I'd like to comment...on new essay collections

A triptych

Of all the forms of writing, essays feel like my most natural form. I should I say forms, since the essay can take many, giving flexibility to a very thinky writer’s sensibilities. Maybe Joan Didion made me fall in love with the essay, her cool sentences paired with her keen intellect and observation captured me. Or, perhaps, the lyric meditations on place in Michael Martone’s The Flatness and Other Landscapes. Maybe it was my early teacher, Susan Neville, who introduced me to the many permutations of nonfiction writing, solidifying my love of it.

Or, maybe I just like them, like I like lemon sorbet, Blackwater Falls, vintage broaches of animals, and striped shirts.

Whatever the case, I’ve been feasting on three new collections: Why I Dyed My Hair Purple: And Other Unorthodox Stories by Kori Morgan, How To Change History: A Salvage Project by Robin Hemley, and It All Felt Impossible by Tom McAllister. I know this one goes a little long, but trust me, the books deserve it.

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Until last fall, I had not seen Kori Morgan—who I knew in graduate school as Kori Frazier—since the aughts. it’s weird to think you spend time in workshops with someone only to not see them for a long swath of time. But, we had a lovely dinner before a reading by another one of our grad school friends, Lori D’Angelo, for her book of short stories, The Monsters Are Here. That’s when I found out that Kori’s book, Why I Dyed My Hair Purple, would be forthcoming in the new year from Calla Press.

Morgan, also a talented fiction writer, gives us a collection of short personal essays that wrestle with the integration of faith and creativity. She leads us through a series of moments that help us understand her development from growing up atheist (her parents wanted her to have the freedom to choose religion without imposing it on her) to born-again Christian—and event that’s rendered in a wonderfully poignant scene at a hotel swimming pool baptized by a friend. Between these, we see a writer trying to reconcile her creative and spiritual selves, against a backdrop of dealing with the tricky intricacies life lobs her way: bullying in school, health issues in college and graduate school, depression, and an overwhelming sense of not belonging. Her conversion doesn’t necessarily cure these—there are churches where she feels excluded, leading up to the purple hair promised in the book’s title:

My slanted smile shows I’m clearly trying to look like Patti Smith or Neko Case or another one of those edgy rock chicks I liked. But instead of their strong, confident appearances, I just come across as sad. There is a vacant expression in my eyes. I’m wearing metallic blue lipstick and thick, black eyeliner. I look like I’m imprisoned inside myself.

Morgan’s ability to reveal these moments—and I think we’ve all had these moments in which we look back, seeing our past selves cast less as fearless and more as revealing our insecurities—helps us to see how hers isn’t a typical religious conversion story. Moreover, she isn’t proselytizing. She’s upfront about her faith and how she got there, but it doesn’t turn towards the reader with implication. As in all good personal essays, she reveals. In fact, although many people throughout this book present Morgan with avenues to Christianity, the thrust of her conversion comes through the study of a literary giant: Flannery O’Connor.

One of the aspects of Why I Dyed My Hair Purple that stayed with me after reading is how members of Morgan’s faith community chastised her for the style of her writing. There’s a real sense that’s she’s dealing with an unreasonable choice: either be a literary writer, or be a Christian one. But Morgan never really accepts this dichotomy, even as it weighs on her. In one of my favorite passages in the book, which I think applies to anyone who is in love with stories and cares what they can do, Morgan writes:

Sometimes, stories are the only way to reveal the most painful truths of the world around us, including our immediate circles. It’s easy to become blind to those things, to make excuses for people, justify behavior, or even ignore them all together.

Kori Morgan’s story is a twinning conversion, where faith and art become fused, become the same path, or whatever the right metaphor is. She puts to the page her truth as a Christian and her truth as an artist, and refuses to choose between them. She does it with clarity and precision, and, at times, with humor and refusal to give up “angry girl music.”

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Robin Hemley is the writer I’ve most wanted to work with, but have chickened out of every opportunity, like workshops and conferences. I’m not often prone to cowardice, but there it is. However, I’ve read his books time and again, putting him among the list of writers I most admire. As well, I think it’s fair to say that A Field Guide To Immersion Writing challenged all my ideas about nonfiction for the better.

So, imagine my delight when I found out about his new collection and pre-ordered How To Change History.

A central thesis in this collection is that to most any event, there is a public history and a private one, and the integration of these can be a thorny matter. It also makes them terrific for essays, a form that seems to me a ready-made for this kind of grappling. In Hemley’s work, we return with him to events and people not because he (or we, by proxy) can change them, but because his understanding of them can change through the alchemy of the essay. The narratives that cling to an event, then, are what he examines throughout his book, and across essays. The intimacy of Hemley’s narrative voice brings us, as readers, into what could be very insular moments of self-discovery and self-reflection. Instead, it allows us to enter a personal history, one in which Hemley peppers with the kind of wisdom any of us could, and probably should apply to our own situations.

