Writing

I love the essay form with an unbridled passion. I think essays offer a power and possibility missing in the novel now, not because essays purport to offer truth, more that I feel a bit stuck with novels. Realist fiction, though imbued with a liberal humanism to understand others, seems to me mired in rules about plot and how story unfolds, building to conclusions, etc, etc. I even get frustrated with how detail is used to reveal characters’ emotions…. You can read more about this here in my review of Kate Briggs’ extraordinary novel The Long Form. So, right now – and this is really a statement of this moment vs. some hard-and-fast rule – I’m interested in the hybrid possibilities of the essay. In all of this I'm grateful for the work of artists like Rochelle Feinstein and Marlene McCarty, Colleen Asper, Ellie Ga, Ellen Lesperance and Kate Newby all of whom have also inspired how I write.