The irony and emptiness of the First Lady’s script is disheartening, and not because it’s a threat to the profession. Among the layers of absurdity, the most blinding is the cost. Very few from any political party has been willing to spare enough cash for healthy food in the low-grade cafeterias of our schools; her husband’s Administration recently withheld $12 billion and fired about 2,000 employees at the Department of Education; now, like a ghost bearing the smile of a mannequin, she floats the prohibitively expensive idea of androids in the comfort of millions of homes. As if.

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The broader concern is that those of us trying to improve public education have tolerated what we do have, as if it were the troubled nephew of alcoholic Uncle Ed who died predictably in a car crash. As if we know there is an obligation to care for the boy, and we’ll feign like we don’t resent the dent it will put in our gaunt budget. Trillions of dollars have slipped out of the U.S. Treasury to pay for pandemic devastation, big bank and auto company bailouts, and defense contracts, while education relies on ironic bumper stickers about the military holding bake sales to fund their pencils and paper.

This is not an indictment on the value of giving money away for our collective health while Covid-19 killed over a million quarantined Americans, nor the prudence of welfare for banks, nor to further enrich the military’s budget. Instead, this is an invitation to consider who really benefits if we, as a united profession, pulled our public-school heads out of Plato’s Academy, chained up the assembly line in our factory model of education, and began viewing the institution as the be all and end all to reversing the decay of American moral, social, and intellectual health.

Sometimes I look at a kid in my class and think, “What if...” What if, for Emma, the girl who is so shy that she is visibly uncomfortable even when I simplify my queries to yes or no questions, yet she listens to every word and has become a college-level writer in 10^th grade. What if, for Savion, whose eyes light up when he passes by in the hallways; who is not my student but formally introduced himself with a firm handshake, eye contact, and a smile; who continues to shake my hand every time he passes; whose charisma distracted me so I wouldn’t notice he’d befriended me for the snacks I give to hungry students.

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What if, for Xion, who isn’t sitting in classrooms all day learning what adults think he should learn. What if this young man, who shows up every day, speaks quietly and respectfully, completes his schoolwork, advocates for himself, and keeps the fire in his daily presence alive because there’s a bright spot in his future somewhere. What if Xion is already in that place, instead of fulfilling the state-mandated seat-time in the arbitrary categorization of other students his age. What if this 15-year-old boy comes to school well-rested at 9:30 instead of 7:30. What if he learns algebra for the good of his brain’s ability to think algebraically but doesn’t have to take three years of math classes and pass standardized tests, because instead he takes a U.S. history, language arts, science, and financial awareness courses until 12:30, takes an hour lunch, and proceeds to an internship at a local hospital where he can learn on the job to become a nurse. What if it is a paid internship so he can continue to help his single mother pay the distended $2,000 rent without working extra hours at a pizza joint. What if he is an athlete and builds his own schedule so he can fit in practice and games.

What if Xion’s little sister Andrea wants to be a scientist and is happy to take math classes straight into college, for which she could begin after her sophomore year because she’s capable and motivated. What if, like Plato’s students attending the “school for would-be politicians,” Andrea was given opportunities to pursue the career that excites her. Then Algebra becomes more than a class for which she checks off a box in her list of graduation requirements. It’s useful exercise for her brain, and it’s meaningful and purposeful because it’s a stepping stone that she has invited into her day, knowing that, like Greek youth 2,400 years before, she attends a “school for would-be scientists.” What if Xion and Andrea could meet up for lunch, and it wouldn’t be distributed by the world’s largest food distributor but prepared by their other sibling, Max, whose interest in culinary arts includes preparing healthy meals for students, and it comes with a little pay while he learns.

What if, instead of human-shaped computers named “Figure 3,” we focus our resources on more schools, teachers, teacher assistants, internships, field trips, plentiful supplies, good and healthy food, snacks, exercise, transportation, organization, free time, sleep, real life hacks, and a thousand other possibilities that facilitate, nurture, and feed the souls of the human beings inside the bodies of our neighborhoods’ children.

What if billions and billions of dollars arrived out of nowhere to pay for the kind of education that we, as adults, expect for our own lives?

During the 70’s, kids under 10 could leave the house on a summer morning and wander anywhere on bike or foot within a mile or so “until the streetlights came on.” My friends and I went back and forth from each other’s houses or to a school or park. We had snowball fights, knocked on strangers’ doors and ran, and on occasion, threw perfect throwing apples at cars traveling on Nine Mile Road.

We had good arms, too. Between Mike, Bird, and myself, we’d load up our left hand with three or four, had one in our throwing hand, and launched them all from about 100 feet, usually hitting a car waiting at the red light at Republic multiple times. Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! All in quick succession, it filled our hearts with adrenaline. We didn’t wait around for a response, as the percussion of sheet metal was our joy. We ran through a tall set of bushes, made our way across the continuous, non-fenced backyards of seven or eight houses, and dipped back out the other side of the block in about 20 seconds. By the time the driver waited for the light to change, we were just three kids kicking around the neighborhood, nowhere near Nine Mile Road. Our education about how to behave without adult supervision was not consistent with any of our parents’ expectations. They’d have been horrified to know we did shit like that.

In the summers and some weekends, we walked all over the neighborhood. Rarely traveling more than 12 or so blocks, we crossed paths with all manner of people. We had enough big brothers that we didn’t have to worry about bullies, so we were about as carefree as a kid could be. But there was no shortage of other people walking the neighborhood that we didn’t understand.

There was Ken, a lanky man whose only impairment was obvious: he had no left arm. He was in his 60’s, maybe older, and wore a tweed jacket that hung from bony shoulders as if on a hanger. He dressed the same regardless of the weather. Out of his right sleeve hung a rubber hand with the fingers curled up like it were formed to knock on a door. What held the rubber hand there, no one knew. By the way it dangled, we could tell that its only function was to hang at the right length to pose as a hand.

Occasionally we’d run into him on his walks, and he’d stop and chat with us. A cigarette seemed to be a fixture in his good hand, which created permanent tobacco stains. He would put his cigarette in his mouth and give us tips on how to wind up and pitch a ball, sometimes using the ball we were carrying to the park. We could tell that in his day he had played baseball by the way he mimicked pitching. “Don’t talk to strangers” came up as a joke among us, but eventually, Ken became familiar; at some point we stopped wondering what his intentions were. I asked my brothers if they remembered Ken, and they both remembered him similarly. Steve, who is four years older, said “There were reports of something bad with children, which I think was bullshit, people imagining stuff because he hung out at the ballparks. I just think he was lonely and liked baseball.” I remember Ken the same way. As for his rubber hand, we never asked, nor did he explain.

There was Gary, who I’ve since surmised lived with cerebral palsy. He toured the neighborhood riding a yellow Schwinn three-wheeler with a big metal meshed basket in the back that sometimes had a bag of groceries or a couple gallons of milk. Guessing now, he was a young adult in his early 20’s. Or maybe he was in high school, but since public schools resisted or denied people with disabilities, he may have been homeschooled or went to a private school. He’d pass by riding his bike in the street and smiling wide, saliva spilling from his mouth, and uttering what were probably full sentences in his head. All we heard was him grunting and efforts to articulate words. One time we had stopped long enough for Gary to get his sentences out. It was laborious, and we didn’t know anything about his condition, his intelligence level, or anything meaningful except that, like Ken, he had a kind and friendly disposition. Eventually we learned to keep it simple and say, “Hi, Gary,” and keep moving.

Three-wheeler

There was “Crazy Lady,” who was a short, olive-skinned older woman who walked those same streets, talking to herself. We’d cross the street to avoid her, but as we passed on the other side, her volume increased and her monotonous mumbling took on a more argumentative tone, or so it seemed. She swore and barked out her irritation. In retrospect, and again I can only guess, maybe she had Tourette’s syndrome and suffered from mental illness. Like Gary, we had no language for her behavior, and we had no idea what to make of her. When we were far enough away, we mimicked her, too. People told horror stories about her, saying that she had committed heinous and violent crimes, but like Ken, it was almost certainly gossip and hearsay.

