ever-present smells of food cooking in the kitchen: meat andplantain pasteles, as well as the ubiquitous rice dish made special with pigeonpeas—gandules—and seasoned with precious sofrito sent up from the Island bysomebody’s mother or smuggled in by a recent traveler. Sofrito was one of theitems that women hoarded, since it was hardly ever in stock at La Bodega. Itwas 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 hadbeen reminded of his mother by the smells in the kitchen. But what I remem-ber most were the boiled pasteles, plantain or yucca rectangles stuffed withcorned beef or other meats, olives, and many other savory ingredients, allwrapped in banana leaves. Everybody had to fish one out with a fork. Therewas always a “trick” pastel—one without stuffing—and whoever got that onewas the “New Year’s Fool.”

There was also the music. Long-playing albums were treated like preciouschina in these homes. Mexican recordings were popular, but the songs thatbrought 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 par-ticular favorite of couples, since he sang about faithless women and broken-hearted men.There is a snatch of one lyric that has stuck in my mind like a nee-dle 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 noamas . . . I must have heard it a thousand times since the idea of a bed made ofstone, and its connection to love, first troubled me with its disturbing images.

The five-minute home movie ends with people dancing in a circle—the cre-ative filmmaker must have set it up, so that all of them could file past him. It isboth comical and sad to watch silent dancing. Since there is no justification forthe absurd movements that music provides for some of us, people appear fran-tic, their faces embarrassingly intense. It’s as if you were watching sex.Yet foryears, 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 theirfeatures into distorted close-ups. And I’m asking them: “Who is she? Who isthe old woman I don’t recognize? Is she an aunt? Somebody’s wife? Tell mewho she is.”

“See the beauty mark on her cheek as big as a hill on the lunar landscape ofher face—well, that runs in the family.The women on your father’s side of thefamily wrinkle early; it’s the price they pay for that fair skin.The young girl withthe 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 yourcousin. He should consider himself lucky to have met her only weeks after shearrived here. If he marries her quickly, she will make him a good PuertoRican–style wife; but if he waits too long, she will be corrupted by the city, justlike your cousin there.”

“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 everyday? Not me. I’m an American woman, and I will do as I please. I can type fasterthan anyone in my senior class at Central High, and I’m going to be a secretary toa lawyer when I graduate. I can pass for an American girl anywhere—I’ve triedit. At least for Italian, anyway—I never speak Spanish in public. I hate these par-ties, but I wanted the dress. I look better than any of these humildes here. My lifeis 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 tobe with him. If I marry him, even my name will be American. I hate rice andbeans—that’s what makes these women fat.”

“Your prima is pregnant by that man she’s been sneaking around with.WouldI lie to you? I’m your tiá política, your great-uncle’s common-law wife—the onehe abandoned on the Island to go marry your cousin’s mother. I was not invitedto this party, of course, but I came anyway. I came to tell you that story aboutyour cousin that you’ve always wanted to hear. Do you remember the commentyour mother made to a neighbor that has always haunted you? The only thing youheard was your cousin’s name, and then you saw your mother pick up your dollfrom the couch and say: ‘It was as big as this doll when they flushed it down thetoilet.’This image has bothered you for years, hasn’t it? You had nightmares aboutbabies being flushed down the toilet, and you wondered why anyone would dosuch a horrible thing.You didn’t dare ask your mother about it. She would onlytell you that you had not heard her right, and yell at you for listening to adultconversations. 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 anamericanito in her belly when this movie was made. Soon after, she put somethinglong and pointy into her pretty self, thinking maybe she could get rid of the prob-lem 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 amidwife on the Island, managed to pull the little thing out. Yes, they probablyflushed it down the toilet. What else could they do with it—give it a Christianburial in a little white casket with blue bows and ribbons? Nobody wanted thatbaby—least of all the father, a teacher at her school with a house in West Patersonthat 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 yourcousin ended up? Irony of ironies. She was sent to a village in Puerto Rico to livewith a relative on her mother’s side: a place so far away from civilization that youhave to ride a mule to reach it. A real change in scenery. She found a man

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Personal Essay 27

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 Ifall, I can feel the reverberations of her laughter. I hear the echoes of her lastmocking words: la gringa, la gringa! And the conga line keeps moving silentlypast me.There is no music in my dream for the dancers.

When Odysseus visits Hades to see the spirit of his mother, he makes anoffering of sacrificial blood, but since all the souls crave an audience with theliving, he has to listen to many of them before he can ask questions. I, too, haveto hear the dead and the forgotten speak in my dream.Those who are still partof my life remain silent, going around and around in their dance. The otherskeep pressing their faces forward to say things about the past.

My father’s uncle is last in line. He is dying of alcoholism, shrunken andshriveled like a monkey, his face a mass of wrinkles and broken arteries. As hecomes closer I realize that in his features I can see my whole family. If youwere to stretch that rubbery flesh, you could find my father’s face, and deepwithin that face—my own. I don’t want to look into those eyes ringed in pur-ple. In a few years he will retreat into silence, and take a long, long time todie. Move back,Tío, I tell him. I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Give thedancers room to move. Soon it will be midnight.Who is the New Year’s Fool this time?


Explore, explain, evaluate, and reflect on Cofer’s “Silent Dancing.”

1. In the 1950s and 1960s, many saw America as a “melting pot.” Theidea then was that although we may have many different immi-grant backgrounds, we should strive towards some common“Americanism.” For some, this is still a powerful idea, but for othersthe melting pot is a metaphor for cultural hegemony or even racialprejudice, a demand that difference be ignored and erased ratherthan celebrated. In your journal, write about your own feelings onthis controversy. Tell the story of a friend, a relative, a neighborwho was an outsider. Tell about your own experience. What did itmean to assimilate, and at what cost?

