How We Speak to One Another

ANDER MONSON

An Introduction to How We Speak to One Another

Dear Reader,

I want to tell you something about what it felt like to be alive today, November 16, 2015, which means I want to tell you what it felt like to be alive on this date in 1999. I was listening then to the Backstreet Boys, probably, or maybe the bands Codeine or Morphine, living in an unfinished basement a mile away from the Iowa State University campus with a Spice Girls poster in my bedroom there. To get to class, I’d walk over the trestle of a retired railroad bridge that crossed a hundred feet above Squaw Creek, then by a row of power plants. Their steam billowed out in clouds and smelled strongly, strangely, like maple. It clung to me as I passed. Later I’d wonder, catching another whiff of it on my clothes, if I had been sloppy at IHOP or was being haunted by a Canadian ghost. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that odd steam or wondered what it was or what was going on in the building ominously labeled Animal Science II and why I dreamed of piggy shrieks and tornados.

That same month The Best American Essays 1999 debuted. In his introduction to the volume, guest editor Edward Hoagland writes that:

Essays are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter. You multiply yourself as a writer, gaining height as though jumping on a trampoline, if you can catch the gist of what other people have also been feeling and clarify it for them.

That night, while wandering about the campus, peering into windows for signs of actual human life, as was my habit, I encountered a raccoon peeking up from a sewer grate installed into a curb. I caught its eyes glittering from the streetlight, watching me as I passed, so I paused and turned. We faced each other and did not move for quite some time.

In 1999 I had the custom of carrying around rolls of Lion Mints, promotional peppermints that supported the local Lions Club. I’d buy them for twenty-five cents from a plastic tray that adorned the countertop of the Salvation Army thrift store in Houghton, Michigan, a former mining town that has not had a working mine in fifty years. I was obsessed with these Lion Mints. I bought dozens of rolls of them when I was home and brought as many as I could to carry back with me to Iowa. I still ate candy then, still wasn’t as concerned with the damage I would later find out I had done to my teeth, that in fact I’m still fixing, sixteen years later.

Lion Mints were dispensed in red plastic trays that read “Lion Mints: A Fundraiser for Lions Club Projects.” Whatever those projects were, they didn’t say. In each tray was a slot to slip in coins to pay for what you took. The suggested price was a quarter, but you could just as easily slide a nickel into the slot and hear it chunk down and know that no one would know what kind of coin you paid with and take a roll of mints. Sometimes I took five or six rolls, congratulating myself for beating the system as I headed out the door.

So that night in Iowa, when I faced the sewer grate against the backdrop of the unidentifiable maple mist, I had a roll of Lion Mints with me. I crouched, pulled out a mint, and rolled it to the raccoon. It grabbed the mint with its claws and clutched it to its chest and appraised me for a moment as if it was about to tell me something true before it disappeared into the darkness.

I haven’t thought about Lion Mints for at least a decade now, but thinking about that Hoagland quote, somehow they come to mind. It turns out they’re made by Sayklly’s Candies, an Upper Michigan confectioner, and I’d always thought they were unique to the Upper Midwest, if not my Upper Peninsula, though that appears not to be true. Do you remember them? Do you recognize them? What did they mean to you? I wonder now: What does the Lions Club even do? What exactly was I (under)funding? What cause was I cheating? Why did I love these things so much that I brought rolls of them with me to Iowa, and why did I roll one to a raccoon in the sewer?

Furthermore, what did the raccoon make of this gift? Did it hoard the mint or bring it to its family, break it into pieces, and serve it to its children from its extended paw-claw? Did it present it to its potential mate as proof of its kick-ass scavenging abilities? Did it think to itself about the provenance of its bounty? Or did it selfishly eat the mint itself without thinking, believing that such providence should not be questioned? Or did it taste the mint and spit it out, incredulous, thinking, This is what you’ve brought me? This is what your culture’s for? and pad off into the darkness in disgust?

Hoagland says: when we write essays, we’re writing to one another. Though I don’t think he’d say it this way, exactly, I think he means that essaying is networking, echoing both those with MBAS and those who spend their days connecting machine to machine. In the afterword to the book Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, edited by the recipient of these letters, the poet Laura Sims, Ann Beattie notes that “whether overly or overtly, whether unconsciously, or even as a prank, writers write to other writers. Just because they’ve died, those writers don’t disappear.”

That’s the thing: we keep speaking to one another, don’t we? Even if we don’t say it out loud. Even if maybe we don’t even know what it is we do.

I wouldn’t run across Hoagland’s introduction until 2009, when I found The Best American Essays 1999 in a Tucson, Arizona, Goodwill. If he was speaking to me, he wasn’t doing it efficiently.

It’s depressing but not surprising that it took me ten years to discover Hoagland. I’m pretty single-minded, obsessive, and slow; like an ai, a maned sloth only found in southeastern Brazil, I don’t read much. I suppose that means I shouldn’t have the hubris to be here trying to articulate something about the essay or what brought me to it, but we essayists seem to like to essay about the essay; we don’t mind writing about what we don’t entirely know. We roll with our Lion Mints metastyle; we wait for our thoughts to metastasize. Sometimes something interesting happens.

