For the longest time, when I thought about an “essay,” I thought about it in the academic sense—dry, heavily researched walls of text that read with dull, textbook reminiscent language with about as much flavor and character as Ben Stein’s on-screen persona. Then I was introduced to Chuck Klosterman, and later David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, and through these writers and many others like them I learned of the diversity, and more importantly the subjectivity one could infuse into an essay. And so the essay became a new favorite form of writing for me. I devoured Klosterman, Sedaris, Wallace. I started reading collections of essays. Malcolm Gladwell led me to subscribe to the New Yorker, which introduced me to a bevy of new essayists.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my insistence on trying to write like I speak flirted with a philosophy of journalistic/essay writing espoused by William Zinsser in his book On Writing Well. According to Zinsser, “Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.” Well, that’s what I was doing in my journalism. My reviews tended to lean more towards editorials,and before I knew it I was writing way more editorials than I was reporting straight news or writing the same three templated reviews over and over again–it was good, it was bad, it was okay.
Later, when I took my first formal creative writing class at Rutgers, my professor and mentor, Leslie Rapparlie, helped me realize that I had a knack for writing personal essays, that there was a heavy dose of “me” that made readers easily connect with my writing and, as another professor would point out, sometimes even laugh out loud. I had unknowingly tapped into the power of writing about experience, and human experience—regardless of what that experience is—is always a blast to read about if executed well. Don’t believe me? Read David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (the essay) or Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.
These days, school, work, and MFA preparation keep me too busy to bust out any fun essays. But they still occasionally happen. It’s my hope that, while in the MFA program and teaching (as an adjunct) I’ll freelance more, for some extra scratch, but also keep writing pieces like Rum-Soaked in San Francisco, which my Art of Revision professor nominated for a W.W. Norton & Company writing contest. Guess that’s gotta mean something, eh?
Selected Works