2. Because essays often have a delayed thesis, or have greater weighttoward the end, the final paragraphs often have particular signifi-cance. Explain the possible meanings of the last paragraph—andparticularly the last few lines—of “Silent Dancing.”

3. Does this essay make an evaluation, and if so, what is it assertingabout 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 isthat “they could relate to it.” Does that criterion apply here? Reflecton whether it’s a standard you often use as a reader to judge thevalue 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 FrancesBenjamin Johnston represents herself in ways in which most nineteenth

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self-Portrait (1896)

Exercise 4.1 29

century woman wouldn’t dare. Her skirts are hiked up to her knees, sheholds a burning cigarette between her fingers, and clutches a beer mug onher lap. Johnston carefully composed the picture to offer a very particularversion of herself. Photographic self-portraits like this one are similar topersonal essays in a number of respects. They often tell a story, and thephotographer, like the essayist, is a subject of the work, sometimes thesubject. We also consider a photograph to be “authentic.” We assume, forinstance, that this is the real Frances Benjamin Johnston, not someoneelse’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 ofthe piece, not some character or other invention.

As writers of personal essays, don’t we attempt to represent ourselvesas authentically and honestly as we can? Aren’t we basically trying to pre-sent verbal pictures of ourselves and our experiences? But how accurateare these self-representations? And if the comparison between a self-por-trait 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 howwe might read the personal essays of other people?

E X E R C I S E 4 . 1

Photographic Autobiography

STEP ONE: Find a picture of yourself, preferably from the past, or use acamera and compose a self-portrait. The self-portrait shouldn’t be a ran-dom shot of your face, but a photograph that is composed to say somethingabout who you are. Choose an appropriate location or setting. Considerwhat you’ll be doing in the picture. Decide whether the picture will be aclose-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 fast-writing using the following prompt: As I look at this picture, it makes methink about _______. And then I think about ______________. And then . . .And then . . .

Feel free to digress and tell a story about yourself, or about the mo-ment 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 noticein the photograph, and especially what it seems to be saying that youmight not have expected when you took the picture.

Stop and look at the image whenever you feel the urge to inspire morewriting.

STEP THREE: Now skip a few lines in your journal. Take a criticalstance for a moment and answer one of the following questions:


■ What do I understand now about myself that I didn’t fully under-stand when this picture was taken?

■ What does this self-portrait say about me that I didn’t expect it tosay?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Your instructor may ask you to shareyour 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 thismake 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 writinga personal essay. Did looking at the picture give you some new perspec-tive on who you were or who you are? Was this distance easy to find?

■ THE WRITING PROCESS ■

INQUIRY PROJECT: Writing a Personal EssayYou’ll write a 1,000-word personal essay that explores some aspect ofyour experience. Your instructor may provide additional details.Choose your topic carefully. Because of the essay’s exploratory meth-ods, the best topics are those that you want to write about not be-cause you know what you think, but because you want to discoverwhat you think. The essay should have the following qualities:

■ It must do more than tell a story; there must be a purpose behindtelling 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’tunderstand then.

■ It should be richly detailed. Seize opportunities to show what youmean, rather than simply explain it.

Thinking About SubjectsWhen you are assigned a personal essay, it’s essential to embrace uncer-tainty and be willing to suspend judgment. This form of inquiry, more than

The Writing Process 31

any other, seems most useful when the writer has chosen a subject becausehe 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 endup that way, too; your draft may just seem to go nowhere. This is a prob-lem, but it’s something that often can be addressed in revision. The key towriting strong personal essays is accepting that first drafts might be realstinkers. But there’s a payoff to this risk—the personal essay frequentlyyields surprise and discovery. You may well find out what you didn’t knowyou knew, and that is among the greatest pleasures of a writer.

As you play with the prompts that follow, then, be particularly vigilantabout pursuing subject matter that is confusing to you, that raises the hairon the back of your neck, or just makes you say to yourself, “I’m not surewhat I think or feel about that.”

Generating IdeasBegin exploring possible subjects by generating material in your notebook.This should be an open-ended process, a chance to use your creative side byjumping into the sea and swiming around without worrying too muchabout making sense or trying to prejudge the value of the writing or thesubjects 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 needyand attached as her?

Does testosterone really make one more confident? Is there a correlation be-tween 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 differ-ent from male ones? Can women and men be friends without an underlyingsexual tension?

Listing Prompts. Lists can be rich sources of triggering topics. Let themgrow freely, and when you’re ready, use an item as the focus of another listor 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.


2. Make a list of questions that have always nagged you about the fol-lowing: school, men or women, fast food, television, public re-strooms, shoes, and sports.

Fastwriting Prompts. In the early stages of generating possible topics for anessay, fastwriting can be invaluable, if you allow yourself to write “badly.”Initially, don’t worry about staying focused; sometimes you find the besttriggering topics by ranging freely. Once you’ve tentatively settled on some-thing, use a more focused fastwrite, trying to generate information and ideaswithin the loose boundaries of your chosen topic. Here are some fastwritingprompts that might yield useful discoveries for a personal essay:

1. Choose an item from any of the lists above as a prompt. Just startfastwriting about the item; perhaps start with a story, a scene, a sit-uation, a description. Just follow the writing to see where it leads.

