Category Archives: Creative Nonfiction

Acts of Curation

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The first semester of my MFA program, my first workshop featured an assignment to make a creative nonfiction documentary. It paired well with discussions of the genre, the unreliability of narrators, the slipperiness of truth, the ethics of asking people to present themselves accurately while subjecting them to authorial curation.

Lately, there’s been an embarrassment of riches for documentaries. Earlier in summer, I watched Steal This Story, Please. Later this month, I’ll inflict Musk on myself (and then maybe watch The Human Centipede 2 as a palate cleanser).

In less than a month, I’ve watched three new documentaries at my local independent theater: The History of Concrete, followed by You Can See Everything, and finally, on election night, NAZA.

That first semester, David Shields gave a craft talk about his controversial book Reality Hunger. Approximately half of the book-length manifesto is lifted verbatim from other source material without attribution, embedded throughout Shields’s own words. The book was an experiment in textual mixing to challenge the reader’s understanding of voice and authorship and ideation. For legal reasons, attribution was included at the very end, but Shields has long maintained that readers should tear those pages out before reading.

Phillip Lopate writes about it sardonically, describing the “notion going around these days that because nonfiction is a construct, it is a fiction. To quote David Shields’s Reality Hunger (which is not necessarily to quote David Shields, since he merrily appropriates authors’ words for his collaged text)…” and then he proceeds to quote (presumably) Shields’s critique of the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy (77). For most of my literary career, though, I’ve been spared this debate. Most of the fiction I read and write is genre fiction, anyway, and besides, what is autofiction if not just an essay that’s protected from legal repercussions?

I’m not interested in whether or not creative nonfiction should be classified as fiction (it shouldn’t) on the basis that it’s constructed because construct is not synonymous with artificial or fake. The imperative in creative nonfiction, I think, is the same imperative in documentary filmmaking, which is not to report the facts, but to make sense of them. The contrivance of a narrative structure necessarily means authors have to curate the facts in order to interpret them, and sometimes (see: David Shields) that can get nonfiction authors into trouble.

The History of Concrete follows John Wilson’s typical style from his HBO show (co-produced by Nathan Fielder), How To with John Wilson. Wilson narrates an experience alongside curated short clips of footage that match, sometimes ironically, what is being narrated. In one scene, Wilson describes signing an NDA for a concrete conference forbidding him from saying anything negative about the concrete industry based on his conference experience, and juxtaposes this with footage of ailing, crumbling concrete structures and evidence of the CO2 output from the production of concrete.

If you care about spoilers, skip ahead two paragraphs.

Nathan Fielder has a particular gimmick, which fed the marketing campaign for You Can See Everything. The premise is absurd: a month before going to jail for fraud, Elizabeth Holmes invited Fielder to record her and her boyfriend’s private life, presumably to show the world “their side” of the story. Fielder openly interrogates his subject on camera; once Holmes goes to prison, Fielder continues the documentary with her techbro boyfriend and employs the help of Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in a fictionalized TV series, to act out scenes that Fielder was unable to record but remembers, for the most part, from memory.

This has generated most of the film’s controversy (other than the gimmicky rating for graphic nudity, which was included for two seconds simply to earn that rating and therefore drive speculation and sell tickets), but to me, having an actress represent what the director readily admits is a potentially limited memory of events seems like a completely acceptable artistic choice in creative nonfiction. Once the author writes, “This is how I remembered it happening,” the audience is free to join in the speculation without a wholesale embrace of what is speculated.

NAZA is the outlier here. The film does not have a central narrator like the other two, but instead is a series of cuts from interviews that Yuval Abraham conducted anonymously with 24 IDF soldiers and technical engineers, all of them at night, on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Because the interviewees could face legal ramifications, their faces are never shown and their voices are digitally altered, and the filmmakers juxtapose their responses to Abraham’s questions with other high-rise apartments in the city, panning over black surfaces peppered with the occasional window where someone has left the lights on inside.

The title of the film is an IDF acronym for “collateral damage” that follows a number—15 NAZA instead of 15 children, for example—stemming from drone strikes on targets generated through artificial intelligence systems such as “Lavender” or “Where’s Daddy?” which was an AI program that recorded, for instance, children of a presumed target reacting to a parent’s arrival, thus making the child’s home a target for elimination, NAZA and all. Hauntingly, there is no music in the film, just the ambient sounds of traffic in a crowded urban district as anonymous soldiers passively compare the destruction of human life to a video game.

