The Personal Reported EssayIn memoir, the emphasis is on internal

reporting and reflection—using events from the personal past to consider a larger question.

In the personal essay, the writer blends the internal with the external—considering issues, ideas, events, topics from the world and merging those with personal reflection

As such, the reportage, gathering of information, becomes less dependent on memory and more on information gathered from the outside world.

Historical Selves, Larger WorldIn Tell It Slant, the authors discuss

“gathering the threads of history” or using an historical frame for a personal story

In personal reporting, writers merge elements from techniques employed in memoir, such as point of view, voice and memory, with observations and reportage from the larger world.

They also incorporate other elements from all genres of writing: structure, visual imagery, theme and metaphor.

Inside World + outside world“This is one of the central imperatives of

combining personal material with history or criticism or reportage: each thread must do some work that isn’t being done by another; that can’t be done by another.”

—Leslie Jamison (Empathy Exams)

Fourth State of MatterJo Ann Beard, essayist

and novelist, The Boys of My Youth & Zanesville: A Novel

“Fourth State of Matter” originally appeared in The New Yorker

Recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Guggenheim

Fourth State of MatterThe piece employs elements of creative

nonfiction, including: personal narrative, reportage, voice, structure, metaphor & theme.

To start:What events are reported in this piece? In

other words, what events are happening?

Fourth State of MatterDog is dyingHusband is goneSquirrels have taken over a room in her

houseNarrator has a job editing a physics journalCoworkers are murdered in a killing spree

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/us/gunman-in-iowa-wrote-of-plans-in-five-letters.html

Elements of CNF• What structure does Beard use in this essay?

Is there a “visual” shape to it? • Identify the author’s use of the elements of Creative Nonfiction, and bring examples of: scene, dialogue, description. How are these elements used?

• “Sourcing” is an important aspect of the reported essay. Sourcing just means research: finding people and documents that help strengthen the writer and readers’ understanding of the topic. Where do we see reportage in this piece?

• Point of view: What is the point of view and the tone of this piece? What makes this a personal essay, not a memoir and not journalism?

• Theme: What is the underlying message of these piece? What unifying metaphor doe the author use to convey the theme? What does it say beyond what it says?

Group ActivityGroup 1: Analyze the structure of this piece, and the

metaphor and theme. How would you describe the theme—what is the message/larger context of this story? What hints are given in the text?

Group 2: Find examples of where the author uses reportage and research to amplify the personal narrative. Be specific and think about where the information came from and how it’s presented.

Group 3: Discuss the POV and voice in this piece. Does POV shift in any spots? If so how and in what way does it change the story? (first person? Third person?)

Structural Set-up The collie wakes me up about three

times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.

She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator—careful, almost went down—then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.

In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

Structural Set-up: Foreshadowing & POV It’s Gang Lu, the doctoral student. Everyone

lights up again. Gang Lu stands stiffly talking to Chris, while Bob holds a match to his pipe and puffs fiercely; nose daggers waft up and out, right in my direction. I give him a sugary smile and he gives me one back. Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.

Gang Lu looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if he is a dog; the student Shan, whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter.

Time slows down/ stories merge The collie fell down the basement stair

s. I don’t know if she was disoriented and was looking for me, or what. But when I was at work she used her long nose like a lever and got the door open and tried to go down there, except her legs wouldn’t do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on the concrete floor in an unnatural position, one leg still awkwardly resting on the last step. I repositioned the leg and sat down and petted her. We used to play a game called Maserati, where I’d grab her long nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears—first second third fourth—until we were going a hundred miles an hour through town. She thought it was funny.

Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his coat. He doesn’t answer, and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.

ReportageOne room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his

sister in China. The study of physics is more and more disappointing, he tells her. Modern physics is self-delusion, and All my life I have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything. Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill himself. You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few traveling companions to accompany me to the grave. Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-calibre handgun and a .22-calibre revolver. They’re heavier than they look and weigh the pockets down. My beloved second elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you.

Metaphor & ThemeHow are these threads connected?

“Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.”

What is the unifying theme in this piece?

“Devil’s Bait: Most important question:Did reading this essay make you feel itchy?

“Devil’s bait” includes:Personal and external reportageScenes, exposition and an overall shapeDescription and metaphorReflection and exposition

Group activity: To analyze Jamison’s essay and its use of the elements of creative nonfiction, then share with the rest of the class for a larger discussion.

The Devil’s Bait“For Paul, it started with a fishing trip. For Lenny, it was an addict whose

knuckles were covered in sores. Dawn found pimples clustered around her swimming goggles. Kendra noticed ingrown hairs. Patricia was attacked by sand flies on a Gulf Coast beach. Sometimes the sickness starts as blisters, or lesions, or itching, or simply a terrible fog settling over the mind, over the world.