2. Most of us quietly harbor dreams—we hope to be a professionaldancer, a good father, an activist, an Olympic luger, or a novelist.Begin a fastwrite in which you explore your dreams. When the writ-ing stalls, ask yourself questions: Where did this dream come from?Do I still believe in it? What moments did it seem within reach? Whatmoments did it fade? Plunge into those moments.

3. What was the most confusing time in your life? Choose a moment orscene that stands out in your memory from that time, and writing inthe present tense, describe what you see, hear, and do. After fiveminutes, skip a line and choose another moment. Then another.Make a collage.

Visual Prompts. Sometimes the best way to generate material is to seewhat we think in something other than sentences. Boxes, lines, and ar-rows, charts, or even sketches can help us to see more of the landscape of asubject, especially connections between fragments of information thataren’t as obvious in prose. The clustering or mapping method is useful tomany 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 onhow to create a cluster.) Figure 4.2 shows my cluster from the first promptbelow.

1. What objects would you most regret losing in a house fire? The an-swer would likely reveal something about your passions, your long-ings, even your regrets. Choose a most-treasured object as the corefor a cluster. Build a web of associations from it, returning back tothe detail in the core whenever a strand dies out. One of the won-derful complexities of being human is that we are sometimes deeplyconflicted (I’m not suggesting this is always fun). Pair two opposedfeelings that you consider typical of yourself. For example,


1964

Beatles

8th Grade

Rocky‘s Raiders

Frank Firestone

Chris Field

Photograph

Guitar

Martin

Chris

Norma

Silvertone

Ruth Cook

standstand

D-28

$465

Dad

Jan the Guitar Gallery

Chicago

Green Bay, WI

open field

escarpmentLimestone running to Niagra

Mary Sherwin

Beatles

45 rpm

“I Want to HoldYour Hand”

FIGURE 4.2 A cluster built around the one object I would most regret losing in ahouse fire: my Martin guitar.

ambivalence/commitment, fear/risk taking, loneliness/sociable,beautiful/ugly, composed/flaky, and so on. Use these paired wordsas 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 likedistinct times in your life. These may not necessarily correspond tofamiliar age categories like adolescence or childhood. More likely,the periods in your life will be associated with a place, a relation-ship, a dilemma, a job, a personal challenge, and so on, but sincethis is a timeline, these periods will be chronological. Examine yourtimeline, and as a fastwrite prompt, put two of these periods in yourlife together. Explore what they had in common, particularly howthe earlier period might have shaped the later one. See Figure 4.3for a sample timeline.


Dad’s alcoholism

The Jan years

Eco-freak period

Political/Karen

New Hampshire

The Montana period

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 informa-tion is that it defies the more linear nature of writing, putting onesentence after another in a chain of thought. When you make a clus-ter, 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 justthinking of any guitar, of course, but my 1969 Martin D-28 withBrazilian rosewood and the ding on the front. This is the one objectI’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 havethat kind of knowledge, obviously, so my cluster wouldn’t say much toyou. Each strand suggests a story, an idea, or a feeling that I mightexplore.

Typically, clustering is most useful at the beginning of the writ-ing process as you test a possible subject and want to see its land-scape of possibilities. I can see, for example, possible essays about notonly the significance of this guitar, but essays on the eighth grade,my old friend Chris Field, and the natural history of limestone. Thebest clusters are richly suggestive that way, but they’re only startingplaces 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 ofthe page and circle it.

2. Relax and focus on the core word or phrase, and when you feelmoved to do so, build a strand of associations from the core, cir-cling 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. Keepclustering until the page looks like a web of associations. Doodle,darkening lines and circles, if that helps you to relax and focus.


4. When you feel the urge to write, stop clustering and use one ofthe strands as a prompt for journal work.

Research Prompts. Things we hear, see, or read can be powerful promptsfor personal essays. Bailey White’s essay, for instance, was inspired by anencounter with a sign at a Florida state park. It’s tempting to believe thatpersonal essays are always about the past, but just as often essayists arefirmly rooted in the present, commenting and pondering on the confusionsof contemporary life. In that sense, personal essayists are researchers, al-ways on the lookout for material. Train your eye with one or more of thefollowing prompts.

1. Return to the list of questions you made in the earlier “ListingPrompts” section. Choose one nagging question about any of thesubjects you were asked to consider and set aside time to explore itby carefully observing them. Write down exactly what you see . . .and what you think about it. (The double-entry notebook method isparticularly useful for this).

2. Newspaper “filler”—short stories often about odd or unusualthings—can be a wonderful source of inspiration for personal es-says. Read your local paper for a few days, clipping these brief arti-cles. Paste them in your journal and use them as prompts for fast-writing.

3. Although the Internet offers infinite opportunities for procrastina-tion, with some focus it can also be a great source for jump-startingideas. What happened to your best friend from kindergarten? Typeher name into the Google search engine and find out. (Be sure to putquotation marks around the person’s name for a faster search.)Think about your favorite vacation—a search for “The GrandCanyon” might help jog your memory. Or perhaps checking out the“News of the Weird” on Yahoo! might remind you of your own child-hood antics.

Judging What You HaveGenerating may produce messy, incoherent writing that would earn youbad 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 towork from abundance than scarcity. But if this material is going to go any-where, it must be judged, shaped, and evaluated; the writer must emergefrom the sea of experience and use the vantage point that the mountain ofreflection 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


too soon. Suspend judgment for a bit and work through the following ques-tions 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 personalessay need not be dramatic or profound; in fact, some of the most com-pelling essays are about quite ordinary things. But as you examine yourjournal writing so far, consider the following:

• Abundance. What subject generated the most writing? Do you sensethere is much more to write about?

