18. Essay(s)
I talked about Wynne Gifford – my English Literature A-Level teacher – earlier in this challenge. What she gave me was the realisation that THE ESSAY is a place where I can fight for my ideas; where I can argue, make the case for what I believe, or organise a series of messy but interconnected ideas. This knowledge was enormously empowering and has stayed with me since.
I find writing essays incredibly hard but rewarding work. I struggle with word-limits, with structure, with keeping ideas manageable, and with the overwhelm of ALL THE THOUGHTS AT ONCE. It feels like I’m winning a marathon or something when I finally see, from the unruly mass of words, the shape of what I’m trying to say finally coming through.
I love reading essays and am grateful for the labour people put into make their ideas available in this form and am in awe of the skill it takes.
Some favourite essays of mine, in the order in which I read them: Coming In from the Cold by Alice Walker (Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987, 1989);
Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson (Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, 1997);
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (first published in 1929);
Notes Concerning the Objects on my Worktable by Georges Perec (Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 2008);
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me, 2014);
Feel Uninspired by Kate Davies (from Wheesht, 2019);
The I in Internet by Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror, 2019).
This mix includes ideas to do with celebrating daily life through creativity; the intersections of sexism and racism; the new problem of selfhood in the age of the personal brand and The Internet; and the power and necessity of Art.
Another essay I think of often is The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino as it’s the perfect metaphor for living while disabled.
My favourite recent essay to write was Ways to Play with Colour for Colour at Work edited by Kate Davies and me.
I enjoyed boiling 20+ years of working with colour down into a word-limited essay and searching for ways to be concise and enabling in words. The process of writing the essay really inspired me to develop it into a full-fat 3D online course: Colour at Play.
All the structure came from the essay and video gave me an almost limitless way to convey the magical stuff at the heart of the ideas: COLOUR!
What essays have shaped your learning? Both to write and to read?
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PS thank you for including “feel uninspired” among this august company – one of my personal faves.
It’s a superb essay and one I think of often. I love your exploration of the work of finding inspiration; the looking that’s involved; the joy of wresting ideas from an “uninspiring” starting point – and your vivid description of the ferns and your transformed relationship to them… recommended reading for everyone.
“The door to the truth might be strangeness” by George Saunders is the most recent essay that really helped crystallize a loose collection of thoughts I had rattling around. It’s in his book “A swim in a pond in the rain” which I would recommend to any writer (or any lover of a good story)
I too love the essay as a form – and genuinely love writing an essay – hard work, as you say, but I really enjoy the discipline of it. An essay you will enjoy: “Culture is ordinary” by Raymond Williams (1958)
Hurrah for the work of essay writing! Hard but so rewarding.
And thank you for this recommendation – I shall look it up :)