The History of Concrete is much more like the works of John McPhee or the New Journalists like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, a sprawling, meandering examination of a topic that spirals outward from a question and gradually pulls in more and more questions the more answers the essayist arrives at, not quite maximalism but density. John Wilson’s view of New York City isn’t that different from Didion’s view of California or, more recently, Hanif Abdurraqib’s view of Columbus, Ohio.

You Can See Everything most obviously correlates to true crime. Fielder isn’t exactly Truman Capote (except for their shared penchant for burning bridges, perhaps), but his relationship to Holmes is confrontational and interrogative. Leah Sottile’s short podcast series Bundyville features similarly disconcerting interviews with the subject of her story, paired with Sottile honestly confronting her own attitude toward the Bundy family.

Polyvocal creative nonfiction is usually sympathetic to those whose voices the author curates, like Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. I think that Valeria Luicelli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions performs a similar act of curation. NAZA is straightforwardly making an argument against the IDF’s use of force in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The filmmakers render the anonymity artistic through juxtaposition, but it doesn’t pull off the kind of knife-to-the-gut cinematic trick that the Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds pulls when it interviews a veteran describing, in enthusiastically graphic detail, his combat experience, only for the camera to pull back and reveal that he has been conducting the interview the whole time from a wheelchair, having lost the use of both legs.

None of these films would likely be called avant-garde, but they do reflect the more contentious debates about how to classify avant-garde cinema. The word originally comes from the socialist tradition of a vanguard movement on the frontlines, treating artistic innovation as a literal frontier. One interpretation, according to Michael O’Pray, is that such films are “fundamentally different [from] their mainstream counterparts—no budget, intensively personal and using quite different distribution and exhibition circuits” (2), though O’Pray also cites the critic Clement Greenberg, “who divided the art world into the avant-garde and the kitsch, which included Hollywood films, and where aesthetic value attached to the former,” as another perspective. Probably because I’m so steeped in genre fiction, I disagree with the notion that entertainment and aesthetic value are antithetical, but the distinction between what a film prioritizes might be more helpful.

In creative nonfiction, structure is everything. As Kim Barnes told us in that first workshop, “memoir isn’t about what you remember but why you remember it the way you do.” If creative nonfiction is about making sense of the facts, then the curation of those facts—what is remembered paired with imagery, sound, and text in an intentional sequence—teaches the reader how to make sense of what they are reading about.

I was originally very critical of David Shields nine years ago. I still am, but I’ve softened on his arguably avant-garde approach to creative nonfiction. My own documentary that month was an extended interview with my father about his grandfather. My job as the curator meant I had the freedom to arrange images and sounds to tell a story I was responsible for, regardless of what my father said in response to my questions. Curation necessarily means taking responsibility for the story told. I’m once again a broken record on this point, but curation and care share the same root, and caring for a subject (a sprawling examination of a topic, a hostile interview, a polyvocal data sample) necessitates a kind of ownership. The story I tell as an essayist is mine, or my version at least, no matter how distant I might seem on the page. Agreeing about the facts is irrelevant; what matters is that my curation of those facts is my own declaration of why they matter.

Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell. Free Press, 2013

O’Pray, Michael. Avant-garde Film. Columbia University Press, 2003.

2013

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A paved walkway with a stone bench in the center. The walkway is arched with trees that are starting to turn yellow in autumn.

By chance, I joined a tour of the newest of my new towns through the Montana History Conference, and by chance, I stumbled upon a concert venue and used media store and soup kitchen in a century-old grocery store called Kirk’s. There was a dog who ignored me and a story about an axe murder where the musicians play shows for a venue smaller than my classrooms.

It reminded me of places I knew well in my actual hometown, downtown places in the hallways of old western buildings with office space and apartments and studios where local artists would set up their weird installations, pour some crackers on a plate next to a box of wine, and play what I would later recognize as shoegaze music while I wandered around downtown Flagstaff with college friends, drifting in and out of stores reeking of incense and espresso.

I’m not nostalgic, or at least I don’t think I am. But every so often I think of the year 2013, which was, for me, a year of art and anxiety. My memories are mostly positive until I think for a moment. My cousin Bill died that year. I had my first publication. I wanted to pursue a PhD in history and study genocide trials and sectarian violence. I started this stupid blog in October of that year. I spent time with friends I’m no longer in touch with. Maybe I was in love with someone, but looking back it was probably the kind of crush Hanif Abdurraqib writes about in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, the kind that, after it fizzles like radio static and “whatever love I’ve claimed fades, I find myself renewed, in search of the feeling once again.”

