Dec 3, 2024: Nicole Walker, No Authority, Just Thanks

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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A year ago, I submitted a book proposal to Bloomsbury Academic called “How to Write the Hard Stuff.” Because it is the academic arm of the press, based in London, the proposal was sent to leaders in the field. British field leaders, who I find daunting and foreign. The leaders in their field had concerns that I was not an expert in trauma, so where did my authority lie? I revised the proposal clarifying that I wasn’t writing a book about how writing is cathartic or therapeutic, but that writing is important and empowering because it allows you to take control of your narrative. I wasn’t planning on being the authority. I am just one writer who has chosen various and sundry techniques of telling my story that might help others shape their own. My authority is usually only in the personal narrative, which is why I write creative nonfiction and why I’m not a politician. I resubmitted the proposal, promising that I was no authority indeed.

The second version passed muster. Unfortunately, I learned this in May. The book would be due in September. My editor, Lucy, was sorry it took so long to get the contract together. She gave me a little extra time—September 30th instead of September 1st.

I had been writing all winter and spring anyway. I had been on sabbatical and worked on a few books—How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the story upon which Writing the Hard Stuff is based. Also, I revised a novel which I’m revising again as we speak. Perhaps with the 15th revision, I’ll get this where it needs to be! But that is beside the point because I did indeed have to put the novel aside to work on this Writing the Hard Stuff book. I thought I just needed to revise some older essays, but as I dug in, I realized I had to write a whole new book.

So I typed. And revised. And read the book aloud. I was almost done when the semester started. I had the big thread and the tiny threads woven throughout. I had calls forward and responses back. I had little jokes littered throughout. But I also had to start teaching my nonfiction class. Do you know what a group of nonfiction students needs? They need to know how to write the hard stuff. They also need to know how to analyze a text critically. So I asked them to bring something from the text for class discussion. If I was the kind of teacher that lorded authority over my students’ heads, this might be an imposing request. But because my main mode of teaching is beginning each day with the foibles of Nicole—from telling them stories about how I got the heel of my boot in caught in the hem of my pants, making me slip down the stairs, to how, right before I was to speak at an event, I spilled wine down my shirt, the fact that in each of my novels, at least one character is named Zach, or the time I had a typo in my Essay Daily essay, my students don’t have a problem telling me what they really think.

The students read with devotion and care. I had never met these particular students before, but I have been teaching at NAU for 15 years. I know NAU students to be intelligent, kind, and wise. I don’t know exactly why I’m so lucky to have such students, but it has never been not true. I’ve had different kinds of studiers—all nighters, right before classers, never studiers—but the attitude they bring is one of openness and generosity. I do teach creative writing, which might explain it. Creative writing is a class students elect to take. It counts as a general education course and, if they follow the track, the classes count as an emphasis toward an English Major. But even if the course is generally made of folks who definitely want to be there, I’m not sure why they are so collectively smart and thoughtful. They didn’t have to exert themselves.  The only graded part of this assignment was to offer a discussion question for the class. But exert themselves they did.

Some responded a lot. Some, a little. But as we spent the semester studying what I meant by hard stuff (everything) and what I meant by writing (so much), we had a document from which to work in which everyone had a little invested. From there, the students wrote 5 essays over the next 5 weeks. To these essays I gave extensive feedback, as did their fellow students. We responded to essays about eyeglasses and seashells, bike riding and growing up near the ocean, the green bottles of Rolling Rock and stories about what a pain in the ass other people are and our own bodies can be.

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I’m not allowed to talk about politics in the classroom although I am allowed to encourage students to register and vote. But they know the personal is political. I can nod with them when they feel disaffected or nihilistic. I can receive commiserating glances when the end of the world seems to be knocking at our door. Perhaps that is what makes these students so great—it’s not that they’re all the same or that they all care about politics or that they all trust me to be their teacher. It’s that they’re willing, to read each other’s work, and mine. They know everyone has a story and it is often a hard one. They’re here to listen to that story and help shape it and to listen to it again. There is as much reading and listening in the class as there is writing and talking. It’s a trust circle. A partnership. A committee. A collective. A community. Every semester I go in expecting it. I’m surprised I’ve never been disappointed. And I am grateful to each of my students every single day. Also. They read Essay Daily. Which is another generosity and another way to build on what we’ve begun.  

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NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books, plus one forthcoming, Writing the Hard Stuff, from Bloomsbury Books. She has written several essays for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits the Crux series of nonfiction at the University of Georgia press. She teaches creative writing and serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Dec 2, 2024: Kathleen Rooney, Perfect Days in Imperfect Times

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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A couple of the many reasons why I enjoy writing in all genres, but especially essays, are:

1. a desire for a sustained period of peaceful stability, and
2. an attraction to a structured rhythm, 

neither of which is always possible to maintain in life.

