A Response to Jia Tolentino’s “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over”

“…to say that the personal is no longer political seems like just a new way of telling women to shut up about themselves because there are more important things in the world to talk about.” All the yes. Don’t shut up. ❤

BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

By Zoë Bossiere

A couple of weeks ago, a piece by Jia Tolentino came out in The New Yorker called “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” The title alone was enough to deluge social media feeds with writers stepping forward to defend the vitality of the personal essay in spite of the article’s assertions, or otherwise agreeing with Tolentino that the personal essay is, in fact, “dead.” The only problem is, the article isn’t actually about what we writers know as the personal essay at all, but rather a separate subgenre of nonfiction called the “confessional essay.” If we want to get even more specific, Tolentino’s article is talking specifically of the confessional essays typically printed in online “women’s” publications such as xoJane, Jezebel, Salon, and others. To compare the personal and the confessional is a common false equivalence, and a great underestimation of all that first-person nonfiction writing encompasses.

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Taking over the Elizabeth Ayres Center for Creative Writing: On gratitude and humility while still owning one’s success

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career, director, Elizabeth Ayres Center for Creative Writing, gratitude, humility, own your accomplishments, writing life

Friends, it is not very often I get to share news this big, and I’ve been sitting on it for nearly four months, so here goes.

I’ve been teaching and designing online writing courses for the Elizabeth Ayres Center for Creative Writing for almost three years now. The Center is independent, founded in 1990 by Elizabeth in her own home, and exclusively online and expanding since 2000. It’s wonderful work and I’ve been so happy doing it. On this past New Year’s Eve, Elizabeth called me to say she wants to retire to follow a lifelong dream of hers (this incredible woman has many, many dreams), and she offered me the Center: to take it over, run it, grow it as I see fit.

After I picked myself up off the floor, I accepted her offer.

What an online safe space is and isn’t

I belong to and help moderate a safe space group on Facebook called Link Your Life (LYL). The mission of this group is to provide “a safe, non-competitive space that is fueled by mutual support and compassion.” We are writers (who share our links, hence the group name), survivors, humans, who want to be lifted and lift each other up in a world that would silence, shame, and push us back down.

Our brilliant and compassionate admin, Shawna Ayoub Ainslie, recently asked us, the LYL moderators, to reflect on what exactly a safe space is to each of us. We realized that while we all share the core concepts, we each have different lived experiences and so approach the notion of safety through varied lenses. And that’s a good thing.

I have blogged about safe spaces before, here and here. I’ve considered what safety actually is, because of course, as I just said, it means different things to different people. And of course, there are real brick-and-mortar safe spaces, and there are online safe spaces, and literary safe spaces, and the safe space underneath my favorite, impossibly soft, charcoal-with-yellow-leaves throw blanket, the safe space of my increasingly solid tree pose, and even underneath my tattoos and leather and poetic “speaker” voice.

Today, I’m going to address only online safe spaces, specifically Link Your Life, and I’m going to start via negativa, to clear up misconceptions.

Must read: Indivisible-A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

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activism, Indivisible, Must read, resist, resistance

Printed!

My must-read post for this week is not a quick skim. It’s a manual for navigating activism after Jan. 20, and it was written by four former congressional staffers who saw firsthand how the Tea Party effectively organized against President Obama.

I first heard about Indivisible through Common Dreams, and immediately read everything on its website, where you can download and print the 25-page guide for free. Do so.

From the creators of the guide: “…the following chapters offer a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents. The guide is intended to be equally useful for stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve.”

Unlike the Tea Party, though, Indivisible promotes “a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness”–and its writers give practical tips for clearly communicating with one’s MoCs, or Members of Congress.

New-old protest poem as I gear up for The Women’s March and writing resistance

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new poem, protest poem

Collective protest for collective bargaining in Madison, WI, Feb 2011. Photo by Flickr user Zach Chisholm (Creative Commons license).

Ever have one of those moments when you think a bad thought that you have no intention of carrying out, and you kind of horrify yourself for even thinking it but you let yourself imagine the fallout nonetheless, and then also feel strangely empowered by acknowledging, if only in your own weird mind, what you could do?

I wrote the following prosy little poem during my self-imposed November daily writing challenge, about a week after I wrote this one. I had in mind the upcoming Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21 (will I see you there?), as well as the last time I attended a protest with more than a few dozen people.

If you’re marching/gathering/organizing/protesting now or any time soon, please be safe, be vigilant, be loud, and be proud.

Parenting is hard and sometimes I mess up

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broken leg, listen to your kid, messing up, not a perfect mom, parenting is hard

I will be a better listener too, little man. Photo by Flickr user Ky (Creative Commons license).

Jax had been wearing his cast less than two hours when I realized, damn, this broken leg could be a big setback in potty training.

