So, what I’ve been wanting to talk about is how I’ve become improbably captivated by essay writing during the process of applying to grad school (which is over and done! yay!)
To begin at the beginning, I should admit that a tome called “The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present,” has followed Jon around since college, and even made its way out to Oregon; despite the offputtingness of its large size and dull, textbook-like cover, it still seemed to have made itself a place in my boyfriend’s heart. Still, I never felt tempted to crack this 770-page book until incident this fall that I’m going to call “the bath of desperation.”
You can probably infer from the name that I was desperate to figure out how to write a personal essay (which, like the devil, goes by many names, including “statement of purpose” “statement of plans” and “candidate statement”). A calming bath, it occurred to me, would be just the thing to soothe my little brain. I’m not sure where this idea came from; I hadn’t done it before and I had none of the requisite “products.” In lieu of bubbles, I went to the bookshelf to find something to look at besides the ceiling. That’s how I ended up wrinkling the pages of Jon’s anthology with my pruny, wet fingers.
I was inspired just reading the introduction:
“The hallmark of a personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue–a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.”
In the Introduction to this book, Phillip Lopate uses some of the techiniques of the personal essay to explain just what it is that makes a personal essay compelling and functional. The intimacy, the frank, conversational tone, the admitted personal style, the very human, rambling shape of the personal essay all set up a relationship between reader and writer regarding the writer’s honesty. The style of the personal essay admits the style of its narrator, who, in turn, is promising the reader that he will use the essay to go about “delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible.”
“The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorbtion in return for the warmth of his or her candor.” In my own crude formulation, the personal essay equals the high-art version of a blog.
Which is why I thought it fitting to share this thought in this forum. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to plunge right in, and the noun “essay” has its roots in a verb meaning “to issue forth.” An essay once described the act of riding your horse forth from your stronghold, in search or pursuit of–