Lopate and Loren: Two Reasons to Fall in Love with the Essay All Over Again
By Kate Flaherty

Let me begin by telling you I love essays. I was one of the two kids in my high school English class who was sorry when the Emerson and Thoreau unit ended. My favorite scene in the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder did not have to do with her move to the great plains in a wagon or riding a wild mustang or meeting her true love Almonzo, but instead with when she was able to go to high school and write her first composition (her topic was “ambition”).

And when I first began working at Prairie Schooner, I loved everything in the magazine—poetry, interviews, stories (what can I say, I’m a bookworm)—but the essays were my favorite sons and daughters. Sydney Lea, Paul Mariani, Nancy Willard, Linda Pastan, JoAnn Beard, Maxine Kumin—these writers were the scientists of literature, examining nature or people or truth with a microscopic eye and sharing their discoveries with their readers. It didn’t matter to me if the essays were about tramping around in the Vermont woods, following the descent into madness of a brilliant poet, attending a wedding in an Iowa cornfield, or dissecting the meaning behind the random murder of a family member in Detroit. I loved the attention to detail, the connections writers made between one world and others, the thoughtfulness of their meditations, and the fact (and yes, fact is an important word in the world of the essay) that it all was real.

So it should be no surprise I was thrilled Bison Books has republished the collection of essays Against Joie de Vivre by Phillip Lopate, one of the modern masters of the essay form, and republished a collection of essays about poet and literary nonfiction writer Loren Eiseley, Loren Eiseley: Commentary, Biography, and Remembrance, a collection that originally was a special issue of Prairie Schooner edited by Hilda Raz. These are two distinctly different essay collections—the Lopate book is a collection of essays by Lopate, and the Eiseley book is a collection of essays by other writers about Eiseley—and yet they appeal to me for the same reasons. The work in these two books makes me want to revisit writers or worlds I have loved, seek out new writing or new worlds I have yet to discover, and meditate on my own writing and the world I live in right now. 

The topics of Lopate’s essays run the gamut from Chekov to the city of Houston to suicide, smoking, marriage, friendship, and the touchy relationships we have with landlords. Against Joie de Vivre also touches on one of my favorite Lopate topics—the essay itself—and its shape, health, and future in this fragmented and complicated world. Lopate is an expert on the art of the essay (and yes I stole that phrase from one of his books), and he can practice what he preaches. The essays in Against Joie de Vivre are insightful, wry, and smart—Lopate instructs and delights with the best of them, no matter what his subject.

The pieces in Loren Eiseley: Commentary, Biography, and Remembrance examine a man whose environmental writing and poetry uncovered the mix of beauty and terror in the natural world, while also making that world accessible from a scientific point-of-view. The essayists in this collection all look at Eiseley from a different perspective, allowing us to see how Eiseley joined the ranks of literary nonfiction, how his difficult childhood and his loneliness and melancholy affected the way he saw the natural world, but also how he managed to find hope in his scientific observations, however dark the struggles of nature might seem. We also see how Eiseley earned his place alongside greats like Thoreau as well as his closer compatriots Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson, and how he paved the way for writers today like Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, and John Janovy, Jr.

You do not have to be a fan of Eiseley to thoroughly enjoy this collection, but I warn you these essays will lead you to seek out his work (and Bison publishes several books by Eiseley as well). If these two collections also lead you into a love affair with essays or with literary nonfiction that you want to transform into a long-term, committed relationship, may I also recommend Dinty Moore’s Between Panic and Desire, a short, sharp and funny memoir that just won the Grub Street National Book Prize in nonfiction, and, for your more contemplative Eisely-like days, John Janovy’s Back in Keith County (now on sale on the UNP website) or Lisa Knopp’s Interior Places and The Nature of Home.

Kate Flaherty is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor, with Hilda Raz, of The Best of Prairie Schooner: Personal Essays.