• Surprise. What material did you find most confusing in interestingways? Was there something that surprised you—perhaps a feeling youdidn’t expect to feel, or a memory that seems charged, or an observa-tion that challenged your preconceptions?

• Confusion. What subject raises questions you’re not sure you cananswer easily? The personal essay is a mode of inquiry that permitsuncertainty, and even some inconclusiveness, so it lends itself to ma-terial that makes you wonder.

• Honesty. What subjects are you willing to write honestly about? Thepersonal nature of the personal essay often leads us to material thatmay be uncomfortable or even private. However, you should not writeessays that make you feel overly vulnerable or unsafe; that stuffshould probably stay in your journal. Pursue subjects that you’re will-ing to share.

Questions about Purpose and Audience. Writing should be seen in a par-ticular situation, addressing certain subjects, and serving certain purposesfor certain audiences. Knowledge about this rhetorical situation is reallythe only way a writer can determine what makes a piece good. With open-ended forms like the essay, however, worrying too much about purpose andaudience too soon in the writing process can intrude on the development ofpromising subjects. The essay, unlike other genres, directly challenges thewriter to work out her relationship with a subject, a process that takesplace in the open, with the reader as witness. At times, it’s a little likedancing nearly naked on a table in a crowded restaurant. But initially, theessayist is the essay’s most important audience. The writer’s motive isstraightforward: What do I want to understand about this that I don’t fullyunderstand 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 eval-uate your journal writing and begin to draft your essay, consider these ad-ditional questions:

• Did your instructor provide guidelines for the personal essay as-signment that might influence your treatment of the material? Forexample, did she specify a certain audience for this draft or a cer-


tain structure or approach for the essay? If so, will the material fitthose guidelines?

• Who is your audience? If your draft will be peer-reviewed how canthis subject be compelling to others in the class? Is it something theywould find interesting or relevant?

• Is there a particular question that drives your exploration of this sub-ject? Can you make the question explicit as a way of focusing yourdraft? For example, Why was I relieved when my father died? Or Whyis it true that men never ask directions, consult maps, or read instruc-tion manuals?

Questions for Reflection. After you’ve generated enough material on yourtopic, seize opportunities to get out of the sea of experience and up on themountain 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 dialecticalthinking that helps writers make sense of things, going back and forth be-tween what happened and what happens, between showing and telling,and observations of and ideas about. In the personal essay, this movementis not just something that occurs in a writer’s journal but often appears inthe finished essay; in some cases, a reader can clearly see in an essay thismovement between sea and mountain. If you need help getting out of thewater, questions are the best way to do it. Use one or more of the followingquestions as prompts for thinking or writing in your journal.

• What do you understand now about this topic that you didn’t fullyunderstand 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 sofar?

• Focus on how your thinking has changed about your topic. Finish thisseed sentence as many times as you can in your notebook: Once Ithought ___________, and now I think ___________.

• Quickly write a narrative of thought about your topic: When I beganwriting about my father’s alcoholism, I thought I felt relieved when hedied. 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 realizethat . . . Follow that sentence with another, and another until you feelthere’s nothing more to say.

Writing the SketchIt’s hard to say when it’s time to begin composing the draft, particularly withopen-ended forms such as the personal essay. Because the essay invites


WRITING WITH COMPUTERS

CUTTING VERSUS DELETING

In revising your draft, your first reflex may be to delete the sentences andparagraphs you want to replace. This is a perfectly acceptable strategy, but forcertain key passages, it may be to your advantage to use your word processor’scut and paste function to preserve the text you are replacing. You can cut thematerial to be revised and paste it either at the end of your draft or in aseparate document created expressly to store such passages. The benefit ofdoing this is that as you move forward with your draft you may eventuallywant to reintroduce some of the material that you replaced earlier. If youdelete material outright, your options for recovering the material at a laterpoint are restricted to consulting a copy of the previous draft (which youshould always save as a separate file) or relying on your memory.

writers to tackle itchy, confusing subjects, and its mode of inquiry is largelyexploratory, it may seem as if you could stay in the shelter of your journal fora long time. On the other hand, you might be uncomfortable with all thetime you’re spending with “bad” writing and rush to the draft too soon, be-fore you have enough material. Working from abundance is particularly im-portant 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 whatseems 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 audi-ence 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 atopic, attempting to clarify your purpose in writing about it. Later, you’llrevise a sketch into a draft personal essay.

Your instructor may ask you to write several sketches using the mostpromising material you’ve developed from the prompts. The following ap-ply to all sketches.

• The sketch should have a tentative title. This is crucial because a titlecan hint at a possible focus for the revision.

• The sketch should be approximately 300 to 500 words. The sketch is abrief look at a topic that may later be developed into a longer essay.

• The sketch should be a relatively fast draft. Avoid the temptation tospend 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 youhope to discover by writing the sketch.

• The sketch should have a sense of audience. You’re writing yoursketch to be read by someone other than you. That means you need toexplain what may not be apparent to someone who doesn’t know youor hasn’t had your experiences.