Then there was a boy about our age named Damon. He lived with his family across the street from Roosevelt Park. He often pushed his way into our ball games, or tried anyway. Living across from the park, he could stand on his porch and see picnickers, baseball games, kids playing tag, dogs running around, and frisbees flying. He probably saw me, my brothers, and friends walking with our mitts and bats, or a Wiffle bat or two, fast-walking and talking and deciding on teams.

Damon had Downs syndrome, and one thing that stood out is that we all believed he wouldn’t live past his teen years. I remember looking at him and thinking, He could die right now. He was bigger and more aggressive than me, so I stayed out of his way. He was too much of a mystery, seemingly unafraid of physical conflict, and somewhat imposing next to my smaller body.

I don’t remember a time that Damon didn’t ask to join in our games, no matter the sport. If he was there, he’d ask. We always tried to persuade him that it was best if he didn’t play with us, but he rarely, if ever, conceded and walked away. I can’t be sure how other kids treated him, but because Damon’s older brother Brian and my oldest brother Paul were somewhat friends, we tried a little harder to include Damon than we actually wanted. Plus, when we tried to deny him, he could quickly get frustrated and lose his temper, so the path of least resistance meant we usually included him.

Damon was round and hefty. Despite being 12 or 13 years old, and his family being mostly blond, he had black hair and an occasional gray strand or two. He stuttered: “C-c-can I play?” We had no idea how smart Damon was or wasn’t, but we couldn’t get away with telling him, “I think I hear your brother calling you.” And then, “You should go probably go see what they want.” Or we’d try logic and say, “Sorry, man, we’ve got even teams. If you can find another player, then you can play.” We knew he wouldn’t find anyone because if they were around, they’d already be playing. We’d try the same excuse even when we did have even teams, hoping he might not figure it out. He’d start counting players with his index finger to see if we did have even teams. “Oh, shit. Here we go.”

After he finished, he might give us the finger with all his other fingers tightly packed together, and stammer, “F-f-fuck you. Just let me hit.” Regardless our response, sometimes Damon would step forward and reach for the bat. Whoever had it would hand it over, and suddenly, he was in for at least a game.

Sadly, the only Damon we ever got to know was the stuttering “fuck you” Damon who made us (me, anyway) uncomfortable if only for the mythical fact that he could die at any moment and, importantly, he looked different from anyone that any of us knew, and we never understood why.

The words we used to use. | “Mongoloid,” along with “mongolism” and “Mongolian idiot,” was medical terminology for Down syndrome until the 1960s and 70s. The thinking was that people with Down syndrome resembled what was then known as the Mongoloid “race.”

My mom told us he was “a mongoloid.” I don’t know if she knew the term Downs syndrome, but she was likely aware that he had a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra copy of chromosome 21. It’s possible she knew all of that and more, but since it was the term that America’s medical community used in the late 1970s, she used it. Mom was as conscientious and decent as anyone; had my mother known then how sickening that term is now, we would have known, too, and she never would have said the word.

With a beer in his hand and family all around, Damon celebrated his 60th birthday in 2024, and continues to thrive.

^ ^ ^

Diane | Oak Park, Michigan | 1975

In the 1970’s, I was a kid at Jackson Elementary School in Oak Park, Michigan. Behind the fourth wing, I made eye-contact with Diane, a girl with a serious disability. It was in 1975, the first year that school districts were legally obligated by the federal government to provide “free and appropriate education” for every child, regardless of ability. If it had been one year earlier, more than likely, Diane would have been prohibited from attending Jackson Elementary and instead educated at home or placed in an overcrowded and underfunded residential facility, called either “state schools” or “state hospitals.”

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I ran in field day races, won flag football and baseball championships, played rummy and Monopoly, and learned my times tables in Mrs. Grady’s fourth grade class. My brain had developed in step with typical cognitive and social skills, according to the American Psychological Association (APA) website. Between the ages of 6 and 10, they say I was “able to understand the viewpoints of others” and “aware that others can have different thoughts.”

I have a distinct visual memory of Diane that lasted two or three seconds, and since that moment it has come to mean so much. The more years that have passed, the more my understanding of it expands, which is true with every memory. The few seconds that our minds capture an event may be remembered for 50 years or more, but the event itself is sometimes the least significant part. The event itself stands as a thumbnail of what was happening all around it, particularly if those moments took place when we understood so little, as was the case for me at the age of nine in 1975.

On that day, recess had just started, and I was hurrying to the usual spot to meet other kids for the daily game of “catch John and Mike.” Mike and I both had several active, older brothers who undoubtedly honed our athleticism. After dark, we played a game called “cream ’em” on the neighbor’s lawn. The idea was that one person would throw the ball straight up, and whoever ended up with it was chased and tackled by whoever could catch him. Playing cream ’em with brothers and friends older than Mike and I was perfect training for playing tag with a bunch of other little kids, so it soon became a game of “catch John and Mike.”

The enormous playground was covered with wood chips that had been repurposed from local tree cuttings by the City of Oak Park. It wasn’t uncommon to get stabbed by sticks that made it through the chipper with dagger-like ends. Up a slight incline, dozens of great oak trees stood opposite the school. All the usual structures stood with their time-worn solid steel: an eight-seat swing set, a tall slide with a hump in the middle, and a merry-go-round that was so heavy it took three or four of us little ones toiling in concert to get it going. By modern safety standards, once these things got going around, the weight and subsequent momentum that was produced would have been deemed “prohibited by law.”

Photo of similar playground with soft grass instead of wood chips

Lofstrand Crutches

On my way out to recess that day, Diane, a Black girl one year older, walked past me using two Lofstrand crutches that helped her support herself on two bent legs, a crooked body, and a big, white-toothed smile. I had seen Diane around the school occasionally, but that was the first time we made eye contact in close proximity. She, along with other children of all grade levels with disabilities, went to separate classrooms in Wing 2. Wings 1, 3, and 4 were for typically developing kids. After bounding out the door and down a couple of steps, I looked up, our eyes met, and her whole face smiled. I was surprised that her eyes seemed inviting and friendly. Whatever my observational skills at the time, I noticed it was more than a reflexive response that people have when they pass by. I learned later that intellectually, we both were typically developing kids, and she happened to have a serious physical disability.

While my two-second memory was of Diane’s eyes and smile, my retrospective, 50-year cumulative memory remembers myself unable to reply, with the invisible burden of dysfunctional social systems that constricted a response like a fat python around a small pig. My parents had taught me to pay attention to my surroundings, but I was paralyzed and couldn’t process what to do with Diane’s eye contact. I had believed that, because she was contained in Wing 2, she must have been unable to think. Or, as I would have said then, she was “retarded.”

Words we used to use

So, I walked past her without a word or a smile. As an adult, I learned that, had she not had the disability, she might never have been there. The Ferndale School District segregated black kids K through 6 at Grant School, so my school was never under 90% white. She was there because, while the school district was unwilling to use federal funds (available the 1964 Civil Rights Act) to bus Black kids to my school, they were willing to bus students with disabilities to my school, Jackson Elementary. Being both a person of color and a kid with a serious disability, Diane was unfamiliar to me in at least those two ways. Soon after the two-second moment, I dreamt about her. It’s the earliest dream that I remember. I’m sure my brain was trying to make sense the day’s two-second event.

In the dream, I was walking toward Oak Park Park, a huge public space with two baseball fields, an ice rink, a significant wooded area, a full-sized pool, concession stands, and several playgrounds. I had played little league baseball and flag football there, so it’s no surprise that that was the direction my dream led me, but it was a couple miles away, and in the Motor City, few people walked more than a half mile unless they had to.

As I got closer to the park, in front of an abstract version of the Oak Park police station, I saw a stairway that went into the ground. No signs, no railings, no apparent reason, but it did have the same carpet as my home: older and worn olive green shag carpet consistent with the times and the income of our household.

I walked down to the bottom of the stairwell to find two doorways without doors. The sunlight from above didn’t seep in more than a foot or two into the openings, creating two voids of darkness. I had no idea where they led, but I had that inexplicable understanding we sometimes have in dreams where we just know. What I did know was that one led to good and the other to evil. I also knew that I had to choose one of the two doorways, enter, and my fate would be determined. It was the right choice, or it was the wrong one.

