An Essay About Essays

I never thought much of the essay, even the creative essay, as I spent thirty years perfecting my talent writing poems and short stories.

Following a tumultuous time in my life (divorce, closing down a business, unemployment), I turned to journaling in inexpensive bound Walgreen’s $.99 notebooks to get me through each day, an inexpensive form of therapy.

That simple act of journalling evolved into tackling the creative essay form, and compiling a group of them into The Low Wire: Meditations on Loss and Creative Restoration (2016). I’ve since followed that with two more essay collections: Laying Low (2022) and Hear Me Out (2024).

For me, the creative essay is short and elegant, a small-scale, subtle articulation of subjects that I hope will have larger import once I’m done with them.

It sounds like I’m creating a prose-poem, or as I like to think of it, a poem without line breaks, expansive in its full use of the English sentence.

I like my essays to dwell on a single-page, yet sometimes they require a longer consideration, like my essay about the World Book Encyclopedia of my childhood and a clever re-casting of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid as “Maslow’s Parallelogram,” which argues for a flatter and more equitable structure among the key elements.

I recently submitted poems, short stories and a trio of essays to Santa Clara Review, one of the oldest literary journals in the west (founded in 1869).

They passed on my poems and stories, and immediately accepted all three essays for publication in the Spring 2024 edition of that journal: “The Trellis,” “San Francisco Ferry Building,” and “Spring Training, Bradenton.”
I will be reading from my work on Friday, May 17, at Santa Clara University.