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• The sketch should be richly detailed. Personal essays, especially, relyon detail to help the writer, and later, the reader, to see the possiblemeanings of events or observations. Essayists are inductive, workingfrom particulars to ideas, starting in the sea and then moving to themountain 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 thebeach smell at low tide, how exactly did the old man’s hand feel inyours, 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 com-munities. The infant mortality rate was high, and people—especially men—typi-cally did not live into their seventies. In fact, the mortality rate from 1920 to1973 for those twenty-five or younger in America declined an incredible 83 per-cent. Some call ours a death-free society because we are so insulated from its re-alities. Someone else cares for the bodies prior to cremation and burial, andwhen 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, asit inevitably will. The difficulty of sorting through our feelings about the loss of afamily member or a friend makes it an excellent topic for a personal essay. Theform encourages writers to explore ambiguities and attempt to work out mys-teries. In the student sketch that follows, Lana Kuchta does just that, trying tothink through the wisdom of the advice many of us have received when facedwith dying relatives: to remember them as they were, avoid seeing them as theyare. Like most sketches, this one doesn’t arrive at an answer to the writer’s ques-tions. There is no theme or thesis yet. But it does tease out a great deal of spe-cific 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 thesedeaths were expected to some degree because the people had terminal ill-nesses. This whole thing is really hard for me to grasp right now—the sheervolume of death surrounding me confuses me about how I feel about deathand these friends and how I should remember them. Invariably when we talkabout someone who is terminally ill, we say that we hope the person goesquickly for their sake as well as the sake of their family.After all, no one wantsto have memories of a prolonged death.We want to remember the person asthey 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 wasangry 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 roomwhere death hung like pea-soup fog over his bed. I was eight months pregnantwith my second son, Elliot. I was already dilated to 3.5 cm and Nora, the mid-wife, wanted me to wait a little longer before I had him. She felt that the stressof 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 himselfthat day.We talked briefly about my job and the baby and Austin, my other sonwho wasn’t quite a year old yet. It was hard for me to see him this way and aswe sat silently searching for things to say I counted contractions. I know he isgoing to die soon; I can feel it, I hope that he will live long enough to meet thebaby I am carrying. He was tired and when a nurse came to do something, Ileft 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 noone would let me into his room.They told me it was better for me to remem-ber him the way he was.

And they were right, but even if they weren’t I don’t think the images thatwould come to mind when I thought of my grandpa would be the last image Ihave of him in the hospital.The last image of him I like to remember is just amonth or so before he went into the hospital. I am at his house for a visit. It isJuly 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 bloatedpregnant body needed. We sat in their living room with the big picture win-dow that overlooked the Sacramento River. My grandpa plays with Austin onthe floor. Austin is crawling around, exploring, and pulling himself up on thefurniture. Grandpa tickles him and they both laugh.Watching them play on thefloor is nice, but I know that grandpa is sick again. The cancer is back and Iknow it even though none of us know this yet. But I am happy to be sitting inthe 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 timebecause 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 myface and smear the inside of my glasses. I know my grandpa would hate thispublic display of emotion. He was a no bullshit kind of guy and had a very lowtolerance for crying. I try to think about other things like the way he was al-ways moving. His hands were always jingling the change in his pocket or hewas drumming his fingers on some piece of furniture. He was loud and opin-ionated, but it was a good thing.

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He showed that he had a passion for life and he wasn’t afraid to speak upfor what he believed in.

He was generous, but he expected you to work hard for what you had. Hewouldn’t just hand money over to you, but he would give you a low interestloan with easy payback terms.

Just as l am now glad that I didn’t see him just before he died. There arethings about my life since he died that I’m glad he didn’t have to see. I’m gladhe 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 tothat house this summer for the first time since my grandma died. I was ner-vous about this. I didn’t know what to expect, what I would feel, what I wouldsay.The house was different, yet the same in so many ways.When the kids andI got into the car, Austin said that it was weird being there because the housestill smells the same after four years.

In the end though I am glad to have the memories of change rattling in apocket, 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 DraftA sketch is often sketchy. It’s generally underdeveloped, sometimes givingthe writer just the barest outline of his or her subject. But as an earlydraft, 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 sketchmight suggest a focus for the next draft, or simply a better lead. Learningto read your sketches for such clues takes practice.

Evaluating Your Own Sketch. Initially, you’re the most important readerof your own sketches. It’s likely that you’re in the best position to sense thematerial’s promise because you understand the context from which itsprang better than any reader can. What are the clues you should look forin 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 im-portant? Might this line be a beginning for more fastwriting? Mightit 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 Sketches1. 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 takesone (not your own, obviously), provides written comments, returns it thepile, and takes another. Repeat this until you’ve read and commented onat 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 youcut it?

Questions for Peer Review. If you’ll be sharing your sketch with one ormore of your classmates, you’ll likely need most help with clarifying yourpurpose and focus for a draft. It’s less helpful in these early stages to re-ceive editorial comments about sentences, especially questions aboutgrammar and mechanics. Here are some useful questions that might guidepeer responses to your personal essay sketches.

• What does the writer seem to want to say but doesn’t quite say in thesketch?

• What line appears most important to the meaning of the sketch, asyou understand it?

• What was most surprising about what the writer said or showed?

• What part of the story seems most important? What part might needto be told and isn’t?

Reflecting on What You’ve Learned. Before you begin working on thedraft of your personal essay, take a few minutes in your journal to thinkabout your thinking. Finish the following sentence, and follow it in a fast-write for at least five minutes. The thing that struck me most about writingand 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 InformationYou may be itching to move on with the draft. That’s understandable. Ifeverything has gone well so far, then your sketch has already given you asense of direction and some ideas about how to develop your topic. But re-member the importance of that dialectical movement between sea and


mountain, or collecting and composing. Now that you have a topic and atentative sense of purpose for your personal essay, journal work can beeven more valuable because it can be more focused. Before you begin com-posing the draft—or during that process—consider using the followingprompts to generate more information in your notebook:

• Explode a moment. Choose a scene or moment in the story or storiesyou’re telling that seems particularly important to the meaning of theessay. 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 mo-ment, or scene, or observation. Make a list of other experiences thatseem connected to this one (see “Cluster” below).

