The Best American Essays 2013 (2 page)

In that first year, for example, a new magazine with the zany name
ZYZZYVA
(see Dagoberto Gilb, “A Little Bit of Fun Before He Died,” p. 254) was launched by Howard Junker in San Francisco. Taking its title from the last word in the dictionary (at least it is in my
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
),
ZYZZYVA
, now under the editorial direction of Laura Cogan, has remained one of the leading West Coast literary journals, consistently and attractively publishing many of the nation’s outstanding writers.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that this series features both writers and the periodicals that publish them. You may not notice at first glance, but this collection is almost completely dependent upon the existence of literary magazines. If you glance down the table of contents you’ll see, aside from prominent periodicals such as
The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine
, and
Harper’s Magazine
, some magazines you may never have heard of—
Hotel Amerika, Hobart, River Teeth, The Normal School, South Loop Review
. If you look at the list of notable essays in the back, you’ll see perhaps even more unfamiliar journals:
n + 1, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, Lake Effect, Fifth Wednesday, Zone 3
. Some periodicals, of course, like
Ploughshares, The Paris Review
, and
Prairie Schooner
, are preeminent among literary periodicals and are well known to writers who submit their work regularly and to editors and agents who are always scouting for new work and looking to discover new voices and emerging writers. But for the most part, I think it’s safe to say that the average American reader is unfamiliar with many of the literary magazines featured or listed in this collection.

The vitality of American literature has long depended on the almost heroic efforts of literary magazines, which manage to survive today despite budget reductions, rising costs, and an unstable publishing environment. It’s true that every year I see magazines fold—
The
Partisan Review
, for example, unfortunately stopped publishing in 2003—but new magazines keep appearing. Some seem to rise out of the ashes of their predecessors. When the excellent
Ohio Review
came to an end in 1999, one of its associate editors, David Lazar, created
Hotel Amerika
(see Marcia Aldrich, “The Art of Being Born,” p. 132), which he took with him to Columbia College in Chicago when he moved there in 2006. Featuring a generous sampling of cutting-edge writing in all genres, traditional and hybrid,
Hotel Amerika
has maintained an eye-catching and creative literary identity for over a decade. It is always a pleasure to read.

Another impressive magazine coming out of Chicago’s Columbia College is
South Loop Review
(see Vicki Weiqi Yang’s “Field Notes on Hair,” p. 217). Published annually and edited by ReLynn Hansen,
South Loop Review
concentrates on creative nonfiction and art, describing itself as designed “for audiences who look for strong, compelling resonant voices that give insight into contemporary experience and cultural phenomena.” With an artistic focus, the editors “give greater emphasis to non-linear narratives and blended genres” and “welcome montage and illustrated essays, as well as narrative photography.” Readers interested in the creative process will appreciate the journal’s dedication to the craft of nonfiction and its interviews with some of the nation’s most innovative writers; a recent issue, for example, featured David Shields on the always challenging topic of truth and nonfiction.

Other relatively new magazines also focus exclusively on nonfiction. One of the most highly respected is
River Teeth
, a “Journal of Nonfiction Narrative” founded by Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman in 1999 on the campus of Ashland University in Ohio. Although the general reading public may not be familiar with the journal, it is well known to nonfiction writers for its exacting standards and wide-ranging topics (the two essays reprinted here—Steven Harvey, “The Book of Knowledge, p. 274, and Jon Kerstetter, “Triage,” p. 123—come from the same issue).
River Teeth
also sponsors a premier annual nonfiction writing conference.

Another recent addition to the literary magazine scene is
The Normal School
(see Ander Monson, “The Exhibit Will Be So Marked,” p. 153), which takes its name from the old term for a teachers college. Now in its sixth year of print publication, the magazine was founded by Sophie Beck, Steven Church, and Matt Roberts and is supported by CSU Fresno, where Steven Church (whose own work has appeared in
The Best American Essays
) teaches creative writing. According to Sophie Beck, the magazine was originally conceived as a home for “homeless writing—things that were too long, too short, too experimental, or unclassifiable that could be nestled in with classically crafted pieces.” A large-size, typographically inviting magazine that publishes all genres,
The Normal School
is indispensable for anyone interested in discovering new directions in the contemporary essay.

Lately a number of literary journals have abandoned print for online formats. Yet
Hobart
(see Tod Goldberg, “When They Let Them Bleed,” p. 205) began life online in 2001 but then launched into print a few years later. Edited by Aaron Burch,
Hobart
(not affiliated with the New York State men’s college of that name), though published irregularly, still maintains an active online presence. Though it modestly calls itself “another literary journal,”
Hobart
is far from typical, especially in some of its theme issues, which, like the one on “Luck” published in 2012 to commemorate the magazine’s thirteenth issue, feature a captivating range of writing and some remarkably quirky items.

