Abby Thibodeau

This week’s readings bring us back to prior discussions about the essayist’s duty to write truthfully. But the essay is personal, as Cynthia Ozick reminds us in her essay “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” and in being personal—in being “the most self-centered … arena for human thought ever devised”—there are bound to be lies.

The essayist will inevitably insert a lie, whether purposefully or subconsciously, not because of some malicious scheme to fool the reader but because those lies capture perfectly a personal view of the world. Does this cheapen the essay? No. It embodies all of the reasons why we love the essay—that is, because we get to witness “the movement of a free mind at play,” as Ozick describes, and a free mind at play is not concerned with getting all of the facts right.

In his introduction for the year 2003 in The Next American Essay, John D’Agata asks a series of questions regarding fact and fiction in the essay, including: “What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in the blanks [?]” The line between nonfiction and fiction, a line we’re often fearful to cross with our own essays, is being erased, or at the very least challenged, in 2003. D’Agata points to a recognizable shift in nonfiction writing, noting the development and influence of the lyric essay.

The lyric essay, as D’Agata explains, holds a unique position between the opposing sides of whole truth and no truth: “It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay, and conflates them into a literary form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception” (436). These aspects, which were also present in our discussions of Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse,” are at the heart of Jenny Boully’s “The Body,” an essay that seems to challenge head-on our notions of real and imagined.

One way that Boully bridges the gap between real and imagined is through the form of her essay. “The Body” is formatted entirely as footnotes, a form typically used to further explain or clarify facts and figures. Turning this factual form on its head, Boully uses footnotes to question a writer’s reliability: “Although the narrative is rich with detail and historical accounts, the author is blatantly supplying false information” (441). In footnotes such as this one, we get a satirical interpretation of the essayist’s role. Boully seems to be mocking the suggestion that facts should be placed above a narrative “rich with detail and historical accounts.”

But Boully pushes her essay further across the line through her use of dreams. While dreams are referenced throughout the footnotes, later in the piece we discover that the notes are entirely comprised of dreams: “It wasn’t until years later, when he was curious as to which papers the footnotes corresponded that Tristram discovered that the ‘footnotes’ were actually daily journals of the author’s dreams” (464). Using footnotes of dreams—combining a factual form with the purest imaginary process—fully challenges the line between fact and fiction. Dreams are an especially clever tool for questioning the boundaries of the essay because they encompass both real and imagined experiences.

I’m a chronic conversational space-filler and sentence-finisher—a trait inherited from my mother—so I appreciate John Biewen’s “praise of the pause” not only as a helpful guide for making more powerful, emotional audio pieces, but also as reminder of what my life mantra should be.

In his essay “Be Quiet: In Praise of the Pause,” Biewen provides several examples to illustrate the effectiveness of pausing and power behind “the withholding of sound.” In addition to his notes on “real” pauses and how silence creates intimacy, I especially enjoyed Biewen’s notes on “pause as emphasis.” The example clips that accompany this part of the piece really show the subtle but noticeable difference even one extra second of pause can make. To further prove his point, Biewen compares two examples and provides the following analysis of the additional, one-second pause:

It’s a one-second pause that allows the listener to digest what’s just been said, but I also think of this kind of pause as a sort of silent raised eyebrow, a glance in the direction of the listener that says, “You got that, right?”

By listening closely to the two clips in this section, we see that a pause—even a brief one—not only adds emphasis to a particular moment but also communicates an idea to the listener. What we might refer to as “reading between the lines” can be observed here as “listening between the lines,” or paying close attention to the pause.

Jonathan Mitchell echoes Biewen’s praise of the pause in his essay about using music when he writes: “Sometimes the best musical choice is to not add any music at all.” Though Mitchell provides the reader with a careful breakdown of his method for creating an experience through music, he is also careful to remind readers that music can often take away from the story and “undermine the meaning.”

Opposite Biewen’s praise of the pause, at the other end of sound spectrum, are The Kitchen Sisters, who seem to fill each moment of “The George Foreman Grill” with music, clever lyrics, and unexpected notes that create a stage for the story or, as they explain, something more like a bed:

We graft beginnings, middles and ends (the instrumental bits) together to use as beds for our stories to lie on. We like it when the music pops at the top and changes rhythms and builds, moving the story forward.

