The Work Room Interview: Eula Biss + Sara Levine on Messing the Essay + Inventive Research
Interview by Cassie Archdeacon
CA: In your description for Research and the Personal Essay you write: “An inventive research process can enliven a personal essay and drive the writer into a more expansive understanding of their own experience.” Are there any modes of research that you've used or witnessed that come to mind as particularly "inventive"?
EB: Sometimes inventive research involves materials that are not obvious sources of information — I’m thinking of Megan Stielstra dissecting deer hearts as a way of writing about her father — or experiences, like Aisha Sabatini Sloan riding through Detroit in her cousin’s police car for a day, or Alex Chee getting a tarot reading, or Jazmina Barrera visiting a series of lighthouses. A student of mine once wanted to write about his relationship to his body, so he found a group of nudists who met regularly to bowl naked. He bowled with them a few times and was writing a comic essay about the experience when one of the nudists died and he was invited to the funeral — a nude funeral. Suddenly he was in deeper than he expected to be, and that’s where the work gets interesting! Inventive research can allow you to meet your subject obliquely and range in a direction that isn’t obvious. My research for an essay about chronic pain took me from Dante’s Inferno to the Beaufort scale for measuring the wind to ancient mathematical controversies over whether or not zero is a number. None of this was explicitly about pain, but it helped me think about the problem of pain in ways that were new to me. Ideally, research generates surprises.
CA: The class that you are teaching together, Messing the Essay, toys with the idea that "there’s nothing you can’t do with the essay”. I'm curious about applying this across genre lines—do you think there's also no genre you can't do with the essay?
SL: The essay is a supple form that happily cross-pollinates with other genres. Thus, essayistic poems (Anne Carson, Prageeta Sharma) or essayistic novels (Tristram Shandy, The Man Without Qualities) or essayistic plays (let's stop with Hamlet for easy reference). This is not to say that "anything goes," only that a clear essayistic impulse—to weigh, to speculate, to acknowledge uncertainty—mingles easily with other forms.
EB: Yes, part of what makes the essay so exciting to work with is that it “does” other genres all the time. There are essays that read like short stories and essays that employ the tools of poetry and essays that draw on the strategies of reportage and the techniques of new journalism. Some of my favorite essays “do” several genres at once, and are, as a result, almost impossible to categorize.
CA: How have the expectations of the essay evolved throughout your career? What about throughout history?
EB: When I first started writing essays over twenty years ago, I didn’t initially call what I was doing “essay,” in part because of the common expectation then that essays should have an explicit argument. I didn’t know enough back then to refute that expectation, so I called what I was doing poetry, which I knew more about. I still run into that expectation of an explicit argument sometimes, but there seems to be a lot more room now for essays to make their arguments implicitly, or to do something else entirely.
SL: I began my studies with a scholarly design to distinguish the essay from its adjacent prose forms, the short story and the prose poem. I'm still interested in what makes an essay an essay, but my desire to pinpoint the hallmarks of the form in every essay I read has relaxed a bit with time. Partly this stems from a desire to make sure what gets called an essay stays inclusive. I get frustrated, for example, by essay anthologies that represent the 19th century with a wall of white writers—and then throw in James Baldwin as if the African-American essay started in 1955. There is really no singular history of the essay. Usually there is just somebody telling you “this is what the essay is” and declining to look beyond the lines they have drawn.