Before I could make the decision, Diane came out of the left doorway. I don’t remember seeing her clearly, like I had that morning, but I knew it was her. I understood that she came out of the evil doorway, so I turned around, and tried to run back up the stairs to safety. My feet felt like they were made of lead that deadened my legs. I couldn’t escape. I made it three or four stairs, dreading that Diane would catch me. And then I awoke with a start.

—

The two seconds of Diane’s spirit walked past me 50 years ago, and it’s alive in my memory.

In scattered and blurry fragments, I remember seeing her go in and out of Wing 2 and spending her recess on that side of the chain-link fence.

And one night, she chased me up the familiar olive-green carpeted stairs, presumably intending to drag me back to my fate with evil through door #1.

Why did I dream about Diane symbolizing evil when I had had my first authentic exchange with her, however brief? Was this how my childhood mind processed unexplained human behavior? I didn’t know enough to question the authorities at Jackson Elementary for isolating Diane and other non-typically developing children. I could see they were in wheelchairs or permanently attached to Lofstrand crutches, and that they otherwise appeared different from me. Gary’s mysterious cerebral palsy and Diane’s still unnamed impairment produced similar physical motions, of which me and some of my friends mimicked their angled bodies and said, “Let’s act retarded.” In 1975, that word was normal and accepted language, and, importantly, it was all-encompassing. It meant that the kids who were administratively socked away in Wing 2 may or may not have had a physical disability, but it was a foregone conclusion that they couldn’t think very well because we never interacted. How would we know?

I was in the dark about their abilities or disabilities. The all-encompassing R-word label cemented the illusion that they were all the same: unaware of silliness, humor, amazement, music, joy, fairness, and a basic understanding of words and gestures and emotions, let alone ideas. Maybe the had no souls or identity. The notion that we could have been friends not accessible. They were “other” people, and yet, in those two seconds, Diane saw me. Being a friendly boy, it was clear to me that what I saw in Diane’s face meant that we could have been friendly with each other. Not that I could have articulated that in 1975, but had Diane and the others been included in our classrooms, would she have been much different than any of my classmates?

Photo Credit: Wrightslaw.com

With the accumulating knowledge, my memory had changed what happened during those two seconds. Outside of those two seconds, all around us, from the School Board to Washington, DC, Diane and I had little chance of being friends. I couldn’t “empathize or give special consideration to those who were different than me,” as the APA says, because every system in the community made sure of it:

The chain-link fence was built to isolate Diane and to free me.

The physical separation of their classrooms was well-signed in the hallways.

My friends and I thought it was normal to mimic and mock Diane and her peers.

The entertainment culture rarely integrated “others” into the rest of society.

The policies of exclusion were constructed by old-world educators of that century.

Only by federal mandate were districts compelled to educate both typically and non-typically developing children.

All of it eclipsed the two seconds of eye contact that connected me and Diane 50 or so years before.

Nothing can be done about the reality of our systems during the 1970’s, but remnants of unenlightened social structures were evident. Who knows how it might have shaped the view of millions of school kids if they had been in the same educational space with Diane?

I will remember the Diane behind Wing 4 at the beginning of recess that day. I will remember her smile, energetic body language, and friendliness. Had there not been a pre-assembled canyon between us built by the adults in that school, that district, and perhaps in all public schools across America, I might have had hours, days, weeks, or possibly years of memories with Diane, whatever our relationship.

Decades later, I will settle for those two seconds.

Topics: Life story, humor, class clown, teaching, parenting, family, human interest, Ferndale High School

As a teenager at Ferndale High School in Michigan in the early 1980’s, I lacked an awareness of the practical things that other kids used to plan their future. What did I want to be when I grew up? I couldn’t imagine because I never thought about it. What colleges would I apply to? College?  

I don’t recall being asked these questions: not by teachers, not by parents. A few classmates chose private colleges, while others went to middle-of-the-road schools. Some aspired to bigger names, like Michigan State or the University of Michigan. Many didn’t go to college at all, and some settled for higher learning institutions with fewer barriers for admission. I waited until after graduation to make plans to attend Oakland Community College, three miles from where I lived.

Most of my friends had family or other adults at school who helped them choose the universities that matched their GPA and SAT scores. I had little to no understanding that grades and standardized tests were related to college because my GPA was 2.0 and I didn’t take the SAT. I knew there was a relationship, but assigning value to any of it was not part of my thought process because the conversations didn’t come up. Homework? Never. The importance of being present and the completion of assignments? I skipped what I could get away with and did as little work as possible.   

I was, however, aware of the school’s attendance policies. Ferndale High allowed seven unexcused absences plus five tardies, but if we reached eight absences or had seven plus six tardies, there was no negotiating with admin: we failed the class. Despite my clear understanding of the numbers and close attention to my attendance record, that was one of the ways I had I lost credit for a course.   

Mr. Basil Hall was my antiseptic, fussy, and lipless 9th grade algebra teacher with a twangy Southern accent and a daily white, pressed button-up shirt. At the time, I was convinced that he failed me because he had no sense of humor. Or maybe I didn’t perform well on the quizzes and tests. Maybe both. Either way, I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me.

Other students who did have answers to important questions and participated in school spirit events would sometimes paint inspirational words on big pieces of paper and hang them in the hallways or the commons. Focus! Commitment! Perseverance! The coaches of the sports I played marched out the same singular ideas, for which I also had no practical use. I played football and baseball because I liked playing sports. I quit wrestling after 10th grade because I stopped liking it. I put no thought into what I was supposed to do differently after seeing the motivational words.  

I was motivated socially, though, and was therefore typical in my awareness of girls, hanging out, going to parties and dances, and doing almost anything to get other people’s attention; there were easy opportunities to be a class clown. On the surface, I appeared impervious to sadness, but underneath, I was compensating for something.

As a two-year-old, when my mom and dad were still together, they’d have these small parties, inviting a couple or a half-dozen friends after putting me and four siblings to bed. I was the youngest, and all of us were under 10. They’d put on Mose Allison or Miles Davis records, play spades or pinochle, drink, and smoke cigarettes. They weren’t exactly beatniks, but they read a lot, including Kerouac and Kesey. They weren’t necessarily bohemians, even though some of them were artists, including my dad. All of them were socially liberal, so I doubt they would have been crushed by either label.

A few years before my dad died in 2016, he told me a story about one of those nights. I had climbed out of my crib and out to their card game in the dining room. This was in 1968, when having five small children in the house wasn’t reason enough to avoid filling it with second-hand smoke. They’d put me back in the crib, but I’d climb out again and again so I could hang out with them. One night I tried something new: As toddlers often do, I thought if I couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see me. He said I climbed out, grabbed a stray diaper, draped it over my head, and crawled slowly in their direction across the kitchen floor as if to clandestinely mingle. They were light-hearted about it, laughed, and, once again, returned me to my crib.

I was still shitting my pants, and the power of positive reinforcement was carving grooves into my neural pathways. I learned early that I could be rewarded for getting people’s attention, so I pursued similar rewards later. I’d get my mom’s and her visiting sister’s attention so they would watch me do something nonsensical, such as flopping like a fish on the shag carpet or making a series of silly faces.

They’d offer the default response, “Oh, you are so silly,” but here’s my advice to new parents: Don’t encourage this behavior in your own children. This is a brief phase in their development, and you need to prune it at once. Laugh one time, if at all, and be brutally honest: “Okay, that’s enough. It was funny maybe once.” Adjust your language to comply with your personal parental philosophy, but don’t curse your children with the delusion of permanent cuteness by positively reinforcing nonsense. If their integrity isn’t reason enough for you to nip it while they’re little, then do it for yourself. You may spend their childhood shaking your head with tight lips and gritted teeth as they cling to a grandiose sense of self.

In first and second grades, I had Mrs. Washington, and she didn’t think I was cute at all. I’d leave my seat without permission or talk too much. She would tell me to put my hands on the desk, palms up. Then she’d smack them with a ruler.

In seventh grade, we were in transition during Ms. Surowka’s math class. Everyone was milling about after a quiz and, on a dare, while she went over results with the diligent kids, I got on my hands and knees and bit her ankle. In a start, she yanked her foot and yelped, “What are you doing!” I didn’t break skin, nor did I intend to, but I got the desired result: lots of laughs from classmates.

