Questions Answered: The How To Write An Essay Collection Q&A

The questions sent to me by chat or email after my two part class on essay collections.

I am finishing a novel while doing a great deal of lecturing and then of course there is too much happening in the world such that once again writing feels hard or even ridiculous. But I do love questions, answering questions especially about writing. And so here we are. Before we get started please consider donating to the Sameer Project’s Medical Campaign in Gaza. Even a few dollars can save a life.

I took the above photo in Wisconsin in July.

Below are some questions from the chat for my essay collection class that I went back to answer, or they are questions emailed to me that I replied to and obtained permission to reproduce here with answers. You can still purchase the class and make use of the recordings, each available to students for a month after the class along with my class on description and setting this August. Write to kate@theshipmanagency.com and she can provide you with the recordings and materials if you are interested.

Here are questions from the How to Write an Essay Collection class, 5000+ words on the matter.

Q: How do you choose titles?

AC: The title is when the story and the reader meet for the first time. I think it needs to act in a way that is both magnetic and structural, giving the reader a sense of what will happen, perhaps, without also pointing to the central metaphor, if there is one. On those last terms, my first novel’s title is not quite a mistake but it defies that advice. I won’t call it a rule.

I think of it like a beautiful door. It is often one for me first, a focusing tool. These kinds of titles may not work as a result when the essay is done but sometimes they do. Again, something to keep in mind. The epigraph you’ve possibly chosen may not work for the reader also—it may be something you needed to write this but it may not help anyone to read it.

Here are some examples:

“After Peter,” an essay I love, is a title I borrowed a little from Joan Didion’s “After Henry,” a collection she published after the death of her longtime editor, the Henry in the title. There’s a long tradition in essays of titles that use On, Before, After—have fun with it. Didion used these traditions for her titles with gusto.

“Girl” I took from the term gay men, queens and queer people have used for each other for who knows how long, and that is partly what it is about, though it is more specifically about my relationship to gender and drag, my mother too.

“Mr & Mrs. B” is a title I took from the nickname the household staff had for William F. and Pat Buckley when I wrote about my experiences as their cater waiter in the mid-1990s.

“The Curse” is the title of my favorite Mexican telenovela from the summer I lived there in the early 80s, translated into English. The housekeeper for my host family would make me a snack and then we watched “El Maleficio” in the kitchen together, and I credit it with teaching me Spanish.

Some people take titles from Bible quotes or poems. I often look for a phrase in the essay that strikes me as right. I find I am always looking for a feeling I want to summon as a part of knowing if the title is correct.

Q: This is the second time I read Speak, Memory and I was then and now so overwhelmed by Nabokov’s visual recall and acuity — the way snowflakes looked seen out of the window, for example. I’m curious about the way you talked about using photographs. Will you speak a bit more about that please at some point, too?

AC: The photos of our childhood for example have a lot of information in them ranging from context—who took the photo, what was the occasion—to clothing styles, relationships, relationship to the person taking the photo. They have place cues and clues about style. In a favorite photo from my childhood, taken on a vacation to Puerto Rico, I’m standing with my hip cocked like a saucy nancy boy, which I was. And my dad still snapped the photo, not bothering to correct me into some more masculine pose. My brother is sticking his tongue out, my mother is holding a hand to one temple like she has a headache coming on, sunglasses hiding her expression in her eyes. There isn’t just simple visual information in this photo, in other words.

In another, my brother and I are reading a comicbook together about Multiple Man, a mutant who makes duplicates of himself. My brother is dressed identically to me, as my mother liked to do to us. We are in our living room with the brown wood siding I remember, a rug with palomino horses running as if at the viewer hung above us. Bookshelves my father made are behind us. The blue corduroy couch I remember so well is much as I remembered, if newer.

You can look into these photos and consider what is nearby. Or what might have happened before and after. I think of something Guy Davenport wrote in his essay on the still life painting: that a still life implies the life lived around the objects within the painting. Grape scissors next to grapes on a plate tells us of someone passing under an arbor and harvesting grapes for the table. The pheasant’s body, bloody, tells us someone hunted the bird nearby and is away before the finish dressing it. Me reading a comic book with my brother reminds me I was at allergy shots that day most likely and was allowed to buy a comic book with my allowance.

But I would add that for us with our phones now, our photo albums in our phone are often what I will call the diary we didn’t mean to keep. I have a diary entry from the first months of the pandemic for example that is just the date. But my screenshots and photos are the record I ended up keeping. My pandemic mullet for example, created when I cut my hair and couldn’t quite cut the back of my head, and my husband had to fix it, that lives there. Also the container rose we had in the basement, which I woke up in the winter of 2021 so that it became an indoor rose in February, that is also memorialized there. I’ll be writing about that rose soon.

For Nabakov, let’s take a look at how he makes use of those snowflakes in this paragraph. I have annotated it with embedded comments I hope you can see.

My mother’s boudoir had a convenient oriel for looking out on the Morskaya in the direction of the Maria Square. With lips pressed against the thin fabric that veiled the windowpane I would gradually taste the cold of the glass through the gauze. From that oriel, some“years later, at the outbreak of the Revolution, I watched various engagements and saw my first dead man: he was being carried away on a stretcher, and from one dangling leg an ill-shod comrade kept trying to pull off the boot despite pushes and punches from the stretchermen—all this at a goodish trot. But in the days of Mr. Burness’ lessons there was nothing to watch save the dark, muffled street and its receding line of loftily suspended lamps, around which the snowflakes passed and repassed with a graceful, almost deliberately slackened motion, as if to show how the trick was done and how simple it was. From another angle, one might see a more generous stream of snow in a brighter, violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight, and then the jutting enclosure where I stood would seem to drift slowly up and up, like a balloon. At last one of the phantom sleighs gliding along the street would come to a stop, and with gawky haste Mr. Burness in his fox-furred shapka3 would make for our door.

—Chapter 4, Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

This passage describes a complex layer of memories, of which the snow is a fleeting part, a juxtaposition to the violence of his memory of the Revolution. I think of this as the writer describing how the snow in the wind can feel uncanny, more of a haunting than a snowstorm, and the snow moving in the wind suggests a purpose, an intelligence revealing itself to me almost like someone spelling a name in the frost of the window, but from the outside. In those moments the writer is working with their indelible memories. The result is like cinema, impressionistic, each sentence like the facet on a gem, showing something different. The effect is lightly inter-dimensional as there are several experiences of time involved. And it is quite graceful, too. Not off-hand as it were but the effort it took is hidden.