Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

By Nicole B. Wallack

Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature.
 
Wallack analyzes examples drawn primarily from volumes of The Best American Essays to illuminate the most important quality of the essay as a literary form: the writer’s “presence.” She demonstrates how accounting for presence provides a flexible and rigorous heuristic for reading the contexts, formal elements, and purposes of essays. Such readings can help students learn writing principles, practices, and skills for crafting myriad presences rather than a single voice.
 
Crafting Presence holds serious implications for writing pedagogy by providing new methods to help teachers and students become more insightful and confident readers and writers of essays. At a time when liberal arts education faces significant challenges, this important contribution to literary studies, composition, and creative writing shows how an essay-centered curriculum empowers students to show up in the world as public thinkers who must shape the “knowledge economy” of the twenty-first century.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781607325352

Book preview

CRAFTING PRESENCE

Crafting Presence

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

Nicole B. Wallack

Utah State University Press

Logan

© 2017 the University Press of Colorado

Published by Utah State University Press

An imprint of University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

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The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

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ISBN: 978-1-60732-534-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-535-2 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wallack, Nicole B., author.

Title: Crafting presence : the American essay and the future of writing studies / Nicole B. Wallack.

Description: Logan : Utah State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022157| ISBN 9781607325345 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607325352 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Essay—Authorship—Study and teaching (Higher) | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching (Higher)

Classification: LCC PE1471 .W35 2016 | DDC 808.4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022157

Cover illustration: The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, ca. 1566. Public domain image.

Contents

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Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Devaluing the Essay in the Age of the Standards

On Showing Up

2 The Genre of Presence

What an Essay Isn’t

Why Consider the Writer’s Presence?

The Best American Essays

The Problem of Naming

Issues of Taxonomy

Essayists Theorizing Genre and Presence

Tracking Evidence and Presence

On Reading Essays

3 Historical Thinking in Essays: Crafting Presence in the Company of Ghosts

Kenneth McClane in the Otherworld

Jamaica Kincaid Traps History

Richard Rodriguez Through the Looking Glass

4 Error and Illumination: Crafting Reading Presences

Susan Sontag Seeks Our Gaze

Gerald Early Reads Ciphers

Franklin Burroughs at the Point of Origin

5 Crafting a Self Made of Images in Essays

Charles Simic Adrift in the Night

Mary Gordon Comes to Her Senses

6 Learning the Essay

References

About the Author

Index

Preface

East 4th Street, The Village, New York, October 1995

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At the very center of our office at New York University, at any given time of day and into the night (lots of nights), a half dozen or more graduate students congregated and chatted around three white formica tables, at least five feet long apiece, set end to end as if someone were preparing the room for a celebratory dinner with far flung relations, and in a disciplinary sense, we were. The entire teaching staff came from various departments and schools around the university, but in this group we tended to represent just a few: English Education (where both Educational History and Composition were housed), Performance Studies in the School of the Arts, English Literature, and American Studies. We were all on fellowships provided by the writing program; we earned them by teaching two sections per semester of composition and participating in comprehensive professional development workshops that were meant to help us identify our values and hone our practices. The impetus for this book began in conversations at those tables among my friends, colleagues, and mentors—teachers all—woven through our gossiping, venting, joking, goading, flirting, complaining, and showing off—about essays.

While many of us had read essays, and even taught composition before, few of us had written them ourselves outside of school, so we had a lot of questions and some concerns. As we became familiar with essays, our table seemed even more populated with the presence of these writers. Kingston, Shilts, Rodriguez, Goulish, Staples, Dillard, Doyle, Sontag, Gopnick, Barthes, Walker, Lightman, Koestenbaum, White, Early, Žižek, Quammen, Hoagland, Rushdie, Anzaldúa, Doyle, Rich, Als, Lopate, Gornick, Ehrenreich, Kincaid, Birkets, Oates, hooks, Didion, Wallace, Aciman . . . they were our associates, and sometimes, our frenemies (a word we would have found so useful had it existed then). We praised and puzzled over the essayists whose work we liked to teach, and dismissed the ones that we found too precious, or insufficiently formal or intellectually unambitious . . . until somebody else sat down and showed us some brilliant draft his or her student wrote about that very essay.

