Breakfast on Mars and 37 Other Delectable Essays: Your Favorite Authors Take A Stab at the Dreaded Essay Assignment

By Rebecca Stern

Breakfast on Mars and 37 Other Delectable Essays will inspire students to think differently about the much feared assignment in elementary and middle schools around the country: essay writing.
Rebecca Stern's fifth grade students were bored to death with essay writing, and the one thing Rebecca needed to inspire them—great examples appropriate for kids—was nowhere to be found. Inspired by a challenge, Rebecca joined forces with her friend, social entrepreneur Brad Wolfe, and the two came up with a terrific proposal—to gather together a collection of unconventional essays by some of the best writers around. They have compiled and edited a collection of imaginative, rule-breaking, and untraditional essays that is sure to change the way you think about the essay.
Contributors include: Ransom Riggs, Kirsten Miller, Scott Westerfeld, Alan Gratz, Steve Almond, Jennifer Lou, Chris Higgins, Rita Williams-Garcia, Elizabeth Winthrop, Chris Epting, Sloane Crosley, April Sinclair, Maile Meloy, Daisy Whitney, Khalid Birdsong, Sarah Prineas, Ned Vizzini, Alane Ferguson, Lise Clavel, Mary-Ann Ochota, Steve Brezenoff, Casey Scieszka, Steven Weinberg, Michael Hearst, Clay McLeod Chapman, Gigi Amateau, Laurel Snyder, Wendy Mass, Marie Rutkoski, Sarah Darer Littman, Nick Abadzis, Michael David Lukas, Léna Roy, Craig Kielburger, Joshua Mohr, Cecil Castellucci, Joe Craig, Ellen Sussman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781596438811

Book preview

Introduction

You’re going to write an essay about what? Eating breakfast on Mars? Bathing with spiders? Why humans need tails? That’s preposterous! Essays are supposed to be serious and structured, right?

WRONG!

For too long, we have held essays captive in the world’s most boring zoo. We’ve taken all the wild words, elaborate arguments, and big hairy ideas found in essays, and we’ve poached them from their natural habitat. We’ve locked essays in an artificial home.

Fiction? You can roam free! Say whatever you want, however you want. Poetry, you get to dance and sing. Art, do back flips and cartwheels, for all we care!

But, Essay, we must tame you. We must squish you into five paragraphs, and we must give you so much structure that you cower in the corner, scared for your life.

The essay’s fate has long looked bleak. But do not despair, for change is brewing. In the following pages, you’ll catch a glimpse of something most people have never seen in the wild. We’ve let essays out of their cages, and we’ve set them loose. We’ve allowed them to go back to their roots.

After all, essays weren’t always tame. It was in the 1500s that a Frenchman named Montaigne first wrote exploratory nonfiction pieces—some serious, some playful, some short, some long—in which he experimented with writing about things that mattered to him. He called his form of expression essais—which, in English, means trials or attempts. (Notice, essay doesn’t stem from a root that means to cage or to bore.)

Montaigne rocked the world with this new genre. His writing showed people that it was cool to try to figure out answers to crazy questions, to think deeply, and to expound on wild ideas. After his first collection was published and praised, people started to emulate his style and form. People started to write their own trials and attempts.

Essays were once hip. They were once provocative. But then came the Dark Age of the Essay. Sometime in the 1800s, essays were rounded up and captured, and they inevitably started losing their flair. As mechanization spread, schools began teaching essays in a similarly rigid way; creative, divergent essays became nearly extinct as each one was encouraged to be the same as the last. Before long, schools were filled to the brim with tired, unlively essays. And sadly, not much has changed since.

Breakfast on Mars features thirty-seven amazing authors who have returned essays to the wild. Through taking on the most fun, challenging essay assignments out there and crafting original essays of all types—persuasive, literary, personal, informative, and even graphic—these authors show us that essays don’t have to be any one particular way. In fact, when essays are allowed to be themselves, they can be every which way. They can be anything. They can laugh and breathe and cry and dream. They can send dogs to the moon, put tails on humans, wear invisibility cloaks, and bathe with spiders. Essays can do a lot when offered the chance. When given back their freedom, essays are truly something to behold.

PERSONAL ESSAY

Describe a time you had to do something you really didn’t want to do.

Camp Dread or How to Survive a Shockingly Awful Summer

by RANSOM RIGGS

It took me about a week to realize I’d been suckered. The ad in the church bulletin had called it a horseback riding camp, but by the end of week one, the only thing I’d learned about horses was how to scrape their stalls clean, and the only thing I’d ridden was an electric fence, which I had backed into in what was probably a subconscious escape attempt. But there was no escaping. I was stuck in the swampy middle of nowhere. Cell phones hadn’t been invented yet, and neither I nor the other campers had the guts to complain to the swaggering, dip-spitting cowboys who served as both our camp counselors and de facto prison guards. As that fence launched me into the air, arms flailing like a rodeo clown, butt tingling with residual electricity, I made a solemn pledge to myself: never