Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

06/07/2024

It's Submission Saturday and we're reading for our fall issue and beyond!

https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

08/05/2024

This summer we're going to be posting work for the purpose of using our summer to recharge ourselves. We hope you enjoy the pieces we choose for you each week.

Here's our first: Jen Palmares Meadows, on Hemingway, Stein, and travel writing.

"When you hear of the Paris attacks, you read what you can from your computer, of the urgency to apprehend shooters, to save hostages, to care for victims. You have never known war, but know that in instances of despair, stories of hope and heroism will begin to emerge. You search for them amongst the carnage, and they come, without fail. A man pulling wounded from Bataclan Concert Hall. Taxicabs shepherding people home without fare. Parisians offering shelter to strangers, with the hashtag , meaning ‘open door.’

You don’t know anyone in Paris, nor have you ever been. In your mind, Paris is breathtakingly beautiful, but what you know of it is croissants and berets, and the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. Still, because you are a narcissist, you imagine yourself in Paris, imagine the absolute fear. As a writer, as a human, this is often the first step one takes towards empathy, towards understanding…

Her tweet would have read:

27 rue de fleurus. My salon is open. "

Want to submit your own work to Assay's blog? We'd love to see it!

https://assayjournal.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/a-moveable-feast-porteouverte-by-jen-palmares-meadows/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR10gRtzZ0IdIkXZyuNCcEdnSAS7qyC38LUsVN9Qw9PZdu_ZO5t7YFKcJ_E_aem_ARJVLyjUsa9MtRx5LRiEU77KCe5nL_NTQAb3G7QLWeBueYi80v5yGPXHL33wo7u6xG18sO96y4-lDQxc6K1qJ8UG

When you hear of the Paris attacks, you read what you can from your computer, of the urgency to apprehend shooters, to save hostages, to care for victims. You have never known war, but know that in…

17/04/2024

We're so thrilled to bring you Candace Walsh's "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" from our new spring issue. Essential reading for anyone writing or teaching braided essays!

"The braid’s combination of writing modes provides not just the benefit of each mode, but the alchemical impact of its combinations. The 2022 article “Healing from Heterosexism: A Discovery-Oriented Task Analysis of Emotion-Focused Writing” in the Journal of Gay and Le***an Health found that expressive writing increases q***r folks’ resilience as they experience ongoing heterosexist oppression. It explains that “sexual minority stressors are linked to the relatively high rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance use disorders documented in LGBTQ + individuals” (Collins et al. 2). Resilience supports mental health, equanimity, and determination. One writing exercise I zeroed in on in that article used, like the braided essay assignment, multiple modes to positive effect: “participants…were asked to express their feelings for five minutes, then to consider what needs these feelings indicate for five minutes, then to think about ways to meet those needs for five minutes. All three conditions resulted in positive effects, including large effects on self-reported change and on event-related stress and medium effects on depression.” First the participants engaged in expressive writing, then reflection and synthesis, then strategy and self-advisement. Results were “characterized by descriptions of confronting negative and painful feelings, delving deeper into emotions, and working through feelings to formulate action plans” (Collins et al. 4). This last process indicates resilience, self-advocacy, and an increased facility for a skill necessary to effect social change. I could see how my happy accident of assigning a larger and more complex project with similar foci over many weeks could result in similar yet more expansive benefits.
​
Writing braided essays is almost always a power-claiming act, and it should be available to anyone, not just creative writing students—and not just college students, of course. I taught a version of the class to the general public via Literary Cleveland in 2023, and saw that the outcomes for students who committed themselves to the process tracked. One student went on to publish her pro-choice essay about having an abortion a few months later. Within academia, instructors of required rhetoric and composition classes have opportunities to connect this process with students who don’t identify as writers. As Felicia Rose Chavez states in The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, a commitment to diversity must include making writing spaces inclusive for people who don't identify as writers and/or have been disenfranchised from the act of writing. Such inclusivity offers further opportunities for students to discover an identification with the writing role while expanding the number of people who benefit from its ameliorative effects. Michelle Hall Keils describes composition studies as “a gateway to enfranchisement” (90): “The invitation to write represents an opportunity to realize the rhetorical possibilities of turning transgressive power into transformative potential” (105)."