We brought a lot to the tables. We showed each other our students’ hits and misses in their drafts. We turned small teaching epiphanies and larger blunders first into stories for the assembled company, then into evidence as we tumbled them over and over, panning for something shiny and useful. We explored many unknowns about essays and student writers: how could we assign an essay for its content, without having students adopt the writer’s method in their own work (or vice versa)? How could students write essays to fulfill specific course requirements if the best essays by published writers almost always challenged one’s expectations for the form? Why did smart and ambitious students seem to want to keep writing five-paragraph essays, or just stories, instead of essays? How could reading professional essayists’ work help students to write them? Would writing even wonderful essays prepare students for their other classes? Michel Eyquem de Montaigne may have asked, Que sais-je? What do I know? but had he been part of this crowd, he would have asked, "Qu’est-ce que je ne sais?" What don’t I know? And the answer, in chorus: Plenty.

In fact, we were starting know a lot more about writing and writers, about audiences and representations, about writing in historical moments for particular publics, through our studies outside of the program. On any given day at the center tables there might be a few of us who were getting our doctorates in English education, including two historians: one charting the intersecting stories of teachers’ rights and civil rights in New York public schools; the other, examining girls’ writing in teen magazines working at the vanguard of girls’ studies; often, too, friends sat down from English literature, who were busy reframing the canon to refresh and deepen our readings of Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Whitman, Dickinson, Woolf; our comrades from Performance Studies and American Studies pulled up chairs, whose research always sounded like the coolest thing you could imagine (Holocaust museums! representations of violence against gay men! bike messengers! first-wave feminist theater! apocalyptic consumerism!); and if we could get her to sit long enough, a playwright working on her MFA would alight whose characters and stories traversed historical periods, ethical dilemmas, and psychic territory sometimes inside just one room. It is one of the great joys of graduate study to work among people who bring to the table such a variety of ways to inhabit the world as readers and writers. In teaching composition our disciplinary differences and affiliations remained, some got stronger, but our ideas, methods, and struggles did not isolate us from one another completely. At these tables in those years, at least, we shared an intellectual commitment to study essays and essay pedagogy, and many of us continue to do so today.

Our program lived, it hummed with living, on the second floor, above a long-standing musical institution in the West Village, The Bottom Line. The club, which had opened in 1974, was losing money and steaming its way to bankruptcy, but most of us were oblivious to that. It could hold up to four hundred people on a good night and they seemed to fill it pretty regularly. From the floor below us microphones boomed and squealed feedback in sound-checks; songs suddenly stopped and restarted in rehearsals; waves of music rolled underneath us during concerts, punctuated by the applause and hoots of the audience. The club hummed back through the floorboards, the sound ignoring the industrial carpet, and moving up the hollow tube legs of the tables, making the tops vibrate just enough to remind us that below had once played the Ramones, and Joan Baez, Bob Marley, Pete Seeger, Harry Chapin, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, and Santana. There was always something happening or getting ready to happen down there, and we could feel it.

Making something happen was very much the expectation around our office, both voiced and exemplified by the director of our program, the essayist, Pat C. Hoy II. Every facet of this writing program radiated from the center table. Nearby, in a second squared ring were our shared cubicles where we conferenced with students and sought some quasi-solitude, and at the periphery (but only geometrically speaking) were the semi-private offices of the directors, which like the conference rooms and the Writing Center cubicles looked out over narrow streets. A lot was half-visible, half-audible in that space. The openness gave us many chances to eavesdrop on one another both on purpose and by accident. There still were mysteries.