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I suppose it’s better to be labeled happy than miserable; I’m not sure. Any singular label has the potential to cause a child trouble because s/he often spends years trying either to live up to it or to shed it. I believed that everything I did would be cherished and adored, and I only started to realize how generic I was after moving to Seattle when I was 20. I had lost my entire social network and ran into the buzzsaw of impartial adults who didn’t know me. Class clown suddenly became my top accomplishment up to that point, and that tidbit of information was best delayed in conversations with new and unfamiliar people. My identity had dried up.

My parents were good people. I’m grateful for most of what I learned or inherited from them. It’s easy to say after the fact, but I used to wish they had had higher expectations. My mom, though she loved me unconditionally, battled depression and was too worn out to impose hard and clear expectations after a decade of raising four older siblings. She found out I drank when I was 15, but she didn’t reprimand me. Instead, she waited a day and asked, “Why do you drink?” I told her I didn’t know, so she pressed a little further.

I said, “To be happy, I guess.”

“You’re not happy?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer, so we settled for no answer since neither of us believed I was unhappy.

While in his seventies, my dad said to me, “You’ve always been the happy one.” Always, he said, forty years after my childhood. His quintessential line was, “Whatever happens, happens.” Not in the “it is what it is” sense of resignation, but in the “it’s all good” sense of easygoing acceptance. That about sums up his fatherly presence. “Happy” was good enough so he didn’t follow up with a question like, “Were you happy?” If he had, he probably would have hit the same wall of denial I put up for my mom.

I spent early adulthood wondering where all the childhood adoration had flown. I spent my school-age years reinforcing the happy label, and it took a couple decades to pick apart the pieces so I could decide what to do with them. A person may have dignity and therefore find happiness, but a happy person doesn’t necessarily have dignity. My father’s father left him when he was two and returned on his son’s 14^th birthday without a word of explanation. My grandfather was a good man, too, but his fatherly presence was missing in action. I wouldn’t say my dad ever injured my dignity, but he didn’t nurture it either. He didn’t teach me to be obnoxious, but he didn’t condemn it. Whatever happens, happens.

^ ^ ^

In my junior year of high school, my antics caught up with me. I had failed humorless Mr. Hall’s math class, lost another by way of excessive absences, and then I failed a third class, this time for behavior in geometry with Mr. Grad. After I had set his hair on fire, figuratively speaking, he told me to leave his classroom forever and that I needn’t go to the office to appeal for reconsideration.

Some other kid must have pushed Mr. Grad’s limits, too. He must’ve been kicked out and had persuaded the administration or counselors to force or sway Mr. Grad to give him another chance. Why else would he hint at the possibility? I figured I was toast and that was that, so planting that seed could have backfired on him; I wouldn’t have thought to tell Principal Dzyacky after I blew up his math teacher’s daily plan. Mr. Dzyacky might have heard me out, too. He was the kind of principal that students felt comfortable around, unless they were in serious trouble. Anyway, I wouldn’t have gone to him for help because, to me, that would have been like telling the cops I’d robbed the corner store and then asking for a ride home with the cash still in my pocket. I was an absolute asshole to Mr. Grad, so not being re-admitted and having to retake the course was a foregone conclusion.

In the same way that I had lost credit for missing too much class time and for failing Mr. Hall’s algebra class, I accepted the third failed course without a word. What motivated me to be a class clown was the desire to maintain my “happy” label; what caused me to neglect my own self-interest—that is, getting a diploma and doing well in school—had more to do with having a dad with the ambition of a chaise lounge. He held himself to a strict standard of happiness and physical comfort, and decades later he self-identified as a hedonist. Zero interest in hard work or making a living, so long as he had enough. Getting kicked out of class in the way that I was, and paying no mind to consequences, fit that model.

Mr. Grad was about 5’10”, his body narrow from head to toe. He had a hawkish nose and a full head of frizzy to curly hair that reached upward and outward about five or six inches from his scalp. It was fairly normal in the 70’s and 80’s to grow big heads of hair. I can still remember a little hop in Mr. Grad’s voice as he coordinated his narration of math terms with marking the chalkboard, striking barely yellow x’s and y’s, arcs, arrows, and perpendicular lines. In a perfect world, he’d have taught only the well-behaved honors and advanced students. He may or may not have been the most inspirational teacher, but he would have been effective because he wasn’t jaded by teaching his subject. I have little doubt that he would have been able to connect with dozens, if not hundreds, of young people.   

In 1983, classroom management strategies were not ideal for responding to unruly and thoughtless youth like me. We either obeyed or failed. If we disobeyed repeatedly, it almost didn’t matter what caused the student’s delinquency, we could have been permanently expelled from high school. That’s how Mr. Grad was able to remove me from his room without bringing another adult into the conversation.

On the day I got booted, an idea had materialized to antagonize him in a way that I believed I couldn't get caught. I sat in the center of his room with the desks neatly squared off in rows and columns, which was like an arena stage for me to entertain the other students, all of whom were within a few feet. In the days of chalkboards, Mr. Grad’s first disadvantage was that his eyes faced away from the class, and the second was that he was busy synchronizing the stick of chalk with verbalizing the symbols and figures.

While he talked and marked the board, I made a low-volume humming sound made up of Ds and Ls, as if to say luddle-luddle-luddle quickly, repeatedly, until he stopped talking. When he started talking, I would luddle; when he stopped, I stopped. In my perfect, imagined scenario, it would be difficult for Mr. Grad to ascertain whether he heard anything at all, and that uncertainty would make his frustration visible, and that visible frustration would make the gag complete. Ideally, it would have been impossible for him to pin it on me. 

He didn’t respond the first few times, so I got a little louder. It didn’t take long before he turned around in a knee-jerk manner. “Who’s doing that!?” When no one fessed up, he kept his head turned toward us while his body slowly returned to the chalkboard. Then he carefully turned his head and uttered more geometric terms and equations, so I started: “Luddle-luddle-luddle...”. 

He spun around and repeated, “Who’s doing that!” Then he warned, “If I figure out who’s doing that, you are done here!” I was in class clown heaven, made giddy by the desired stimulus and instant reward. I had the entire class’s attention, and I was sure that he’d never know it was me. Even if he did accuse me, how could he ever prove it? He studied the faces before him while I fantasized that this game could go on for the rest of the school year. But he quickly erased that vision and pointed, looking every bit like the afflicted Puritan unmasking witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts some 330 years ago. He resounded at last, “You!” Then he wound up his arm as if to recharge the energy needed to repeat the indictment. His arm fully extended, and finger stiffly pointed toward my face, Mr. Grad proclaimed, “It’s you!” I think he was simultaneously bursting with joy and about to erupt into untenable anger.

“Me? It’s not me!”    

He took slow steps toward me, which added to my sense that he absolutely knew it was me, and even if he didn’t, he wasn’t going to hear my cries of innocence. I nevertheless continued to cry my innocence.

He didn’t give me a chance to bargain my way out of it, though. “Out! Get out of my room!”    

Other students never said it to my face, but I have to assume that at least a few were exasperated by me. Years later, it occurred to me that a classmate must’ve nodded their head in my direction with accusing eyes because I have always thought it peculiar that he had asked twice who was making the sound and waited a solid 10 seconds before pressing me into his crucible with inexplicable confidence. What else could have triggered his sudden certainty that it was me? It’s also possible that he detected a slight shit-eating grin on my face, or maybe I overplayed my saintliness, or maybe he didn’t care if he was wrong—this was his chance to get rid of me. Regardless, Mr. Grad only had a handful of faces to analyze as likely culprits, and mine was first among them.

While he bolstered his vehemence, my false denial diminished. We bickered back and forth while I gathered my things. When I reached the doorway, I stopped and looked back to my classmates for confirmation that I was hilarious. The positive reinforcement taunted Mr. Grad. I still had a foot in the room and was still high with adrenaline. For Mr. Grad, I couldn’t leave the room fast enough. He showed his stern face and pointed toward where the school’s office was if we could see through the white-painted cinder block walls: “I don't care where you go! Don't even think about coming back! You can tell the office anything you want...you are not stepping foot in this room again!”   