So maybe I am nostalgic sometimes. Kirk’s Grocery rekindled a kind of want I have for what theorists like Henry Jenkins call participatory culture. The history conference, I think, was a good reminder of how common this desire is among people I could get to know better.

I listened to Hanif Abdurraqib read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us on audiobook on a drive across Montana at the start of the month when the first glimmers of autumn showed in the trees, the wind, the clouds. I share his desire for, not hope, but honesty, which is not the opposite of hope, but is also not an alternative to hope, either.

Like a lot of writers these days, I’ve been thinking about Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s approach to history could, potentially, be accused of leaning on nostalgia, but his critique of the industrialization of art in the interwar years seems more salient now than in the last few decades.

For Benjamin, the process of photographing or filming a work of art reproduces its image, but not its interpersonal ritualistic utility “embedded in the fabric of tradition” that originally clarified the meaning of that particular image. His point, of course, is not that photography or film are inferior modalities—the Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov had already developed a theory of the montage that would later influence everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Jane Schoenbrun—but that the reproduction of art through industrialized means puts art at an arm’s length from its ritualistic context, which originally “found its expression in the cult.”

Beholding a statue is a ritualistic experience with endless possible angles that situate the viewer in the same possible station as the artist, whereas looking at a picture of that same statue filters its possible meaning through the lens of the photographer who acts as a third-party interpreter. The problem is not photography as a medium, but the use of photography as a replacement for interacting with art. A film cannot replace a political speech; a video cannot replace a concert; a film review cannot replace a film; a video benediction, though sometimes necessary, cannot take the place of the ritual of benediction at the end of a church service.

This is all well and good when considering classical oration. The opening scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey depicts the cultic expression of art through a poet engaging, in real time, with a captive audience. The same thing happens in Sinners when Sammie pierces the veil of time and space with his music. Sculptures evoke awe, paintings evoke curiosity, live music aligns us to rhythm. What about my genre, creative nonfiction?

I’m sure hearing Abdurraqib speak in person is different from a curated audio book, which is a form of mechanical reproduction. Still, I found myself pulled in by the cadence and pause of his voice, his momentary reflections over his own diction, the structure of his interrogation.

Good memoir isn’t nostalgic; it’s also not tragedy porn, either, like Hillbilly Elegy, a curated platter of suffering to shore up credentials and advance policy from afar. Good memoir is captured by writers like Abdurraqib’s essay “Defiance, Ohio, is the Name of a Band,” which genuinely feels like a spell being cast when I hear it in his own voice. Good memoir is like Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, in which Hamilton describes her childhood in New Jersey with a magic trick of contrast: “We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning” (Hamilton 6). If there is nostalgia here, it is clarified by consequence, and if there is regret, it is pulled apart by nostalgia.

The renewed attention in Benjamin’s essay stems from fears about the imposition of algorithmic technology on art. The key question, I think, is about how we relate to ourselves through art, not how we relate to art in and of itself. I am against, at this point, any firm rule about what is or is not good writing, but for now, what makes memoir worthwhile is the potential for specificity to become universal, however momentarily.

Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kills Us. TwoDollarRadio, 2023.

Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Random House, 2012.

Everyone Should Write Memoirs

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“What I am trying—needing—to do in writing these things down together, in putting all of these memories and images of ‘me’ and ‘her,’ of Kyger and A, of all our multiple selves side by side or over and under, layered together, is to see and understand, at once enliven and detach from, that version of myself that cut my bangs and didn’t cling to the San Francisco man…” Lauren Westerfield, Woman House

Bookshelf with books arranged by color, red on the right and green and blue on the left.
Isle of Books in Butte, MT

Years ago, I maintained the practice of keeping a daybook, a journal that followed one single organizing principle: Each entry would begin with the weirdest observation or interaction I could remember that day, and each entry would try to understand why that observation or interaction mattered through narration rather than abstraction.

The result was that I spent more time trying to do different, varied things in my daily life so that I would have something to write a few paragraphs about each night. Some days were easier than others. Living in a walkable city made for more interactions with strangers, friends, enemies, dogs, some of whom became recurring characters in the stories that gradually took shape in the daybook. Midterm elections in that year made for some surreal interactions while canvassing or marching in a parade. My intentions led me to debates, arguments, awkward conversations. Friendships that lasted and friendships that have long since died.