That’s a lot to take in, so let me give you an example. In the book’s title essay, Hemley recounts his Uncle Roy, a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There’s some debate about whether or not Uncle Roy was on the USS Arizona, the warship that was bombed. He recounts the family lore, and his childhood memory of Roy as a good joke teller, some other episodic moments with his Uncle, leading up to Roy’s death, where Hemley drops in one of those blink-and-you-miss-it revelations:

Some events freeze you in time and you can never escape them, and then, trying to escape, you embrace them.

Suddenly, I am thinking about any story I’ve told about myself, or my family, and how, in fact, escape is futile. The story takes on its own life. But Hemley isn’t going to rest there. Later, in the same essay, recounting a shared memory with a cousin, he drops another:

I know that sometimes our imaginations are more powerful than facts.

And, doesn’t this get to the imperfection of memory better than us simplistically characterizing them as “not perfect.” We cannot help our imagination’s intrusion into the construction of the story, the memory.

And then, in the same piece, Hemley helps me understand the mechanics of story, memory, and essay:

I’ll just say that sometimes the broad strokes of a story spare us from coming face to face with something unbearable. Sometimes you need to cover your head with a blanket, but then sometimes you need to throw it off and look around at the world as it is.

It’s this not-looking and looking that makes this particular collection of essays feel so personal to the reader, even as Hemley recounts moments that are very specific to him. We move with him through experiences, through space, and time, tacking back and moving forward together. More than remembrances, we can glean from these essays something essential that applies to ourselves. Many of us have heard the writing advice that to express the universal, use particulars, but in the case of Hemley, he actually pulls the blanket back on exactly how that principle works.

Hemley also infuses travel into this collection. In the essay, “On the Island,” where Hemley travels to the island of Corregidor, an island in Manila Bay, he renders the island in deft stokes:

Three Philippine officials, one dressed in the traditional barong Tagalog, lay two wreaths, one for Filipino soldiers and one for Americans, on either side of the memorial while the soldiers salute Steve follows solemnly behind, wearing slacks and a tucked in Hawaiian shirt. He carries off an impromptu speech admirably, under a drizzly sky, within sight of the gray ruins that dot the island. Even without such a sky and such ruins, even without such speeches, I would find the landscape somber and melancholy in a way that seems most in line with my wistful and restless soul.

Later, he will talk about Corregidor as having “no such thing as an innocent stroll.” The island, part of the Japanese effort to conquer the Philippines in World War II, is a place of ghosts. That Hemley can render Corregidor as both scary and yet seductive to explore shows us his facility for bringing the same kind of emotional nuance to places as he does to people and situations. Nothing is straightforward in a Hemley essay, much as it is in life.

I could easily go on about this remarkable collection, but, instead, I’ll comment on an essay that I believe can be examined using a narrative medicine lens. “In the Waiting Room of Dick Van Dyke” is an essay that gets at the anxieties of being a patient. Or as Hemley writes, “…health as we know now is an illusion, and everything formerly innocent and attractive, like the sun, or freckles, might kill us.”

We learn that an uncle of Hemley’s is a character actor who has appeared in Three Stooges shorts and a few episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, a show that he characterizes as “never having any consequences.” That uncle encourages a young Hemley to have moles looked at, which he puts off, as many of us do, and when he finally does book the appointment, he has recurring dreams of being in the waiting room to talk with Dick Van Dyke. He cuts to the actual waiting room and exam room, vacillating between various emotions and anxieties, those that, to anyone who has been in the medical waiting room, feel pretty accurate. The doctor, only referred to as “the doctor” and not by a specific name, takes on that flat, white-coated character that could be any doctor, the anonymous feeling of the medical encounter. After having some moles removed, Hemley tells us that he has the Dick Van Dyke dream for many years, and additional mole removals. “The waiting room,” he writes, “was its own destination, the wait itself the entire point.”

While the essay could have ended there, it doesn’t, and to its betterment. The moles removed from Hemley’s back have been used in a textbook for medical students. And here’s is where the impact of the essay has that resonance that my work in narrative medicine has taught me:

When med students look at my back and try to pick out what moles look dangerous and which benign, do they wonder who belongs to that back? Do they wonder how long I lived?

Narrative medicine, done right, makes us wonder about others, develops our sense of compassion towards the plights of others. Hemley’s essay takes us into the anxieties of patients in a way that almost sneaks up on us, until we encounter these questions, and the others that end the essay. It doesn’t afford us an easy exit. Nor should it.

I will leave you with one more quoted passage from How To Change History, from an essay on the literary life, and one that has given me perspective:

I see instead that worrying about one’s place in the pantheon of writers not only gets in the way of living but writing as well.

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Tom McAllister is probably the Barrelhouse-affiliated person I know least well. But at the recent Conversations and Connections, a one-day writing conference put on by that literary organization, I was struck by his reading from a new collection of essays, It All Felt Impossible.

