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Liz Prato: On Didion's Trail at the Royal Hawaiian
Joan Didion covered many topics in her canon of essays—Charles Manson, California’s agriculture belt, the Black Panthers, hippies in Haight-Ashbury, the Getty Museum and complicated grief, to name a...
View ArticleWill Slattery: Impressions and Preliminary Maxims Gleaned from Teaching High...
1. Of late I find myself entrusted with the responsibility of educating Arizonan high schoolers in the discipline of "creative writing." The basic structure of this responsibility is not hugely...
View ArticleDylan Cooley on the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction
This week’s news that the U.S. has withdrawn from UNESCO has created a lot of uncertainty in Iowa City, IA. As North America’s only UNESCO City of Literature and home to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the...
View ArticleSung Yim interview with T Clutch Fleischmann
Below is the next installment in a series on writing, gender, and genre, this time with Sung Yim. Sung’s first book, the memoir What about the Rest of Your Life, is forthcoming from Perfect Day...
View ArticleKaty Sperry: Cool Cunt
I have been thinking a lot about the word cunt, lately. The way that it rolls so sweetly off my tongue. The way it does not make me think of grotesque things. The way it makes me think of my vulva, its...
View ArticleEssay Daily's Int'l Essayists series
This series kicked off a while ago as I was digging into Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table and found myself trying to name all the essayists I could who were born / live / reside / write from outside the...
View ArticleMari Yoshihara on living in two languages
On the clear afternoon of March 11, 2011, I was about to start my jog around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The sun and the air announced the arrival of spring, as did the attire of many businessmen...
View ArticleDisrupting the Macho-Man from Within and Without
Ezra Pound’s poem Erat Hora, the magical powers of woman beheld:‘Thank you, whatever comes. And then she turnedAnd, as the ray of sun on hanging flowersFades when the wind hath lifted them aside,Went...
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Dec 3, Terese Svoboda, Finding Lola
Dear Essay Daily readers, we welcome you to the 2017 edition of our Advent Calendar. This year our theme is Recoveries, meaning that we've asked our contributors to recover essays that are in neeed of...
View ArticleDec 4, Clinton Crockett Peters: Cannibalizing the Work of Lina Maria Ferreira...
Placenta steak anyone? I tend to see chopping the world into dueling camps as a sign of old-school hierarchical thinking, which has roots in colonialism (us vs. them), as well as old-God...
View ArticleDec 5, Lela Scott MacNeil: Betty Fussell is Too Excited to Shut Up
“Food is not a subject in the way that the great subjects of literature like War, Love, Death, Sex, Power, Betrayal, or Honor are subjects.” This is how Betty Fussell begins her essay, “Eating My...
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Dec 6, Sarah Minor: Recovering from Descent
Over the past six years I’ve met many folks—writers, and the other kind of person—who I call beloved dissenters. At least one of them has shared the table in each of my seminars. Others have sat across...
View ArticleDec 7: Marcia Aldrich, A Life in Lists: Anne Panning’s “On Personal Frictions...
A Life in Lists: Anne Panning’s “On Personal Frictions & Discontinuities, Or, How Reading Montaigne Temporarily Messed with My Mind”Marcia Aldrich1Just after graduating from college, I shared an...
View ArticleDec 9: Stephen Benz on Ambrose Bierce
“Strange and Beautiful”: Ambrose Bierce on the Battle of ShilohIn the visitor center of Shiloh National Military Park, an interpretive display identifies renowned participants in the Battle of Shiloh,...
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Dec 10th, Sonja Livingston: Towards Solstice
Toward Solstice: Ten Unexpected Sources of Light (An Instagram Essay)We are pretty good at recognizing sources of light. There are candles and stars and light bulbs. There’s the switch on our phones to...
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Dec 11th: Kevin Mosby on Charles Reznikoff
Matter of Fact: On Charles Reznikoff’s TestimonyWatch the ho-hum testimonial confessions of Dennis Rader, the B(ind)T(orture)K(ill) Killer. Note the placid, innocuous demeanor he maintains while...
View ArticleDec 12, Dorian Rolston: Method Men
1There’s nothing I can tell you about Nicholson Baker that you wouldn’t be better served just going ahead and reading him. In fact the whole point of this piece is to get you to do just that. But this...
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Dec 13: M.F.K. > D.F.W.: Reconsidering the Lobster
by Lawrence LenhartThe first time David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” was dropped in my lap, I wasn’t impressed. The timing was all wrong anyway. It arrived the same semester as Peter...
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Dec 14, Robert Atwan, Contented With Content: Autobiographical Reflections...
Contented With Content:Autobiographical Reflections on the Aesthetics of the EssayRobert Atwan*Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud. —Joseph Addison (1672-1719)1.A few years ago,...
View ArticleDec 15, Brian Oliu: Scaffolding
I am about to close on a house. It is a nice place in a fabulous location. There is a lot of brick. Like most houses in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, it is very long—there is something about the South that...
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