The Moral Essay: Purpura’s “On Being a Trucker”

A grateful tip of the hat to The Missouri Review blog’s Robert Long Foreman for singling out Lia Purpura’s recent Brevity essay, “On Being a Trucker,“ in his blog post examining the essay, and the moral essay in particular.  Here’s an excerpt of his discussion, but read Foreman’s full entry, it is well worth it:

To demonstrate the virtues of creative nonfiction – and of the essay in particular – I turned to Lia Purpura’s “On Being a Trucker.” It begins with speculation as to the language used by truckers to describe their cargoes, and then follows a quick series of associations to reach a conclusion that is utterly astonishing, given the sweep of its implications, its apparent distance from the opening lines, and the celerity with which its author leads us to them.

… Purpura’s essay is like a precisely landed punch to the chest, and it makes plain several of the things I value in the essay, or in creative nonfiction generally. One is obvious: Purpura’s relationship to her reader is a rather unique one, one by which she may offer her simulated train of thought in a more or less straightforward fashion, directly from writer to reader. The essay as a genre is also known, I explained to my very small audience, for precisely the sort of movements Purpura makes, as an essay follows a series of unlikely associations, often to their equally unlikely conclusion. Not only does the piece demonstrate – and very briefly – the virtues of the essay; it is simply a great piece of writing.

Of Books and Tin Houses

There has been scads of talk this past week about Tin House magazine’s new submission policy, asking writers to buy a book from a bookstore, and prove that they’ve done so, before submitting.  At first there was misinformation — people thought Tin House was demanding that writers purchase Tin House books, which was not the case — and now there is simply confusion.  We love bookstores, we love books, we love literary magazines, so why does this feel somehow wrong?

Michael Nye, managing editor of The Missouri Review, has elevated the discussion nicely. Here’s a bit:

The relationship between the literary magazine and its audience has grown increasingly combative over the years … and, more than dollars and cents, this poor and deteriorating communication seems to be at the heart of this controversy. Literary magazines are feeling increased pressure to remain fiscally sound, if not profitable, as seen by the recent pressures on TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, New England Review, just to name a few, and are looking for ways to monetize just about any aspect of their organization, not out of greed, but out of the increasingly desperate need to remain alive.  Readers and submitters sense not only are the major venues and financial support vanishing as the slicks stop printing fiction, but that that magazines that do publish fiction are increasingly chosen because of agents and a writer’s “platform” in cooperation with the literati’s self-fulfilling prophecy of annointing the 20-Under-40 (and so forth).  Further, readers and submitters believe that the literary magazines are closed to them: the quality of the work is poor and the editors are only publishing their friends based on who they went to graduate school with or who can do them a favor (“Publish my poem and I’ll publish yours!”).

So, literary magazines believe readers and submitters aren’t financially supporting their journals; readers and submitters believe literary magazines are a clandestine society off-shoring their money woes onto the backs of others.

Frankly, I think both parties have valid complaints.

And the full blog post can be found here.