https://www.assayjournal.com/candace-walsh-the-braided-essay-as-change-agent-assay-102.html

16/04/2024

Today in our celebration of our new spring issue, we're highlighting Thomas Larson's "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child"--

"By paraphrase, we attempt to say the “same thing” in other words. Helpful, you say, but also a bit indefinable. According to The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language edited by Tom McArthur (1996), under the entry for “paraphrase,” its definitions are not simple. Each of the paradigmatic terms—explanation, clarification, translation—come pre-loaded. Like leading-role understudies, they may fit or stand-in for the character in a play, but the main actor’s performance will, obviously, be superseded.

If the thing uttered or written in the first instance is unclear, a paraphrase may extend the muddied point and compound the unclarity, that is, put something too different in the original’s place, a form of Chinese whispers. Still, it’s a good-faith effort—to give the source another chance, words clarifying words. (With writing, as I’m doing now, I’m crafting the sentences inwardly and, on my typing fingertips, trying to say what I trust or hope the sentences want to say, a kind of paraphrase that assumes somewhere in my mind’s recesses resides the more efficacious expression I truly desire, which can be, wholly or slightly, better said, clearer, perhaps less paraphrasable.) Language’s commiseration over its own failings emphasizes an honest but fraught path—to avoid a wobbly or wild or an over-stipulative meaning. Which is why paraphrases can only be partially true."

https://www.assayjournal.com/thomas-larson-paraphrase-or-writer-with-child-assay-102.html

15/04/2024

We hope you're enjoying the delights of our new spring issue! Today we bring you Micah McCrary's essential "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom"--we hope you enjoy it!

"We need greater openness towards a more foundational, fundamental overhaul of how (especially new) student-authors become exposed to the world of professional creative writing. While I don’t currently teach at a university where introductory creative writing courses are cross-genre, I think one way to go about this might be in examining these issues specifically within the multigenre CW course as an access point towards discussing identity, access, privilege, and representation in CW. Alternately, curricula may be designed to be split by genre (my current course design is titled Critical Concepts in Creative Writing: Nonfiction) so that the course may be treated as an introductory survey in critical readings on creative writing (which, for nonfiction, are taken from journals including Assay, TEXT, New Writing, and The Essay Review) and their literary counterparts, examining the present issues through lenses specific to the genres that are part of an instructor’s specialization. In teaching these texts, and in having these conversations with my own student-authors, I’ve been able to watch them develop a healthy conception of how creative writing may work both culturally and professionally—examining not just how it works inside and outside the college/university, but in communities directly informing (or impacted by) student-authors’ writing projects.

These are the discussions I want to have with student-authors. I want to talk about authors’ choices not just being influenced by their style/voice but by their overall positionalities—and I also want to discuss how these choices can be refereed not just by what authors are willing to express but what, in some circumstances, they are or aren’t permitted to express.

In all, this call-to-action looks a bit like CW more often and deliberately incorporating other fields like cultural studies or critical race studies into its curricula, the way these fields have already been incorporated into English/literary studies. Especially for those of us in literary nonfiction, who constantly engage with texts about others’ lives in addition to writing about our own, I call for a kind of mélange at all levels of CW throughout the Academy to work toward more transdisciplinarity so that perhaps the CW course I can become most comfortable teaching in the future may feel, in some ways, like an introduction to the field rather than merely its techniques. Where, instead of scene or POV we discuss with student-authors issues of privilege while acknowledging the diversity of bodies behind creative writing, making other aspects nuanced layers above new foundations."

https://www.assayjournal.com/micah-mccrary-normalizing-creative-writing-scholarship-in-the-classroom-assay-102.html

14/04/2024

It's Syllabi Sunday! Have you seen our syllabi bank lately? We're looking to add new classes to our resources, so as you're working to wrap up your semesters and quarters, please consider adding your syllabi to our community resources!

