PicoBlog

QUIS UT DEUS is the translation of the Archangel Michael’s name—Who is like God?—and I never did find out why it was on this Florentine building. But I’ve wanted to use it in a newsletter and today’s letter seems as good a time as any.

Today I’m writing to tell you about the newest of my essay classes, which begins a week from today at the Shipman Agency online and is a response to someone asking me something last fall at an event that was very much on my mind: “What did you learn from reading so many essays for the Best American anthology?”

These talks all come with writing prompts of my own design, and craft essays I’m writing for the class, essays that will eventually be in a book on writing someday. I hope you can join us. The classes are closed captioned, have ASL interpreters, and will be recorded if you are not able to sit down for the lecture and Q&A at that moment.

In this class, I'll convey a sense of what I saw reading several thousand essays for the Best American Essays 2022 anthology, and the prompts will draw from some of the essays in the anthology, as well as some classic essays over the years that have informed and inspired my thinking and writing. If you have any ideas about what you'd like me to address, also, please leave a note for me in the comments here or send me a message.

In the winter of 2020, as I was preparing to begin reading for the 2022 edition of Best American Essays that I was going to be editing, I was also in the midst of preparing a new essay collection and taking a partial novel through some edits. I soon found however as I tried to do this that I felt a kind of meta-scrutiny on all of my actions, a gradually disabling self-consciousness. Would I be able to do this, I wondered, as I read for this anthology? Was this something that should wait? And then January came, and month by month my sense of needing to wait grew.

This would change me, I understood. And I needed to pay attention as to how it would do so.

I grew up as someone who read back issues of the New Yorker in my friends’ summer lake camps. Each time I found them they struck me as exotic: no photos, just illustrations on the cover, and pages and pages of words, occasionally accompanied by a cartoon. The magazines I was finding then in the 1970s were from an era John McPhee describes here, of approaching an editor and asking them what they thought of oranges, and getting the nod to write a very long essay about oranges.

Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more. Many, if not most, of my projects have begun as ideas for The New Yorker’s section called The Talk of the Town, and many of them have grown to greater length. In the nineteen-seventies, observing the trials of an experimental aircraft, I intended at first to tell the story in a thousand words, but the tests and trials increased in number, changed, went on for years; a rich stream of characters happened through the scene; and the unfolding story had a natural structure analogous to a dramatic plot. The ultimate piece ran at fifty-five thousand words in three consecutive issues of the magazine. “Oranges,” seven years earlier, had grown in the same way, but my aptitude for selection needed growing, too. Bingham, after restoring much of what he had cut (and suggesting to Shawn that what we were doing made sense), insisted that substantial amounts of text remain down and out. Even I could see that for magazine purposes he was right. Four or five months later, as the piece was being prepared for publication as a book, I asked my close friend Mr. Bingham to help me choose from the original manuscript what else to restore, and what not to restore, to the text. In other words, the library at the Citrus Experiment Station had beguiled me so much—not to mention the citrus scientists, the growers, the rich kings of juice concentration—that I lost the advantage of what is left out.

I don’t know that anyone writes like this anymore. But it remains in my mind as a kind of literary ghost, the idea of someone just sort of passing an editor and saying, in the hallway, “What about oranges?”

Back when I started selecting my own essays for How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, in the fall of 2015, I was greeted with what seemed to me to be the shadow of the historical novel I’d been writing over the last 15 years. In that time, my publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had become Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and I had been passed on to three different editors. When Harcourt had been merged into HMH, I’d even received a message from the editor in chief, soon to be my newest editor. No one who worked there had read any of my pages, despite the contract that was still in place—could I send something for them to read? This was my second novel, The Queen of the Night.

By the fall of 2015, that novel had been proofed and sent to the printer, and I was in the period of waiting for reviews, waiting for lists, waiting to be interviewed, waiting to go on tour—and it had been so long since my first book I felt almost like a debut author again. The industry had changed, also. When my debut novel appeared in 2001, I was an early adopter to have an author site. When I started my first blogs in 2004 and 2007, writer friends and publishing people told me I was wasting my time. By 2015, all of my social media posts and blogging was now counted as something that helped me, even a prescient act. I had the feeling of someone dropped from a plane, not quite where I would be and not where I was, either. And I had written so many essays over the 15 years since my first novel appeared that I was also feeling like my sense of myself as a novelist was essentially a private one. A Google alert notified me of a reader who speculated, in their blog, that it seemed like maybe I was still writing fiction.

I had 77 published essays to choose from, approximately, as well as a number of essays written as drafts, as yet unfinished. In them I saw essays written for anthology prompts, essays written for my blog initially as posts, essays written for Out Magazine, but nothing written in this meditative way McPhee describes. The closest I had was “The Rosary,” an essay I thought of as just too indulgent, though I would come to see that indulgence as a strength, written almost entirely on my own. The essays were more mirror than shadow, together, not just of my thoughts but of the way I had arranged my thoughts to seek an audience within the context of how the essay would be published, and who would edit it. And when I did choose 16 of them finally for the collection back then, I sought to edit them, improving them, and in the process, removing some of the identifying marks of the earlier publication process—edits I disagreed with—or inserting more where I had wanted more.

As I turned to a second collection then I knew it would be like that. But I remembered how judging the PEN Faulkner in fiction in 2015 and the National Book Awards in fiction in 2017 had given me snapshots of the fiction being written that year, this would also fill up my head with a kind of auric photo in my unconscious of the essays being published that year. I was about to take a kind of long-exposure photograph with my mind.

What would I see?

When I stopped editing that collection, it was in part to give the person I would become after this was over the job of editing that next collection.

I’ll write more about this Tuesday.

Until then,

Alexander Chee

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