The essay, like the poem, is a form pursued for love. There is no money in it. The only acclaim comes from a very small audience of readers, many of whom are also essay writers. The cultural traction of the essay, in the aggregate, is very small. When essays are part of something change-provoking, it is usually in part because of something outside the essay, such as the place of the writer in a change movement, or the intersection of a much-waited-for message with an important historical moment.
This reality would only be a diminishment of the value of the essay if we could agree that the value of things is entirely in the breadth of their utility. This is an idea that I resist, in part, because the essay has taught me that it is wrong. Because the essay values by the intensity of its individual, idiosyncratic, subjective attention. A subject or object, small or large, benefits from the full force of the essayist’s attention for three, thirty, or three-hundred pages—however long it takes to complete the act of attention to the essayist’s satisfaction.
The essay, when done well, is usually in some way weird. It does not want to conform to marketplaces or authorities of any kind. Whether or not the essay is kind to the reader, the expectations of the reader are a secondary consideration to the exigencies of the essay itself, as ideas and language unfold in real time. This is one of the reasons that the essay is my favorite form to read. I know that I am unlikely, when in the hands of a good essayist, to be wasting my time on the perfunctory. I’m going right into the unknown, and whatever happens there, we won’t spend much effort sanitizing it. We’ll look straight at it, together.
If you read a lot of books, like I do, you might agree that not all of them are great, and that many of them aren’t really that good. This is something that is impolite to say, so most of the time we’re right not to say it. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, and it also might mean that readers who care about good books might have an obligation to notice when they are in the presence of something good, to ask why it seems like the thing is good, and to point other readers in the direction of the actual good thing.
Recently, I found an actual good thing, a first book of essays by a writer from New Orleans and Tuscaloosa named Brooke Champagne. The title, Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, does a lot of work to tell the reader about some of the subject matter, which includes, to be sure, New Orleans, and the life of a Latina who lived there. What the title doesn’t do, out of modesty I’m sure, is tell the reader what makes the book good.
There isn’t any one answer to that question, and I’m sure different readers will have different opinions. For me, the book’s pleasures begin in the construction of the speaker’s persona. The “I” of this book isn’t satisfied with easy answers or easy questions. Instead, the reader is asked to reckon with an intelligence that turns things over, again and again, not just in single essays, but also, structurally, throughout the book, which makes expert use of pattern and variation in ways any poet would envy and admire. Also, there’s the special qualities of the language (in this case, occasionally, more than one language), the facility with beginnings and endings, and the weird special logic that could only have come from the one essayist that offered it.
When I finished reading, I wanted to ask the essayist some questions. Lucky for me (and for you), she agreed. Here are her answers:
Kyle Minor (KM): Nola Face is a first book, but in some ways it doesn't seem like a first book. It seems like the work of a writer who has been letting a series of essays slow burn for a long time.
Brooke Champagne (BC): Thanks for bringing up my advanced age right out of the gate, Kyle! (This is a joke, though my doctor began referring to me as “geriatric” a decade ago, at 34, when I’d decided at that “advanced age” to become pregnant.) In all seriousness, I appreciate that observation so much, because this collection has been simmering for many years. One of the first essays collected here was published in 2013, just for some perspective. And I vastly revised that essay to fit in with its surroundings in Nola Face, and also updated it to fit in with who I was then versus now. Sort of. I joke about this in the book, but it’s true for me: as an essayist, it took me a long time just to understand that the wisdom to write an essay won’t come tomorrow (or the next day or the next, ad infinitum). All the wisdom (or lack thereof) is already within me, and I’m just trying to get across the “me” interpreting whatever experience or theory I’m working out as accurately as possible. But the “me” changes with time, and then those changes become part of the essay, too. I tend to write (or revise) slowly and think slowly, which is why I’m bad in a fight but will eventually prevail. Just give me ten years, dammit, and I will figure out how to win.