In the introduction to their certain-to-be-indispensable Rose Metal Press Field Guide to the Lyric Essay (coming out in 2027 and seen so far only by Abby Beckel and me, their editors), Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Ann Roripaugh explain the lyric essay expansively as “creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language—to resonances of sound and imagery.”

On election night, rather than torturing ourselves by obsessively refreshing the returns, my spouse and fellow writer Martin Seay and I watched Wim Wenders’ 2023 movie Perfect Days, an elegant spiritual drama about a fifty-something bachelor and Tokyo public toilet cleaner named Hirayama, played by Kōji Yakusho. 

My friend, DePaul colleague, and fellow Poems While You Wait poet Eric Plattner (who shares my affinity for hybrid genres) recommended the film. It’s a movie with characteristics of a lyric essay, kind of like those of Agnes Varda, in which the calm, gently comic, forgiving focus on people and the places where they live provides maps to their subjects’ inner lives, honoring the subtle interior shifts we all experience, even if these feel small in comparison to the cataclysms of geopolitics or whatever. 

The movie Perfect Days is fiction but feels at times like a documentary thanks to Wenders’ attention to the minutiae of this particular guy’s day-in-day-out dedication to a literally shitty job that he performs with more intention and care than a lot of people ever dedicate to anything. 

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The toilets themselves work almost as supporting actors, beautifully designed and sculptural, looking as much like tiny houses you might want to live in or art installations you might pay to see as they do mere public amenities. 

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In fact, the movie originated because “Wenders had been invited to Japan as the guest of a prominent Japanese businessman who hoped that the director might want to make a series of short films featuring the toilets, which had been conceived as showcases for Japanese artistry and hygienic mastery.”  

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Wenders instead decided he wanted to make a feature-length film about a fictional character, but the toilets appear and re-appear in a meticulous pattern, punctuating the story of Hirayama and underscoring his own meticulousness.

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Wenders uses repetition to show how Hirayama—in his humble apartment in the shadow of the Tokyo Skytree and at the toilets he tends to in the high-end Shibuya district—creates a structured rhythm within the chaos of the city, carving out his own patch of peaceful stability. 

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Over and over again, we see him wake at dawn without an alarm, roll up his sleeping mat, brush his teeth, wash his face, spritz his beloved plants, don his blue coveralls, attach his numerous toilet keys, purchase his coffee from a vending machine, and drive his van to work while listening to cassettes of Patti Smith, Otis Redding, and the Animals. 

Gradually, lyrically, Wenders blends variations into this repetition, showing how little obstacles—his flaky co-worker quitting and leaving Hirayama to spend a day cleaning all the toilets solo, his niece coming to crash at his tiny apartment after a fight with her wealthy mother, Hirayama’s sister—sometimes disrupt his clockwork, but never keep him from doing his job or stop him from being steady and kind to everybody he comes in contact with, including the trees in the parks where he works and the users of the toilets who interrupt him at his cleaning.

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The combination of documentary and lyrical techniques made the movie feel not just essayistic but also ritualistic, as much a meditation as a narrative, and made me think a lot about structure—structuring a life and structuring a story. True care and attention—showing up reliably and noticing what’s there—are basically sacred but essentially rare in art and in life. 

Using the patterning that Czerwiec and Roripaugh cite to create resonances of sound and imagery, Wenders manages to effectively dramatize and celebrate the less flashy but noble aspects of being an ethical person.

There’s a trend of what I’ve come to call neglect-masquerading-as-care where people fail to show up and support others in the ways they said they would do, while spinning this unreliability as concern: teachers letting students not turn in work—work that would help them learn and grow and take them outside of themselves and into other worldviews—because the student is vaguely “struggling” (and/or the teacher doesn’t want to have to do feedback), for instance, or bailing on commitments to friends and loved ones and declaring it self-care. It’s unpopular to say, probably, but: that sucks. That behavior sucks. It lets everybody down, including the bailer, and is the flat-out opposite of true care, because making demands—as in challenging oneself and others to commit and see something through—is a form of love. 

Perfect Days, with its structured rhythm matching that of its lowkey heroic protagonist, feels compelling because it’s life-affirming to watch a work of art that is in huge part a reflection on keeping your word and showing up and giving your all no matter what. 

I used to think that just showing up and paying attention were pretty low bars, but lately I think they are everything.

It’s hard to talk about stuff like this without sounding self-important or righteous. Wisely, Wenders almost never has Hirayama talk. In the way a lyric essay can use white space and leave stuff out, the script trusts audiences to get the point without excess explanation. Yakusho—who won Best Actor at Cannes—plays Hirayama with the expressiveness, humor, and pathos of a silent movie performer. 

