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 be a “social justice action” for marginalized/minoritized writers; an assertion of queer lives’ complexities; a feminist refusal of linear hero’s journeys; and a way for students to weave empowering threads (i.e., memoir, research, cultural critique) together in one piece. Three innovative essayists who also teach will showcase braided essays’ dynamic, hegemony-undermining possibilities. Download event outline and supplemental documents.
CW: Melissa Febos’s “The Mirror Test,” a braided essay on slut-shaming, was the inspiration for how the braid could use theory and history and individual experience. CW and AC used an Excel spreadsheet to try and map out its structure and make its mechanics visible. They did the same with Melissa Falivenos’s braided essay “Switch Hitter.” CW developed an assignment: find or pick an issue that matters to you; then 1) write personal narrative about your experience with it (expressive writing), 2) research the issue (to gain expertise on the issue), 3) then note how the issue is represented in pop culture (helped students analyze and decode systemic messages). Students wrote about anxiety, navigating autism, gender issues, etc. Students wrote 10K word essays and felt empowered as advocates, and also reported the process was healing, though this wasn’t necessarily a goal. Though they weren’t trying to espouse writing as therapy, science does show that expressive writing creates feelings of agency over things, not feeling like a victim. The assignment led to hope, expertise, and healing.
NW: In 2022, the NYT published her piece “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” It was hard to write because of privacy, politics, exposure, and feared response—but the distancing effect of the braid form helped her to write it, and helped people to read it. Moving between the portrait of her daughter, the details about her mom’s cyst, and the immediacy of NW’s story kept the essay fresh, but also helped that she didn’t write about abortion head on. Soon after, she led a community writing workshop where she had them 1) write a paragraph about something they were obsessed with recently, then 2) a paragraph about something they would like to research, and then 3) about their own stories/experiences. Then, she had them go between these, weaving sensory details with established facts with issues. The braided essay, with its elasticity of thought, its resistance to itself/to any one thread, keeps it from being too overtly partisan. She cites Citizen (how Rankine braids microaggressions and Serena Williams), Braiding Sweetgrass (how Kimmerer braids botany, motherhood, and indigenous knowledge), and Refuge (how Williams braids the flooded Bear Lake refuge with her family’s cancer). The braid becomes a lens for big abstract ideas, to refocus them on small details. It allows you to introduce facts and research with the personal, makes it both more appealing to the reader (the personal details) and harder for the reader to dismiss (facts).
SM: has 3 Propositions about the braided essay as change agent: 1) “new” and “experimental” is a misnomer to the braided essay because it’s actually an old form, and yet it still feels new and experimental to students just discovering it. To SM, it feels like we’re starting over by constantly “rediscovering” the braided essay, rather than building on it. Using Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, she shows how he uses this ancient polyvocal form to combine history, folklore, and memoir. But she notes that translating it into the medium of literary language in print may not be the best fit, which is why it seems so fragmented and experimental to us now. But it’s important to show how to tell a story collectively, not individually. With the braided essay, readers tune into the patterns and repetitions before they register the connections. 2) Today’s braided essays don’t combine, they undo—they make you notice the separate threads. 3) The braided essay uses delay and omission to make creative readers, because it allows readers to make the connections for themselves. SM cites Exoo and Fallone’s essay in Assay about using CNF to teach the realities of sexual assault to first responders, for how the nonlinear braid calls attention to details and is an alternate way to express a trauma, for those trained to read it.
AC: why do braided essays appeal to marginalized writers, especially queer writers? They get you away from assumptions and limitations of writing advice (show, don’t tell; write what you know; be coherent). They appeal to the sense of/condition of uncertainty. The braided essay is a structure that helps you write what you don’t know, lets you put things beside each other to make surprising connections. It dismantles certainty, and subversively undermines systems of power/authority (she cites Borich’s essay in Assay, “Radical Surprise”). The braided essay is able to hold space for complexity, to address big questions without knowing all the answers—it appeals to the very idea of assay. The models for AC’s own writing and teaching are Yuknavitch’s
“Woven,” Chee’s “Girl,” and Febos’s “Thesmophoria.”
Audience Question: do you worry about the braided essay becoming formulaic? like, it can be a great tool in composition classes to move beyond the 5-paragraph essay, but does it become its own template?
- CW: that’s definitely a concern, and it can be, but there are bad examples in any form, especially when assigned to students.
- SM: there’s a great parody of a braided essay that starts with a personal moment, then gives a definition, then gives some history, so yeah, but I think it’s a problem of transition, of not paying attention to how the threads are connecting and moving or leaping to the next. In this way, it’s borrowing from poetry, with that lyric leap, and also the kind of reading it demands.
- NW: the braid form is a constraint, kind of like the sonnet, but that the threads are always resisting both themselves and each other.
Audience Question: do you compose each thread separately, or simultaneously?
No individual responder, but most say they are working on different parts at different times, and then gradually start putting different parts together to see how they fit or speak to each other, how the juxtapositions create surprise, both for them and for the reader. CW talks about how the braided essay puts pieces of each thread next to each other, and that the spaces (whether a number or dingbat or just a crot) indicate the breaks between them, but also provide a space for the reader to decide how we’ve moved from one to the next. NW again points out how those breaks are like poetry, and SM says yes, and the chunks of content are also like lyric parataxis.
Audience Question: how do you know how to balance each thread? do they need to be equal?
No individual responder, but all agree that they’re not necessarily balanced or equal, and they rarely write theirs that way.
Audience Question: several of you have drawn comparisons between the braided essay and poetry or lyric strategies. In the introduction to A Harp in the Stars, Randon Billings Noble calls the braided essay a lyric essay form. Do you think the braided essay is necessarily lyric?
- NW: no—I agree that lyric essayists are drawn to it, but I don’t think it has to be lyric. The threads might be a mix of approaches, and might use language that’s not lyric. Lyric braided essays would be more focused on sound.
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, the lyric essay collection Fluid States (selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose), and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
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