For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange ailment, and no one — or hardly anyone — believed them. But there were a lot of them, reportedly 12,000, and their numbers were growing. Their illness manifested in many ways, including fatigue, pain, and formication (a sensation of insects crawling over the skin). But the defining symptom was always the same: fibers emerging from their bodies. Not just fibers but fuzz, specks, and crystals. They didn’t know what this stuff was, or where it came from, or why it was there, but they knew — and this was what mattered, the important word — that it was real.”

(The Devil’s Bait, Leslie Jamison)

StructureAfter the piece’s establishing shots, it

provides a chronological condensed history of Morgellons.

The scenes or real-time elements of the story take place at the Morgellon’s conference and the story weaves in and out of the conference into research and Jamison’s own memoir.

What type of shape does this internal/external structure create for the reader?

Reportage The characters/people introduced in the opening are re-introduced as Jamison

meets/interviews them at the conference:

Paul’s disease is different in that you can see it. His right ear is the most obvious sign of his affliction. It’s a little twisted, almost mashed, and it has the smooth, shiny texture of scar tissue all along the juncture between ear and jaw. His face is dotted with red pockmarks; the skin is stained with milky patterns, and he’s got teardrop scars around his eyes. Paul says he came home from the fishing trip with his legs covered in chigger bites. “You could feel the heat coming out of my pants,” hesays. His whole body was inflamed. I ask about his symptoms now. He simply shakes his head: “You can never tell what’s coming next.”I ask whether he gets support from anyone in his life. He does, he says. That’s when he tells me about his sister.At first, she wasn’t sympathetic. She assumed Paul was on drugs when he told her about his symptoms. But she was the one who eventually discovered Morgellons, just about a yearago, and told him about it.“So she’s become a source of support?” I ask.“Well,” he says. “Now she has it, too.”

Reflection“When Dawn talks about her body as something that’s done her wrong, I fall into the easy groove of identification. Her condition seems like a crystallization of what I’ve always felt about myself—a wrongness in my being that I could never name and so pinned on my body, my thighs, my face. This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons. But my willingness to turn Morgellons into metaphor—a physical manifestation of some abstract human tendency—is dangerous. It obscures the particular and unbidden nature of the suffering in front of me. I feel how conveniently these lives could be sculpted to fit the metaphoric strictures of the essay itself.”

Reflection“Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something, and what we’re trying to purge resists our efforts. These demons belong to all of us: an obsession with our boundaries and visible shapes, a fear of invasion or contamination, an understanding of ourselves as perpetually misunderstood. But doesn’t this search for meaning obfuscate the illness itself? It’s another kind of bait, another tied and-painted fly: the notion that if we understand something well enough, we can make it go away.” (Devil’s Bait, Jamison)

Personal Reported EssayThis is not a term paper—it’s a reported

personal essay, so the topic should be something you’re:

• Interested in learning more about and writing about• Able to report/research• An experience you’ve had that you want to investigate outside of just personal memories• Able to bring personal reflection or personal investigation to

Why report?Interviewing sources, and research, can enhance and

deepen our topicsInterviews and research provide credibility Moving outside our own brains and experiences broadens

our expertise, knowledge and ideas for all writingThis is why so many nonfiction and fiction writers work in

both genres—because there is so much cross-over in the techniques of gathering information for a story and for the techniques of writing fiction and creative nonfiction

(And also because non-fiction provides more opportunities to publish and get paid to write)

Forms of reportageInterviewing: Finding people to talk to whose

own experiences/ideas can enhance your story

Immersive experience: Using the opportunity of an experience to create real-time structure/scene

Reading (books, articles, reports): looking for credible materials that allow you to understand your topic/interest in a larger context

Personal Essay Prompt, adapted from brevity magazine Make a list of 10 things of which you’re a master or fan. Include

talents, skills, hobbies, qualities of character. Be as specific as possible. Examples: Daydreaming in bed; baking cupcakes; hiking mountains; playing videogames, the zombie apocalypse.

Choose one item on your list and free-write about it. Describe how to do it, when you learned it, what you accomplish, where you do it, why you’re interested in it

Now write about another person connected with this topic. Include characterizing details that capture the person’s personality or mannerisms.

Next, write about a particular scene or event that involves your topic and/or your person. Look for opportunities to add dialogue and setting.

(https://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/craft/craft_simpson9_08.htm)

Next stepsTake what you’ve written, and write a complete draft.Begin creating a “reporting/research” plan: what do

you need to know? What do you want to know? What are some possible sources for continuing your exploration of the topic?

If you hate your topic from class, you can pick a new one, but you need to bring two copies of a complete first draft to our next class.

Length is not important (two to three pages is sufficient if they are fleshed out)

We’ll be working in pairs in the next class to solidify the reportage elements.