by Kyle McKillop

The Joyful Current: Essay as Art Form

by Kyle McKillop

The classroom murmurs with the sounds of my rolly chair and the collective pencil-scratch brainstorming of twenty-five Creative Writing 11 students. “What are you thinking about?” I ask the next kid on my path.

She chews on the lid of her pen, staring at a web on a half-filled page. “I was going to do a collage essay, but I really want to try the hermit crab. Do you think a resumé could work?”

She’s well on her way. We exchange a few more words, and then I roll on to the next table: “What are you thinking about?”

And he’s holding his head with one hand; he half-looks at me and says, flatly, “I’m stuck.” We dig in together.

***

The first writing forms I learned to teach were the paragraph and the five-paragraph essay, both of which followed the same basic format: hook! topic sentence! point! example! explanation! repeated as needed! conclusion! These forms were effective in showing kids the structures they needed to explore an idea with a little depth. But I seldom saw more than that little depth, and the essays were also repetitive—as expected when following a formula. And did I mention the collective sad sigh a class would emit whenever essays were mentioned?

After experiencing a few hundred five-paragraph pieces, I wondered what other teachers did to make essays exciting and engaging. It’s not always easy to see into other classrooms, though, and it wasn’t until I started my MFA in creative writing that I finally found a path for myself, something that would be appealing to students and of course to their audience, including me.

***

An essay is just an exploration of an idea, which makes the genre shimmer with opportunity for writers like students and teachers. English Language Arts especially loves the subgenre of personal essays, which Robert Lee Brewer defines as “a piece of nonfiction writing that shares an interesting, thought-provoking, entertaining, and/or humorous story for readers that is drawn from the writer’s personal experiences (even if it’s second-hand information)”. In many English classrooms, this shows up as the personal narratives we assign to help students access their own expertise and voice.

I get a kick out of the personal essay, in part because I’m nosy and in part because it can be personalized so much. When introducing the personal essay that is our final project in English First Peoples 12, I preface it by sharing Tim Bascom’s Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide. In particular, we look at what he says about narrative structures, braided structures, and coming full circle. I also share some of my own writing, like this essay on death: modelling is important in my classroom, as is vulnerability. This essay you are reading is a personal essay too, I’d argue. And, in class, only once we’ve seen and discussed examples, or even made one collaboratively, will we proceed to working on our own.

Wayne Grady, when I took his Creative Nonfiction class at UBC, had an interesting personal narrative/research assignment: he asked us to pick an important date from our lives and tell the story of what happened to us that day. But we also had to research other events that occurred on that date and tie them all together. My own example starts and ends with a proposal and in between jumps from Fukushima to Libya to Syria to Surrey. The key is in the research: creative nonfiction stays as close to the truth as it can. But creative nonfiction doesn’t shy away from feeding its readers the images and dialogue that are needed to make a story engaging, even if that means that some details must be invented (with fidelity to the truth!) instead of recalled.

***

This is a roundabout way of introducing the form that became my creative writing pathway through classroom essays: the lyric essay. Here’s what Dave Hood says about lyric essays:

“The lyrical essay is a type of personal essay that combines both prose and poetry. It is often crafted like a prose poem. The writer uses a series of image or ideas, not narrative or argument, to craft the essay. The image can be of a person, place, thing, or object. The idea can be anything. The writer attempts to recreate the experience and evoke emotion in the reader by using sensory details, description that expresses what the writer sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and feels.”

This is eye-opening, even thrilling, for students. The form that they have been drilled on, that they are bored by, is suddenly catapulted into art. And kids love to make art.

***

One of my favourite definitions of poetry: “intense language.” Another favourite: in a choppy sea, poetry is the water that claps the thrust of the bow, the water that tumbles over and away, the water that sticks to the sailor and slips under warm clothing to make everything clammy. In the expanse, poetry is what moves, what shudders the boat; it’s the dark form that hides the dark undersurface shapes. But it’s also the bounce and skip and the airborne moment of cresting the wave, birdlike, to play in some invisible joyful current. And we take the boat out because we need both of those elements, the unknown fear and the unknown joy.