Can I just say, and maybe your writing process fits this category: I so envy the longform journalist-essayist who’s able to be expansive, philosophical, totally thorough, completing research and composing a deep-dive thought piece within six months. It’s like, huh? It’s a weird (and maybe embarrassing) thing to admit I work on each discrete essay for years, though maybe not so much because with this first book, I was working on a lot of them at the same time. Even after many of them were accepted for publication, I’d return to them and edit, mostly to cut. I remember fondly the time when I believed “publication acceptance” was synonymous with “completed.” Ha! Paul Valery’s quip about a poem never being finishing, only abandoned, also feels true for the essay. Maybe especially for the essay. Our thoughts about any particular subject continue to evolve after the book-producer in the distance clicks Print, which is why writing an essay about any particular subject is merely an invitation to take it up again later, maybe with a different perspective, or additional research, or just the blessing of having lived longer and learned more. But still, one must decide when to be done with an essay, and here’s my current barometer: it’s done when I stop waking up in the middle of the night sweating over a new idea, more notes for revising, etc. When something else is waking me up (something is always waking me up), that’s the new essay subject.
KM: The book's subtitle, A Latina's Life in the Big Easy, makes material promises about place and identity, and the book makes good on those promises. But the more time I spent with the book, the more I thought that there were unannounced preoccupations that might in some ways loom larger. For example, this book seems form-drenched, almost form obsessed. Not just at the essay level, where we have a lot of interesting formal experimentation, but also at the 50,000 feet in the air level, where the observer can see the whole thing as it hangs together. The parts, the proportions, the repetitions, and the ways you vary them.
BC: I am obsessed with form, and I love that perspective of seeing it all from 50,000 feet in the air. As a writer yourself, I’m sure you can relate to the way we create moments that feel like magic for the reader, which is just working so intensely at them for so long that what results is something you’re maybe not always 100% aware that you actually did. Just as a small example, one of the essays in the middle of the book is titled “The Stump of The Giving Tree,” where I offer a takedown (kind of) of that perennial children’s classic. And then closer to the end of the collection, in “The Case for ‘Cunt,’” I consider the state of our politics through language, and how every time we say the word “country,” we could also be saying CUNT-tree. Okay, so this is a small thing, but that resonance of a tree is just one of those accidents that happens when you’re writing across different ideas, but the reader is like, whoa, there’s that tree again, but it looks different this time.
Back to the form obsession, it seems like what separates journaling from essaying is primarily form. That’s what I learned what an essay could do, by messing with form. I probably understood that intuitively ever since embarking on the essay decades ago, but easier said than done. Now every time I consider a new subject to write about, that niggling question of what-form-will-it-take is always in the back of my mind. And there’s the temptation to get cutesy with it, which I try to avoid. Like, not everything is a hermit crab essay (essay-as-receipt, essay-as-itinerary, essay-as-recipe, etc etc). But even in a straightforward narrative, the shape of it—where it will begin and end and what fenceposts or other resonant details are set up in the middle to make the journey make sense to the reader—yeah, that’s form, too.
KM: You've been living for many years now in Tuscaloosa, teaching at the University of Alabama. Is the reader right to intuit that there's something about that geographic dislocation that has given the essayist enough distance on New Orleans to achieve a kind of double-vision—to see it not only as you saw it from the inside, but also as you have come to see it from the outside?
BC: Your question makes me think of the cruel and only sometimes-true motto another writer friend quipped about the town where we live: “Welcome to Tuscaloosa, only four hours from New Orleans.” I recently attended a literary festival where there was a panel about writing place, and the discussion there clarified for me how crucial the distance away from the place-as-subject is to me as a writer. It’s basically about seeing the place from both insider and outsider perspectives. Transplants to New Orleans talk about this all the time, “I wasn’t born here, who am I to write about it?” This is coming from folks who’ve lived there for decades, as adults, who most definitely “know” the place better than I do. I left New Orleans at seventeen and have never lived there as an adult, so what the hell do I know? My mother and some of my family still live there, so I’m a perpetual visitor. After Katrina happened and Tom Piazza and others straightaway wrote the definitive books of this place, documenting the city before a storm would change it forever, I thought, oh well, other people are telling the Important Stories of New Orleans, but all I have is mine. It took those years of dislocation you’re referring to, moving two states away that might as well be continents away, culturally, to register that my story was good enough to tell simply by virtue that no one else would be able to tell it. Plus, dammit, it was mine. No one has experienced New Orleans with Lala as a maternal figure and tour guide, of that I’m pretty sure.
I’ve taught classes in immersion writing and we discuss the advantages and pitfalls of both knowing your subject deeply or just thinking you know it. For me it boils down to, whatever the subject, have some humility. If the subject is your birthplace, or yourself, most of all. I’ve been blessed with the congenital awareness that I have a full understanding of nothing. That’s made me a forever-student in every subject I consider, maybe especially this contradictory, illusory place of my birth.
