Joseph Franklin and Dr. Patrick Madden, English
Nothing was more important to me in creating this collection of essays than keeping a regular record of personal experience, reflection, and inquisition. From pre-writing, to drafting, to revising, my daily record has provided an indispensable source of material for this collection. Three of the essays, “The Proper School,” “Marriage in Pieces,” and “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” as well as many of the brief essays in “Selected Shorts,” all began as blog entries. When I wrote every day, the ideas flowed and the work progressed. When I wrote sporadically, the ideas sludged forward, usually as muddy as they were weak, and rarely went anywhere worth-while.
In addition to journaling and note taking, reading has been extremely important to my creative process. I often got caught up in the chronological build-up of events and filled my rough drafts with mini-histories of my life that were both boring and unnecessary. When this happened, I picked up a copy of Fourth Genre, or Creative Nonfiction, or Brian Doyle’s book Leaping. In the pages of these great essays I found a blueprint, guidepost, and oracle that connected me to the best in essayistic styling. I found, not a well, but a tide of inspiration—one that ebbed and flowed on the shore of my creativity—not constant, but reliable. Reading the good essays, I discovered, was the key to unlocking my own essayistic inkling.
When I began writing “A Suitcase full of Rations,” for example, about working in Japan for a year, I started to include everything from plane flight to plane flight. I needed to cut back on the detail. So I turned to my favorite example of selective use and omission of details, Brian Doyle’s essay, “Room Eight,” from Leaping. In this essay about a summer Doyle spent teaching little children their catechism, Doyle describes the summer, not in chronological order, but as a series of separate but related incidents with the children. The vignettes he includes serve as selective bits of poignant memory that show us a more complete emotional picture of the summer than if he had written down every detail in order like a journal. I used his essay as a model for my own and was able to overcome my own tendency to overload an essay with numb facts.
Writing and reading in this manner, I slowly, unsteadily stuttered this collection into existence. My project was approved in January 2005, and I began working on two essays: one about Boy Scouts, and one about my part time job at Wendy’s. In June 2005, my wife and were offered a teaching position in Japan and the project was put on hold until we arrived in country and got adjusted to life as English conversation instructors. I finished my first essay, “Working at Wendy’s,” in November 2005, while living in Japan. I submitted the essay to Random House’s Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers contest and won the grand prize, which included a large cash award and publication in an anthology that came out in August 2006. I finished the Boy Scout essay, “Climbing Shingle Mill Peak,” in February. “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” and “The Proper School” were finished in March and April, respectively, while I was still in Japan. Each time I finished an essay, I sent it to professor Madden for review, and to publications for consideration. I submitted essays to The Florida Review, the Bellingham Review, Wordup Media, The Utah Arts Council Original Writers Contest, the Atlantic Monthly Student Contest, American Literary Review, The BYU David O. McKay Essay contest, and “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” placed in the BYU English department Meyhew essay contest.
I took a brief summer hiatus from writing in July and August, during which time my family and I moved back to the United States and got settled in for my last two semesters at BYU. In October, November, and December, I finished the rough drafts of “Marriage in Pieces,” “The Placenta in My Living Room,” and I finalized all of the shorter pieces, and turned in the entire rough draft to Professor Madden and Lance Larsen (who I’ve asked to be a reader) for review over Christmas break. I received their suggestions and corrections and revised the draft in late January, just before turning in the final project with my portfolio to the Honors department.
In many ways this project is exactly what I thought it would be when I started, and in many ways it is completely different. Apart from the concrete differences which are inevitable in a creative work (like the fact that half of my essay topics are different from the original list in my project proposal, and the fact that my title has changed at least three times), the end product is similar to what I imagined—a collection of essays in various styles that represents my attempt to grapple with the reality I live in. I feel like the project is of sufficient quality (and by sufficient I mean a text that is never finished, but has begun to come close to approximating the feelings, emotions, ideas, and truths in my mind) and of sufficient depth. I was often surprised how a particular essay would come to life and take me where it wanted to go, rather than the other way around. I discovered that the more I tried to wrestle an essay into compliance with my preconceived notions of story and morality, the harder it became to write. As I wrote to discover, rather than writing to reconfirm, I found that my stories had their own things to say, separate from my intentions. The best essays in this collection speak for themselves, and the most problematic ones are still too cluttered with my own agenda.
I found that I favor the mosaic approach to the essay, and I realize this may be a sign of immaturity as a writer. I recognize that it is easier for me to collage together disjointed snippets of story than it is to create a start-to-finish, flowing essay that is as fluid and relevant as it is wandering and immediate. Knowing this, I have consciously tried to write both types of essays, forcing myself to tackle the essayistic approaches I have trouble with. The results are mixed. In some cases, like the Wendy’s essay, I feel like I captured what it was like to work the night shift when and where I did, but in “A Suitcase Full of Rations,” I’m not sure I produced a sufficiently rounded picture of life in Japan. And in “The Proper School,” I feel like I didn’t saying anything new, but just rehashed the same concerns that all writers have when they’re considering graduate school.
In the process of completing this project I have learned so much about the writing process, about deadlines, about making time to write, about the power of revision, and about the work involved in publishing. I did my best work when I gave myself deadlines, made goals for submission, and worked regularly on my writing. As I said before, I feel the essays are sufficient for submission, but not complete. I’m not sure an essay is ever complete. This is the business of essaying, of trying—and while I feel these essays show some sparks of quality, insight, and maybe even a little talent, I know that words can always be tooled, metaphors sharpened, details refined, and commentary compacted. Would that I had read more, revised more, thought more. In every essay I am sure there are places where I can add a little, delete a little, expand a little, and contract a little. Still, as a preparation for graduate school in creative writing, as a culmination of my liberal arts education, and as a physical manifestation of the way my writing and thinking has developed over the past five years, I believe this collection does its job.