Feedback from Professor Bennion

Well, I now have four rough drafts of some personal essays to include in my upcoming eBook and honors thesis.  The first essay, a bus ride to McLeod, but also through my thoughts and motivations to travel; another essay on my disillusionment with Buddhism; one on the complex nature of charity; and another on making sense of marriage.  I've been working closely with Professor Burton and Professor Bennion on revisions, and so that is the goal of this week.

But I've learned something in the process.  Personal essays are hard.  Vulnerable, embarrassing at times, soul mining, and more.  All of the ethical questions I explored in Ghana regarding creative nonfiction are staring at me right in the face.  Yet, I have to be honest.  I have to be accurate if they are ever going to get off the ground.  This is a unique opportunity for me to revisit India in a way I never was able to with Ghana, to make sense of it and create something that others can read and understand something of what I have experienced in a way that is meaningful.  

Here are some sections of general advice that Dr. Bennion gave me this week that I found extremely helpful, particularly on how to be more objective in my writing of a personal essay:

"You have produced marvelous writing.  It does need another draft.  I’ve read the essays twice and made extensive comments.  Most of my comments have to do with being slightly more clear and precise.  It takes me ten drafts to be precise.  And sometimes I’m not precise then, so this is nothing unusual.  I do encourage you to face this work sentence by sentence.  I’ve made here some general comments, my specific comments are made inside the essays.   

I believe in the objective power of the essay, to follow us or even aid us as we try to get distance from or perspective on our difficult experiences.  The specific mechanism is a special kind of variable tone.  By tone I mean your own attitude toward your experiences. 

Sometimes you paint yourself as a martyr, sometimes as a victim, sometimes as the strong one; these visions of yourself are important because they are truly what you felt at the time.  What I’m asking is that you continue to reach toward another way of looking at all this, a little detached, a little distant, ironic possibly, but not guilt-driven or self-praising.  Just looking at yourself as another human in the tangle of experience.  It may seem that I’m asking you to make your final response coldly analytical, or narrow, but that’s not it. An essay is the one medium I know of that can make the writer be subjective and objective at once about her own experience.  Of course poetry and fiction can do this in other ways, but the essayist must step back from her own experience and use emotional and logical devices to see herself with wide, guileless, sophisticated, ironic, charitable eyes.  It may be that your experiences so shook you, made you so depressed that this will take some reaching.  I believe you can do this.  This material is wonderful, thick, complex, interesting, and you’ve rendered it extremely well.  I’m just trying to indicate what you might stretch toward next.  It requires more a change of thinking than of specific writerly changes.   

I’ve read the essays twice and marked them carefully.  They are well enough done that they could be put straight into your thesis with some minor revisions.  Despite their quality, I’m asking you to undertake another significant revision, where you go through the pain again and try to see it in a new way.

Another piece of advice: As I said already, you have great material (astonishing material) and you write well (meaning that you are generally clear, that you have a pleasing informal style, that you are a wanderer and a thinker, and that you have questions at the base of what you write).  One thing you can do better is to mark time more clearly and to make stronger transitions between scenes and meditations on scenes.  What you’re doing in the one entitled Essay 1 is weaving together different times, so the core story is the ride on the two busses from Delhi to Dharamsala, but you weave into that an experience talking to your supervisors, your father, and your experience in Ghana.  So you’re moving back and forth in time, like the mind works.  It’s natural and will work well, but in this draft I’m confused sometimes about what happened when and what you thought when.  You just need to make your time transitions clear.  That brings me to a related point. An essay is a genre which compares thoughts during one time to thoughts during another time.  So you have to be especially careful when you give a thought, that you make it clear when you had that thought.  You can also make it clear when you change your mind about something. 

My other general comment is that your sentences often can have shades of two or more meanings. The meaning is clear to you, but may be cloudy to a reader.  For example, when you’re talking about saying goodbye to your father you say “We knew the routine.” And that could mean you knew how to get ready for a trip and say goodbye or that you knew how to check into an airport.  Those two are almost the same, so the sentence for a careful reader seems like 3-d when you take the glasses off, just a slightly fuzzy, double image. I’ve given comments concerning where you could be more precise."