KM: There is a lot of thinking about language going on in these essays, some of it explicit, some of it implicit. How we use language, why we use it, how we misuse it, how we mute it to avoid the consequences of saying true things, how it can mean differently in different contexts. As you developed these essays, and as you started to collide them against one another as the book took shape, how did your thinking about language expand?
BC: “Lying in Translation” was one of the first pieces written for this book, and I suppose all my thinking about language in all its forms stems from there. In that essay I depict the literal act of having to lie for self-preservation when I was so young. Being rewarded for lying both from the possibly-offended party and my grandmother Lala, who forced me into those lies, has led to a lifelong obsession of what words can do, or fail to do, and what they’re for. Other language-related essays (maybe all of them are, in a way?) certainly informed one another as I was working out what it means for a woman to love cursing, for example, or to code switch from the language of my Westbank New Orleans streets to my role as a professor in Alabama.
I think, or at least I hope, I approach life through a mostly comic framework, so that when fucked up things happen to me, I have to laugh about it. That said, I’m a nervous, neurotic mo-fo, particularly when first meeting people, and in these and many other situations in life, I feel out of place and unable to find the right words, ever. Which is difficult and embarrassing for anyone, but especially for a writer. My husband is also a writer, and he and I often commiserate about how when we’re in polite company, with a new dentist, let’s say, we dread the “and what is it that you do?” question. Because they judge us so hard for being English professors and writers, as in “I’ll make sure to use correct grammar around you.” If these polite people only knew all the cunty words ticking across the chyron of my brain. In this way I totally relate to George Costanza. I want to tell inquiring strangers that I’m an architect, and let them talk about how impressive that is and leave me to just listen (I know nothing of architecture, though I did read Devil in the White City). Architect = automatic ethos. Compare that to Writer = why are you secretly judging the way I speak/think/am? Meanwhile, I’m like: Dr. Dentist, sir, I don’t have any of the good, impressive words for you right now. Please just brush my teeth for me, and thank you.
KM: One criticism that has been leveled at formally-engaged work is that it is too often a cold and cerebral exercise, too abstracted from the ground-level, flesh-and-blood human experience. I've read plenty of novels and essays that could be indicted in that way, but these essays couldn't be any more interested in the flesh-and-blood stuff. Family, motherhood, cultural inheritance, friendship, childhood, body stuff, domestic life, a carjacking . . . And I'm just scratching the surface here. I wanted to ask how, in your practice as an essay writer, these two elements—the chasing of the form and the chasing of the troubling questions that make your heart beat hard—are working together? Which comes first? Does anything reliably come last? How does one enrich or inform or change the way you process the other?
BC: I love this question so much. What comes first for me is whatever makes the heart beat, blood pulse, the anger or love or whatever emotion I’m feeling…I have to physically expel it from my body, so I do that through writing. Luckily for the reader, they don’t ever get to see me figuring out how those emotions will take shape into something coherent that’s not just for me. I’ve thought about this a lot lately, how long my writing takes. There’s a constant process of cooling and heating. The method and the madness. The heat of the subject and writing of it, and the cooling of the feeling. After the initial heat, I regularly return to it so as not to ever let it get too hot or too cool again. It’s a forever Goldilocks situation with the essay, whereby I have to care enough about a subject to keep at it for a long time (warmth), but be distanced enough from it to make sense of it (coolness). This is why it’s extremely difficult to teach essay writing in a semester-long format. I can give students the tools, give them notes for starting on a project and tips for seasoning it, but they must figure out their own heating/cooling system for their subjects longer term.
KM: One plausible pitfall of taking on literary language which can cause an individual's story to be seen as a one-to-one stand-in for a larger group, place or culture, is that implicit, needling questions, often good ones, start to creep into every choice. In the case of this book, the reader thinks that the essayist was always aware that this was so, and so was always making adjustments to ensure that the examination of all these things—the individual, the people of origin, the intersecting cultures, the city—was always being properly poked and prodded and complicated, so that none of the important stuff was reduced to a single thing less contradictory than life itself and all the people we know. But, of course, the reader didn't write the book. So I wanted to ask the writer—how were you thinking about these kinds of questions as you worked on the essays, especially in relationship to the big abstractions (and there are others): Latina, New Orleans, Catholicism, Capital-M Mother . . .?
