Kelly Danckert

Radical Revision

The first time I flew on a plane, my luggage was lost. I left Boston when it was ninety degrees, sunny, and humid, and I remember I spent weeks picking out the perfect traveling outfit: something comfortable but chic enough to hopefully cover the fact I was a nineteen year old who still had never flown on a plane by herself. I packed my carry on to the brim with books, my laptop, a notebook, a pen, everything that seemed essential at the time. I remember standing in Terminal E, the international gate at Logan Airport, and wanting to think about how mature it was to do this by yourself but all I could think about was when Lizzie McGuire also left the country for the first time, also going to Rome.

Airports are funny places. They’re a lot like train stations, yet everything is more exaggerated. Everywhere around you someone is either missing a plane, or running to catch one. Saying goodbye to a loved one, or yelling at a stewardess about something silly. People seem to either be yelling or asleep, there’s not really an in between. I pass the time making up stories for these people around me, because that’s all I can do to not go crazy waiting for my suitcase to show up. I  remember watching the luggage carousel roll around and around again, a maroon luggage with a green tag never showing up. Suddenly, I became a person in one of the stories I was telling myself earlier.

And it wasn’t really about realizing, in my shorts and a tank top, that Rome was experiencing an unseasonably chilly week for late May or the fact that I’d been traveling for twelve hours without brushing my teeth one because I’d packed my toothbrush. I felt shackled to the airport when I had so looked forward to hopping off the plane and jumping right into exploring. It was like I was trapped in the tiny customs office of the airport, tethered to my belongings that were on a flight to who knows where when all I wanted to do was run outside and explore the new place around me.

Staying still has never been something I’ve been good at. From the three different apartments I’ve had since I moved out to the schedules I make for myself, being busy is always something I strive to do. I remember writing in my journal on the bus to DC, getting ready to start a summer internship. “If life were stagnant, there would be nothing to write about.” I was just starting another journal, after filling up the pages of my other one mere days before leaving for the entire summer. And maybe this is something I do to drive the hunger behind writing, because just as staying still gives my limbs an itch to do more, not writing things down puts a tick in my hand. So sometimes I wonder if all of these things: lost luggage, new apartments, a flurry of internships, jobs, and classes, are born out of the need to write.

And sometimes I think this is why I run. Because I’m not a person where running comes easy, but it was a task born out of necessity. While the compulsion to write has always been something that was innate, I didn’t begin running until my freshman year of college, when this restlessness really began to kick in. I’m not sure where entirely it stems from, but all I know is that the itch I got in my fingers when I felt the need to write things down suddenly moved down to my legs. I run when I feel too full to stand still, and when my mind is too active to focus on any one thing in particular. And so one morning after I first moved out of home and was settling in my apartment, I decided to take off and chase after whatever it was I was looking for, but it wasn’t easy.

Writing always came easy to me, and perhaps I forced myself to start running as a challenge to myself and in a way, to fuel the desire to write. Because, in a way, I think running in a way is a lot like writing. Maybe adding a physical element to writing cleared my head and provided a challenge that let me understand how to overcome writer’s block and meander through my mind like the feet meander through the streets of South Boston. When I first started running, I remember I would get to the same spot each time and almost turn right back and qut. Red faced, sweaty, and wheezing, I remember looking at all of the cars whizzing by me and lamenting on the fact that they’re all probably watching my struggle to make it the 3 mile mark.

But I always forced myself to keep going, and somehow I feel like my writing has benefitted from this desire to never sit still. The habits I reinforce from running somehow manifest when I sit to write things down. Sometimes when I run, the jumble of words in my head sort themselves out, weaving a neat trail of thoughts on the sidewalk I leave behind me as the words trailing across a fresh page of my journal. When we write, we write to make sense of the world, and I feel like I run in order to see the world more clearly and to understand how to push myself in new ways, take more chances.