I got a few publishable essays out of the daybook, but the wider consequence was that writing down my observations, and observing more intentionally and with more curiosity, made me a better person. It made me more engaged in local civics, more attuned to the experiences of my neighbors, to the weather, to the community, and to myself. It represents a marker of my personal growth, a version of myself I recognize but no longer am.

Lauren Westerfield uses a more affecting craft move to demonstrate this kind of distance between present and past selves in her newest collection Woman House, specifically in the essay “Double Exposure.” The guiding metaphor of photography in this essay lends itself to marked distinctions between past and present selves, but she materializes this distinction on the page by describing her former self in third person, as one new character in a cast of many.

Of course, the question of whether or not we are our former selves is not, itself, novel territory. Sabrina Imbler’s transition narrative “My Metamorphosis” uses the metaphor of a moth to examine their own transformation. Memoirist Beth Nguyen compares a similar process in the works of Edith Wharton to the lyrics of Taylor Swift in an essay I have assigned, with limited success, to my composition classes. An episode of Northern Exposure that aired when I was two months old, “Crime and Punishment,” involves the legal argument that the character Chris in the Morning is different from the time in which he was incarcerated, a theme that I find endlessly valuable in narratives like the film Sing Sing and Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room and Emily Ruskovich’s novel Idaho.

I can’t speak to the therapeutic or psychological benefit of writing about oneself, but I do think that the project of self-examination is valuable for its own sake. Being able to see oneself as subject to transformation, as malleable and impermanent, is the stuff of religious and civic consequence. Self-reflection is the point of art, which I take to include literature and scripture and polemics and folklore. I think that there is awe in our ability to grow, recognize growth, and learn from that growth, which is at least partly the gift that memoir grants.

Phillip Lopate writes that regardless of your intention or position, “what you do need, however, is a tone of assertion” to write memoir. This is less a matter of factual confidence than it is self-recognition. I can describe the facts of my life in any given year with broad accuracy, but making sense of those facts, identifying their meaningfulness, is the challenge of memoir. It’s not the what or why or how so much as it is the who and for whom?

This is why Westerfield’s use of third-person to address her former self is valuable as a practice. I can try it now, and so can you: My former self, a skin I have shed, is, let’s say, myself in 2017. That version of myself was new to an MFA program and he was eager to absorb everything into his writing practice. He was energetic, more charming, more naive, less annoying by some strange happenstance. He hid less. He talked more. I would like to tell him he was doing better than he thought, but that is not the purpose, nor a possibility. The past cannot be changed; it can only be received, at different times, with different radio frequencies. Memoir, in the last analysis, is not a form of nostalgia, but a dialectic process of understanding. I think that we are starved for understanding, as a community and polity and language. More memoir-writing is not for the benefit of readers, though; I think that we would have better avenues for growth if we took seriously the self-interrogation that memoir requires, that we would be better as a collective if we examined our past selves with more attention to the artistry, the freeing grammar, of distance.

Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell. Free Press, 2013.

Westerfield, Lauren. Woman House. University of Massachusetts Press, 2026.

Four Sundays in Indiana

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“The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite,’ he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to rewrite.'” -Kate Briggs, quoting Roland Barthes, 115.

i

I can’t remember where I heard (a professor, a book, a lecture, hearsay) that creative nonfiction is about distinction.

The genre is trustworthy hearsay, an oxymoron. The phrase creative nonfiction already raises more question than it answers.

I think of distinction as central to observation, and central to questions, the kind worth asking: What am I doing with my day? What makes it different? What distinguishes this breath this meal this prayer this walk from the last?

I’ve always hated February, how eager it is to be finished despite how slowly it takes. In my head, the month is pale blue, like gas station mint gum that loses its flavor as quickly as its shape. How do I distinguish these days beyond shades of murk and rhyme? What makes this February distinct from the previous thirty?

I am writing about February, if translator Kate Briggs (translating Roland Barthes) is correct, because I want to rewrite February.

ii

    At a panel at a conference in Kansas City, Lilly Dancyger says that creative nonfiction is about asking questions, which only raise more questions. It’s the act of asking that matters most, not the questions or the answers but this Socratic mitosis. I write this in my notebook, but fail to cite who in the panel said the following: “There are no answers, just a deepening and sharpening of the question.”