• Research. Do some quick-and-dirty research that might bring inother voices or more information that will deepen your considera-tion of the topic. For example, find out exactly how long that solareclipse was back in 1983, and whether it was in July as you seem toremember. Interview a local expert on your topic. (For more infor-mation on where to look for information, see Chapter 12, “ResearchTechniques”.) Do some background reading.

• Cluster. In your journal, try to move beyond narrating a single expe-rience and discover other experiences, moments, or scenes that mighthelp you see important patterns. Use the list above of related experi-ences or observations, and fastwrite about those, or develop a clusterthat uses a key word, phrase, or theme as its core, and build a web ofassociations. For example, let’s say your sketch is about your experi-ence working with the poor in Chile. Have you had other encounterswith extreme wealth or extreme poverty? Can you describe them?What do they reveal about your feelings or attitudes about poverty oryour reactions to what happened in Chile? See Figure 4.4.

Photo of Afghan refugees

Poverty/Wealth

J.R. Simplot‘s grand house on the hill

My old neighborhoodin Chicago

When my friend Chris had to sell his house

FIGURE 4.4 The start of a cluster built around Poverty/Wealth.


Composing the DraftSome of my students get annoyed at all the “stuff” I encourage them to dobefore they begin a first draft of a personal essay. In some cases, all thejournal work isn’t necessary; the writer very quickly gets a strong sense ofdirection and feels ready to begin composing. But from the beginning I’veencouraged you to gravitate toward topics that you find confusing, andwith that kind of material exploratory writing is time well spent.Remember, too, that journal writing counts as writing. It not only offersthe pleasures of surprise, but it can ultimately make the drafting processmore efficient by generating material that you won’t have to conjure upduring those long, painful periods of staring at the computer screen won-dering what to say next. This front-end work may also help abbreviate theend of the writing process—essentially, all this mountain and sea work inyour journal and sketches is revision (see Chapter 14 for more on prewrit-ing as a method of revision).

As you begin drafting, keep in mind what you’ve learned from yourwriting 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 whenyou 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 formsof development to develop your subject?

Narrative. The backbone of the personal essay is often, but not al-ways, narrative. Remember, however, that narrative can work in an essayin 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 ofyour thinking as you’ve come to understand something you didn’t under-stand before. Often a single essay uses all three types of narrative.

When we tell a story of what happened, we naturally begin at the be-ginning: “I awoke startled by the unearthly buzz of the alarm clock.” Butsometimes beginning at the beginning is the worst place to begin. (SeeChapter 14 for more about “leads.”) You should explicitly or implicitly es-tablish your focus in the first few paragraphs, and opening the essay withthe first thing that happened may reveal nothing about your purpose. Itjust establishes that you woke up. For example, note how Bailey White be-gan her essay with an anecdote about leaning over the railing at a Floridastate park gazing with “awe and wonder” at Devil’s Millhopper, a gorgethat seemed charged with “spiritual significance” and a sense of timeless-ness. In contrast, a few paragraphs later, White reveals a less uplifting de-sire—she has the urge to throw “the nibbled end of a hotdog bun” down thegorge. Within a few paragraphs, Bailey establishes the tension that will


drive the piece: the conflict between what’s obviously responsible behaviorand our secret desires to do a little wrong.

Consider beginning your draft with an anecdote (like White’s) or thepart of the story you want to tell that best establishes your purpose in theessay. If you’re writing about the needless destruction of a childhood hauntby developers, then consider opening with the way the place looked afterthe bulldozers were done with it.

Judith Ortiz Cofer’s essay illustrates how a personal essay can stitchtogether not just one narrative but several stories, all of which are con-nected by the essay’s theme or question. Notice as well how the stories defychronology. Time in writing is nothing like real time. You can write pagesabout something that happened in seven minutes, as George Orwell did in“The Hanging,” or cover twenty years in a paragraph. You can ignorechronology, as Bailey White did, if it serves your purpose, too. They key isto tell your story or stories in ways that emphasize what’s important. Askyourself, What does the reader most need to know to understand my think-ing and feelings about this topic? What should I show about what happenedthat gives a reader a clear sense of what happens?

Using Evidence. How do you make your essay convincing, and even mov-ing to an audience? It’s in the details. This is a form that thrives, like mostliterary genres, on particularity: what exactly did it look like, what exactlydid she say, what exactly did it sound and smell like at that moment?Evidence that gives a personal essay authority are details that make areader believe the writer can be trusted to observe keenly and to rememberaccurately.

Remember the middle of Orwell’s essay, “The Hanging,” when he wit-nesses a young man on the way to the gallows? In typical fashion, Orwellrelies on understated details to dramatize his realization that he’d neverfully 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 theprisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms,but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straight-ens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hairon his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wetgravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, hestepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle.

After seeing a condemned man avoid a puddle, we’re prepared forOrwell’s declaration that “cutting a life short when it is in full tide” is“unspeakably wrong.” Without that memorable observation, we’re morelikely to dismiss Orwell’s statement about capital punishment as merelyopinion; details involve the reader in ways the mere explanation of feel-


ings or ideas often doesn’t. We feel along with the writer, we are impli-cated in his experience.

As you draft your essay, remember the subtle power of details. Tell,but always show, too.

Workshopping the DraftIf your draft is subject to peer review (see Chapter 15 for details on how toorganize workshop groups), think carefully about the kind of responses youneed from readers at this point in the process. In general, you should en-courage comments that make you want to write again.