I looked in the direction he was pointing, then I reached into my pants pocket, pulled out a dime, placed it on my first finger and thumbnail and flipped it in a silver-twinkling arc that landed on his desk calendar and came to rest. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” I said, and then I turned around and walked into the unknown. He was still screaming at me when the slow-closing door obscured his words.

It took a few hours for the adrenaline to subside and be able contemplate what had happened. I knew right away that I was an asshole. It’s who I was at that moment, and I didn’t feel bad about it. I felt good about the attention and rewatched highlights of my perfect coin toss in my mind’s eye.

High school students have always suffered from this kind of ignorance because that’s the nature of guessing one’s way through the most serpentine developmental transition of our lives: puberty and family dynamics. As happens with most people, I suppose, my consciousness increased when adulthood nudged me out of youth and then spent the next several years tapping me on the shoulder: John, pay attention. Instead of persisting in making other people’s lives miserable like I did with Mr. Grad, I became a teacher myself.   

^^^

We faced the same psychological challenges in the 80’s that teenagers do today: depression, suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and others which were often exacerbated by OCD, ADHD, autism, and a dozen other common conditions. Classmates were sexually abused, had learning disabilities, and endured poverty and substance abuse. Persistent bullying was as normal as ever.

I had a close friend whose father was in prison. I had another close friend whose father, an officer of the law, beat him. One of my classmates, straight after graduation, married a man 30 years older. They each found ways to have pretty good lives, but that wasn’t true for everyone.

Frank Mason hung himself in a park with a bed sheet.

Olivia Thompson may have been on the spectrum, but if you said that to a counselor in 1983, they’d have said, “What spectrum?” The poor girl faced cruelty almost daily.

From the age of 10, Billy Sellers helped his paraplegic father go to the bathroom and waited for his mother to come home from the bar before he could go out to play; he later spent two decades in prison for armed robbery and lives with schizophrenia.  

Most of the black students at Ferndale High lived in a bizarre, tiny, red-lined township—undoubtedly a holdover from the Era of Segregation—that had similarities to a Jewish ghetto. On two sides of the roughly square neighborhood stood 6-foot fences. A warehouse district graced a third side, Highway 102 (8 Mile Rd) partitioned the fourth, and only four or five roads provided access in or out, allowing for only one to lead directly into a white neighborhood.

The impact of most of these imbalances, tragedies, and maladies were unknown, unaddressed, downplayed or misunderstood by teachers and parents. It was a time when mental health support was miserably inadequate, stigmatized, and often dismissed like a bad cold. Social-emotional problems existed among young people, but the strategies to address them didn’t. Obviously, teachers back then had compassion and constructive conversations about students who faced trauma and prejudice, but in 1983, getting at his or her deeper problem and talking about its connection to problematic behavior was more a matter of personal judgment. Educators in the 2010’s and 2020’s are “trauma-informed” through training in social-emotional learning, or SEL, and while these problems have always existed, today’s educators share a common language to discuss how past trauma impacts a student’s present experiences.

Mr. Grad was among a generation of teachers in the 70’s and 80’s who embraced the practice of doing all the talking. Everyone is familiar with teacher-centered instruction: Information passes from the knowing mind to the unknowing mind. Done. We can spot it in the way teachers organize the classroom. The desks in Mr. Grad's room, like most in America, were in straight rows and columns that faced him and the chalkboard. Ideally, students entered the room, sat still, listened, and took notes. Quizzes and tests would be scheduled at regular intervals. Anyone who attended public schools (and most others) knows this routine, regardless of age, and very few look back and think to themselves, “What a dignifying experience that was.”   

I’m not sure it would give Mr. Grad any solace, but having been that thoughtless student and remembering it so clearly contributed to my becoming a teacher. Over time, long after our last interaction, my childhood wounds buried in my subconscious mind when I was luddling had oozed into my conscious mind. Eventually, I became aware of a whole lot more than the obvious fact that I behaved poorly in 1983.      

I was eight years old in 1974, the year my parents divorced. I had a familiar disengaged response when they broke the news: I laughed. My mom asked, “John, why are you laughing?” “I don’t know,” I replied. 

That same year, my two oldest siblings quit high school in 9th and 10th grades and then lived permanently elsewhere. There was no explanation.   

In 1975, I was molested by a neighborhood boy. Mildly enough not to traumatize me, per se, but enough to twist my sexuality and play a part in a few episodes of self-destructive behavior. I didn’t begin to own it until I was 31.   

In that same year, my dad had campaigned and won president of the school board for Ferndale School District, and yet he paid $68 a month in support for three children and rarely asked us about school. No one acknowledged the irony in that. Not to me, anyway.

By 1982, during my sophomore year, my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 52 and allotted eight months to live. Eight months later, she died. I was back in school in two days, and about a month after that, I gave Mr. Grad hell. 

Instead of living with my dad, I had two offers from friends’ parents. I stayed with one of them until I graduated. I did have a say in that because if went to Royal Oak to live with my dad, I’d have had to change of schools for my senior year. It was nonetheless evident that my dad’s girlfriend was done mothering1.

Despite having my other classes in order, no conference was held regarding my behavior in Mr. Grad’s (or anyone else’s) class. I never spoke to a counselor about my mother dying, nor did a teacher ask, nor did I let on. No second adult knew about my assholish behavior because my mother had died, my father was busy being a friend, and my friend’s parents, with whom I stayed, didn’t receive a phone call since it was never reported to the office. Mr. Grad probably didn’t report it out of fear that I might worm my way back into his room, and I can hardly blame him. I didn’t report it because it hadn’t occurred to me to turn myself in. As far as Ferndale High School was concerned, I failed a class. It happens all the time. They reassigned the geometry course for my senior year with a different teacher. That’s all.    

It’s not as if kids don’t fall through holes in today’s schools. They do. All the time. And conferencing did happen with adults in the 70’s and 80’s, but it was more likely for kids to fall through the cracks unexamined, and when the adults don’t examine the child’s psychological or personal development, who will? The child? Maybe. Maybe not.

Many students address their wounds with substance abuse. Some skip school for weeks. Some get depressed and never return. Others become violent and sometimes land in prison. I coped with my losses by putting on a happy smile and pretending everything was copacetic. I was a dick to Mr. Grad, and I didn’t care. That thoughtlessness, that striking lack of awareness of oneself and future, regardless of the reasons, is a hallmark of adolescence then and now. Public education deserves much scrutiny, and yet today it has indispensable systems that address a child’s well-being, a child’s life. Young people are fallible human beings carrying burdens they sometimes can’t carry and deserve to be educated with dignity, even when they make poor choices, and public education seems to be more aware of that now.

There was no excuse for my behavior with Mr. Grad, but was it predictable? I was the same as the millions of students who in 2025 still sit, listen, and take notes while managing wounds they may not know exist. I don’t fault Mr. Grad. Sure, in retrospect, he could have had better classroom management skills, and it’s ultimately on him that he took the bait from me. But he was the norm in 1983 and to a large extent still is. I don’t fault the educational culture of the 70’s and 80’s. They were amidst a century of precedent: teacher-centered, squarely organized, and punitive mindsets. It was what it was.

Imagine if, from the beginning, American schools had created learning spaces that nurtured a child’s dignity and well-being first. Our schools today have inched closer through student-centered instruction, social-emotional learning practices, and restorative instead of punitive mindsets, but they still drag around the anchor of last century’s teaching models.

I wasn’t a victim of the times; I was a predictable outcome. Until we transform what we do in education to address the child as a full human being with an innate right to dignity, our losses to standardized testing, smart phones, and chronic absenteeism will persist.2

2

Standardized tests where half the students pass. Chronic absenteeism, which continues to rise. Teen suicide and depression rates that are higher than ever. Addiction to social media in which no one knows the outcome. Etc.

This is an essay about what defines an essay, the genre.

15-20-minute read

"An essay is a structured way of sharing information.”

—Angel Esperas, mother, 35, earlier this week

What Is an Essay? No, Really. What Is an Essay?