    In Evansville, a rideshare driver tells me about her life in this city that is actually a town. She tells me about her plans to leave. She tells me that people born in Evansville find themselves stuck because of one of two things: they get wrapped up in the legal system, its labyrinth of parole, fines, probation, and technicalities, or because of poverty. This is not a town anybody wants to stay in.

    The west side of town is where immigrant labor built bricks and commerce on the Ohio River. The east side is where the new money pools. The east side of town is a horizonless expanse of malls and chains and products and solutions and parking lots that never reach a quarter of their capacity. Buildings stand apart, hands in their pockets, trying to be noticed.

    Driving home from the conference on Superbowl Sunday, the roads are quiet and I have ten thousand things to think about/through/with. I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, podcasts, music. I laugh so hard at a podcaster’s stupid joke about the Internet, tears in my eyes, that I almost drive into a ditch. It seals the deal, really, to commit to a decision I had made months before. To get it over with.

    iii

    It is windy on the Ohio River. On the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, I dress in black for a vigil. I recognize a few faces from the library, from bookstores, from somewhere indistinct. Some wear keffiyehs. Some carry flags. It is too windy to light the candles we hold but we manage. We share the flame from civilian to civilian as the wind snuffs it out. When my candle goes out in a burst of wind, I turn to a stranger and she lends me her flame. I share the fire with someone else after another gust of wind. Our hands numb, I think, but we keep the fire alive together. Is it a different fire from candle to candle? Do we carry the same message, or does it change meaning with every curved hand protecting it from the elements?

    People speak. People listen. A man describes his memories of Palestine before the Nakba. Another, his memories as a refugee in Syria. I am glad that there is so much turnout from Evansville. I thought about driving to Louisville or Indianapolis for such a vigil, but even here, there are enough hands to protect the fire from the wind.

    iv

    I used to think of Sundays as the simplest days. I have used them to do chores, prepare meals for the week, and rest for the next morning. That’s what a sabbath should be, a reiteration of itself, a returning-to. Right?

    Briggs likens translation to a group of women dancing in a gym. One line of women cannot see the dance instructor, so they imitate the moves the women in front of them do. Likewise, the women in the row behind them cannot see the instructor, so they imitate the women in the line ahead of them as they imitate the women in the line ahead of them. Each dance move is a translation of the instructor’s through the translation of each concurrent row of dancers.

    I go to the library before the screening and help the coalition set up for a documentary. I see more familiar faces. I see colleagues from the university. There is coffee, there are books, art displays about the fact that gauze may originate from the weavers of ancient Gaza City. And there are platters of dates. Once, I worked for a chef who insisted during Ramadan that we, her prep cooks, put down our knives and ladles and join her in breaking her fast at sundown with a feast of dates. That was in May, 2021, during another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, or, as one Israeli official has described it, mowing the grass.

    Is it enough to call a sabbath, a sabbatical (a respite, a prepared-for invitation to contemplate) a translation of the previous? Does this mean the dance instructor is God resting on the seventh day and we are all, in some way, trying to imitate the restfulness that follows Creation? And what does that mean for the eighth day? What comes after a sabbath? Is it recreation, a translation of the same creation, an apocalypse of the old to make way for another creation? Are these Sundays a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis?

    I like how Barthes (translated by Briggs, one dancing after the other) describes it: “I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it.” This is about reading literature and responding by writing literature, but I think the same is (must be) true of looking at one’s weekly calendar, at oneself and one’s place in the community. I want to retrieve the previous week by redoing it. I want to find my previous self, shake him like a dusty rug. I want a second chance. Should or shouldn’t doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter. That I can do better is what propels me, what keeps me writing and rewriting and rerewriting.

    Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.

    Quick Breads for Saint’s Days

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    Every year, members of my family mark St. Patrick’s Day with loaves and loaves of Irish soda bread, which is partly an excuse to put currants from our many gardens into a quick bread for Spring. Where my grandparents live in western Montana, peppered with copper boom towns, massive St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are a holdover of the Irish who worked the mines alongside many other immigrant communities. Most Keenes I know aren’t Catholic, and we’re not connected to the nineteenth century Irish diaspora, so we’re not exactly using family recipes. Nevertheless, the soda bread is a way for my family to connect with each other and with communities in the Northwest. Baking bread is an excuse to celebrate, or maybe it’s the other way around.

    I don’t make quick breads often. For me, the joy in baking is the artistry of leavening, which requires patience, dedication, attention. We rarely made them in baking school, too, focusing instead on the science of yeast. Quick breads, leavened by salt and acid releasing carbon dioxide when applied to heat and moisture, have their name for a reason.