There is a strong sense of this “moving forward” in “The George Foreman Grill” that I think comes from the “pops” and “changes” of music. Though I don’t know enough about music to point to the specific elements at play, it’s clear that the songs providing the “bed” are catchy, steady and upbeat. The music drives the story but never overtakes it.

On the topic of how to choose songs, The Kitchen Sisters offer a contrasting approach to Mitchell’s idea of only using music “you really truly love” and make the case for using music other people love:

When we interview people we always ask them to tell us about their own “soundtrack,” the music that captured the time and place they are telling us about.

This approach struck me as an interesting way to incorporate more layers of “the personal” into an audio essay. What better way to create “personal” depth in a piece than to feature the subject’s own soundtrack? That is, of course, if it complements the piece, as even the Sisters admit that these “soundtrack” sounds only appear in a fraction of their stories.

At a time when our attention is rigorously divided between Facebook, Instagram, Hulu, Snapchat, Vine, YouTube, and Netflix (though not necessarily in equal measure), it’s easy to forget that the technology that once captivated us most was radio. Yes, the simple, unassuming radio, now easily forgotten amid a roaring sea of images, videos, and gifs.

But English professor and radio essay expert Jeff Porter challenges the notion of “forgotten” through his examination of the modern radio essay, and if we set aside our screens for a moment, we’ll see exactly what he means.

In his piece “Essay on the Radio Essay,” Porter provides a brief history of radio that calls attention to its once-prominent place in American homes. Gaining popularity during the Great Depression, radio quickly became a media staple in American culture: “By the late 1930s, radio was preferred by a wide margin to newspapers and thought to be more credible and more personal” (189). What was it about radio that made it more credible and more personal than written word? Porter believes the proof is in the voice.

Radio, in being a wholly aural medium, relies on voice to captivate audiences and convey meaning. Programs of radio’s early years cultivated the “vernacular lyricism” and “heart-stirring zeal” of radio commentators to bring the timeless tradition of storytelling to mass audiences for the first time. As radio evolved, and faced the competitive forces of television, it required a new approach to voice, and, as Porter explains, National Public Radio was particularly invested in searching for voices that could “break through the sound barrier.”

One of these “breaking” voices can be heard in writer and This American Life contributor Sarah Vowell. In fact, in his essay, Porter describes Vowell’s voice as sounding like a “disaffected teenager scheming revenge from the basement of library.” Indeed, there is something unique about Vowell’s voice: a southern pitch that makes you sit up, a sincerity that makes you lean in. Her deliberate pacing, rhythm, and rural lilt keeps the listener engaged at each word.

In her piece “City Mouse, Country Mouse,” Vowell explores her family’s journey from rural Oklahoma to “big city” Bozeman, Montana. Integrating the voices of her family members with her own, Vowell turns a simple story of resettling into a complex, familial narrative. 

Instead of simply telling the audience why her father wanted to move, Vowell asks her father directly, and allows the audience to listen in on the same feigned excuses he’s been giving the family for years. Instead of simply describing the libraries in Bozeman, one of the many impressive features of “big city” life,  Vowell records a conversation with her twin sister Amy in which they reminisce about the one-shelf “library” in Oklahoma compared to the many libraries of Bozeman: “Bozeman had separate buildings that were libraries and how fun that was to just go and look at all the books we wanted,” says Vowell nostalgically. Instead of simply commenting on her mother’s initial unhappiness in Bozeman, Vowell records a conversation with her mother: “Let’s talk about something we generally avoid talking about.”

In her radio essay “NRA vs. NEA,” Vowell engages the listener by reaching beyond the restrictions of radio, enlisting full-on participation from audience members. As she accompanies her father into the mountains of Montana to test out his homemade cannon, she tells the audience to turn up the volume at the exact moment the cannon is fired, an attempted simulation of what the cannon sounds like in real life. “Hey! Turn it up again!” She screams to the audience. With the volume up high, the cannon sounds like a destructive thunderclap.

In both pieces, Vowell demonstrates how voice does more than merely carry a message and, as Porter proposes, how voice becomes “a medium in its own right” (193). Voice builds a distinct connection between an infinite audience and a single storyteller; voice compels the audience to listen.