For a long time I’d thought of my own essaying as mine work, a kind of solo exploration down here in the dark. But then one time I was chipping at a hunk of rock, watching my tool spark, and suddenly it broke through a wall and ran into another tunnel—like the one John D’Agata dug in Halls of Fame, for instance—and I realized, oh, hey: this is a cool tunnel. And I saw him there, grinning, and grilling something unidentifiable. “Yo, John, I like what you’re doing here,” I said, awkwardly. “I thought I was alone. But you shouldn’t be grilling down here. Fumes and all.” He just looked at me like I was a fool. “This is how you do it, G,” he said. And I was. But now I was a fool with a new tunnel to explore.

So I followed that tunnel awhile and saw where it intersected with others, like an Anne Carson tunnel, an Albert Goldbarth tunnel, a Jerald Walker tunnel, or a Jenny Boully tunnel, and farther down it hit a Theodor Adorno tunnel, and then it led to Virginia Woolf, and farther back it all got honeycombed and smelled like fresh animal and glittered wildly, and all of a sudden I saw that this dark underneath that I’d been moving through was both a little less dark and just a bit smaller than I’d thought before. And in the dark down there, I found myself craving a Lion Mint, if just for the little light they make in the mouth when you crunch them up.

That is, when we’re speaking essay, we’re not just talking to ourselves. We’re not just working by ourselves. Or: we don’t have to be. Essaying isn’t just about the “I”: it’s about the “we.” It takes a community. It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Is this why essays feel more naturally collaborative than other literary forms? More communicative? Maybe this is in part why working on an essay while online has always felt more natural to me than trying to stay Wi-Fied and yet get a poem right. Maybe this is why Facebook is basically, as David Shields rightly once said (and what a tunnel that dude made), a personal essay machine.

The New York Times tells me that we are in the age of the essay. We are, I think, but we’ve always been. Maybe we just didn’t know it before. We’re caught in the literary present tense, still being spoken to in whispers by Sei Shōnagon. Good essays essay interminably. They are little simulated minds calculating in the dark, waiting for someone to stumble into their tunnel. They keep listing their hateful things, tallying the pleasures of the contrary. They keep thinking, keep sorting through their stimuli, keep uncovering and echoing meaning. An essay is thinking in action. And interesting thinking doesn’t age.

But is it any surprise then that the age of the essay coincides with the age of the internet? I know, I know. The thinking, such as it is, that the internet fosters sometimes seems an anathema to essay. It coasts along the surface, while good essays instead go down. But the connections that the internet fosters seem to me quite well suited to making and disseminating essays. That Hoaglandian “speaking to one another” now happens increasingly fast. It’s not that essays are going viral, exactly: they’re too dense for that, the good ones anyway; they require more work than the six-second Vines that sprout and spread so easily now and creep up the side of my unsold house in Michigan and get inside the siding. But essays online are more accessible, and they get out there more quickly. Thanks to Google, if you’re speaking to or with or of others, they might just get an instantaneous notification that their names just showed up and boom, you’re connected.

Whether it’s good or bad or something else, this availability has become a fact of the modern age. And sure, the numbers mean that we don’t read even a fraction of what we come across. But still, when we do, and when I read something that gets me hot, I want to tell someone about it. It’s not a shocker that essays, the most rhizomic of literary forms, flourish in the networked—the social—age.

This thought was in part the impetus for Essay Daily (essaydaily.org), which came online the first week of 2010 as a website without a big idea but with a hunger for connection. Mainly what I wanted was some kind of place to aggregate our thinking, for us to speak more directly to other practitioners of essays, and to grow the tribe. It quickly became a space for speaking back—explicitly—to those whose words found their way to us. Even if we can’t actually contact Virginia Woolf, if we can’t rouse her ghost, she still speaks to me and through me, and I want to honor that. Or H. L. Mencken, or Audre Lorde. Or Christopher Smart. Or Robert Burton, here still in my head anatomizing my melancholy.

A couple of years after I hatched the site, I read an essay by Craig Reinbold—then one of my students in the MFA program at the University of Arizona—that manifested that exact kind of excitement on making a connection, this time over a translation of a line of Chekhov, how one translator renders a particular post-lake feeling as “delicious,” and how that choice bewitched Craig, and how flat-out stoked (there is no better word for this) he was to tell us about it. And tell us he did. I could feel a spark, reading it. I told him so. It’s a great essay, and these five years later, he’s finally published it in the literary magazine Zone 3. You should check it out and see if it speaks to you. If I were writing online I’d just link it, but here all I can do is tell you about his work. In a later essay, Craig doubles down on this and writes about how much he loves the music of the band Morphine, and how much he wants to share that with you. I happen also to love Morphine, though I jumped off the train an album or two before Mark Sandman, the singer, died onstage.

In the electric light of his excitement, I understood that I had found a fellow traveler, and I think I told him so (Craig, if I didn’t, I am so doing now: welcome to my tunnel; I’m happy to have intersected yours), and so I talked him into joining the site as managing editor and coediting this anthology. He held that post for a few years, until the end of 2015. His tunnel’s only gotten bigger since.