As such, we see that he’s the kind of special person who notices and appreciates—or as needed ameliorates—whatever a situation presents. He takes a film photograph of a tree every day on his lunch break, for example. He uses a small mirror like a dentist would use to see if there’s anything gross encrusted on the underside of a given toilet seat, then scrubs vigorously. 

For leisure, Hirayama frequents the cheap paperback section of his neighborhood bookshop. Whenever he checks out, the woman who runs the shop offers some comment on his selection. As he purchases a book by Ayo Kōda, she says, “she deserves more recognition. She uses the same words we do yet there’s something so special.”

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Because Hirayama so seldom speaks, when he does, his words carry extra weight. As he and his niece are riding their bikes along the Sumida River, she tries to start planning her next visit, but he reminds her “Next time is next time! Now is now!” They repeat it back and forth, a playful chant between them.

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Shot by shot, toilet by toilet, Perfect Days shows one guy—deserving more recognition, using the same materials we do—riding through assorted indignities and vicissitudes, but persisting with his own essential interests and desires. There are lots of ways to give rhythm to one’s life, one’s art, and to keep showing up and being awesome in a world full of shit. 

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press. Her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023, and her picture book Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister Beth Rooney, is forthcoming. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.

Dec 1, 2024: Danielle Geller, Timberborn

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Beavertown.

I’ve been playing a lot of Timberborn lately, one of those simulation games we call ‘city builders.’ Traditionally, they’re games in which the primary objective is to grow a village into a thriving and commercially successful metropolis where all of your citizens’ needs are met. Timberborn is that but with cute beavers. 

As your beavers multiply and your colony grows, you plan for drought and build levees and dams to divert water from doomed rivers into reservoirs.

In beaver culture, water is life.

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Rakash dances like no one’s watching.

I realized, when beginning this essay, that I spend so much in-game time at the macro level—expanding Beavertown, battling water physics—that I never stop to appreciate the day-to-day of my beavers and all we’ve worked for. So, in celebration of this day on Essay Daily’s Advent calendar, I bring you a glimpse into the lives of my beaver buddies.

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Industrious beavers harvest sunflower seeds.

Some beaver facts: The first ‘true’ beaver evolved in Germany between 10–12 million years ago, and the largest beaver known (Castrorides ohioensis) lived in Canada between 1.4 million and 10,000 years BC. (Because this is an Advent calendar, and because I have some leftover Catholic nostalgia for the holidays, I’ve chosen to retain the English abbreviation for ‘Before Christ.’) The largest beaver stood 3 feet tall, measured up to 7 feet from nose to tail, and weighed as much as a black bear.

Beavers typically eat bark, twigs, aquatic vegetation, and lily roots. In Timberborn, they also eat carrots, sunflower seeds, bread, grilled potatoes and chestnuts, and maple pastries. In their natural environments, beavers cache the buds and twigs of their favorite trees—willow, alder, osier dogwood—in the mud outside their lodge. In Timberborn, they build stackable warehouses that contribute to the game’s ‘verticality,’ the ability to send beavers into the sky.

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Lumberjack Chikyil gnaws on a pine.

I’ve been reading about emergence, a multidisciplinary study of complex systems and the properties and patterns of behavior that come into being only through the interactions of individual components within a larger whole. (Google a murmuration of starlings.) Somehow this led me to the 2013 issue of Theory, Culture, and Society that celebrated the work of Friedrich Kittler. In the introductory remarks, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young reviewed the multiple interpretations of the German cultural theory Kulturtechniken [1], first translated into English to refer to ‘environmental engineering,’ large-scale processes like irrigating land, straightening rivers, and building reservoirs. (What beavers do. [2]) The word has since been co-opted by theorists to refer to ‘cultural techniques,’ the past and emerging technologies that shape society and culture. Cornelia Vismann offers this frequently cited example:

To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, a plough drawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum [3] is the result of drawing a line—a gesture which, not accidentally, was held sacred in Roman law. Someone advances to the position of legal owner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, marking one’s territory—ownership does not exist prior to that act. 

Kulturtechniken has more recently been applied to new media technologies. Radio, television, the internet: they’ve been called democratizing forces—the internet, especially, the bastion of free speech. We see where this has gone.

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Industrious beavers scavenge a flooded human ruin. In the real world, you can recognize a beaver pond by its stands of skeleton trees.

You could ask what video games have done to (or for) human society, though it’s hard to generalize across genres, between role-playing games, survival games, first-person shooters, and so on).

A critique [5] of the traditional simulation and city-building genre is that its core mechanical systems are based on the industrial model of urbanization, consumption, and exploitation of the natural environment and the poor working class. Despite Timberborn’s ‘light ecological message,’ [6] the game borrows the common trope of society vs. nature. (With beavers.) You’ll eventually send your unwitting beavers into the ruins of human civilization to harvest scrap metal used to build excavators, sluices, and mechanical pumps.

