On Sylvia Spruck Wrigley's "Narrative, Creative, Lyrical, Flash"

How to write nonfiction that hits like fiction does.

Happy February, friends!

I live in Philadelphia, and the biggest thing that happened here this month, obviously, was the Super Bowl. I missed the game because I already had fancy dinner reservations, but you can’t really miss the Super Bowl when you live in Philly and the Eagles are playing.

I also took a short nonfiction class with the essayist and speculative fiction writer Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, whose Accidents and Incidents newsletter is one of the few emails I actually look forward to receiving. I had spent the latter half of 2022 fiddling with new creative forms, mostly personal essays and poetry, neither of which I’d really poked at since college or even high school. I’m pleased to have had some tiny little successes – as you can see in the News section below! – but I’ve also been looking for ways to get some formal training without, y’know, doing another MFA. Sylvia’s class was informative, generative, and heartening, and I’d recommend it for anyone interested in dipping a toe – or a whole limb – into short nonfiction.

News

My horror-leaning Shakespearean sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress,” will be published in Shakespeare Unleashed in April 2023.

My essay “Form as Laboratory,” as well as my poems “The Queen Converses with Her Jailer,” “Further Experiments in the Revival of Organisms,” and “Observations of a Shoggoth,” will be published in the Horror Writers Association’s dark poetry column in spring 2023.

My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023.

My essay “‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” will be published in Heritage Local in 2023.

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley’s “Narrative, Creative, Lyrical, Flash: Exploring the Diversity of Short Nonfiction”

This live, two-hour class was hosted through the Rambo Academy. Here’s the official description:

As fiction writers, we invest considerable time and effort on storycraft, worldbuilding and structure, while treating nonfiction as mundane and unimaginative. This discovery course will introduce short work from a range of sub-genres, from reviews and food writing to personal essays and experimental structures. Together, we’ll read a carefully curated collection to explore narrative drive in nonfiction and how innovative authors are combining research, literary devices, personal experience and fact to achieve thought-provoking work. We’ll also look at modern structures such as hermit crab essays and nonfiction flash, to see how fiction techniques and frameworks can create the bones of an engaging piece that is compelling, informative and powerful.

Which does, indeed, about sum it up! We talked about what constitutes creative nonfiction (aka CNF); specific CNF genres, such as the personal essay, literary journalism, and the topical essay; literary techniques often used in fiction, like point of view, verb tense, and sensory information, that can also make creative nonfiction more engaging; how to use nonfiction techniques, such as chapter headings or footnotes, in a nonstandard way; and experimental structures, like hermit crab essays, that can keep you from veering too far into the realm of the academic and help you unpack the question of what story, exactly, you’re trying to tell.

I’m not going to enumerate everything we discussed, partly because it was a very full two hours and partly because I want you to take Sylvia’s class if it’s offered again! (You can see I do not have this problem with Save the Cat.) But I will tell you the items from the class that resonated with me the most, the unexpected little gems that this class presented to me.

Jay Rayner’s “The Polo Lounge at the Dorchester Hotel”

I’m a sucker for a savage restaurant review, and this is an exemplar of the form. It’s specific, evocative, and cruel. (Sylvia also mentioned that during the pandemic, when there were no restaurants to review, Jay Rayner cooked his own food at home and savaged that instead, which I think is very funny.) However, I also appreciate this essay because it caused me to go and reread my all-time favorite restaurant review, Pete Wells’s New York Times reassessment of Peter Luger Steak House. Specifically, it made me think about why I think the Wells essay is so much better than the Rayner essay, even though they’re both fantastically fun to read. It’s the difference between self-righteously indignant language like this, from Rayner:

Editors don’t send their journalists to cover wars because they like misery and carnage. They do so because the readers need to know about the carnage. By the same token, albeit with rather less moral urgency, I didn’t go to the pop-up of the Polo Lounge on the rooftop of London’s Dorchester Hotel because I like watching rich people pay ludicrous prices for cack-handed food that’s a gross insult to good taste, manners and commercial decency. I went because some risible hospitality operations need to be called out. Being positive is all well and good, but that shouldn’t mean absolute shockers get a free pass.

…and this, from Wells, also indignant but also regretful, erudite, a little baffled, and somehow – even though we’re talking about a damn steakhouse – tragic:

…But those other restaurants are not Peter Luger, as Friedrich Nietzsche might have said.

“When in this essay I declare war upon Wagner,” Nietzsche wrote in “The Case of Wagner,” “the last thing I want to do is start a celebration for any other musicians. Other musicians don’t count compared to Wagner.”

I could say the same thing about other steakhouses — compared to Peter Luger, they don’t count. Luger is not the city’s oldest, but it’s the one in which age, tradition, superb beef, blistering heat, an instinctive avoidance of anything fancy and an immensely attractive self-assurance came together to produce something that felt less like a restaurant than an affirmation of life, or at least life as it is lived in New York City. This sounds ridiculously grand. Years ago I thought it was true, though, and so did other people.

Mordecai Martin’s “The Writer Goes to School: A Translation and Overidentification between Translator and Translated in 54 Footnotes”

This is a translation of a Yiddish text. As the title says, it includes fifty-four footnotes. The “personal essay,” so to speak, is contained in these footnotes. I loved this. I’d never seen an essay written in quite this form before, and I love how the form reinforces what the essay itself is about: family, history, tradition, language, knowledge, Jewishness, the dead.

A quote, the same one Sylvia shared with us:

2 I came to Yiddish for the ghosts. I have been convinced from a young age that I will one day encounter my great grandparents, dead decades before my birth. What will I say to them? What language to greet them in, to show I have spent my time honoring them and their memories? The problem with ghosts is that they’re people. The more I learn about my great grandparents, both specifically from family lore and in general conclusions about their generation, I wonder if they WOULD be proud if I spoke to them in Yiddish. Possibly more bemused than proud. Why did I waste time not being a nice American boy, like they had hoped for, like they had been so proud to see my father and his brothers becoming? Then again, my father and mother have so little insight into their own grandparents’ interiority. It was not a time for showing children what made your heart bleed. Bubbe sold sweaters in a little shopping cart around Brownsville. Zayde was a waiter in Crown Heights, though all he ever cooked was cucumber salad. Wispy little ghosts, remembered for wispy little gestures. Better, now that my Yiddish is coming along, to study literature.

John McPhee’s “Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out”

Finally, this one, an essay on writing from the New Yorker, speaks to me because it gives me permission to do what I already wanted to do:

You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in. If not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

So that’s all there is to it, really. You pursue what you’re interested in, and you cast everything else aside. But that’s true for all writing, isn’t it? Nonfiction, fiction, poetry. And maybe life.