This book was an intentional project: 42 Years in 42 Essays. The Author’s note at the expands on the parameters of the project, many of which McAllister didn’t strictly adhere to, which, seems about right. The thing that gets you writing can easily stand in the way of it. He rightly abuses his own rules.

Writers have been trying to capture the significance of life, which is to say the significance of their lives, pretty much since we started trying to make sense of the world using the unwieldy tool of words. But what is it that we want to know from this unpacking? Perhaps that is the essence of why some life writing resonates beyond the author understanding himself. Some of that has to do with the quality of the writing, of course. But McAllister’s collection illustrates how a life can facilitate reflection beyond it.

Starting with his birth year, 1983 (aside: oof! Recognizing I am a full decade older than him somehow made me feel like an aged person), McAllister begins more with ideas and relics from those years in which he was too young to have formed actual memories, and moves into childhood, which, in his middle-class Philly neighborhood seems both familiar to anyone who was young in the 1980s, and also particular to him. In his rendering, its riddled with different kinds of danger. In“1989,” McAllister discusses it outright:

My personal history is littered with these moments—of intense despair, certainly regarding my doom—that turned out to be harmless, exaggerated. The more I spend writing about my youth, the more I realize how much of my story is one of irrational panics. Moments of self-inflicted hysterics that dictate choices I make for the rest of my life.

I found this section so interesting—and here’s where a reader’s personal history can inform how such passages resonate—because I always associate 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a collective easing of panic. But the collective is not the personal. Now, just to be clear, McAllister doesn’t write about the Berlin Wall—that’s what I bring to the reading of “1989.” I would suggests that this is also something essays can do—invite us to more openly acknowledge our experiences as we read them, shading the contextual aspect of them. I can appreciate his sense of doom and danger, set against the idea that the Cold War is defrosting.

Intensely personal essays, like many of those in It All Felt Impossible, rely on vulnerability and honesty. While every author of nonfiction creates a narrative persona, in personal essays there cannot be crafted facades for the author to hide behind. Contradictions and flaws get confronted on the page. In the “2000” section, McAllister, graduating high school, comments on this aspect in a especially forthright way. It really struck me as, perhaps, being the heart of the project. He comments on a phrase, “that didn’t age well” to explain-excuse things that at an earlier time was either racist, sexist, homophobic, or a combination therein. He leads up to a thoughtful reflection about being young and male at the turn of the century, and his current desire to be something else:

It was so easy to be casually cruel. We were caught up in performing for one another, and the only thing that mattered was who could get the most laughs in the meanest possible way. Saying something aged poorly is one way to excuse yourself from having to examine your own complicity. If you keep asking questions, eventually you have to dig into what you’re doing now that won’t have aged well in 20 years, and that’s too fraught for many of us to handle. I’m not afraid of “cancel culture” as it’s often discussed. I’m afraid of losing the respect of friends and family who matter to me. A lot of my past didn’t age well. I hope I am making a better effort of it—all of it—now.

For all of the artful writing in this collection, and there is plenty of it, this moment of reflection made it stand out to me. Being this honest isn’t easy or fun, but for a reader its memorable, and for a thoughtful reader, it might just instigate the same kind of reflection. And if an essay can do that, it’s succeeded.

There are moments of real joy in this collection, too. Surviving a tornado during his time in graduate school in Iowa, McAllister joins his classmates in an impromptu feast, as with electricity out from the tornado, they’re trying to eat food that would otherwise spoil. At two in the morning, having one of many “one last beers” he writes:

We swelled with the urgency of people having their last night on Earth. On one side of the tornado had been grad school and on the other side was the rest of my life, as if it picked us all up in a single swipe and plopped us down into some other place.

That is, I think, a good way to read It All Felt Impossible.

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A last thought about all three collections: we live in an anxious time, and if there is any one form that can help us untangle and confront and maybe even start to deal with our anxieties, it is the essay. It is, perhaps, a ballast against the instability of the world, not because it gives us respite, but because it challenges us to face the anxieties head-on. For what better form to address a question to be answered, a conflict to be resolved, or a journey of understanding? You can make a good case for many other genres, and I’m sure they would be compelling. But if you read these three collections in succession, as I have, perhaps you’ll come to the same conclusion as me.

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Odds and Ends

• We’re coming on the close of another National Poetry Month. As I have in years past, I’m drying to write a poem a day for the whole of April. It’s a good practice. It’s also a nice rest when its completed. But this year, I got to read with two remarkable poets, David P. Prather and Marc Harshman, at Booktenders in Barboursville, West Virginia. Everything about the day was lovely, and a big thank you to Ashley Skeen, co-owner of the bookstore, for hosting us.

• I also presented on book proposals at the Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections in DC at American University. This is a terrific, supportive, one-day conference, and I encourage you to attend one sometime if you want a wonderful day of exploring writing. All the fun and advice, none of the pretension.

• Looking for a writing event this summer? I’ll be presenting at the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Conference in Ripley, West Virginia June 6-8, 2025. For all levels and all genres, it’s a fun few days at Cedar Lakes.