BC: One of the first things I teach writing students, particularly the unwilling ones in composition courses, is the paradoxical fact that the more specific a writer can be in rendering any situation or story, the more universal and connected your reader will be to it...even if they cannot personally relate in the least. Because you’ve showed them this singular way of seeing. So while there was a generalized anxiety about being mistaken for speaking for all Former New Orleanian Ex-Catholic Latina Mothers, I tried to always operate at the micro level of “get this scene right, get this reflection right” that over time contributed to getting discrete essays right (or as right as I had the ability to get them).
Still, once I conceived that I was even-a-little-bit trying to write about New Orleans, that fear of Big Representation crept in. Nola is just this canonical, mythical place that absolutely does not belong to me (cities belonging to anyone is a theme here and maybe a subterranean, unexamined-by-me colonial perspective). It took maybe some more maturity to understand that no place belongs to anyone and that, quite obviously, New Orleans is itself so many places at once. People are that way too, and the contradictory character of Lala, my Ecuadorian grandmother who in addition to the city is the star of the book-show, was easy (and fun) to build because of her contradictory nature. Figuring out how to replicate those contradictions themselves was both the challenge and delight of writing this book.
KM: At the end of the long run as an essayist that this book represents, what have you come to believe the essay is? What is it for? What can it do? And what can it maybe do that no one has asked it to do yet? And, for your own essays, what's next? What new literary want has the success of these essays generated in you as an essayist?
BC: Several years ago the New Yorker did a profile on Donald Glover, filmmaker and storytelling genius, and in it he said something along the lines of “narrative as we know it is dead.” Like these are the last gasps of traditional forms of storytelling, and he was lucky to come in at the end of it and get his stories told the way he wanted to. I guess he was anticipating the “takeover” of AI or whatever. Reading this I became very angry with Donald Glover, understandably, and the hubris of dubbing oneself the Last Great American Storyteller, even if that self is the inimitable Donald Glover.
My own non-genius thought about all this is that as long as humans inhabit the earth, they will tell their stories. It’s not that complicated. How we tell them, in what forms and with which technologies, and how traditional publishing will fare through this, shit, I can’t even possibly imagine the limitlessness (or conversely, the potential limitations) of that. But the essay in particular is one I hope keeps expanding and opening up as much as possible. Not to parrot the Donald Glover stance, but I’ve worried for years about the death of poetry because it is written and read mostly by other poets and artists. But at least children still feel poetry is accessible, and they kinda-sorta continue playing with it early in their school years. But the essay? I think if someone did a version of Jay Leno dude-on-the-streets interview asking people what they think of The Essay, they’d say, “I hated writing those in college” or “I hated writing those when trying to get into college” or “are you calling me stupid? I didn’t go to college so I have never once had a reason to think about the ‘essay.’” So that’s my fear. That the essay is only wedded to The Academy, to literariness or learnedness. Yet I also realize that creating the essay demands a mind that, let’s face it, probably went to college, which is a place that at its best just teaches you the practice of thinking. Or is otherwise an autodidact, which I’m not sure our culture is even capable of creating anymore (do I sound like Donald Glover in my premonitions yet?). What I’m saying is yes, college is the place we perhaps go to analyze this form, and living is the place we learn to write it.
As for what’s next for me, I have two ongoing essay projects that I hope will not take me ten years to complete but let’s be real, I’m slow. One of them includes essays in the vein of Nola Face, funky forms and funniness all related to the aging, decaying body (mostly mine). In this collection I’m using different body parts as metaphors to tell the stories of my family and friends, past and present, alive and dead. So I tell a story of my grandmother through her legs, my husband, through his facial hair, my mother, through her puzzle-solving, game-playing brain, myself, through my knee injured while running that one time when my dog led me to fall in a foxhole. In another project, a more demanding memoir-in-profiles titled Lives of the Aints, I’m writing about Saints football and the community of dead and dying members of my Nola community that the sport brings together, even from beyond the grave. Telling stories of the dead is brutal work, and emulating and expanding Butler’s Lives of the Saints is no small task. But writing essays is hard work, and essayists—all of us—were born to do hard things.
Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press. Her work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. She lives with her husband and children in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.
Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears online and in print at The Atlantic, Esquire, New England Review, Iowa Review, New York Times Book Review, and three volumes of the Best American Series. A new book of essays, How to Disappear and Why, will be published by Sarabande in Fall 2024.