Search Results for: essay

Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

I teach in Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. Twice a year — once in January, once in June — the faculty and students gather in Oregon for 10 days of lectures, workshops, and readings. My wife is not wrong when she jokes that this is like camp for grown-ups.
Still, I like to think that serious work gets done when we get together. While some of the best talks at the residencies deal with the nuts-and-bolts of writing, the talks I prepare tend to address topics related to the writer’s mindset, or the fine-ish line between factual writing and fiction, or the writer’s role in civic life. I developed one such talk, “The Courage to Sound Like Ourselves,” into semester-long courses at universities where I otherwise teach.

On June 16, 2017, in Forest Grove, Oregon, I delivered a talk called “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story.” The title comes from Nabokov. The subject is the place of empathy in the moment of writing. Rather than develop a semester-long class for a university based on the talk, we’ve decided to present a version of it here at Longreads as a mini-course on empathy with a reading list, discussion questions, useful links, a few critical responses, and an invitation for readers to respond.

One of the early lines of thinking in what follows stresses that education is a constant reminder of all that one does not know and that at its best, learning with others requires a good-faith effort to puzzle over ideas together. You’ll see that, like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy in recent years, especially where my writing and my teaching are concerned. “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” is my best recent attempt to say what I think.

The course takes up a recent useful book where my thinking is concerned, Against Empathy by psychologist Paul Bloom, who offers his own response alongside memoirist Daniel Raeburn and Pacific MFA student William Gatewood. Like Bloom, I know that empathy is often taken “to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good.” And like Bloom, I can see empathy this way, and I’m not opposed to kindness, love, or goodness. Seeing empathy only this way, however, I’ve come to believe a problem morally and also limiting to our potential as artists. This course is mainly focused on the dubious place of empathy in art.

The Encyclopedia of the Missing

(James Hosking)

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion. Read more…

A Life Worth Ending

Longreads Pick

In this reported personal essay, Michael Wolff writes about watching his mother “dwindle” painfully between life and death — not well enough to live on her own in her final years, without tremendous intervention from her family and doctors, but not sick enough to just quickly die. He makes a convincing case against the medical establishment’s practice of keeping the dying alive long past such time as they are able to thrive on their own, leading to excruciating slow deaths that deplete families and tax payers.

Published: May 20, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,874 words)

My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion

Longreads Pick

A reported, scientific essay in which physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee considers the body’s proclivity for homeostasis, which kept his elderly father’s failing body alive for longer than seemed to make sense, after he had begun failing, and falling.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 8, 2018
Length: 23 minutes (5,819 words)

Only a Fool Buys Kombucha on a Tuesday

Weekend crowds at Coney Island, New York (Howard Brier/Flickr)

The current crop of stories at Real Life Mag are centered on the theme of circadian rhythms, including a piece from poet Linda Besner on “off-peakers” — people who try to save time and money by avoiding the 9-to-5, weekdays-for-work-weekends-for-play schedule that traps so many of us in lines and traffic jams. Her exploration of what it means to be an off-peaker turns into an interesting (and political!) musing how societies decide to organize themselves.

The comment sections of off-peakers’ blogs are, paradoxically, bustling: stories of going to bed at nine and waking up at four to ensure that the day is perfectly out of step; Legoland on Wednesdays in October; eating in restaurants as soon as they open rather than waiting for standard meal times. There’s a wealth of bargains to be had by juggling one’s calendar to take advantage of deals. (The app Ibotta, which tracks fluctuating prices on consumer goods popular with millennials, determined that Tuesdays are actually the worst days to buy rosé and kombucha; you should buy them on Wednesdays. Avocados are also cheapest on Wednesdays, while quinoa should be bought on Thursdays and hot sauce on Fridays.) Many posters write that they are considering changing professions or homeschooling their children to join the off-peakers.