I have a story, or stories, to tell, and a predicament has been understanding the difference between two forms—essays and memoirs—and then deciding which is best for my writing. Before I started the Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at Goucher College, being an English teacher, I thought the difference was not so full of drama. Essays are more research-based and memoirs are more memory-based; essays are more objective while memoirs are more subjective; essays are shorter, and memoirs are longer. Also, one can write an essay about someone or something else but not so in a memoir. Clearly, I was missing something.

My problems started to swell on my first day of the 2024 Summer Residency while everyone energetically unpacked their bags and computers. I overheard an open discussion about it. In a sunny room with floor-to-ceiling windows, there were eight or nine other students, three mentors, and the director (also a mentor) of the program. Most knew each other from past semesters, and our spirits were high. Based on my assumptions stated above, I anticipated a precise, sterile, and efficient delineation, whereby one of the mentors might state it as cleanly as a dentist polishes her patient’s gleaming white teeth. Others would nod and approve, and then we’d open our readings and have a nice literary discussion. Instead, there was a brief clarification about length differences, but disagreements persisted, and I piped up to say, in so many words, “Essays are more fact-based. They include research about issues or events outside of the person’s memory, and memoirs rely more on memory but can use facts or statistics.” (I probably wasn’t that articulate, but this is an essay, which means I can approximate when necessary, so long as my reader doesn’t call bullshit.) One of the mentors called bullshit and shot my little thought down like a quail flushed from the bushes: “No, I don’t think so.” Those were her words, but what I heard was, “Back off, teacher-boy.”

It was nothing like that, of course, because the mentors of the program don’t treat people that way. I was being sensitive, and it only felt that way because, as an English teacher, I have an unwritten obligation to know all things related to language, including, and perhaps especially, the distinctions among genres.

I got over it, but my long-held assumptions about the two genres had been placed on unpaid administrative leave. Instead of feeling discouraged, it sparked my need to find out. Because I didn’t hear the mentors coming to clean and sterile agreements, it became murkier. I have since read and listened to everything I could. During the ensuing fall semester and Winter Residency in New York City, I listened to professional writers and classmates as if every next sentence might hold key points about the clear indicators of the genres. I discovered that the apparent father of the modern essay is 17th century writer Michel de Montaigne. Virginia Wolff’s and Joan Didion's names came up a lot, as well as a few well-known and unknown professors. I searched for a baseline from which to begin my education of the genre so I could gain a clearer understanding. The more I researched though, the once-clear, once-murky definition of an essay then became a moving target. It almost seemed like the experts were purposely trying to be less clear. I felt like the cliché, dumbstruck detective staring at a suspect board crammed with headshots, tacks, and colored yarn. Some English teacher I was.

But, in the spirit of an educator, I did what I would typically do when introducing a complex topic to my 10^th-graders: collect concrete details to create a baseline understanding.

Here is that baseline:

Essay: a piece of writing, rarely more than 100 pages, that expresses a relatively narrow aspect of the writer’s position on any topic. It may be written objectively or subjectively or any combination of the two, casually or formally or any combination of the two, and from memory or by investigation or any combination of the two.

In short, an essay is nonfiction that may be two pages or a hundred. It is not a clean genre.

My search for concrete descriptors was like Googling John Smith. Ambulatory and drifting, the essay may arrive at your door in a fresh new suit or with filthy toes sticking out of his shoes. He has few obligations, particularly if one compares him to fiction or poetry. Fiction may have a range of subgenres, such as science fiction, but the genre is prose that describes imaginary events and people. That’s it. Poetry is an endlessly complicated craft with innumerable possibilities in form and style, and yet one only needs to see it in print to tell it apart.

Eventually, the distinction between essays and memoirs became less important because defining memoirs is substantially simpler, and anyway, I had decided on essays as my craft for the program. If I intended to write a compilation of essays, I needed to know what the genre expects, and therefore, this is the result of my search for its shapeshifting identity.

^ ^ ^

“Half the articles published are propaganda, political, economic, social; the other half are purely informational, mere catalogues of fact. The essay is nowhere.” – Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Essayist, 1935

What Essay Experts Say, and Don’t Say

If I told the average person that I was writing an essay, they might assume it involves research on a topic assigned by the professor—whatever the subject. Knowing it’s an English-related course, they might expect that I would be asked to compare or contrast authors. If I were writing about fiction, they would imagine familiar names of writers, like John Steinbeck or Toni Morrison. I might write something like:

In the novel by Toni Morrison called Beloved, she uses imagery to magnify the metaphor of the power of memories. She writes, “He looked at her then, closely. Closer than he had when she first rounded the house on wet and shining legs, holding her shoes and stockings up in one hand, her skirts in the other (Morrison 186).”

And then I would follow with objective analysis: “One might argue that...”. And so on.

But if I wanted to show how an author of essays articulates metaphors to represent memories (same essay prompt), the average person would likely not expect it to read:

In a book of essays by Lauren Hough called Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, she uses imagery to magnify the metaphor of the power of memories. “After the night Jay’s shockingly hairy ass landed on my face, I learned to sleep with my head to the door (Hough 66).” One might argue that...

And so on.

The similarities, one fiction and one nonfiction, are telling. If one didn’t know either piece of writing or their authors, there would be no way to discern them. It could even be argued that Hough’s essay sounds more like fiction than Morrison’s novel. I don’t think so, but it could be argued.

Knowing Morrison’s work, her words fulfill common expectations because anything goes so long as the scene is imagined. It remains clearly fictional whether one identifies it by a subgenre, such as historical, science, or any other. It illustrates how the genre is easily identifiable and, unlike this essay which attempts to define an essay, it wouldn’t require 20 pages and 15 sources to explain because the elements are more limited and unambiguous.

My previous assumptions about essays were so much simpler. I had thought that they should maintain a modicum of decency, and yet “Jay’s shockingly hairy ass” (Hough, 27) is not that. Also, Hough’s work is purely subjective with no pretense. The typical person might furrow their brow upon hearing that it is an excerpt from an essay. Over the eight days of the Summer 2024 Residency, I learned that “Jay’s shockingly hairy ass” (Hough, 27) equally belongs in Hough’s book of essays as it does in a memoir or fiction. Subjectivity is a feature that does nothing to help a reader recognize the genre.

It gets murkier.

Jenn Tatum, writing for Marginalia, the graduate student blog at Columbia College Chicago, said, “An essay doesn’t know where it’s going, doesn’t know its end result (Tatum).” This personification of an essay, as if to have a mind of its own, suggests the qualities of a vagabond, which is not particularly reassuring. Certainly not concrete.

Robert Atwan (2012) does his best to confuse the issue. Atwan was the series editor of The Best American Essays for 38 years, from 1986 to 2023. If anyone can clarify the definition, it’s Atwan. He writes in a journal article, “Notes Towards the Definition of an Essay”:

The essay’s literary identity was almost totally lost early in the century, and the word has, as Lynn Bloom [Distinguished Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing Emerita at the University of Connecticut] aptly noted, become a catchall for any sort of nonfiction prose. A collection designed for a short-story course, for instance, would not contain memoirs and creative nonfiction, nor would a poetry anthology feature journalism and reportage. But in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, an essay can be whatever anyone claims it is (Atwan, 113).

A “catchall,” said Bloom. It reminds me of the teacher who tells every one of her students that they are special, which makes no one feel special. If I were an essay, “catchall” wouldn’t boost my morale either.

As a decades-long leader in critiquing the essay, Atwan references a bizarre child’s fantasy story to describe what has become of the genre. What are we to understand about it if the literal and figurative rabbit hole down which Alice falls represents her descent into an unexpected and bewildering exploration of the subconscious mind? The definition remains liquid. It isn’t the reference to the story itself that mixes up our understanding, it’s that Atwan (113) uses it to say “an essay can be whatever anyone claims.” It would make for a fascinating roundtable discussion to interpret, or perhaps more aptly, ponder, what Atwan’s message means specifically. It might help to locate some concrete details, or it might not.

More recently, Thomas Karshan, a professor of literature at the University of East Anglia, penned an essay called “What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Wolff.” He said: “Essays have always understood themselves evasively, preferring to define themselves by what they are not. They are not quite knowledge, and they are not quite art (Karshan, 37).”