That’s a prose poem, which could be described, I suppose, as intense prose. Prose poems concern themselves with feeling over explanation, with showing over telling. Basically, they create a vibe. No line breaks needed.

For example, look at “whole foods rotisserie chicken” by Chelsea Balzer. It’s written in prose: three paragraphs. It’s intense, in that the words are not wasted, and there’s imagery and (to steal a phrase from Susan Musgrave) wisdom lines, in which Balzer presents a truth about the world. What’s the point, though? The reader has to think carefully to settle on a theme, to find a deeper meaning—or even a topic. The writer doesn’t have to say it directly. The reader has to feel it out, sound it out.

Here are some other prose poems to check out: John Barton’s “Sombrio Beach,” Shauna Barbosa’s “Every Year Trying To Get My Body Right” or “Strology__ Scorpio” (scroll down), or Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “NDN Homopoetics” and the gorgeously sad “sacred.” Or read grade 12 creative writing student Rupam Atwal’s “The Time Traveller.”

***

My friend Maria is a collage artist. I’m sure you know the form. For her, it’s the careful slicing of images into one larger combined form, a new work emerging from many tiny pieces. Something beautiful and fragmented.

The collage essay works in a similar way. The writer creates a set of narrative fragments but doesn’t connect them directly. Instead, connections form thematically, letting the many tiny elements form a larger meaning. Often, the title is a key that unlocks the rest of the essay.

See, for example, Christina Tang-Bernas’ essay “in-glish.” Gosh, I love this piece. And students love it too. The title is a perfect key to slot into the rest of the essay: the phonetic dictionary feeling, the language theme emphasized. We drop into narrative in the first line—“I learned to speak English in preschool”—and it lasts for a few paragraphs. Then we hit a significant marker, the asterisk: does it mark a jump in time? It seems to, yes, but there’s clearly something else going on too: there’s a new story, with the same protagonist, with no direct connection to what has already happened.

This keeps occurring, in five separate chunks, until it ends. By then, it’s clear how the title affects the rest of the piece: those fragments are not fragments but instead speak to a whole, to the title, to a thoughtful nonfiction narrative theme that many students have a profound connection to.

Brenda Miller’s “Typos” is another example of a collage essay. Here, the section breaks are simply spaces, followed by a quoted line. The four sections meditate on the errors of the title, hinting at narrative but also fantasizing about the alternative world created by misspellings. It’s not fiction; it’s a thought process, true but imagined.

Students can really dig into this form. Once they identify that overarching element, they just need to brainstorm tiny examples from their own lives. They have fun with it, and even the section-dividing symbols cause debate. To read three examples from grade 10 students, check out the As Vacant As A Grass Field anthology.

***

Another powerful lyric form is the braid. Braided essays are just as the hair metaphor implies: strands of thought woven together to make something grand, something unified. These differ from collage essays in that the separate sections will show up more than once, the way a strand of hair dives into the stream of the braid and then resurfaces. It’s a relatively common structure, often used in longform journalism. And as the word “longform” suggests, one of the braid’s traits is its length.

Here’s a simple example: Donovan Vincent’s article on binging video games. It looks at two strands: Cam’s addiction and the nature of video game addictions in general. It shows the movement between the two strands with a slight line. And the Cam parts lean on narrative, using dialogue and imagery to bring the writing to life, while the addiction parts focus on facts, on research. The results are a lengthy examination of the issue that both shows and tells.

A popular example in my classroom is John-Michael Schneider’s “When I Was 11, My Dad Killed My Mom” (content warning: some violent imagery). This one uses a heavy stylized line, almost like barbed wire, to separate the family past, the writer’s current explorations, and a study of journalism ethics. And the sectioning isn’t as tidy as in Vincent’s article—we might move back and forth between those strands without a signal. The result is more narrative than the video game article, but that’s still a result of research: Schneider writes about his own growth and studies.