    Linda Civitello writes that the popularity of Irish soda bread in the US was in part because the 1847 famine in Ireland “produced an atypical diaspora. When Europeans migrated, the men usually came first, in order to work and then later send for their families. With the Irish, however, a disproportionate number of single women” emigrated (39), finding work in US and Canadian households as maids or cooks.

    When visiting some Keenes near Portland recently, one of my cousins told me that when he was in high school, boys were not allowed to take home economics, but because he and his friends wanted to learn to cook, they struck a deal with the teacher to show them some of the basics during her grading hour.

    This gendered division of culinary labor has deep roots. Civitello points out that women “have been connected to bread making since antiquity. . . The Old English word for ‘loaf,’ the staple of life, was hlaf. ‘Loaf-keeper,’ hlaford, became ‘lord’; loaf-kneader, hlafdige, became ‘lady'” (6).

    For most of human history, bakers relied on yeast that was locally available, either from old batches of bread, the residue of beer brewing, or yeast cultures that had to be maintained. In ancient kitchens, “the presence of yeast was mostly accidental” (Gisslen 4) because any mash of grain collects those microscopic organisms on their own. In medieval European bakeries, it was common for cooks to tend ovens separately from bakers, whose professional focus was on leavening (5). Baking was often mysterious because its ingredients were difficult to quantify, recreate, and package. No two yeast sources were alike.

    What makes Irish soda bread Irish isn’t the soda, though, which only became common in Ireland in the 1830s as a cheap alternative to yeast. The use of soda ash, or potash (potassium) from burned plant material, was common in the Americas centuries before. Instead, what makes Irish soda bread Irish is the buttermilk, which farmers had on hand to provide the acid necessary to act on the soda.

    Louis Pasteur identified yeast in 1857, around the same time American chemists began packaging commercial baking powder to eliminate the need to add acid to leaven quick breads. These developments democratized bread, but they also made it much easier to commercialize and monetize.

    By the time I was in high school, it was a given that baking is a science, not an art. My own high school cooking class was taught by a former military man from the South. A decade later, in baking school, I found myself disappointed that it wasn’t the art of baking I was being taught, but the science of cost efficiency. I was being trained to be a good employee, not a skilled baker.

    It’s almost a cliche to distinguish baking from cooking by the chemistry involved in the former, which itself is false because all cooking involves chemistry. In other respects, distinguishing cooks from bakers is also gendered.

    There’s a scene in the 2021 film Pig in which Chef Feld, played by Nicholas Cage, reconnects with a baker, Helen, played by October Moore. Feld has been off the Portland culinary scene for decades, and is only returning to find his stolen truffle pig. It’s unclear why he left the scene, but in his absence, the cooks he inspired became manipulative, self-serving, violent sell-outs, trading their own interests for trends, all except for Helen.

    In the logic of the film, cooks are cutthroat and solipsistic, while bakers are patient and generous. This dichotomy reflects the gender roles in a traditional action movie (the men stoically kill the bad guys on behalf of women who then tend to their wounds), and while Pig starts like a typical action movie, it ends somewhat differently.

    After talking with Helen, Feld changes his approach. When he confronts Darius, the restaurant owner who stole his pig, he doesn’t exact his revenge. Instead, he cooks the meal he once made for Darius and his now comatose wife years ago. We see him cooking slowly, patiently, finally serving a meal that brings Darius to tears. In the film’s logic, Feld acts as a baker, not a cook, using the dish (“a bird, a bottle, and a salted baguette”) as a medium for human connection.

    Bread is often a symbol for human connection. Political analysts describe household economic policies like taxes and local infrastructure as bread-and-butter issues. One Bolshevik slogan during the Russian Revolution called for three things: Bread, Peace, and Land. The Labor slogan bread and roses comes from suffragist Helen Todd’s statement, “we want bread for all, but roses too,” a call for material sustenance as well as social freedoms. Bread distinguished pastoral nomadic societies from sedentary agriculturalists who settled along rivers to grow their grain. In Biblical tradition, God tells the Israelites to eat unleavened bread in their hurried exodus from Egypt, and in the Gospels, Jesus breaks unleavened bread during Passover the night before his crucifixion, resulting in the production of billions of unleavened communion wafers for the Catholic Eucharist.