Little man was averaging one accident per week before he broke his right tibia. We hit potty training hard last spring and by mid-summer, had tackled no. 1. It took a little longer for him to recognize the urge to go no. 2, but we got there. Jax’s main obstacle to mastering the potty is one he shares with many kids: he doesn’t want to stop playing to go sit on the toilet. As such, he often waits until the last possible second, then bellows, “Mommy I have to gooooo peeeeeeee!” and tears through the house, tripping over shorts and undies he’s pulling down while running (for real, how did he not break something sooner than this?).

It’s entertaining, as long as he actually makes it to the potty, which he does 95% of the time.

A broken leg means there is no running to the potty at the last second.

Motherhood: Part Dragon, Part Grace

Sarah Certa with first-day-of-school musings on motherhood and a lovely poem for her daughter, Evelyn: “…oh / tiny dragon, forgive me, it was me / who woke you, it was me who fed you first.” ❤

SarahCerta

This morning I dropped my daughter off for her first day of second grade, and, like every year on the first day of school, I’ve spent the morning steeped deep in my emotions about motherhood, & growth, wondering how it is that this child slipped from the stars down through me & into this life.

Looking at her is like looking up.

Motherhood is the most challenging realm of life on Earth that I have yet encountered. It scares the hell out of me. Is there anything more intimate, more astonishing, more terrifying, than growing a human body inside you & then spending the rest of your life watching it take form outside of you, a part of you yet apart from you? Talk about balance! I still haven’t got it figured out, except to say that maybe children are here to teach us there is nothing to “figure out” –…

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Tarantella: IV

Emily Van Duyne narrativizes her life with an abuser, and it sounds like my own. This is gorgeous, courageous, in-depth writing about how fear, gaslighting, and cumulative and unrelenting traumas compound the challenges of escaping abusive relationships.

I am so grateful to have found this writer and her words.

noneofthatblog

There is a blacksmith and there is a shepherd and there is a butcher boy
And there is a barber who’s cutting and cutting away at my only joy
I saw a rabbit as swift as a knife and as quick as a candlestick
And I had thought it’d be harder to do, but I held her and skinned her quick, held her there
Kicking and mewling upended unspooling unsung and blue
Told her wherever you go little runaway bunny I will find you
And then she ran
As they’re liable to do

Be at peace, baby, and be gone…

I have discovered it is difficult to convey terror through the written word.

In my mind, there are timelines I have to recall, and stick to, so that when the Reader receives this description of my life with Will, she will be able to recreate, in her mind, my experience…

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Are You a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

Check out this piece by Kara Post-Kennedy on being mothered by “a coven” of good witches and bad. It reminded me so much of my own childhood, how much time I spent with three grandmothers who I came to think of (then, now, and once, in a poem) as my “three fairy godmothers”–each with her own distinctive way of showing me what it means to be a woman, for better and for worse.

Open Thought Vortex

Memories of My Grandmothers

Growing up, the classic line from The Wizard of Oz when Glinda asks Dorothy “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” made perfect sense to me. From my very earliest memories I was always surrounded by formidable women, women of vast and mysterious powers, some of them very good and some of them rather frightening. Most of the women I was raised by and around had astonishing strength, talents, tenacity and seemingly endless energy; in so many ways I do not live within a mile of the standards they set. And while I mourn this a little, I am grateful that I grew up knowing without a shadow of a doubt that women CAN (and frequently have to) do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.

The “good witches” in my life are too numerous to count, but include my own mother, her best friend, and so many…

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Love letters to my FB friends #18

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amwriting, love letter, Love letters to my FB friends

Dear S.,

Our business is love letters. We write them sad as butterflies who only see flowers in photographs, forget-me-nots and widow’s tears. We write them with the stoic immutable hope of the orb-weaver gliding back and forth across a high-traffic threshold. We write them joyful as krill when the whale beached itself. We write them with animal imagery because we forget who we’re writing to, or I do, when my dog licks my hand and I think every being is kind, and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since I’ve been bitten. We write them to invent kindness, or reinvent summer breezes. We write them as whispers into microphones and startle at feedback. We write them as plugs in the wall and try not to stick our fingers in. We write them with the rage dialed back to simmer so we don’t burn the words we’ll eat later through feeding tubes, because once upon a time we let the rage boil over, but watched foam and froth fizzle like July 5. We write them belatedly. We write them beckoningly. We write them to discover new colors, crystals, planets, perhaps with watered down gravity and low rent. We write them without knowing why, or we write them to find out why–why, why, mama? says my almost-four-year-old when we make letters in chalk and he likes the B better than his J and I think, of course he’s mine but how? We write them so we don’t forget how to write. We write them so we don’t forget. We write them just so. We write them to yes and to no, to nothings we dreamed as everythings. Or maybe none of this is true, maybe we are the dreams, trying to mean.

xo S.

**

Love letters to my Facebook friends project