Often my students are reluctant to write this form because of its size, but a few of my students have tried it out. One anonymous writer from my class created “From the Land of Five Rivers to the Pacific West Coast,” a powerful collision of family immigration and Canadian immigration policy that emerged from an in-class inquiry project.

For a sophisticated writerly version of the braid, check out Eula Biss’ work, like “The Pain Scale,” which looks at the title topic but also at numerical values and religion, or “Time & Distance Overcome,” which slides through a history of telephones, a history of telephone poles, a history of lynching, and a family history. Each flows like poetry, leaving us to wonder how we arrived at the ending.

***

Lastly: what if the writing looks like a quiz but sounds like facts? Or looks like a map but tells a story? Congratulations: you’ve found a hermit crab essay!

I first learned about hermit crab essays (hermit crabs for short) in a creative nonfiction course taught by the brilliant Kevin Chong. A hermit crab is a nonfiction piece that looks like one thing (a recipe, a field guide, a letter, etc.) but is really an essay; the term was coined by the writers Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola.

Hermit crabs are difficult for teens but not at all impossible. Consider this an extension activity: your most dedicated writers might attempt one. It requires inspiration and an ability to extend a metaphor across a significant piece of writing. I’ve only tried writing a hermit crab once myself, and it was a mess. But they are a joy to try and a joy to read.

So what might a hermit crab look like? A good starting place is Brenda Miller’s “The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer”, in which she explains the form and also gives an epistolary example: she uses the form of a rejection letter to explore vulnerability. Her essay is approachable for students but, because of this, tends to create more letters instead of new forms. Having said that, one of my favourites that I’ve seen in class is this letter written by Jujhar, who pours the pain of racism and academic failure into a piece called “UBC Rejection Letter.”

But like a hermit crab takes on the available shell, there are many other forms just waiting to be used for this type of essay. Deesha Philyaw, in her essay “A Pop Quiz for White Women,” uses the shape of an online quiz (à la Buzzfeed) to expose modes of racist thinking. In another example, Dinty Moore uses Google Maps to relate his story of escorting the writer George Plimpton around the University of Pittsburgh in 1977: “Mr Plimpton’s Revenge” rolls around the eastern seaboard, plotting their movements then and later. Or there’s Gitanjali Bhattacharjee’s “Impossible reCAPTCHAs,” which exploits the reCAPTCHA tech device’s phrasing to make us think about racism, misogyny, capitalism, Jeff Goldblum, and so much more. Each of these pieces hides its nonfiction process inside another shape, playing with the expectations of that shape to elaborate on the important or thought-provoking or juicy topic that is really being explored.

And there’s this lovely little “Resumé” by an anonymous past student. The form is instantly recognizable, but we know very quickly that something else is going on. The catchphrase is unexpected, the job titles too. What is happening here? we wonder. Why—and then we realize that the writer has bigger goals for us. They want us to think about racism, about gender equality, about a human’s worth. They want to take us on a journey into their heart.

***

Eventually, I roll my chair back to my desk. A roomful of students is scratching, scrawling, one-finger-typing away. What is appearing: narratives, collage essays. The hermit crab I just mentioned, “Resumé,” is being written overtop of the sixteen-year-old writer’s actual resumé. Over by the windows, someone is delighting in the traditional personal essay. There are some struggles in the room, but everyone has chosen what they want to write. Everyone cares about what they’re writing. Everyone wants to make this art. And I can’t wait to read them.

.

.

TL;DR:

Essays can blow your students’ minds, especially forms like personal and lyric essays, including prose poems, collage essays, braided essays, and hermit crab essays, because kids love to make art.

Further Reading:

Other Essay Forms to Consider:

Literary Métissage

Personal Narrative

Visual Essay

Leave a comment