In our program, at that time, students began the course by testing the idea of an essayist they had read against their own first-hand experiences. These kinds of essays looked easy to write but they weren’t: students would tell stories for their own sake, voice opinions and chunk long quotations from their readings to prove that they were right; they would try to use an essayist’s craggy piece as a mirror, and looking into the bumpy surface claim, unconvinced and unconvincingly, Maxine Hong Kingston’s experience in ‘No Name Woman’ is just like mine. So around the table we strategized about how to get students to read essays more fully and fairly. We swapped class plans, writing prompts, and handouts, and I wondered what we were missing. If the struggles were mysterious, the successes were no less so. When students were able to really write essays they not only told compelling stories, performed deft analyses of evidence, posited exciting claims, and crafted beautiful sentences. There was something else there, and this quality drew a line between all pieces of our students’ writing without it and those with it; I started to hear myself in conferences talking with students about places where they were most alive and visible on the page, but these were not the words I needed.

I finally came across the notion of presence in the anthology we were given to teach from, Robert Atwan and Donald McQuade’s The Writer’s Presence: A Pool of Essays (McQuade and Atwan 1994). I read its introduction alongside material from the program (instructors’ handbooks and published student essays) and outside (editors’ introductions to other textbooks; College English and College Composition and Communication) as if they were fragments of the Rosetta Stone. Every day, on my subway commutes to the Village from Brooklyn, then Queens, I read essays in journals (Harpers, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, Callaloo, The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, Granta, and The New York Review of Books) until I started to see what made each one unique but also connected to every other essay I had read. Atwan and McQuade’s word presence sounded good me—it was close to what I was after.

Atwan and McQuade consider the many meanings of presence, from simply being physically present, to having a sense of self-assurance or dignity, to its more recent connotation, which suggests having an impressive personality (1). While they make sure to clarify that creating a personal presence in a text is not synonymous with writing exclusively in the first person, they insist that in order to achieve a sense of presence the student writer "should be written by the first person singular—by you (2). They claim, [i]nteresting essays are produced by a real and distinct person, not an automaton following a set of mechanical rules and abstract principles (2). But, of course, it’s tricky when you must teach essays in first-year composition courses or anywhere else for that matter, since students may expect some rules"; also I was finding that principles, which are always abstractions, were helpful or teachin, but only to the extent that we were able to put those principles into practices—of reading, writing, revising, workshopping (rinse and repeat, as needed). The questions I had about presence and how it worked in essays were powerful enough to drive my dissertation. The second half of the 1990s also marked a time, not coincidentally, when writers, editors, and scholars laid the groundwork for what we now can call the field of Essay Studies. As was fitting, commentators on the essay worked inside and outside academic contexts. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, writers and editors of essays found increasing support and acceptance for their work, but essayists and scholars of the genre in composition had to renew the call for serious consideration of the essay as a focus for writing programs, for its own sake and on its own merits.

The 1990s were a good time to be a writer or publisher of essays in the United States. Literary magazines and quarterlies where essays were published were thriving. By 1996, Robert Atwan’s annual essay anthology, The Best American Essays, had been in continuous print for a decade, and featured many of the United States’ most well-known writers in any genre as guest editors for each volume (including Susan Sontag, Joseph Epstein, Cynthia Ozick, Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Hoagland, and Joyce Carol Oates). Creative nonfiction programs drew undergraduates and graduate students in increasing numbers, and the Association of Writing Programs conference began to rival both the Modern Language Association and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in size and importance. By many visible measures, the end of the twentieth century should be understood as time when E. B. White’s sense of the essayist as a second-class citizen in the world of arts and letters was being countered by a renewed prominence and respect for essayists and their work, the like of which they had not enjoyed since the rise the New Journalists in the late 1960s and 1970s. The early years of the internet and blogosphere promised greater access, variety, and circulation of essays than ever before—the essay then had a home in the future of American literary culture.