Oh, boy. Could there be a more lost individual? Combine the three uses of personification to describe this genre of writing, and our person doesn’t know where she is going, doesn’t know who she is, and her identity is better understood by what she is not than what she is. If the essay were a person, she’d be on a mental health watch list. Or tripping on mushrooms. Or, “whatever.”

I was not exactly accurate in my delineation of an essay and memoir on that first day of the program. I wasn’t wrong either. I was partially right, depending on the audience. After all, even those who have steeped their entire lives in the craft are as rigid as jellyfish in defining the genre. Maybe by virtue of its atomistic complexion, an essay doesn’t exist. Maybe the subgenres of essays should proudly stand on their own feet, uncomplicated and whole as individual genres. Maintaining the experts’ use of personification, critical essays would stand firm with their feet apart, holding clipboards. Historical essays would face the past and hold banners of time and place. Academic essays would work ever harder in their slavery to form. Personal essays would sit cozily by the fire in a cushy chair and dream of being a wealthy memoir. Everyone would know exactly what defines them. Instead, the essay is all of them.

If an essay can be everything, then is it nothing?

Perhaps I can take solace in this pervasive ambiguity. Maybe my partly accurate explanation on that first day of the program was not cause for shame, given that my definitions grew naturally from my profession as a high school English teacher. In my world, my definition was spot on. Maybe even generously loose.

^ ^ ^

“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.” —Joan Didion, 2006

A Reinterpretation

Atwan’s allusion to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in working toward the definition of an essay has another possible interpretation. As I said earlier, it’s true that it suggests the genre is a descent into an exploration of the subconscious, but the rabbit hole also symbolizes the potential for adventure and the wonder of new experiences. It’s true that it symbolizes the unexpected and bewilderment, but it also leads to looking more closely at our lives’ transitions, the mockery of social conventions, and hope for a better life. It may be a disturbing story with wild and unreal situations, but there are constructive interpretations.

In an article called, “Celebrating 150 Years of Alice in Wonderland,” Rachel Hatch writes for Illinois State University’s online publication, Redbird Scholar: “An Oxford University professor of mathematics, Carroll filled both Alice books with numerous references to mathematical puzzles and philosophical debates yet kept it engaging for children (Hatch).” Hatch’s key words are “puzzles,” “debates,” and “engaging.” They begin to crack open a quality of the essay that revolves around the unsolved or perhaps incomplete. Hatch identifies features of Carroll’s fiction that engage readers by inspiring them to carry ideas and themes away from their reading chair, beyond the simple telling of the story. Jan Susina, professor of English who researches and teaches Carroll in children’s literature courses, says, “Our culture reinterprets the Alice books, just as we reinterpret Shakespeare and fairytales (Hatch).” Susina suggests that the success of the Alice books is in part because audiences continue to engage with them.

Atwan’s choice of analogies doesn’t help us gather concrete elements of the essay; rather, it emphasizes that there is a relationship between writer and reader that engages the reader to think about more than what is being said. Whether Atwan meant that specifically or not, Alice in Wonderland initiates a conversation, and perhaps that is what he meant in his title: “Notes Toward a Definition of an Essay,” instead of “The Definition of an Essay.” Maybe the whole point is not to set conclusions to the standard of total conclusiveness. Maybe an essay is partly defined by not declaring a final truth but opening the possibility of new questions.

Not to make too much of a single allusion by a single essayist working towards a definition of an essay, but Atwan and the others touch on a less tangible quality of the genre that begins to help me fashion a more three-dimensional and recognizable structure.

^ ^ ^

“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.” – Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Truth and Reality

A hundred and seventy-five years ago in 1994, I was working on a bachelor’s degree in the University of Washington’s unique Comparative History of Ideas program, or CHID. It was a degree focused on examining ideas across disciplines and historical contexts. The program emphasizes experiential learning and self-reflection, and I clearly remember a time when self-reflection was foisted upon me during my final presentation in CHID 205, Method, Imagination, and Inquiry.

The classroom was small with about 12 other students, the lights were dimmed (or maybe that’s how I remember it), I was at the front of the class, and my presentation was in the question-and-answer phase. That’s when it happened. The word “reality” slipped out of my mouth like an old man’s dentures. In most circles outside of a university, the word isn’t always loaded. In the university setting, it’s at least twice as likely that someone will call you out for it. In the CHID program, students were required, with venomous saliva spilling forth, to challenge my chutzpah. Jack pounced: “Reality? What is reality?” I don’t remember the guy’s name, so I’ll call him “Jack.” He was the first to summon a response from me. He was pale with orange hair, stood about 5’11”, and had piercing but friendly blue eyes that made him look attentive rather than intimidating. If I saw him at the pub, I’d recognize him.

“Uhh,” and I paused just long enough to qualify for a pause, and out beyond left field somewhere near Oklahoma came a response not conjured by consciousness. I said, “Reality, inasmuch as one can predict it.” I literally said that. I was happy with myself. I couldn't say where that shit came from, and yes, I remember the wording verbatim because when he asked the preordained question, I wasn’t ready but immediately knew my error. Not having stammered in a moment like that is a memory I don’t forget. Nonetheless, my face felt hot because words like “reality” and “truth” were, and probably still are, curse words. I had broken a CHID code, and my whole body felt it. I continued to argue my point. I don’t remember exactly what I said next, so to be clear, this is a favorable paraphrase that is almost certainly more eloquent and confident than I was in that moment: “Gravity is technically a theory, but I think we can all predict it will be here if you jump from a 12-story building. In that sense, gravity is reality.” At the time, I didn’t know if I was talking out my ass or if I thought on my feet in an impossible situation and impressed the hell out of everyone. I still don’t know because I blanked on the remainder of the presentation. I suspect it was more the former, so I have since scrubbed it from my memory to stave off the possibility of knowing the reality. Oops. There’s that word again.

One thing I’d like to say about this story is that Jack was brilliant and kind. When he asked the question, it wasn’t a gotchya moment for him. It was a good and fair question I deserved to be asked. Jack was, and presumably still is, a good person.

The second thing I’d like to say is that the most truthful element of that story is not the simple facts, such as the name of the course, the number of students, or even Jack’s hair color. Trust me, it was orange. Those are factual truths, but where the question of truth becomes intriguing, mysterious even, is in the attempt to inform my readers, you, which emotions I experienced without telling you which emotions I experienced. That is, I needed to be sure that you knew I felt angst without telling you I felt angst. The goal was for you to know how I felt, precisely, 175 years ago in 1994 at the University of Washington—and unflinchingly believe it.

If I told the story right or, rather, honestly, then readers know that I felt angst, fear of ineptitude, dread, and momentarily confounded, without my saying so. I want them to know that I felt a little proud of my clever response but uneasy about the blackness that followed. The essay, in terms of that 15-second episode in my life, should develop trust between myself and my reader.

Reliability is necessary for any writing, of course, but a personal essay needs to be so while conveying an entirely subjective experience by a single person for an event that possibly lasted only 15 or 20 seconds 30 years ago. One might legitimately ask, Who cares? It may be the most unreliable form of writing. So, I ask again, why invite the old, stodgy Academic Essay to stand rigidly under the same umbrella when he is in so many ways the opposite of the trendy new personal essay, which is reliable.

Maybe honesty is a better word than truth. Maybe that’s how we marry the two, or at least get them to room together. It doesn’t come with the baggage of dogma—what is truth? And, honesty is an adjective, which allows both writer and reader to have a discussion around the descriptor, whereas the so-called truth is an historically effective way to pick a fight or start a war. Old Man Academia is nothing if not honest, and if he isn’t honest, he gets blackballed from the university. He is even happy to invite his readers to verify his truths. The pact is well-established. The personal essay wants fewer rules and has less desire to justify her truth with journal articles or demographic studies. The personal essay, too, is nothing if not honest, so the personal essayist—given that his content could just as well be fiction—must make a similar pact. While the outcomes of academic and personal essays possess dichotomies (i.e., objective vs. subjective, factual vs. experience), the focus on being impeccably honest is inherent in the writing process of each. In this way, we have found one way that both subgenres belong under the same genre umbrella.