Reflecting on the Draft. To prepare for workshop, make an entry in yourjournal 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 notebookthat summarizes what you heard, what made sense and what didn’t, andhow you plan to approach the next draft. Your instructor may ask you toshare this information in a cover letter submitted with the revision.

Questions for Readers. There are many ways for a writer to structure re-sponses 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 atthis 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 groupthat are particularly relevant to the personal essay:

1. Is there a story I’m telling that I need to develop more? Is there astory I’m not telling that I should?

2. What do you think is the real story? In other words, what idea ortheme is lurking beneath the accounts of my experiences and obser-vations?

3. What seems the most important detail, the one that seems to saymore than it says, that reveals some important feeling, attitude, oridea? What detail seems less important, less revealing?

4. Do I move too high on the mountain of reflection, saying what seemsobvious or overly abstract and general? If so, what questions do youhave about what I say that might get me to come down closer to thesea, where I’m more likely to have better insights?

5. Do I explain things that are unnecessary to explain, that are bettertold through showing rather than telling?


Revising the DraftI think revision is one of the most misunderstood aspects of writing. I re-cently surveyed about sixty advanced placement high school students andmost thought that revision mostly involved tinkering—maybe “fixing” asentence, running spellcheck, or adding a detail. Think about the word—“re-vision”—which implies re-seeing. This is much more than tinkering; itis an effort to discover new ways of understanding your topic, your ques-tions, your thesis, and your own understandings. Another common miscon-ception is that revision is something that only comes at the end of the writ-ing process. In doing all the journal work you’ve already done a lot ofrevision. You’ve circled your subject trying to discover a topic and what youmight 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 butdon’t help your readers understand why you’re telling it?

• There is too much sea and not enough mountain. In other words, doyou reflect sufficiently in the draft, contributing your new under-standings of what happened?

• There isn’t enough detail. Since personal essays often rely heavily onnarrative, they should show as well as tell. That is, help readers notonly understand the significance of your experiences but in somesmall way experience those significant moments themselves.

GUIDE TO REVISION STRATEGIES

PAGE

PROBLEMS IN THE DRAFT (CHAPTER 14) PART NUMBER

Unclear purpose 1 xx■ Not sure what the essay is about? Fails to answer the

So what question?

Unclear thesis, theme, or main idea 2 xx■ Not sure what you’re trying to say?

Lack of information or development 3 xx■ Needs more details; more showing and less telling?

Disorganized 4 xx■ Doesn’t move logically or smoothly from paragraph to

paragraph?

Unclear or awkward at the level of sentences and paragraphs 5 xx■ Does draft seem choppy or hard to follow at the level of

sentences or paragraphs?


Refer to Chapter 14, “Revision Strategies,” for ideas addressing theproblems outlined on page 47 and how to revise your draft following yourworkshop. Use the table on page 47 as a guide to the appropriate revisionstrategies for your draft, but remember that a draft may present problemsin more than one category.

Polishing the DraftAfter you’ve dealt with the more global issues in your draft—is it suffi-ciently focused, does it answer the So what? question, is it organized, andso on—you must deal with the local issues. You’ve carved the stone into anappealing figure but now you need to polish it. Are your paragraphs coher-ent? How do you manage transitions? Are your sentences fluent and con-cise? Are there any errors in spelling or syntax? Section 5 of Chapter 14can help you focus on these issues.

Before you finish your draft, make certain that you’ve worked throughthe 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-onsentences, unclear pronouns, and misused words (there/their,where/were, and so on). (See the handbook for help with these gram-mar issues.)

❑ You’ve run your spellchecker and proofed your paper for misspelledwords.

S T U D E N T E S S A YThe personal essay that follows impressed me not only because it was eloquentlywritten and honest, but because of the way it worked through a question andan idea. Too often we forget that it is some idea we want to mull over or ques-tion we want to explore that is the backbone of the personal essay. Telling astory, or several stories, is often a part of a personal essay but those stories al-ways are about something larger.

As you read “Holy Jealousy,” notice how dramatically former studentMicaela Fisher shifts from narration to exposition, from showing to telling, fromthe sea to the mountain. Like George Orwell’s essay earlier in this chapter, thesemovements are pretty obvious. One risk is telling too much and narrating too lit-tle; good narration often keeps a piece moving, while exposition tends to slow itdown. Consider what happens here.

Student Essay 49

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HOLY JEALOUSY

Micaela Fisher

“Micaela, I want you to cultivate your friendship with him,” she assuredskeptical me, yet again. “I am not jealous of the relationship the two of youshare—I know it’s clean, and I support it. Please don’t hesitate in your friend-ship with him because of me.”

Why did it bother me that my friend so willingly sanctioned my newfriendship with her boyfriend? Why did it take me so long until I accepted thatshe truly wasn’t jealous of the extensive time I spent with him? That she wasokay with our sharing racquetball, chess, music, theology, hugs, even whileshe was away at school?

I wanted her to be jealous. Not because my relationship with him wasn’tclean, but because theirs was a relationship I believed in. And I knew jealousyneeded to protect it.

Jealousy is not categorically evil. Envy is evil, and when we equate jeal-ousy 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 whatbelongs to oneself. Envy is toxic, a destroyer of good things. Jealousy is a pro-tector of the sacred.As my friend earnestly reiterated her lack of concern overmy intensifying friendship with her boyfriend, my instincts chorused theirown concerns: “Where is the jealousy, the guardian of this relationship? Whowill keep it sacred?” Jealousy in its proper place is born out of loving protec-tion, and it is both an instinctive (emotional) mechanism for guarding the rela-tionship and a deliberate act of aggression toward what would threaten it.Thejealousy reflex is intended to lead to removal of the threat.When it does so, itis a good thing.