Some off-peakers are motivated by savings, some by avoiding crowds, but off-peaking also offers a more abstract pleasure: the sheer delight in doing the unexpected. The gravitas attached to the seasons of life listed off in Ecclesiastes is echoed in the moral overtones attached to perceptions of what is appropriate for different hours of the day. It is wrong to laugh when everyone else is weeping or to embrace when everyone else is refraining from embracing. Ordinary activities become subversive when done at the wrong time: eating spaghetti for dinner is ordinary, but having linguini with clam sauce for breakfast breaks the unwritten rules. Once you start transgressing, it can be hard to stop: The arbitrariness of custom begins to chafe.

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How Are There Still Beauty Pageants When Feminists Have Been Protesting Them for 50 Years?

A protest against the Miss America Pageant on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, 1969. (Santi Visalli Inc./Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Progress can sometimes be infuriatingly slow. Take the continued existence of beauty pageants. For most of my adult life, I’ve tried to forget they exist. It’s not quite as easy to do that now that the President of the United States is someone who once owned three pageants, and we’re often reminded that he allegedly sexually harassed contestants. Still, I find the perpetuation of this anachronistic tradition hard to believe, especially when you consider that feminists have been protesting them for 50 years.

In the January issue of Smithsonian, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay writes about one of the earlier protests, when radical feminists from New York descended on Atlantic City in 1968, to protest the Miss American Pageant. The article appears in the wake of a recent sexist email scandal that has led to new management of that pageant — the #MeToo moment having its effect on Miss America, but not enough of one to shut down the whole enterprise.

Gay reports on the sexist and racist history of the pageant — for which only white women were initially eligible as contestants — and of the 1968 protest.

The 1968 uprising was conceived by a radical feminist named Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase, “The personal is political.” Disrupting the beauty contest, she thought, in the summer of that year, “just might be the way to bring the fledgling Women’s Liberation Movement into the public arena.”

She also puts the protest into greater context, shedding light on its lasting impact.

While the 1968 protests may not have done much to change the nature of the Miss America pageant, they did introduce feminism into the mainstream consciousness and expand the national conversation about the rights and liberation of women. The first wave of feminism, which focused on suffrage, began in the late 19th century. Many historians now credit the ’68 protest as the beginning of feminism’s broader second wave.

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Dance Me to the End of Love

Longreads Pick

In this personal essay, Abigail Rasminsky looks back on the youthful days she trained to become a professional dancer — and the injury that put an end to her dreams.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 8, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,983 words)

Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement

Longreads Pick

In the wake of a sexist email scandal that has led to new management of the Miss America Pageant, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay reports on 1968 protests by radical feminists against all that the pageant stands for.

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 1, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,646 words)

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Longreads Pick

In a personal essay about the naivete of young love, Lisa Romeo recalls her first college romance, when she was willing to overlook a lot — until she wasn’t.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 4, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,767 words)

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Mint Images - Paul Edmondson / Getty

Lisa Romeo | Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,767 words)

My boyfriend said it with such confidence, such nonchalance. “Don’t worry. You’re safe in here, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left, and I heard his key in the padlock on the other side — the one he’d installed to keep out his drunk or stoned apartment-mates who kept “borrowing” his cigars, raiding his mini-fridge, and hitting on me.

I was a freshman at an expensive upstate New York college, majoring in journalism, and I’d fallen hard for this guy the first week of September. Though I was young for college — I wouldn’t turn 18 until later that fall — people had always said about me, “She’s so mature, so level-headed,” compliments I shirked away from, instead longing to be a little less sensible, a little more wild. In high school, I had mostly dated self-assured, brainy guys, predictable guys, often Italian and Catholic guys, guys who, if they were girls, would have been me.

I was done with all that, I thought. I wanted something different, someone different.

This guy was short, wiry, pale, certainly older — returning to college at 24 — and also German, Protestant, and had definitely not finished at the top of his high school class. Different, but not a bad guy, not a mean guy, not a guy I couldn’t bring home.

And he wasn’t a guy. He was a man.

A man with a past. A story.

Read more…