These are just a few of the literary journals I read regularly. Years ago, when I taught courses on magazine writing I’d begin by asking students which magazines they would submit work to. It should probably not have come as a surprise, but I was nevertheless surprised to see that nearly all of them said
The New Yorker
. I assume this response had less to do with their talents and ambition than with the fact that it was the only magazine of a literary nature they’d heard of.
The New Yorker
is without doubt a great magazine, one that publishes memorable work issue after issue, forty-seven issues a year. Yet it’s interesting to note that in this collection
The New Yorker
appears only once. This volume is indeed a tribute to the astonishing amount of great writing that is consistently published year after year in what we used to call the “little magazines.”

The Best American Essays
features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure that their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays (with full citations) to the address above.

As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editors, Deanne Urmy and Nicole Angeloro. Liz Duvall once again expertly handled production. I remember the excitement of reading the first essay I’d seen by Cheryl Strayed, then a graduate student in creative writing at Syracuse University. “Heroin/e” appeared in what was one of my favorite magazines at the time,
Doubletake
, in 1999 and was selected by Alan Lightman for
The Best American Essays 2000
. Since that early appearance, Cheryl Strayed has emerged as one of the country’s outstanding nonfiction authors. It is a pleasure to have her return to the series, this time as an editor. Her keen sense of prose narrative is evident throughout this collection, as is her receptivity to a diversity of voices and periodicals. So get ready to experience an abundance of exciting essays.

R.A.

W
HEN I TEACH WRITING
I tell my students that the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be
and nothing was ever the same again
. By which I mean the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay. Also there should be something at stake in the writing of it. Or, better yet, everything.

The stakes of my own first essay couldn’t have been higher, beginning as it did at dawn in Taos, New Mexico, on the Fourth of July in 1997, when I woke abruptly and tearfully, as if from a nightmare, and sat straight up in my bed with the icy realization that I was forgetting my mother. It was a strange thing to realize, given the fact that in the six years she’d been dead I’d written about little else, my nascent body of work a mosaic of her too-short life. My mother the horse-crazy army brat. My mother the pregnant nineteen-year-old bride. My mother the battered wife. My mother the scrounging-to-get-by single mom. My mother the bread-baking, back-to-the-land animal lover. My mother the intellectually avid optimist. My mother the forty-five-year-old cancer-riddled corpse.

You could fairly well say she was my subject, though
obsession
might be a more accurate word. Both before and after her young death she was at the heart of every short story I wrote, and she was also at the center of the novel I was writing then—on that Fourth of July in Taos, where I was a resident at the Wurlitzer Foundation. Teresa Wood, the character I’d based on her, was my mother condensed and expanded, magnified and muted, twisted and reformed—my attempt to create the purest expression of who she was. But on that morning when I woke with a sense of urgency and regret, I understood in a flash that I’d done the opposite. All of that conflating and distilling and mishmashing hadn’t made my mother more pure. It hadn’t conjured her back to the world. It had only taken her from me in yet another way. Fiction had ruined her.
I
had ruined her. It was an unbearable thing to realize all at once. And so I did the only thing I could do. I went immediately to my computer and began writing with one simple mission: to remember my mother.

I wasn’t trying to write anything that would be anything. The word
essay
didn’t even come into my mind. I wanted only to transfer my version of the actual truth from my head to the page so a document of my mother’s life and death would exist as a buffer against the other, fictional version I felt so deeply compelled to write. I began with a description of her naked dead body. How strange that moment was—when she was so profoundly there while also being so profoundly not there. From that first line onward, the words came raw and reckless and ravaging all day long. The hours passed without my noticing as I wrote and rewrote each sentence. I didn’t eat. Or think. In my memory, I didn’t even rise from my desk, though I must have. Out of a feeling of emotional necessity rather than artistic intention, I wrote the true story of my mother’s cancer diagnosis and the ugly death that followed only seven weeks later; of the way my enormous grief turned into a self-destructive sorrow that manifested itself in heroin use (among other things); and of the brokenhearted acceptance I finally had to bear. By the time I stopped writing it was dark outside. Night. I paced the room as the pages I’d written printed out, and then I read them out loud to myself, understanding only then what I’d done. Written an essay.

The word
essay
means “to try,” “to attempt,” “to test.” It’s what I was doing that day when I woke and sobbed in my bed and ended up hours later with an essay in my hands. Trying, attempting, and testing are what writers do in every form, of course—the making of literature is always an experiment—but I think those words convey something essential and particular about the art of the essay. Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known. A good essay isn’t a report of what happened. It’s a reach for the stuff beyond and beneath. Essayists begin with an objective truth and attempt to find a greater, grander truth by testing fact against subjective interpretations of experiences and ideas, memories and theories. They try to make meaning of actual life, even if an awful lot has yet to be figured out. They grapple and reflect with seriousness and humor. They philosophize and confess with intellect and emotion. They recollect and reimagine private and public history with a combination of clarity and conjecture. They venture into what happened and why with a complicated collision of documented proof and impossible-to-pin-down remembrances. And they follow the answers to the questions that arise in the course of writing about what happened wherever they go. The essay’s engine is curiosity; its territory is the open road.