At the same time, debates about the essay—and particularly the personal essay—began to arise for teachers and scholars as a metonym for ideas about the goals, methods, and even the viability of composition instruction and curriculum in the post-expressivist period. Unhappily for all concerned, as Wendy Bishop and Douglass Hesse have noted, proponents of any form of creative or literary nonfiction have been likely to find ourselves without a place to stand in composition scholarship (Bishop 1999; Hesse 2003, 2009, 2010). Paul Heilker suggests that if we dedicate composition programs to study of the essay as its own good and end, it might help us create a place and a role for composition that doesn’t fashion faculty or students to serve other disciplines or other parts of English studies (Heilker 2006, 204). I share Heilker’s sense that we in composition, creative writing, and literature share an insufficient sense of common purpose. As a result, we miss in our courses and in other aspects of our institutional lives and scholarship, what one another brings to the table.

In an earlier iteration of this project, I sought to bring these worlds of the essay and these conversations about the form into dialogue, with an eye to giving myself and students insights into the intellectual, creative, and theoretical contexts and debates in which we were working. I wanted to be a better teacher and reader of essays, and to help other people do the same. It is still not possible for me to think about essays without imagining the implications for teaching and learning them, and so I hope that this book will contribute to a richer understanding of how our students can become more present as writers and thinkers in the world through the essay. Equally urgent, and potentially more so, those of us who teach the essay in our separate spheres of literature, creative writing, and composition—as content or product, or as practice—are missing opportunities to help one another do our work better. If every colleague who assigned something called an essay took fifteen minutes to talk with students about why she/he/they/we turn to essays and name what they afford us when we write and read them, we would find ourselves not explaining an assignment, but voicing the values of a liberal education.

Acknowledgments

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I like the play in the notion of acknowledgment(s), and draw on its agreeable flexibility here; the people I am naming not only deserve recognition for the various ways in which they made it possible for me to write and publish this book. They also offered truths about it (some of them I wanted to see, some not so much), showed me its potential, and created space—temporal, physical, intellectual—to see it through.

At the Expository Writing Program (EWP) at New York University (NYU) I first met extraordinary teachers and scholars who took the essay seriously as a genre and a focus for pedagogy. Even though many of us have found our professional homes elsewhere, I continue to benefit from their influence on my thinking about the essay at that formative time: Sally Allen, Wayne Berninger, Bruce Bromley, David Cregar, Gita DasBender, Michelle Dent, Kristin Dombek, Lauren Fitzgerald, Sandra Friedman, Anne Ellen Geller, Madeleine George, Robert Gunn, Stephanie Hopkins, Maria Jerskey, Ed Jones, P. G. Kain, Matthew Longabucco, Diane Masiello, Heather Masri, Randon Noble, James Polchin, Phyllis Nash Schlesinger, Paul Scolieri, Cristobal Silva, Benjamin Stewart, M. J. Thompson, Bill Tipper, Mary Wislowcki, and Marion Wrenn.

My mentors from the EWP—Pat C. Hoy II, Darlene Forrest, Denice Martone, Barbara Danish, and Alfred E. Guy Jr.—still guide me 20 years on; they each exemplified the hard-won and enduring satisfactions a life in an essay-writing program could offer; I draw daily on what they taught. Pat and Darlene served on my dissertation committee, chaired with compassion and care by Gordon Pradl, and they all helped me to shape a project in which my commitments to literary criticism, composition theory, and classroom practice could reinforce one another rather than compete. Darlene taught me to trust teachers, students, and texts, especially at moments of difficulty and impasse. Pat challenged me as a writer and teacher to be productively unsatisfied with work that was not charged with ideas—however else it might be engaging—on or off the page. His belief in the project has buoyed me often.

At NYU, Pam Cobrin and I planned and sometimes co-taught essay and gender studies courses as we developed our pedagogical values. I often say that it was the possibility of working near Pam, who directs Barnard College’s outstanding Writing and Speaking Program, that led me to my current professional home. Pam’s discerning responses to this book’s early drafts emboldened me to envision its future. Jonna Perrillo, Carley Moore, and I formed our dissertation group to dramatize the presence of readers for one another, and to get our work done when it was hardest. Their writing, research, teaching, and activism inspire me. It is a privilege for me to continue to share a writing life with them. Carley’s essays enact at the highest level of craft how a writer synthesizes narrative, analysis, cultural commentary, and vivid language. As I developed the book’s central argument, Jonna’s perspectives and questions about how English educators can bridge the gap between essay theory and pedagogy prompted key discoveries. Every writer should have the good fortune to have a reader as invested, rigorous, and pragmatic as Jonna. This project would not have become a proposal or a book without her.

Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking has been a central influence on my teaching and approach to professional development. It has been transformative to work among people who revel in writing and essaying as a practice to foster intellectual community: William Alba, Susan Behrens, Jeff Berger-White, Celia Bland, Maureen Burgess, Margaret Bledsoe, Ric Campbell, Indu Chugani Singh, Frank Cioffi, Paul Connolly, Alan Devenish, Anna Dolan, Stephanie Dunson, Tonya Foster, Jamie Hutchison, Erica Kaufman, Ileana Jiménez, Jim Keller, Susan Kirshner, Alice Lesnick, Mary Leonard, Nancy Leonard, Sharon Marshall, Tracy McCabe, Myra McLarey, Judith Miller, Irene Papoulis, Peg Peoples, Cindy Parrish, Ray Peterson, Kristin Prevellet, Joan Retallack, Neil Rigler, Eléna Rivera, Susan Fox Rogers, Catherine Scheive, Judi Smith, Rick Vartorella, Teresa Vilardi, William Webb, and Rob Whittemore.

It was wonderful to join the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia in 2003 at a moment when the Undergraduate Writing Program (UWP) was first finding its form and creating its curriculum. At that point, I could not have anticipated what we would make of this opportunity. Seven years later, I became the program’s director, and continuously find sources of excitement about UWP’s possibilities. Many current and former faculty, staff, and administrators at Columbia have played large and larger roles in helping us build an essay-based writing program and a professional culture for the next generation of visionary teachers and students of writing: Rachel Adams, Carlos Alonso, Peter Awn, Daniel Beeby, Elizabeth Blackmar, Susan Boynton, Michael Cennamo, Laura Ciolkowski, Nicholas Christopher, Sarah Cole, Julie Crawford, Andrew Delbanco, Margaret Edsall, Patricia Grieve, Marianne Hirsch, Margo Jefferson, Phillip Lopate, Ben Marcus, Sharon Marcus, Hazel May, Kathy McKeon, Anice Mills, Michelle Moody-Adams, Roosevelt Montas, Janet Moy, Robert O’Meally, Patty O’Toole, Bruce Robbins, Barbara Rockenbach, Pamela Rodman, Victoria Rosner, Andrea Solomon, Alan Stewart, Paul Strohm, James Valentini, William Wadsworth, Chris Wiggins, and Kathryn Yatrakis. At Barnard College, Lisa Gordis and Lisa Hollibough each played vital roles at different moments in this project. I especially wish to thank the chairs of English at Columbia—Nicholas Dames and Jean Howard—who granted me a sabbatical to complete the book.

The directors, administrators, teachers, and Writing Center consultants of the UWP are among the most thoughtful, committed, and talented that I have had the good fortune to work with in any context. Perhaps more than anything else, I am grateful to them for their willingness to reflect on teaching essays and to experiment with their pedagogy so it can be true to their own values and make meaningful work for their students and clients. Joseph Bizup, the UWP’s first director, envisioned how our essay program would complement the most venerable parts of the Core curriculum. He read early versions of this manuscript and encouraged my scholarship in every way. For their contributions to my own thinking about the essay and the UWP’s approach to teaching the genre I thank Suzanne Menghraj, Eric LeMay, Catherine Savini, Kate Daloz, Alvan Ikoku, Jennifer James, Reif Larsen, Maggie Pouncey, Tara Gellene, Christopher Edling, Emily Hainze, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Timothy Donahue, Adela Ramos, Frederick Bengtsson, Lytton Smith, Benjamin Miller, Bridget Potter, Rashmi Sahni, Yurina Ko, Saskia Cornes, Joe North, Valeria Tsygankova, Zachary Roberts, Selby Wynn Schwartz, Maxe Crandall, Rebecca Strauss, Abigail Rabinowitz, Jason Ueda, Alexander Landfair, Tana Wojczuk, Simon Porzak, Allen Durgin, and Rebecca Wisor. John Stobo has been a constant companion as the UWP evolves. His institutional memory and calm under pressure have seen us through major shifts in our staffing, physical plant, and curricular overhauls. Although she did not live to see this book published, I remember in gratitude my dear colleague, Lexi Rudnitsky.

