by Hillery Stone
One sunny Saturday in the spring of 2023, my beloved dog was hit by a car. The circumstances were a series of heartbreaking missteps: a friend’s chaotic house during her daughter’s birthday party, a door left open, a group of strangers who, trying to catch my disoriented dog, chased him into the street.
If you’ve ever had a pet you rarely parted from, who has been your steady, protective shadow for years, you will understand the heavy grief I experienced after he died that afternoon in the animal ER. I wept; I woke up in the night when I didn’t feel him on the bed; I wrote down fragments of things I felt and sensed but couldn’t complete.
This is the life of the writer. We experience a tragedy on two levels: the first is the one that feels, that grieves, that aches in every room where he isn’t; that plans the ceremony for the children, that speaks to the vet on the phone about the bill for the dead dog. The second level is the writer who is gathering evidence, who understands this story will grow more stark with time—who knows it’s too painful to write about yet but will nonetheless hold onto it in fragments, for down the road it will become part of the experience of sensemaking.
When you are writing a personal essay, you have to ask yourself over and over, what is this about? Not the details, not the screeching tires, not the scarf that smelled like gasoline and detangler. What is this about?
Essays attempt to understand. They’re digressive, composed efforts to answer our great questions, make sense of our stories, the misfortunes and longings that other people experience, too; our larger histories, our collective human reaching toward meaning. It isn’t enough just to tell our own experience. Vivian Gornick, master essayist, writes “A subject beyond the self must be intersected with.”
Which is to say, in order to write a personal essay that reaches your readers, that persuades your readers, you must write something that resonates beyond itself. Your dog is all dogs, all loss. Your story is part of a universe.
What I bring to my life as a writer is what I bring to the classroom when I teach: a devotion to the imaginative, unusual relationships we can make between things. Faint associations, appositions, contradictions; if we close-read our texts and experiences, we will find these connections everywhere.
To read a text “closely”—to linger on it, notice its language, question it, make connections—is an active, affectionate process. To look deeply at anything is a loving act. But I don’t talk about love in the classroom, at least not in the beginning. Instead, my students look for patterns in texts from the first day: words with “heat”; images; concepts. They gather them and use a dictionary, in groups, to look them up. They “draw” whole texts using shapes to delineate sections of evidence. They argue with texts using lived experience, sympathize with texts using stories from their parents, stories from TV shows and philosophy class and the Bible. We do this textual interacting with poetry, personal and critical essays, films, art; we do it with well-known published writers and with each other, understanding that our writing, too, is bountiful and full of promise.
Many personal essays will not come out of a place of grief. They will come out of other experiences, other stories. They will come out of a moment of shame, or embarrassment, longing, or the complications of a particular joy. They will come out of a moment that feels like a small fire inside—you don’t even have to know why it burns, only recognize that it does and be willing to follow it and feel it out.
I help my students get to these moments with a series of guided free-writes—describing a painting, a familial ritual or a place—and then I walk them through building an essay. By close-reading their writing and discussing it with each other, they form a guiding question to investigate. Then they begin to gather evidence, to help them think more deeply about the question.
What is evidence? It is a moment remembered from a novel, a story overheard, a movie, an experience. It’s anything you use to think through your concepts. I find, in my teaching, that my students often worry that they don’t have anything to write about. But they always do. We look at their guided free-writes together and highlight patterns of connected words or moments of sharp, conceptual thinking. Sometimes it’s an “ah-ha” moment; a small revelation.
One student last semester, following a prompt to recall a family tradition, wrote about his grandmother who began to burn the traditional family rice every night at dinner. When I asked him why he thought the story had stayed all these years in his mind, he said that he had been the only one in the house who noticed that something was very wrong with her.
I can get a lot from asking students to tell me more about their story: more details, more observations, more tension. What is happening outside of this scene? What haven’t you said yet? What social or political issues might be at play? What deeper truth might you be covering up?
Mining their own evidence means reading themselves. Looking more closely at what they’ve written; swapping with another student and finding patterns in each other’s work. What did your partner perhaps unintentionally share? What clues did she leave in the language, or in the white space?
Modeling essays that are well constructed and beautifully written is always, of course, the best practice. In the Personal Essay unit, we read two to three essays a week, often in class together. We can’t talk about everything in every essay, but each class models some essential part: a compelling beginning; the use of an outside text to complicate the writer’s thinking; a powerful personal scene; an intriguing end that offers something new to the argument.
One of my favorite essays to use as a model is Chang-rae Lee’s “Coming Home Again” in which Lee recounts, in wonderfully detailed stories, how his Korean mother kept his family loved and afloat with food. He details the salted stew meats, the scallion-and-hot-pepper pancakes; the radish kimchi which would take over a room with its odor. Through these cooking and eating scenes, we see conflicts develop in his family as Lee becomes a teenager and goes off to boarding school and a culture vastly different from his own. The pain for him, and for his mother, is palpable, but so is the need to break away. In one scene my students always love, his mother shows up at boarding school with an entire Korean meal in a cooler—which he details over multiple paragraphs—and, deeply homesick, Lee eats until he throws up.
I come close to crying every time I finish this essay. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve read it before. So how does the essay move us and persuade us?
I have the students look for words, as they’ve learned to do, words being the underbelly of the essay. Hunger. Educated. Separation. We’ll work on finding other words in the text that are synonymous or leaning the same way. Ravenous. Training. Disconnected.
Then I’ll push them to put two or three words into a sentence, to articulate a relationship between them. This is important work, and needs to be done over and over to break their habit of simply listing concepts as an idea.
Here’s an example from class: rather than saying simply “the essay is about hunger, separation and education” I’ll push them until there are logical and interesting relationships between the words: “the essay wrestles with how education can separate a child from his immigrant parents, and all the food in the world can’t fill the hunger of that lost family bond”.
Many conventional writing guides will tell you to start an essay by sketching an outline and writing an introduction. For me, this has always seemed backward. I have my students sketch an outline of their personal essay much later in the writing process, and I have them write the introduction—which I call a beginning—last. Here’s why.
Writing a personal essay is an enactment of the thinking process. You are literally thinking through a problem or a question while you are writing. This is where the intimacy comes from. You can reenact as you read. It isn’t until you’ve done this work of figuring out what it is you’re saying that you can write your artful fishhook of a beginning.
Robert Atwan, who founded The Best American Essays series, wrote in an introduction that the 5-paragraph essay we all learned in high school is nearly the opposite of the true form of the essay. The traditional 5-paragraph essay, he writes, “not only paraded relentlessly to its conclusion; it began with its conclusion. Its structure permitted no change of direction, no reconsideration, no wrestling with ideas.”
The powerful, professional essays we read out in the world now use precisely these essential mechanisms: meaningful digressions, reconsiderations, wrestling with ideas. A real essay, Atwan says, never begins with its end.
And a real essay, at least a personal one, is always an artfully and painstakingly made exposition, an intersecting of the personal and the political; a thoughtful, well-crafted argument, no matter how remarkable the subject. The writer V.S. Pritchett said of the genre, “It’s all in the art; you get no credit for living.”