When I run on the same route for too long, I become too aware of the fact that I’m running and I get too stuck inside my head. I can feel every breath puncture my chest, and I’m thinking about the miles and the end goal rather than the process of getting there. Just as there can never be the same formula or the same approach to writing, I realized that the same principles apply to running. And once again, I find myself questioning why I did, in fact, force myself to start running. Was it more innate than I thought? The similarities to running and writing make me believe that the same part of your brain where my compulsion to write things down stems from is also the same part of the brain that’s active when I run to chase after answers and chase after clarity. Maybe I’ve always been restless, and maybe I just didn’t realize that there was such a physical  component to writing things down. I’m not someone who can sit in an airport, idly waiting for my luggage to show up, instead I find the narratives and the stories in people around me. It’s how I make sense of the world, and in running, I’m chasing after that same clarity I’m looking for. To me, taking on a long, windy sidewalk is the same as looking at a blank page and feeling that sense of renewal. A sense of home, and comfort, at knowing that maybe I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know the process by which I’ll try to figure it out.

In Journalism, there’s this thing they teach us called the inverted pyramid. A writer must start with the most broad, important details because it’s almost guaranteed everyone will read the first sentence. However, the details that are more specific must come later because only those who are really interested in the story will continue to read, hence the inverted pyramid writing technique.

This technique stresses the introductory lines, and Ozick does the same. However, she very clearly points out that the essay is not like the article in the sense that the essay does not expire and does not exist in a certain time frame. The introductory paragraph still matters though because like an article, it sets the tone for the rest of the piece.

One of my favorite openings from the essay anthology we read is the one from Barry Lopex’s “The Raven.” It reads:

“I am going to have to start at the other end by telling you this: there are no crows in the desert. What appear to be crows are ravens. You must examine the crow, however, before you can understand the raven. To forget the crow completely, as some have tried to do, would be like trying to understand the one who stayed without talking to the one who left. It is important to make note of who has left the desert.”

The essay opens with a note of mysticism. Ozick talks about the power each essay has, and the power in this introduction lies in this peculiar tone of someone instructing the reader to compare two very similar yet different things that the reader probably never thinks about. There is an ominous note, and before I finished the essay I had a feeling the author was going to venerate the raven and I was right to an extent. The essay acts almost like a morality essay through the tales of the crows and ravens.

The second essay I looked at was one that we had read in class previously, which is Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse.” The introduction reads as follows:

“It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been the death of someone, irrational,that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into a fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place – a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early the next morning.”

There is so much foreshadowing in this introduction, which is mainly why I wanted to focus on the piece. Immediately Dillard sets up this tone of dread, which is a major theme she explores later on when she sees the total eclipse. The style also very closely reflects the style of what to come. In that introduction alone, Dillard uses three metaphors which is something she continues to use throughout the piece to describe the phenomenon and how it makes her feel.

Moreover, she also sets up this sense of anticipation for what to come by not immediately naming the event she and her husband drove all the way to see. Annie Dillard’s power lies in her words and her control over them, which is something she sets up immediately in the introduction paragraph.

Final Project from Kelly Danckert on Vimeo.

Jonathan Kern creates a set of rules to follow when writing for reading on the air, and one of the most important things to keep in mind when reading for the air is to read slowly so that people have time to process. When it comes to stories that are heard and not read, the audience does not have the luxury of going back to reread whatever they may have missed. So, pauses are important and short sentences are necessary.

Ugly Pew in particular utilizes pauses both for dramatic effect and to give readers a chance to digest what he says. I notice this at first around 3:11 when he talks about the bubble gum he used to hide under the ugly pew until he was a about fifteen, imagine babies crawling under the pews and below the “stalactites and stalagmites” of his mouth. This is such a beautiful metaphor for something as disgusting as used bubblegum under the pew, and then he asks both himself and the audience, “At what age do we lose the ability to see magic and waste?”

He pauses, both to give readers a chance to answer it for themselves, and also to let readers ruminate on exactly what he is saying. At that young age of fifteen, the narrator had enough imagination to compare babies crawling under pews that may or may not have gum under them to cave explorers roaming through caves with beautiful rock formations. And he imagines this beautiful image all through what so many adults would write off as gum carelessly stuck to the pew. The pause at the end is very deliberate, and really drives home the themes of maturity, wonder, and reflection.