Essay Daily doesn’t work as a solo effort, its raison d’être being connection and conversation. And we’ve added many other voices since. As of this writing (November 16, 2015, quickly approaching midnight, Arizona time, which exists in a kind of unchanged state, whether you want to attribute that to the presence of so much spectacular and unchanging sun or the fact that Arizona doesn’t do daylight saving time, on account of we don’t feel the need to save daylight, we’ve got enough already, thank you very much), we have published 483 essays. Included here are forty-six of them, a starter kit, with several that haven’t been published anywhere before.

I’d have preferred to include them all, all fellow travelers essaying out there on the site and on the internet and speaking to one another always, but this being a book, and books not being conducive to all-inclusiveness, what you are about to read is only a sliver of what we’re about. We offer these essays as overtures to conversation, as prods to communication, as the kind of electric charge you used to get in the boys’ bathroom in the old Houghton High School on the very lowest floor when a bunch of us joined hands to make a circuit from one hand drier to the other. What I remember about it is this: as long as you held the circuit you wouldn’t feel the shock. But when someone finally released his neighbor’s hand, those two would feel the shock, and we all would shout. Then we’d pass around those Lion Mints, put them in our mouths like a communion wafer, and let them dissolve.

While editing this introduction a month later—in a Starbucks, as is my habit—I see one of the baristas walking around with sample cups of whatever new Frappuccino concoction they’ve made for me to try. Or perhaps someone just was training on a macchiato and screwed up, so they made a flaw a feature and spread the failure around? I have my headphones on to isolate and soundtrack myself, but when I see him in my peripheral vision, I take them off to signal my openness to being approached with the prospect of a free caffeinated something. Here, I think, let’s make a connection.

I think a lot about balancing two essay practices: that of openness (essaying as listening, as paying attention, as aggregation and collage, as a sticky ball sort of thing that can be rolled over the world to pick up whatever it encounters: conversations, auto accidents, the linguistic anomalies of the American Southwest, the play-affections and sparring of a couple reclining on a couch outside) and that of withdrawal (essaying as closing, as isolation, as scale move away from, as epic simile, as processing and churning, as analysis, as introspection, as inwardness).

So what if it’s a bit of a false binary? One can’t ever open entirely or close entirely, I know. These two states aren’t sealed from one another. Seepage occurs: we see the self in everything; we see everything in the self. Sometimes you offer a Lion Mint to a sewer raccoon, and sometimes the raccoon brings you treasure from the sewer. It’s only in looking and talking back to the world that we allow the self to manifest.

These days, if you’re anything like me (and I believe that at heart we are more alike than not), you’ve got a lot of noisy perspectives you’re made to wade through. A lot of voices echo through my days: on social media, television, blogs, websites, newspaper opinion columns, the six or seven magazines I subscribe to, talk radio, satellite radio, podcasts, video game narration, Red Wings hockey color commentary, and so forth. My brother subscribed me to the National Review (as a joke? to convert me to his way of thinking? I am not sure). It’s jarring, reading it, but I guess I find the jarring bracing. I mean to say I’m trying to be open to it, to not just surround myself with sameness. And every so often I find something surprising and deftly made in there, which makes me reconsider ideas I had accepted without thinking.

Well, the barista runs out of samples just before he makes it to me. I get disappointed, put my headphones back on. Sometimes you wait and it does not come. Still, Essay Daily has allowed me to reserve some space in my days for a conscious practice of openness to the world and to the force of others’ voices. Though we don’t always publish daily, we aspire to that dailiness: we publish essays at least twice weekly, enough to feel constant and persistent, to make these essays—these encounters with other minds—a regular force. During the Advent season each year, we do it daily, offering an essay a day to you as an Advent calendar.

I mean to say that both these modes of essaying—opening and gathering and then withdrawing in contemplation—are practices for me. They’re ways of being that feel more and more necessary. I’m sure I’ve been changed by them. I hope for you that you feel the same. Someday, if not now.

At the risk of exposing a wack metaphor: I think these essays are the Lion Mints. I want you to have one. Actually, take a roll. Take all of them and carry them with you. They’ll freshen your breath and, if used properly, may abet a random animal encounter that changes the way your day (even your life) is going.

If you want to put a quarter into the slot, great. A nickel’s fine, though too, because there are a lot of ways of giving back, of metabolizing shame, of saying thanks and maybe sorry for my ignorance. I get it now. It took about a decade to get it through my frozen Michigan skin. Perhaps you’ll figure it out quicker.

What we’d like best is for you to speak back to us and send us a message back. Now we become raccoons, waiting for you to roll your regional mints into our open arms and ears and mouths where we hang out in the sewer.

Essay us or shout back at us from afar as you see us passing underneath your window, rolling mints into the darkness; though to speak is not necessarily to be heard, it’s a start. As are the practices of openness and withdrawal. So come read more. Write a piece for us. Make our practice your practice. Enjoy the mints.