Please be courteous with the ideas you find here and give credit where it is due.

13/04/2024

It's Submission Saturday! Polish up those craft and pedagogy papers and send them our way! We read year round, but for best consideration for our fall issue, submit by June 1!

https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

12/04/2024

Don't miss Lindsey Pharr's "Brave Person Drag": Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" from our new Spring 2024 issue!

"In her New Yorker essay “The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books” Leslie Jamison describes her own childhood experience reading the books as “wearing brave-person drag” (13). While drag usually experiments with gender, the works explored in this essay do not. Rather, these works reflect the universality inherent to RuPaul’s signature phrase: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” Every day, we define ourselves through the choices we make, in the ways we show up, as whatever version of ourselves the moment calls for. In these memoirs, CYOA format allows for the exploration--one might even say performance--of alternate versions of persona free of the constraints of the first-person point of view and linear time.

The recent appearance of memoir in the Choose Your Own Adventure books’ format, (referred to interchangeably as CYOA or gamebook format) has the potential to take a gimmick and elevate it to great emotional relevance in the same way that drag performance uses stylized persona to inhabit an internal truth. In the hands of Paul Crenshaw, Carmen Maria Machado, Dana Schwartz, and Elissa Washuta, the format’s unique combination of nonlinear narrative structure, present tense, and the second-person point of view packs quite the punch. This combination enables these talented memoirists to address subjects that transcend their individual experiences, including a fluid sense of identity, the cyclical patterns of abuse and addiction, and the expanded sense of consciousness within which these narratives take place."

11/04/2024

We're so thrilled to have new work by Amy Bonnaffons in our spring issue! Don't miss her "Writing from the Big Brain: An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education"--essential reading for anyone writing and teaching nonfiction.

"I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between word and image, as I fitfully attempt to move through the project that has defined the last several years of my life: a sprawling creative-nonfiction book based on an unpublished memoir by my great-grandmother. The book concerns my own female ancestors and the ideas I internalized from them about bodies and discipline and power and creativity and what it meant to be a Good (White) (Christian) Girl. I’ve explored all of this while experiencing infertility, pregnancy and the birth and infancy of my first child—deeply immersed in the messy, uncomfortable realm of the body, aware more than ever of the need to translate the body’s shadows and messy, fleshy truths into words. (But how?)

For reasons I didn’t fully understand, I found myself drawn for inspiration not only to creative nonfiction exploring similar themes (Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maggie Nelson) but also, specifically, to hybrid visual-verbal memoirs (Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Nora Krug’s Belonging, Anne Carson’s Nox, Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love). In 2015, I took a comics class and started exploring my ancestors’ stories in this format—and was surprised to find that formal problems that had previously stymied me seemed easily resolved once I had the tools of literal image at my disposal. Visual metaphor became structurally load-bearing; more importantly, there was something about moving my hand across the page, in marking lines, that allowed the material itself to move—to unstick itself and begin to transcend the cramped conditions of its origin."

https://www.assayjournal.com/amy-bonnaffons-writing-from-the-big-brain-8203an-argument-for-image-and-process-in-creative-writing-education-assay-102.html

10/04/2024

We're so pleased to have Marcia Aldrich's "On Difficulty" in our new spring issue--don't miss it!

"In eleventh grade I discovered that difficulty can give pleasure and that the simple can be a cheat. All at once, my world flamed up.

Until that school year, Mrs. Troup, kindly, blue-eyed, and middle-aged, guided my English education at the Moravian Seminary for Girls. She favored Ogden Nash for creativity, and for backbone had us diagram sentences to reveal the skeleton of grammar. In her classes on the second floor of Main, with its sharply slanted ceilings, we damned the unsolvable and grappled only with the plotted. Mrs. Troup’s approach discontented me, though I couldn’t name my dissatisfaction or my yearning. I felt that the body flesh of writing had escaped me.