The way he draws out his story as well is reminiscent of Kern’s advice to slowly tell a story. In the beginning, we are unsure as to the direction of where the narrative going. He is providing immense details of the ugly pew he’s sitting on, the sermon itself, and the church as a whole. It isn’t until 4:50 we realize why we are in a church, and it is because his sister is in a hospital, fighting for her life. He gives us this detail, and then goes back to his observations of the church. It isn’t until even later we discover that his sister is in the hospital because of her attempted suicide. Like Kern points out, the author of Ugly Pew uses timing to really drive home his themes and keeps readers on the edge of their seats.

Alduous Huxley points out three poles of reference for the various poles of essays: the “personal,” the “concrete-particular,” and the “abstract-universal” (88). He claims that each essayist tends to have one pole they are most comfortable with, and that it is rare one essay employs all three. However, Albert Goldbarth’s “Delft,” is a complex piece and employs nearly all three poles in an essay about fleas.

How he becomes interested in fleas is entirely a personal anecdote because he first encounters them on a personal level when his girlfriend’s cat becomes infested with fleas. He says, “They’ve only pestered me once in my life, and that was at Cynthia’s.” Immediately, we are introduced to the first bit of personal information about the narrator: that in college he was madly in love with a girl named Cynthia, so much, that he became obsessed with fleas after picking them off her body. “So I picked fleas off her, chasing them with a fox hunt ardor, suffering my own pink frieze of bites around the ankles as necessary dues, and thanking that near damnable cat for bringing them in” (255). Right there we have the motivation behind the various odd turns the essay takes.

The narrator then goes on to describe the sex life of fleas, or the concrete particular. On page 257 he goes into immense detail about the link between fleas and the female hormonal cycle. He discusses their ovulation, nad all of the science and biology that goes into it. At first, this seems like an irrelevant tangent, however it leads readers into the final pole Huxley was talking about and really, the larger themes of the piece as a whole. He seems to be arguing how fleas infiltrate nearly every aspect of life and are unbiased in who they pester. All this is really because of their spectacularly fast reproductive rates.

The abstract universal is the most prevalent pole in the piece because it seems to be what ties everything together. The narrator discusses art and Vermeer, facts about fleas, poetry, and Christopher Columbus just to name a few. It is the fact section where the abstract universal is really grasped, where it seems like the narrator’s intent is to show just how common fleas are. He writes, “Fact: Monkeys aren’t natural hosts to fleas…Fact: The patient pupal flea in its case will wait alive but inactive, over a year, for a proper host to appear. It knows. A realtor unlocking a house a house abandoned for months…Fact: Jesus the Christ scratched fleas” (266).

Here is a very diverse cast of characters that are seemingly unrelated, are in no way particular or concrete, or personal. The narrator leads us to this point through his personal motivations for writing this piece, and the concrete facts of flea reproduction.

Benson believes the true essayist is not “concerned with discovering a theory” but rather concerned with “observing, recording, interpreting, just as things strike him, and letting his fancy play over their beauty and significance; the end of it all being this: that he is deeply concerned with the charm and quality of things” (43). Annie Dillard does just that in her essay, “Total Eclipse,” in which she and her husband observe a total eclipse.

She is not concerned with the science behind it, nor is she concerned necessarily about the historical context. Dillard’s mission, it seems, is to put the reader directly in the scene along with her for the reader to experience the same emotions she feels as the phenomenon occurs. She does this by employing a repetitive sentence structure: Subject, verb, adjective. For a few consistent examples, she writes, “The clown is bald” (97), “The hotel lobby was a dark, derelict room” (98), “The hill was five hundred feet high” (99), and so on.

But more so than just structure alone, the way Dillard writes about her lived experience is really what makes this essay just that. When she is describing the actual moment when the eclipse occurred, she didn’t just describe what she saw, but how it made her feel. She says, “Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shooting up your arm. If you think very fast you have time to think, ‘Son it will hit my brain.’ You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming and screamed before it it” (108).

Here Dillard is literally talking about what she felt in the course of one second, real time. She slows down reality to describe moment by moment exactly the feeling of almost dread and unease the total eclipse made her feel. Comparing it to anesthesia coursing through your veins is describing this contradiction in time: anesthesia will slowly numb you, and yet it takes seconds to inject into your veins.