The UWP’s first-year students expect their essay-writing courses to introduce them to the intellectual culture and practices of the university and beyond. I thank them not for flawless performances on the page, or their collegial support of their fellow writers, but for exercising their negative capability—that is, their ability to withstand and seek uncertainty—in order to write essays. Their promise and achievement as essayists gave this project wings.

Choose your colleagues well when you can, if you can. I am not a proud person mostly, but I am about this: I have chosen the best people I know to work alongside every day. Without Sue Mendelsohn, Aaron Ritzenberg, and Glenn Michael Gordon this book would not have seen the light of day. Early on in our collective work as writing program administrators we pledged to provide one another support as writers; I cannot imagine a group of more generous and demanding readers. Sue’s insightful questions prompted me to articulate the book’s exigence and to explore its warrants. Aaron’s keen sense of the hermeneutic circle helped to highlight how I could manage its theoretical and pedagogical dimensions. Glenn’s mighty editor’s eye and unwavering belief saw me through some of the most difficult moments of impasse and revision. He often was able and willing to see what had been hiding in plain sight to me. These are great friends and wonderful writers with whom to share a career.

It has been exciting to contribute to the emerging field of Essay Studies at this formative time. I had been an avid reader of Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays series for over 25 years before I finally got to meet him (thanks to Bridget Potter). It is gratifying to be in conversation about the essay with someone whose ideas I have valued so highly even as they continue to evolve. Ned Stuckey-French’s essays and his literary-historical work on the form should be required reading in every course that teaches the genre. Over the years, I have sought him out in person and on the page for advice and ideas about courses, essays, and publishing, and he has been generous with it all.

At every milestone on this project toward publication, I have recognized newly my luck in having Michael Spooner to work with as the director of the Utah State University Press. From our initial chat at a booth at the CCCCs through the readers’ reports, the revisions, and production, Michael always communicated his enthusiasm for the work, even when some substantive rethinking was in order. I thank my anonymous reviewers, who tested rigorously my project’s method and argument, and also expressed their belief in the value of a book like this for the field.

My friends outside of my working sphere, and my family, have sustained me. Any work I do is enhanced immeasurably by their presence in my life, if not now, then when it counted: Patti Dinsmore and Steve Handley, Cynthia and Theodore Arenson, Julie Arenson, Jason and Mathias Sypher, Gertrude and Samuel Berger, Elaine Cregg, Henry and David Berger, Annie Rech, Richie Shulberg, Sarah Shulberg, Margaret and Alejandro De Hoyos, Frances and Henry Gunn, Christopher Godfrey, Kiah Coble, Colleen, David, and Lauren Petty, Renée and Larry Wade, Helen Wallack, Janet McNaughton, Michael Wallack, Elizabeth Wallack, Nicholas Bruce, George and Nancy Stump, Joshua and Lauren Stump, and Blaise and Samala Wallack and family.

Madeline Rockower Wallack, my mother, taught me that each of us has a responsibility—ethical, emotional, and political—to show up. I am sorry that this attempt of mine comes too late for her to see it. I thank my father, Albert C. Wallack, and sister, Gabrielle Wallack for every gift of their attention, concern, love, and interest for a lifetime.

The people who have lived most intimately with, under, around, and despite this book since its first inklings are my son and daughter, Gabriel and Lucia Petty, and my stepson, Henry Petty. I do not know where one gets the genes for kindness, smarts, empathy, curiosity, and affection, but they got them in marvelous form. I thank them for their ideas and belief, for their good experiments in their own lives, for enriching mine ever more.

