Essay Confusion, Documentary Disrespect

I’m posting late again for various reasons, but I had a good time at NonfictioNow last month. Some colleagues and I beat a bunch of undergrads at trivia at the Linebacker Lounge—that place is a gem—and it was nice to be surrounded for a few days by a few hundred people who write and teach more or less the same stuff I do, which has both no name and too many: creative nonfiction, the essay, whatever. It’s the only setting where I don’t have to explain what that means.

After that experience, it was interesting to read this recent-ish Freddie deBoer piece the algorithm suggested to me, and to be reminded that even other professional writers—not to mention much of the publishing industry—usually mean something different when they talk about essays. To them, it usually means a particular variety of straightforward personal and/or argumentative writing published on a small subset of New York-centric websites, or in the sort of books you might see at the airport. In my professional circles, essay means more or less the opposite of that. (My colleague and I once spent like a hundred hours discussing this very thing on our old podcast about the “literary essay,” an ad hoc term we never really defined; we were too busy talking about Val Kilmer and Nic Cage.)

It’s especially interesting to me that his overview begins in 2010. That was the year I taught my first graduate nonfiction course, which means that I’ve been having to wrangle these two very different interpretations of essays for the whole time I’ve been teaching them. Around then, as I recall, the major internet media apparati headquartered in New York—Gawker, et al— started using the word essay to describe a kind of offhand, unchallenging, internet-specific first-person writing that had previously been called blogging. The transition to using “essay” was an unfortunate part of a larger movement to legitimize internet bullshit by appropriating the language of art—like the advent of “curation” to refer to social media feeds, which was clearly a joke until it wasn’t.

In any case, it worked. Suddenly, articles were being called essays, and every blogger was now an essayist.1

Meanwhile, out in the provinces, a whole different essay thing was happening. In 2010, John D’Agata’s About a Mountain and David Shields’ Reality Hunger were released. Although I remember their receptions being mixed, and legacy media being unkind to both, they were both hugely influential in reconsidering the essay as being neither fundamentally argumentative nor drawn exclusively from personal experience. Instead, this kind of essay valued inquiry, uncertainty, and research, and often refused resolution.

That definition of the essay was part of the case D’Agata made with his series of Graywolf anthologies, whose release dates bracketed 2010. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets also came out around this time—late 2009—and although it was first released on a small press and took a while to develop a cult following, it was probably the most influential of them all in the long run, in the sense that it became the most imitated book among MFA students for the next decade, and the comp title for every fragmented nonfiction book for all eternity.2 Also around that time, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize was launching the careers of a lot of great, innovative essayists.3 By 2014, when Claudia Rankine’s Citizen came out, this kind of essay really hit the big time.

Since then, the two varieties have probably blurred to some degree, in the sense that it seems like a lot of more recent “literary” essays do what the bloggier ones used to, dressing up obvious personal writing with arbitrary formal gestures and internet research. And the death of online outlets (and rise of places like Substack) have only further confused the issue. I’m constantly seeing people on here refer to Substack posts as essays, which seems deeply unfortunate to me, as a lover of the more literary variety. As does the fact that although I put a fraction of the thought, time, and care into these posts that I would into a real essay, more people read this than will ever read most of the actual essays I write.

This is a pretty cold take at this point, but The New York Times is making silly little lists again. Lots of people had thoughts, which was obviously the point. My issue with the list might be different from most. Last year, I wrote about my annoyance at the proportion of nonfiction on their sister list of books, a little less than a third. Guess how many documentaries made the film list?

Three. Three! Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, and The Gleaners & I. To be fair, all three are masterpieces, but Christ on a bicycle: three documentaries? Somehow, “hundreds of directors, actors, and cinematographers”—and a handful of writers, all of whom seem to be novelists—decided 97 percent of this century’s best films are fictional.

They picked five Christopher Nolan films! You’re telling me our foremost auteur of stoned-English-major nonsense has made more great movies than the entire documentary film industry?4 An industry which for that entire time has been experiencing what many consider a golden age? 

No Other Land doesn’t belong on the list? Hale County This Morning, This Evening? Man on Wire? Restrepo? Nostalgia for the Light? Capturing the Friedmans? Waltz With Bashir? No Home Movie? Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat? Fire of Love? None of those are better movies than Superbad? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.5

The takeaway here is that you should never let fiction writers decide anything. I watch a lot of movies—I’ve seen roughly 80% of the list—and most of the best ones being made these days are documentaries.

Despite what it may seem, I also try to avoid talking about AI all the time here. There’s enough of that in the ether as it is, most is either paranoia or propaganda, and almost nobody knows what they’re talking about, least of all me. But it’s still the biggest issue in my professional world, and lately it seems to be constantly encroaching upon and enshittifying … well, everything.6

I’ve also been reading my friend and colleague Megan Ward’s book, which takes a fascinating angle on AI, considering how early debates in the field over how to conceive of humanness relate to our notions of what makes literary characters seem real. Along the way, it covers the early conceptual history of AI development, which is all new and fascinating to me—the competing ideas for what it might mean to make a machine think, and other AI models that might have been, most of which seem preferable to the technofascist nightmare the technology is actually turning out to be.

Speaking of which, a friend recently sent me this nugget out of MIT, which corroborates my experience and those of every other writing teacher I know. Of course using an LLM to write lowers your cognitive engagement with the task at hand.

Lately I’ve been thinking about individual ways to resist the onslaught of what Matt Seybold calls Technofeudal Education, thanks in large part to his insightful post on the subject. (I’ve recommended his podcast here before.)

Some other stuff:

• Update on the ottoman situation, which I did not expect to inspire as much engagement as it did (do I need to write more about furniture?): I bought one. Teal, circular, corduroy. Technically it’s a pouf, a word I feel like I shouldn’t be saying. I’ve moved on to rug and lighting dilemmas, but I’ll spare you the posts about those.

• The other day, an acquaintance texted to tell me I was quoted in Webster’s Word of the Day. For a former copy editor and dictionary dork whose prized possession is my OED,7 this is a great honor. Also, not to brag, but it’s my second time.

• I recently watched the latest seasons of both Hacks and The Bear, and am confused about why the latter gets all the attention.

• Speaking of restaurants, two of my favorite places to eat in Oregon just won James Beards. One is JinJu, which was two blocks from my old apartment, and makes the best macarons, among other things. The other is Antica Terra, a winery I can’t afford—thankfully, I have friends who are members—but where I’ve had two of the best meals of my life.

• Speaking of my old neighborhood, Katie Cusumano wrote a wonderful essay about foraging in Portland. It’s one of the best things about summer in Oregon. I’ve been stuffing myself with cherry plums.

• I’ve been listening to this new Sepe album a lot this week, and not just because of the lyric in this song that mentions my last name.

• Here’s what I’ve been listening to so far in 2025: