Manliness: a personal essay from Salon
On the morning of my wedding, in the tiny alpine village in Slovenia in which my fiancée grew up, I walked with my best men and a trail of 100 guests up the curling road to the tiny Baroque church on the hilltop. As I turned the bend, I was stopped by a rope strung across the path. A cluster of stern and angry people I’d never met stood blocking my way. They carried Medieval-looking implements: A long rusty saw, an ax, an old scythe and a wooden pitchfork. If I was planning to marry my Slovenian fiancée, I first had to pass the “tests of manliness.”
This is the old Iron Market in downtown Port-au-Prince, burning six days after the 2010 earthquake. Photo by Riccardo Venturi, Contrasto.
Personal Essay
I’ve been teaching the personal essay this quarter in my workshop. We’ve talked about the difference between telling a story and writing a story. In telling, the narrative benefits from gestures and facial expressions: that’s a big part of how we convey emotion. In writing we only can use what we put down on paper to get our emotion across into the mind of our reader. So we’ve discussed finding ways to convey emotion in writing that don’t simply say, “I’m sad.” Which frankly doesn’t do much, except to make the reader sad that the writer couldn’t find some better way to convey her sorrow.
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