Jealousy can stem from insecurity, though when it does it is more accu-rately called envy, because it demands from another more than it rightfullyowns. Insecure jealousy is jealousy gone wrong, a corruption of a useful appa-ratus and a poison to a relationship. Insecurity always robs from others.

The marriage of my high school friend and her thirty-year-old husband isa frightening example to me of insecure jealousy. William “protects” his wifeby requiring her to stay home all day every day with their two little boys. Intruth, it is his enormous insecurity that drives him to keep her sequesteredaway from even women friends lest she discover companionship outside ofhim. Perhaps I’m being too hard on him; yet it does make me shudder when atwenty-one-year-old girl is so incredibly isolated that she becomes an unper-son apart from her husband.William crosses the line.There is nothing healthyor good about his “jealousy.” There is not anything good about a jealousy thatforces a person to be less than who she is.


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On the other extreme, a nominal commitment with no territorial pa-trolling whatsoever is not healthy either. A relationship in which each partneris at liberty to roam without any sense of inhibition is a lifeless relationship, ora strained one since one of the partners is probably suffering without using hisor her mechanism for jealousy. A relationship is by nature exclusive—“I likeyou” means “I choose you from among all others”—and jealousy is a keeper ofthe 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 upinteracting with a lot of women, and my mom can be spunky in a way thatcatches the eyes of some men. While neither of them seems to impose regi-mentation on the other, they are honest to each other about concerns thatcome up in their interactions with the opposite sex. My dad told me about atime when Mom was much younger and couldn’t see that a certain man had asexual interest in her and Dad told her he strongly preferred that she avoid theman. He mentioned times she’s asked him not to spend much energy with cer-tain women.The way they use jealousy seems to me the way its supposed to beused—as a protector of the marriage, as a very loving thing, as a signal thatthis person they love, the part of this person they own, is being stolen bysomeone other and they won’t just quietly allow it.That’s jealousy.

Jealousy was missing in the relationship of my two friends. It seemed tome a lack of honesty on their parts, and that bothered me. But in a dating re-lationship rather than a marriage, jealousy is a more complex machine—theboundary lines are more difficult to define.There isn’t absolute commitmentas with the vows of marriage; there’s something that seems worthy of protec-tion, but nothing justly inviolable. My friend did not own her boyfriend andcould not rationally restrict his interactions with me. Yet, theirs was not acavalier relationship; they’d been dating seriously for more than two years. Itwas a relationship worthy of protection, I thought, and it wasn’t being prop-erly defended.

The guy was my best friend at school. We debated theology and arguedphilosophy and competed in everything from guitar performances to racquet-ball games. Our views on much of what we discussed were dissonant, but weboth loved to engage our minds in intellectual aerobics. We deserved eachother’s pedantry. He widened my world and I widened his, and we were veryclose 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

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Student Essay 51

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for us to sharpen each other. She told me my friendship with him was goodfor both of us and that it was something for which she was thankful. So Itrusted her on that; and she trusted me with him.They were two people thatI loved fiercely.

But people can sustain only so much intimacy. While the two of themwere trying to deepen their relationship, I was subtracting time and energyfrom them both, I subconsciously listened for her to say, “Hey, Micaela, you’retaking time from him that should belong to me.We need to draw some bound-ary lines here—my relationship with him is suffering and needs defending.”She was reluctant to do so because jealousy seemed to her all insecure reac-tion. But I wanted to feel jealousy from her so that I could be sure theirs was aprotected relationship.

And eventually, it happened: jealousy kicked in.The exclusivity of their re-lationship 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 chesspartner and my best school friend.That continues to pain me, but I know it wasa loving judgment that caused her to ask for exclusive space, and I was glad tohonor her request. I respect her jealousy and hope it extends to anyone whomight come close enough to threaten their allegiance to each other—withoutit, their relationship is in continual danger of being diluted or undermined. I amencouraged 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 tothreats. The mechanism of jealousy should not be ignored. It is only throughjealousy, jealousy rooted in love, that the sacred remains holy.

EVALUATING THE ESSAY

Discuss or write about your response to Micaela Fisher’s essay using someor all of the following questions.

1. What is the essay’s greatest strength? Is this something you’ve no-ticed in your own work, or the drafts of classmates?

2. Is the balance between exposition and narration, showing andtelling, handled well in “Holy Jealousy?” Does it read fairly quicklyor does it drag at points?

3. The essay uses line breaks between sections. What do you think ofthis technique? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

4. What would you recommend to Fisher if she were to revise “HolyJealousy?”

USING WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED

My students often love writing personal essays. At its best, the genre isa rare opportunity to reexamine our lives and better understand our ex-periences. The insights we earn are often reward enough, but what haveyou learned in this assignment that you might apply in other writingsituations?

1. The personal essay you wrote relies heavily on narrative and per-sonal experience. How might an ability to tell a good story, usingyour experiences or the experiences of others, be a useful academicskill? How might you use it to write a paper for another class?

2. The personal essay is a deeply subjective form which would seem toput it at odds with formal academic writing which seems to strivefor “objectivity.” Are they at odds?

3. Based on your experience writing a personal essay, what do youthink are its most important qualities? If you were to write morepersonal essays, what would you strive to do next time?


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THE CURIOUS WRITER - Higher Education | Pearson variations in final published form. Visit to contact your local Allyn & Bacon/Longman representative. THE CURIOUS WRITER Writing a personal