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Personal Essay

Personal Essay
by Grace Elliott

 

I am trying to learn how to write personal essays. For years, I have struggled with how to write true stories about myself. I worry about the lack of special in my life, the lack of event. 

“The point is not the events,” I tell myself now as I try to learn how to write essays. “The point is the frame.”

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“The Structure of the Book is a Bad Trip”: Joshua Wheeler On Writing “Acid West”

I got a chance to have a conversation with Joshua Wheeler, my teacher and friend, upon the release of his debut book of essays, Acid West, just out on FSG Originals. Joshua writes with a rhythm and comic timing reminiscent at times of John McPhee—a younger, more irreverent McPhee—who has definitely never set foot on the campus of Princeton like our aged master. Wheeler’s world is John Wayne and dive bars and adobe motels and thrift stores and desert dirt […]

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Showbiz

Showbiz by Joe Bardin From the start, the scales of giving a damn were tipped against our coach, seeking to advance his career by rising through the college ranks, with Vassar College Men’s Basketball circa 1986 as his springboard. When he announced we would have to come back from Winter Break early to prepare for a holiday tournament at SUNY Binghamton, there was considerable grousing. I took a certain Spartan satisfaction in the sacrifice, but the upperclassmen had a confab […]

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The Same Vines Twice: An Interview with Donald Breckenridge, Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail

Donald Breckenridge has served as the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail since 2001. In addition he is the author of several novels, including You Are Here, 6/2/95, This Young Girl Passing, and Rockaway Wherein. His latest  invention is the second volume of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology. This second helping of the Rail‘s fiction section is that rare collection that is joyfully archival: a work which genuinely spans the globe. It is a dusty-fingered, crypt-cracking dossier of stories that conjure laughter, […]

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Morning Bites: Hollywood Forever, Little Napoleon In New Jersey, Literary Journalism, And More

The New York Review of Books had a pretty distinguished panel discuss literary journalism. Dustin Kurtz has a handy user guide to Amazon coins. What’s the story behind The Great Gatsby’s epigraph? So Napoleon’s man junk is in New Jersey. Hanging out at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Talking with The Knife. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.    

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East India Company’s “Smoakey” Tea From 1785

If you pay enough attention to rare book collection blogs, you sometimes learn things like how the East India Company logged all the tea they brought in from China: “Quality ranges from “musty and mouldy” to “superfine”. Additional symbols noted the leaf size, smells and other conditions such as “woody” or “smoakey.” The Rare Book Division at Princeton recently acquired the catalog from 1785. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.

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In Some Sense, But in Another, Not at All: Talking about Music with Paul Muldoon

You’ll see the word “gaiety” a thousand times if you read any essay on Paul Muldoon; while linguistic feats like “pulley glitches, gully pitches” abound in his work, he is somehow never donnish. He can show you ways of looking at words without pushing you away from them. His resume—spotted as it is with names like Princeton, Oxford, and The New Yorker, where he is the poetry editor—also includes two rock bands, operas, and a song that has been covered in […]

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