September 12, 2019
Adventures in Composition and The Essay
This is the first in a series, Adventures in Composition and the Essay. Since I’m teaching the most composition courses I’ve ever taught in a single semester (three), I have […]
July 23, 2019
Flannery O’Connor and Kierkegaard
What could make a woman resign herself to her own death and that of her family? The answer to this question emerges through reading southern writer Flannery O’Connor and the […]
August 11, 2017
An Ode to the Essay
In his foundational 1910 work “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Georg Lukács imagines the act of essay making as “an event of the soul,” “a conceptual reordering […]
May 11, 2017
The Body as Essay (Part 1)
In Ancient Greece they spoke of a wandering womb as the root of hysteria. The uterus is like women; it’s capable of so much but still has to defend itself against […]
July 31, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (Part Two of Six)
[Continued from Part One] Earlier, I almost took off on a tangent, using a fairy-tale metaphor to describe Jamison’s initial reaction to West Virginia. I loosed my mind on some […]
July 31, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (Part One of Six)
In “Fog Count,” an essay in The Empathy Exams that spun out of her trip to visit a friend incarcerated in West Virginia, Leslie Jamison describes how she falls, weak-kneed, […]