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The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by john d'agata st. paul, mn: graywolf press, 2009. 656 pages, paper, $23.00
Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings eileen pollack boston: wadsworth-cengage learning, 2010. 424 pages, paper, $60.99
The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction robert root lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2008. 224 pages, paper, $29.95
Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir sue william silverman athens: university of georgia press, 2009. 272 pages, paper, $19.95
John D'Agata is out to change the essay canon. And he's succeeding.
That canon, as Lynn Bloom showed over a decade ago in an article in College English, is a teaching canon. The essays that dominate it come from the anthologies designed for first-year writing classes. Editors load these anthologies full of short, accessible essays that can be used by beginning teachers to model one or another rhetorical mode for distracted 19-year-olds.
In the late 1990s D'Agata and his mentor, the late Deborah Tall, began looking for essays they considered more poetic and "literary" than the usual fare. They soon began publishing what they called lyric essays in the Seneca Review, which Tall edited at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, D'Agata's alma mater. In 2003 D'Agata, who is a fine writer of nonfiction, edited The Next American Essay (Graywolf), an innovative anthology that contained an essay a year (except for 1992, which got two) for every year from 1975 (not coincidentally the year of D'Agata's birth) to 2003. In lyrical and personal headnotes, D'Agata introduced his readers to lyrical and personal essays. "I want you preoccupied with art in this book," he warned them on page 1, "not with facts for the sake of facts."
Now D'Agata has extended his project beyond late twentieth-century America. In his new anthology, The Lost Origins of the Essay (again with Graywolf), D'Agata ranges across 6,000 years, dips into the cultures of several nations, and off ers us 49 essays meant to "claim to an alternative tradition."
If the bugbear of D'Agata's previous anthology was facts, this one is haunted by commerce. "I am here in search of art," he announces. "I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce."
Graywolf, however, needs to...