Then Mark Hinderlie, a recent graduate of Yale, came to teach. He lit firecrackers in the classroom. For the first three weeks of class we had to write a new short story every school night. What? we yelped. Write? We’re not writers. We had written nothing but five-paragraph essays. Nonetheless, preposterous as the task was, my classmates and I each wrote fifteen stories in three weeks."

https://www.assayjournal.com/marcia-aldrich-on-difficulty-assay-102.html

09/04/2024

We hope you're enjoying our brand new spring issue! Don't miss Lynn Bloom's "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal"--

"​In grief, we look for stories to help us survive, and as models that will enable us to tell and interpret our own stories. Deraniyagala’s story is extreme—in the erasure of three generations of family at once; in her understandable wish to kill herself, at 40; in the seven years it took her to find calmness, “to rest with my disbelief about what happened, and with the impossible truth of my loss” (203). She concludes this brief, bone-thin book, “I am not whirling anymore, I am no longer cradled by shock. . . .But I have learned that I can only recover myself when I keep [my family] near” by imagining their presence in “Our life, as it would be today” (226-7). That hardly anyone except bombing or earthquake victims can match Deraniyagala’s story in extent in no way diminishes others’ grief for their own losses, of parents, spouses, children. Loss is a tsunami, whatever the scale."

https://www.assayjournal.com/lynn-z-bloom-vanishing-points-memoirs-of-loss-and-renewal-assay-102.html

03/04/2024

Pedagogical discussions of nonfiction are so important to how our genre moves forward--we're so pleased to have these three really important additions to the conversation in our spring issue.

https://www.assayjournal.com/102-pedagogy.html

02/04/2024

Don't miss these amazing informal discussions of nonfiction--and two brand new additions to the Assay Interview Project!

https://www.assayjournal.com/102-conversations.html

02/04/2024

Check out this amazing duo of articles from our brand new spring issue!

https://www.assayjournal.com/102-articles.html

01/04/2024

No foolin' over here! We've got the brand new spring issue of Assay for you, the last half of our incredible 10th anniversary year! (Can you believe it's been a whole decade? We can't...) We have an incredible lineup of writers, subjects, texts, and pedagogy--we're so excited to share it with you!

https://www.assayjournal.com/

21/02/2024

From our panel reports, check out this write up of "The Braided Essay as Change Agent"!

Panel Participants: Candace Walsh, Nicole Walker, Anna Chotlos, Sarah Minor Description: How is the braided essay form innately subversive, in realms of interiority, the classroom, society? It can …

20/02/2024

More panel reports from ! Don't miss "Fragmented Inheritances: Lyric Essay and Intergenerational Trauma"!

Panel Participants: Joanna Penn Cooper, Kiki Petrosino, James Allen Hall, Rajiv Mohabir Description: Lauded essayists discuss experiments with form, including fragmentary approaches to narrative, a…

17/02/2024

Our panel reports are starting to come in! Thanks to Heidi Czerwiec for this report!

If you wrote up a report on a nonfiction-oriented panel, please send it to our email (assayjournal at gmail) and we'll put it right up! Thank you!

Panel Participants: Jen Soriano, Julie Marie Wade, Constance Collier-Mercado, Barrie Jean Borich, Marco Wilkinson Description: Conventional approaches to nonfiction emphasize single stories, linear…

15/02/2024

We're so pleased to have another addition to our Backlist series on our blog, this time a treatment of Joan Didion from Lauren Melton--don't miss it!

"It is not that Didion fell out of love with New York. She outgrew it."