    In baking school, I became deeply depressed, in part because I had volunteered to overwork myself, but also because the program dissolved the sense of connectivity that I had associated with baking. I had to admit to myself that I was there not to learn new skills, but to monetize one of my hobbies, and in that monetization, I became alienated from it. Mark Fisher describes the process like this: “Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems” (34).

    So, I make a loaf of soda bread and think of family. I don’t have buttermilk, so I add vinegar for the acid. I use oat milk, too, and a recipe I’m unfamiliar with. It comes out soft and crumbly and a little dense. I cut into it too fast, too eager to taste it. I place a chunk on my tongue and chew it slowly.

    Civitello, Linda. Baking Powder Wars. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

    GIsslen, Wayne. Professional Baking. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017.

    Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009.

    Notes from Flagstaff

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    burn 2

    “As for me, I am a watercolor./I wash off.” -Anne Sexton, “For My Lover, Returning to his Wife“

    It should be monsoon season in Flagstaff but the air is bone-dry and the only thing in the sky that isn’t hazy blue is a plume of wildfire smoke. I sit in a tea house while “Back in the USSR” plays on the radio, sipping oolong and watching passerby walk up Aspen Avenue in downtown Flagstaff. It’s just like the old days, or just like how I remember the old days, but something is different. I’m just like the passerby now. I can no longer be a smug local people-watching the tourists.

    My childhood in northern Arizona was defined by two local features: The inevitability of wildfires and the possibility of leaving for outer space. In 1884, a fire destroyed Old Town, leaving only the part of the city closest to the tracks. Ten years later, Percival Lowell founded an observatory on a hill above the city to look for life on Mars, though his research would later lead to the discovery of Pluto. Flagstaff is a city of dreamers, artists, mystics, and scientists. I landed squarely in one of these quadrants, or all of them.

    I left Flagstaff four years ago. It’s not as if this city is completely different. Instead, Flagstaff to me has entered the uncanny valley. It’s familiar enough that I recognize it for what it’s supposed to be, but enough of it has changed that it just doesn’t feel right. I am also a different person. We meet one another, the city and I, halfway at our respective crossroads, doing double takes.

    Still, I have connections. In a tiny house in a semi-familiar neighborhood, I help fold veggies into egg roll dough with four Flagstaff friends, two married couples, both of whose weddings I missed because I was traveling or had already skipped town. We sit outside under strings of lights in the now seasonably warm evening air and catch up.

    I used to live with one friend here in a house on Talkington Street near the ski resort. I’m glad how familiar this scene still is, how easy it is to cook with friends after so long apart. Later, we chat about people we remember from high school, wherever they’ve ended up. Sammie shows me an art project. Cari is going to seminary in New England in a few weeks. Ryan is preparing another album after a month-long tour.

    This is the Flagstaff I have always known, catering to the ambitious and the adamant. Following the emergence of art, mysticism, and dreams, though, there is always some form of commercialization, and Flagstaff is not immune from the power of Capital to market nostalgia.

    It’s fitting that the first settler structure here was a saloon, before the loggers and miners moved in. Gun violence was commonplace. In one apocryphal account, there was a saloon murder every week between 1882 and ’83. Were it not for the scientists who took an interest in the region, John Wesley Powell and Percival Lowell, Flagstaff would have likely become one more ghost town or company town, its residents finally driven out when logging and mining came to a standstill. Instead, Flagstaff became a tourist town and a college town. And, at a certain point, the college experience is sold to high school graduates using the same advertising techniques that tourist traps use. Come for the mountain view, stay for the nostalgia.

    Except, most people who can afford to stay in Flagstaff are long-time residents. And expensive student housing structures have popped up across from the tracks, and parking is now regulated with warnings and tickets, and there’s a fire close to my old neighborhood. The last few days I’m here, my phone is constantly buzzing with evacuation alerts and flash flood warnings from late rainstorms. I am used to waiting for evacuation notices. This is something they don’t advertise in the college brochures, to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, to have a bag packed at the door. And I heed the warning. I am ready to leave.

    -jk

    On Revisiting a Daybook I Gave Up On

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    Garden.jpgHere’s what happened: on September 1, 2018, I started a daybook. My goal was to write a few paragraphs every single day, usually a detailed description of something I observed or did. The goal was to think in the present tense, to not compare moments, but simply describe what happened.

    I made it two months and six days, stopping short at Election Day, adding a few posts in November and December. By January, I cut my losses. Life got weird. I was involved with some political activism and needed to grade mid-term and term papers for my composition classes, and holiday travel coupled with other writing goals pushed the daybook out of my routine. What I have as a result is a detailed sketch of life in Moscow, Idaho, during the autumn of 2018. An artifact from which I can mine for inspiration.