I suspect their father, Robert Petty, is the source, as he is for the remarkably enduring happiness of my life. Bob constructed—with his own hands—a room where I could write. He constructed—with his own choices—a daily life in which our family could thrive. No work of mine could exist without these beautiful expressions of his love and commitment. This book is dedicated to him.

CRAFTING PRESENCE

1

Introduction

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Experiments in the psychology and neuroscience of learning show that learning that sticks—the kind that leads to the changes we expect of college, what we call higher learning—requires rich engagement with new material, not just memorization, and that the outcome of this engagement is a concrete and tangible change in the mind—a change in how one thinks and makes sense of the world.

—Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersch (We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education)

As someone who has felt a lot of trouble being clear, concise, and/or cogent, I tend to be allergic to academic writing, most of which seems to me willfully opaque and pretentious. There are, again, some notable exceptions, and by academic writing I mean a particular cloistered dialect and mode; I do not just mean any piece written by somebody who teaches college.

—David Foster Wallace (Introduction: Deciderization 2007—A Special Report, The Best American Essays 2007)

What must American students learn to succeed as writers in college and beyond? What role can essay-writing in particular play for twenty-first century students in their intellectual development? Today, American high school and college teachers are expected to prepare students to write across a broader range of disciplines and in more discursive environments than ever before. Current national initiatives for curricular reform define literacy entirely in terms of skills acquisition, while in the process, essay-writing as its own comprehensive learning goal has been marginalized. To focus first on skills in writing asks students to compose for purposes that masquerade as genres—for example, a summary, description, analysis, or narrative. However, these skills do not carry intrinsic motives for writing. Put another way, when students write primarily in order to exercise skills they may not understand why those skills are valuable. Writers do not compose descriptions for their own sake; we do write essays. To devalue the essay also reveals troubling assumptions about the capacities of student writers and the future we imagine for them. A skills approach imagines students as protean workers who need to be readied to fulfill others’ goals for their thinking and writing: intellectual stem-cells for the world beyond school. Teaching students to write essays acknowledges them as people who can—indeed must—construct and contribute original ideas to the world in many registers and guises while they are still in school.

There are several pedagogical values and beliefs that are foundational to this book and the composition programs in which these ideas have driven curriculum design and professional development. I offer them to reveal immediately my own orientation toward the essay but also to encourage my colleagues to do so both with one another and with their—your, our—students. To teach the essay acknowledges writing as a technology for original thought and deep engagement with texts, with the self, and with the world. The essay as a genre relies on those intellectual, ethical, and creative capacities we most need students to cultivate in order to thrive inside and outside of school. Essay writing over time and across disciplines teaches students to:

• modulate self-expression and social commentary

• situate themselves historically, intellectually, and culturally

• engage rigorously and ethically with ideas, data, and texts by others

• reflect on and revise their ideas, values, and sense of self

• develop discursive, aesthetic, and rhetorical awareness

• document shifts in their thinking, commitments, and modes of expression

In the chapters that follow, I pursue two inter-related arguments: one pedagogical, one theoretical. Pedagogically, I argue that the past 30 years of debate about the essay among scholars and practitioners of the form has left educators in composition and English literature uncertain about the value of essays for academic work, and creative writing faculty largely to focus on teaching craft. By extension, composition teachers who foreground the essay in our courses must demonstrate that writing essays will prepare students for every future writing task or context they are likely to encounter in or out of school. The essay fails this test, as naturally it might. While learning the discourse conventions of one discipline or genre can help students to learn how to learn others, writing essays cannot alone prepare students to write lab reports, dissertation chapters, memoranda, or policy statements. Calls for a profound rethinking of the content and approach of writing curricula by David Smit, Elizabeth Wardle, and Douglas Downs focus on how to address failures in knowledge and skills transfer from first-year writing courses—often presented as essay writing courses—to future occasions. However, as writing studies scholars, including Douglas Hesse, Kurt Spellmeyer, Paul Heilker, Wendy Bishop, Pat