“It’s almost as if the point of the essay is to watch an author actively thinking.” –Katherine Bomer | The Journey is Everything: “Reclaiming Essay”
WRD 241/515: The Essay is a course that challenges students to learn and unlearn what they think to be the essay, adopting a stance of “writing to know.”
Taught by Professor and Executive Associate Dean Pete Vandenberg, students are asked to compose three essays throughout the quarter in which they “explore the essay as art and craft, as well as social action and cultural production” (Course Description). Throughout the quarter, students have read, discussed and critiqued a wide variety of essays, from its roots with Montaigne to contemporary and multi-modal expressions.
The following selection of essays from the class come from the first two major assignments:
- The Unfolding Essay: This essay asks students to first focus on a place, and through use of narrative elements, to allow that writing of place to bring them to some greater insight. The selected essays “Tap Twice” and “Balmora” are such studies of place.
- The Disjunctive Essay: For this essay students wrote about any topic of their choosing while leaning into possibilities of discontinuity and metaphor. The selected essay “Heat” represents this kind of essay written in segments of fragments.
The following essays demonstrate the wide range of topics tackled, approaches, and unique voices that have emerged from WRD 241/515.
“Dandelion Flower Crowns” – Weronika Koleda (BA in WRD 2020)
Spring, although a season in itself, has always resonated with me as a particular feeling. It appears almost as a change in tone. Spring air maintains a different consistency, perhaps a softer density, that emits a kind of quietness resembling a low hum contrasting the cold white noise of midwestern winter. Silence, as the greenery thaws from the embrace of the smell of rain. There are buds emerging on the trees’ fingertips, on the shrubs’ follicles, freckles in the soil. How strange that nature’s most productive and frenzied season occurs in silence… Read More
“Heat” – Andrea Morgeson (M.Ed. in Secondary Education for English 2020)
Central Florida Gothic is real. It’s the dimming and sand ridden houses made of stucco and fading magenta paint. It’s the cone shaped Twistee Treat drive thru that stays open until 11 in the deserted strip mall that now serves as a spot to park your car and eat your dripping dessert before it cedes to the humidity. It’s the palm tree lined developments where one house design fits all, with steel enforced roofs but vinyl slick floors… Read More
“Tap Twice” – Megan Palmer (MA in WRD 2020)
When I drove for the first time, I almost caused a three-car accident in front of the West Warwick Pizza Hut. My dad had let me drive his Nissan, fondly dubbed by me and the neighbor kids as “The Babe Magnet.” I think right then and there, amidst the honking (the other cars) and the middle finger out the window (mine), he realized I’d need a car as tough as I was… Read More
“Balmora” – Robert Rosenbaum (MA in WRD 2020)
The static of the screen popped occasionally and emitted that stale, empty, yet seemingly strange smell. The CRT glow shot through the complete darkness of the room, curtains shut, save for the bit of moonlight of the outside world creeping in from behind the edges of the curtain, a reminder. The only thing one could do is look forward into the only obvious source of light in the room – peering into it… Read More