    I wrote a total of seventy posts. Most of them were redundant, but some choice scenes emerged. Here is one scene: one evening in October, I stopped to pet a dog named Tuna outside the one good bar in town, the Garden, and a woman ran out to let Tuna lick her face. Tuna’s human apologized for the dog’s bad breath, but the woman said, “It’s okay,  I just had a shot of gin so I can’t smell anything,” before jogging off in the direction of the police station.

    I spent a lot of time in the daybook reflecting on the Muscovites I see everywhere. There is a man with a beard and a panama hat. There are the Neo-Confederate church members downtown. There are the activists I trucked with, a retired state senator I ate donuts with every Saturday morning in October.

    This last year, I’ve started to view my writing in the long tradition of creative nonfiction stemming from journalism: the dispatch, the report, the place study, the travelogue. I wonder how many notes essayists record that never make it to print, the observations that get cut. The simplest description of creative nonfiction I can think of is this: to describe what happened.

    In mining my daybook from last fall, I have now collected material for three essays by categorizing and cutting. I wrote a lot about food, a lot about politics, a lot about anxiety, plenty about the sheer weirdness of this town in the Idaho panhandle. I described, in the most boring details possible, what happened between September 1 and November 6, not just my experience, but the lay of the land writ large, the season, the changes and my acclimation to the changes.

    After the experience, I cannot recommend the practice of keeping a daybook strongly enough to other writers. It is tedious and boring in the moment, but so is exercise and meditation and learning to play music. A daybook for a writer is like scales for a musician. It is foundational, elemental, the bedrock of storytelling and keen observation. Maybe I’m becoming more of a reporter like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe. Maybe I’m just doing what poets and novelists do to build image and character. In any case, my writing style has come out better for the exercise, simply a paragraph at the end of a long day, a scene, a drink, a ritual like prayer.

    -jk

    Essay Published in Blue Earth Review

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    ZionI’m pleased to announce that my flash essay “After Zion” is the featured online nonfiction for the next print issue of Blue Earth Review. It is what the title suggests: Dawdling after a long hike through Zion National Park. You should also check out the featured fiction and poetry for this issue while you’re there.

    This short essay, along with one recently published in Dark Mountain, is one in a long string of environmentally-focused flash essays I read back in September as part of an Idaho MFA tradition, the yearly symposium: Each second-year student reads a selection of their work in a low-stakes setting, usually a faculty member’s house, and responds to questions and comments about their work to prepare them for their third-year thesis defense. Two-thirds of the flash essays I read at my symposium have found homes in print or online. Does that mean that I will only successfully defend two-thirds of my thesis next year?

    -jk

     

    Essay Published in Dark Mountain

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    Sunset in the WoodsI’m pleased to announce that my flash essay “Notes on Preparing for a Wildfire Evacuation” appears in Dark Mountain 15, which is themed around forest fires. The Dark Mountain Project is a UK-based literary and arts organization whose goal (they literally wrote a manifesto about it) is to use art to realistically address global ecological crises.

    Much of my writing is environmentally focused, and this particular essay is about growing up in the mountain West, where wildfire season is a yearly, ongoing fact of life. I’m glad to have an essay in Dark Mountain, and I’m glad for the encouragement for the weird, at times discomforting direction my personal essays are going. Now that I live in northern Idaho, wildfire season remains a fact of day-to-day life. So too, though, are forests and mountains, the quieter features of the mountain West, the areas I’m used to exploring freely, that I hope to continue to explore. My writing will inevitably dwell on forests and fires alike. Now that I am about to enter my final year in an MFA program, as I prepare a book of essays for my final defense, I’m grateful for institutions like Dark Mountain whom I can trust with my weird, discomforting work.

    -jk

    Essay Published in Split Lip Magazine

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    highway 43 2

    I’m pleased to announce that I have an essay in the August issue of Split Lip Magazine. It’s titled “Faking It,” and it’s a creative nonfiction essay about the time I sold my soul to the devil. It might be called excessively creative nonfiction.

    Feel free to read it, but also check out the other work this month and in the archives. Split Lip publishes a small handful of writers each month, as opposed to many other journals who feature a lot of writers two or three times a year.

    For me, this is an honor, and also a good way to kick off the semester on the first day back to work for TA training.

    -jk