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“To speak the truth truthfully to one another is not only a delight; it is close to the core reason we exist in the first place.”

–Friar James V. Schall, Society of Jesus, 2009

An Alliance

The creation of the modern essay has been attributed to Michel de Montaigne because he merged personal reflection and a more conversational tone with the Western tradition of intellectual inquiry. Prior to Montaigne, over 400 years ago, shorter written contributions not called essays were put forth by thinkers like Plato in Ancient Greece, Cicero in Ancient Rome, along with thousands of others from every continent. An essay, regardless of its etymology, has been a fundamental part of humanity since our consciousness rose up and demanded to be heard. The pact a writer makes with the reader includes early thinkers who didn’t write essays, per se, but who nonetheless expressed what they saw to be truths through short, nonfictional pieces of writing.

In a previous section, I discussed how Atwan and others define the genre by referring to its “catchall” quality. They often use vague and abstract language (and personification) to say that the essay aims to engage and invite the reader to the thinking of the writer. Montaigne deliberately mixed that invitation into his essays without trying to achieve absolute conclusiveness, as if to say, “This is not all. Tell me what you think.” From the same journal article, Atwan explains:

Montaigne settled on the word essai to characterize his literary efforts...The etymology of essai can be traced to the late Latin exagium, which meant "to weigh" or "a weight." By the fourth century, the term had spread to the Romance languages with the additional and modern meaning of "to attempt" or "to try." Though we normally translate the title of Montaigne's book as Essays, suggesting only the genre, we should remember that in his time the term suggested no literary genre and would be read as "attempts" or "trials," or, since the verb essayer had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest: to sample, taste, practice, take a risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out, to sound—and these are only a few ways we might understand the term Atwan (2012, 109).

Anyone who has gone to high school would likely agree that their essays were “practice” and a “taste” of a broader subject (109). That they “weighed” an idea for 3-5 pages. Both the stringent academic paper and the liberated personal essay have a devotion to honesty. Both “weighs” limited and specific ideas (109). And if you continued to read and write essays after high school, this makes even more sense.

Because essays are a person’s attempt to make a brief and specific idea available to readers, those who wrote before Montaigne did so for similar reasons. The context of time and place in which they lived, of course, meant that they had their own edifying and unique way of considering it. Atwan writes that the “ancient Greeks and Romans, who developed the approach to an essay, although they didn’t call it that, with much stricter expectations, such as a commitment to objectivity, or...euboulia, that is, the capacity to give good advice, or for sound judgment (Atwan, 116).” Whether an essay does or does not explicitly offer advice, it demands sound judgment.

Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia, which alludes to the process of living virtuously. In modern psychology, eudaimonic well-being emphasizes meaning, purpose, and personal growth. These therapeutic emphases are consistent with writing essays. Ancient Western writers were ardent in their search for meaning and truth, for which their written works had exemplified.

I could continue for volumes identifying the perspectives of writers from all around the world who expressed their individual ideas. Whether they strived toward strict objectivity, as the ancient writers and all those who followed their precedent did, or if they were Montaigne in 1570 and the writers who followed his break from convention, they all had something to say and are still read today because they forged a pact with their readers, and the readers read with confidence.

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“If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”

– Dr. Stephen Shore, 2012, advocate and on the spectrum

What an Essay Is

As human thought developed throughout Europe (and the West) since Homer’s epic poems around the 8^th century B.C.E., it took an incredibly long time for the writers who followed to merge their own voice with intellectualism. Montaigne was the first to succeed 2,400 years later. Also, how would the history of ideas have been different had Plato and Aristotle followed Socrates and insisted on the Greek oral tradition of “puzzling” and “debating” their ideas? Ideas alone are like vapor whisking around in our skulls, and unless we attach words to them, our identities are abbreviated at best. When we speak words, our identity gains a more full voice. The need to be heard is inherent in all of us. It was inevitable that, even if Plato and Aristotle had emulated Socrates and only spoken their minds, someone else would eventually write down their thoughts in order to make them real and permanent.

It is astonishing, too, how devoted to intellectual integrity writers had been. Aristotle’s eudaimonia and Plato’s euboulia are only two ideas that flourished. In the 5^th century A.D., St. Augustine wrote over five million words while living in northern Africa. In the 1200’s, Thomas Aquinas wrote 2,900 pages in a single book so he could answer 614 theological questions in 3,125 articles. All of them followed the same language within the language of integrity. Virtue. Duty. Discipline. Objectivity. They wrote exhaustively toward honesty and truth to convey ideas from mere wispy thoughts to eager and passionate readers. Atwan writes that “it remained this way throughout the West until the late 1500’s when Montaigne” showed up and said, in so many words, “Let me tell you what I think, and how I came to think it.” And he did. He pissed off a few people for inserting a subjectiveness that had been mostly avoided, but he did so with enough fidelity and enthusiasm that it stuck.

Sitting comfortably at my desk centuries after all of them with the infinite expanse of information in my pocket, it’s unsurprising that the Montaigne sprung the power of the subjective voice when he did.

Consider:

• Europeans hid miserably from vengeful kings, queens, and the Christian god for at least 1,200 years in the Dark Ages for attaching words to their thoughts; and then the printing press was invented in 1440, which gave way to literacy.

• One lifetime later, heretic and outlaw Martin Luther applied this new literacy by alternatively interpreting the Bible and posting 95 theses on a church bulletin board. The Pope declared his own singular interpretations, while Luther suggested others. This in turn loosened the Church’s grip, and other freshly literate thinkers suggested newer interpretations. Soon the Pope had to compete with a dozen new voices. Perhaps this is where subjectivity took root.

• The Renaissance cleared space for the Enlightenment in the 1600’s, which was the same timeframe that Montaigne added his voice to Western intellectualism. Or put another way, the Church finally loosened up their assholes and the capital “I” Individual could say it out loud and without recrimination.

In a more progressive Europe, Montaigne was empowered to declare himself worthy of acknowledging that he had been listening to the conversation and said this about his essays: “I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I am here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow (Nixon et al., 2024).”

Maureen P. Heath (2019) writes about a chapter in her book, The Roots of Christian Individualism:

Montaigne looked inside and sought self-knowledge as a step toward self-acceptance in the temporal domain. The chapter [in her book] highlights the subjective-self meme as a turning point towards modernity, where we define our individuality in our differences. Montaigne turned from humanism as a basis for life, to the human values he found within himself and this is a mark of a more modern individuality (Heath, 181).

Perhaps an essay is so difficult to nail down because it’s one word trying to describe the unique ideas of countless individuals¹.

In 1935, Katherine Fullerton Gerould wrote an essay called “An Essay on Essays,” and writes, “The essayist says, ‘Come, let us reason together.’ That is an invitation—whether given by word of mouth or on the printed page—that civilized people must encourage and, as often as possible in their burdened lives, accept.” (Gerould, 117) The genre that Gerould describes sounds like more than “attempts,” “trials,” “tastes,” or “practice.” An accepted invitation to read an essay, whether a rigorous academic journal article on the ethics in the development of artificial intelligence or “Jay’s shockingly hairy ass,” is an RSVP to which the reader agrees in good faith (Hough). S/he expects that the writer will honor that.

I am 59 years old and grateful for the lifelong educational opportunities I’ve had, including my experience as a high school English teacher of twenty years, but I walked into Goucher College’s Creative Nonfiction Writing program without a clear idea about the partnership that essays demand. The essay was labeled by a distinguished professor of English, Bloom, as a “catchall.” Tatum says the “essay doesn’t know where it’s going, doesn’t know its end result.” Karshan says that “essays have always understood themselves evasively.” They define the genre like this because the essayist is not writing to emulate the other but to expand and share a sliver of the self. “In the fashion of Alice-in-Wonderland, an essay can be whatever anyone claims it is (Atwan).” Whatever.

If you’re an essayist, it opens the fields by miles; however, be mindful that you’re making a pact with the reader, so whatever you write, be honest and make no pretense.

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¹ I borrowed this notion from advocates of people on the autism spectrum. The original goes something like this: “Autism is one word trying to describe millions of stories.” It helps to clarify the epigraph for this section. Who to credit for this quote is unknown.