What does a twenty-one year old woman growing up in Moorhead, Minnesota, a town best known for an often-flooding north flowing river, have in common with a twenty-year-old woman who lived a movie-l…

06/02/2024

We're still looking for bloggers to cover the nonfiction panels at AWP this week--let us know which you'd like to write up and we'll cross it off! Here are the Thursday panels--

Let us know in the comments which panel you’d like to cover and we’ll be in touch! Thursday, February 8, 2024 T127. The Language of Leaving: Puerto Rican Writers on/from the Diaspora(Cl…

06/02/2024

New on the blog! Check out Krista Lee Hanson's insightful discussion of Anne Boyer's The Undying.

"Women with breast cancer often feel expected, even pressured, to perform a shiny, forced hopefulness; Boyer rejects that expectation by writing directly into the discomfort, the pain, the loss, the rage and the indignities of cancer and cancer “care.” The book’s subtitle, written as a vertical word column on the book’s cover, announces her intention: “pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer and care.”

 Last summer as I sat waiting for my first mammogram after feeling a lump, I looked around the sparse room and felt myself recoil from the pink ribbon decor. Even before I was diagnosed with b…

31/01/2024

Call for Saturday bloggers at AWP! Here are the Saturday panels we'd love to have covered!

Let us know which you're interested in and we'll cross it off!

Let us know in the comments which panel you’d like to cover and we’ll be in touch! Saturday, February 10, 2024 S122. Rebel Voices Only(Deborah Taffa, G’Ra Asim, Lamya H,…

30/01/2024

Here are the Friday AWP panels we'd love to have covered as part of our work to bring the voices and ideas of AWP to the larger community--

In the comments, let us know which panel you'd like to cover and we'll mark it off!

Let us know in the comments which panel you’d like to cover and we’ll be in touch! Friday, February 9, 2024 F112. Q***r Architectures: New Models for Memoir (Alden Jones, Zoë Spran…

29/01/2024

Call for AWP Bloggers! Going to the 2024 AWP in Kansas City? We’re looking for guest bloggers to write up reports on the panels, because, as always, we expect our cloning abilities to malfunction. Here are the Thursday panels we'd love to have covered!

Let us know in the comments which panel you’d like to cover and we’ll be in touch! Thursday, February 8, 2024 T127. The Language of Leaving: Puerto Rican Writers on/from the Diaspora(Cl…

25/01/2024

Going to the 2024 AWP conference in Kansas City?

We’re looking for guest bloggers to write up reports on the panels, because, as always, we expect our cloning abilities to malfunction.

We’ll post the schedule of panels over the next few days and if you’d like to claim a panel to write about, let us know in the comments (and we’ll cross it off our list here).

What to Write: We’re looking for a summary of the panel/panelists, poignant quotes, and personal reactions–aim for 500-700 words. The goal is to give those who aren’t there a good idea of what went on. These reports are also a way that we include writers, teachers, and readers who may not be able to attend the conference. It’s a wonderful act of literary citizenship, and in advance, we’re grateful for your time.

Going to the 2024 AWP conference in Kansas City? We’re looking for guest bloggers to write up reports on the panels, because, as always, we expect our cloning abilities to malfunction. We& #821…

15/01/2024

Are you getting snowed in too? Why not polish up your work and send it to Assay today? We're looking for craft papers, scholarly articles, informal analysis, and pedagogy for our spring issue and beyond. If you've got questions about whether your work is right for us, drop us a line!

Stay safe out there, friends.

https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

07/01/2024

It's Syllabi Sunday! Need craft readings for your CNF classes? Check out the Assay Curriculum!

Assay has compiled a list of resources from our journal and In the Classroom blog (2014-present) to assist teachers and writers at all levels of writing and teaching nonfiction. We intend...

06/01/2024

We're looking for nonfiction pedagogy--formal, informal, or choose your own adventure--for our spring issue and beyond. If you've got questions, drop us a line!

https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

06/01/2024

https://assay.submittable.com/submit

06/01/2024

Well, what do you know--it's Submission Saturday again! We're hard at work putting together our spring issue, so is your work in our queue? Don't procrastinate--send it today!

https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html