This entire section is slightly disturbing, and also very self aware of how the body responds to fear and dread. Dillard could have merely mentioned how quickly the shadow passed over the hills, but because she drew out one tiny, tiny moment into a long narrative and description, she’s placing the readers in that moment right there with her in terms of how she feels. That moment right there is exactly what Benson was talking about in terms of relaying a lived experience to the readers.

The essay has always been a very personal genre, with the writer being able to honestly reflect on an idea that more often than not strikes a chord in someone else.

In Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams,” it’s so clear that the author has a very strong grasp on human emotion, and all of the complexities that go along with it. She is able to fully step into the character of all of the characters she is playing and grasp all of the nuances of their emotions. This is especially clear when she plays the young woman who is so lost to grief that her body succumbs to seizures without her realizing it.

About this character, she says, “Her refusal to make eye-contact, her unwillingness to explicate her inner life, the very fact that she becomes unconscious during her own expressions of grief, and doesn’t remember them afterward – all of these might be a way to keep her loss pristine, unviolated by the sympathy of others.”

The narrator knows this woman is simply a character in a script, and yet she understands her in a way that goes beyond simply what is outlined. The long, complicated sentences show the narrator’s depth to which she has thought about this, which to me really shows that she is a woman who is so aware of her surroundings and aware of human nature.

I also find that when she is talking about her second case study, the woman getting an abortion, the lines between her story and the character she is playing get blurred. “Dave and I first kissed in a Maryland basement at three in the morning on our way to Newport News to canvass for Obama in 2008,” she writes, and when I first read this I thought she was creating a narrative for the character she is playing. It wasn’t until she wrote, “We were writers in love” that I questioned whose story I was reading – was it the narrator herself, or was it the character she is playing?

Because there are so many blurred lines, to me that shows her empathy extending so far that it’s hard to differentiate. It’s clear that she is someone who thinks very deeply, especially when she’s reflecting on her impending abortion. She says, “We drank wine. I drank a lot of it. It sickened me to think I was doing something harmful to the fetus because that meant thinking of the fetus as harm-able, which made it feel more alive, which made me feel more selfish, woozy with cheap Cabernet and spoiling for a fight.” Once again, the rambling sentences show her train her thought and how she really does throw herself wholeheartedly into other people’s shoes.

Joan Didion’s essay opens on an incredibly personal note: a confession of sorts of why she and who the reader assumes to be her significant other, broke up. It’s a snapshot of her life at a single moment in time; a single sentence accompanied by the date and where Didion was when she wrote it. The reader is left with questions Didion goes on to ask her. What was she doing in Delaware? “Waiting for a train, missing a train?” As Carl H. Klaus points out in his piece “Essayists on the Essay,” Didion’s essay is personal, free, and unfolds slowly and in a way that mimics how she is processing the information she’s writing about.

Didion goes on to answer a broader question: why keep a notebook? The way she answers this questions, however, reflects the characteristics of the essay that Klaus talks about. Didion could have made this piece a persuasive one, where she talks about the reasons people should keep a notebook or she could have made it more like an article where she writes about the benefits of keeping a notebook. Instead, she answers the questions as she’s mulling it over herself. The essay isn’t set up in a way that is a purposeful, methodical exploration of the subject, it’s simply an exploration of her thoughts.

After listing off some potential personal reasons for keeping a notebook, Didion seems to reach a conclusion. She says, “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.” The way she writes makes it seem as though she came to this conclusion through writing about it. It wasn’t an answer she found by thinking about it beforehand and then deciding to write it down, but instead by working through it with words and internal musings.

This is one of the main distinctions Klaus makes between an article and an essay. He says there is a “personal orientation of the essay and the factual mode of the article.” He goes on to say the article is “out of touch with human concerns.”

The driving force behind Didion’s piece “On Keeping a Notebook” is her voice and personal connection throughout. The narrative is freer, more open, and consists more of impressions and thoughts than fact. It is this personal voice and casual exploration of why she chooses to keep a notebook that is one of the defining traits of an essay that Klaus explains in his piece.