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Azra hauls a box of maple pastries across a levy that connects the Watertown and Ender districts.

Political theorist Langdon Winner famously asked the question: “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In that essay, one of many he wrote on the subject, he warns against technological determinism—the belief, for example, that the plough determined the political act responsible for our concept of ownership (and empire).

But to say that technologies are inherently neutral—that it isn’t the tool but how it is used that determines its place on the spectrum of good and evil—is a simplification. Concerning technological legacies [7], where a society invests its time and money shapes the form and function of what comes. Ten thousand years ago, around the time the last giant beavers paddled around Canada, the agricultural revolution dawned. And from pottery to the wheel to construction and engineering, we’ve ordered the world to our benefit. 

Who ‘we’ and ‘our’ encompass makes the difference, both politically and socially, [8] a reality I’ve been trying to escape through video games.

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A young Folktail visits a shrine to contemplate nature.

There are two factions in Timberborn: the Folktails and the Iron Teeth, who are unlocked after you reach sufficient happiness in a Folktails game. (The beavers, it seems, have had their own agricultural and industrial revolutions.) As characterized by the game’s developers, the Folktails’ primary identity is attributed to their respect for nature. They live by the simple motto: “Comfort, food, and sturdy wood.”

 

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Talis floats in a mud bath and ponders the meaning of life.

Iron Teeth, on the other hand, defected from their traditional ways. Through their mastery of iron and science, they achieve progress through ‘ingenuity, efficiency, and disregard for the environment.’ Their motto: “Work hard, work hard.” When I tried to play the Iron Teeth faction, I quit soon after I discovered they don’t breed naturally—they just stick water and berries inside a breeding pod; five days later, a beaver baby pops out. 

There’s an aesthetic difference I found difficult, too. Where a Folktail would erect a bucktoothed scarecrow, an Iron Tooth would place a scrap metal bell that sounds at the begin-and-end of each work day and evokes a punch card industrial hell. (With beavers.)

I’ve decided the Iron Teeth are for a different kind of player, possibly a different kind of human, than me. But what Timberborn’s developers have done, for better or worse, is give its players the ability to choose.

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Notes

1. Friedrich Kittler, a philosopher and media theorist, once argued that software doesn’t ‘exist,’ and by consequence, that the bulk of modern texts composed on electronic mediums like WordPerfect exist not “in perceivable time and space but in a computer memory’s transistor cells” and that writing itself is a thing of the past.
   
   
2. In the ‘real world,’ beavers are attracted to the sound of running water, streams and culverts alike, which makes them a pest in human society. Even though we’ve learned they’re important ecological engineers, people have put a lot of time and energy into designing contraptions to try and prevent beavers from flooding land we want to keep dry.
   
   
3. Imperium Romanum is the title of a 2008 city-builder developed by Haemimont Games. In a positive review on Steam, a user named ‘praxis’ liked that the game didn’t “skirt around the issue that slavery was a common practice. Slaves will do all the building and hauling here, and they get separate ‘housing’ and will not be able to fill the ‘free’ jobs that your settlers will take. If you overwork your slaves (i.e. don't build enough slave shelters) then they are likely to revolt until you get their workload under control.”
   
   
4. Vismann, C. (2013). “Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty.” Theory, Culture & Society, 30(6), 83-93. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/10.1177/0263276413496851
   
   
5. A couple years ago, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell published an article in which he wonders how the realities of climate change will effect the developers of city-builders. He reviewed a handful of games that have responded to this ‘crisis of conscious’ in interesting ways.
   
   
6. It’s unclear to what extent Timberborn’s developers believe the game responds to current ecological issues, but it’s played a minor role in their marketing strategy at least.
   
   
7. On the ‘About’ page on Langdon’s website, he lists some of the ‘bad habits’ we’ve inherited from our industrial. This list includes things like the ‘needless destruction of living species and ecosystems;’ the ‘exploitation of working people;’ ‘surveillance as a means of social control;’ the ‘celebration of technical toys as if great social accomplishments,’ among others.
   
   
8. As he also points out, the technologies we’ve developed to order our world also order human activity. “In the processes by which structuring decisions are made,” he writes, “different people are differently situated and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness” (Daedalus, Winter 1980). As we’ve seen, people don’t always understand what they’re voting for.

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Danielle Geller writes personal essays and memoir and enjoys nerding out about birds, fish, and video games. Her first book, Dog Flowers, was published in 2021, and her essays have appeared in Maisonneuve, Guernica, The New Yorker, and Brevity. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona and currently teaches at the University of Victoria.