Upon the publication of the third volume of Strong Words: The best of the Landfall Essay Competition, Claire Mabey talks with co-editor (with Emma Neale) Lynley Edmeades about what an essay is – and what makes a good one.
In 2017, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino published an essay called “The personal-essay boom is over”. Tolentino tracks the proliferation of the online personal essay, and its demise (through the Trump era). In conclusion she says: “The Internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things. But I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability. I never got tired of coming across a writerly style that seemed to exist for no good reason. I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”
In broader terms, it appears that we’re in a healthy era for hard copy essay collections: from Solnit to Benge; Gleeson to Dunn; Patchett to Kidman. Writing mostly by women, in other words: an interesting observation in itself (also covered by Tolentino, above).
The Spinoff is no stranger to the essay form – every Sunday we publish an essay, and they are incredibly varied in subject and style. They offer expansive insights into people’s lives: some devastating, some uplifting, some enraging, some reflective, some informative. Mostly, they’re all of the above.
But, what is an essay? What is an essay meant to do? I talked to Lynley Edmeades, who has judged the most recent Landfall Essay Competition and co-edited, with Emma Neale, Strong Words 3 (a collection that has pulled together essays from the past two years of entries), to discuss.
Claire Mabey: What is the origin of the essay as we know it today?
Lynley Edmeades: Wow, that’s a BIG question! The essay, as we know it today, reaches right back to Michel de Montaigne, who popularised the form in the 16th century. The term comes from the verb essayer, from the French, which means to attempt. I think this is still true with regard to the genre today — many essays are an attempt or effort to work through an idea, to try something out through thinking and writing.
Why do you think essays are popular?
There is a largely personal element to the contemporary essay, which has its roots in Montaigne’s forays into the form. For many years people would associate the essay with academia or as a pedagogical tool, but more recently, people have started to recognise it as a more creative, informal genre. It’s like long-form journalism but with more personality. It allows us to get to know the person behind the writing, while also showing us that person in the wider world; a great antidote to the quick-fire, combative nature of social media, where binaristic opinions are the modus operandi. The essay does what Joan Didion famously suggested – it tells us stories in order to live.
What do you look for in an outstanding essay?
I look for experimentation of form. I love essays that teach me how to read them, that kind of perform themselves as they unfold. I also look for a quality of curiosity, a writer who is curious about themselves and the world around them. This curiosity allows the writer to show a vulnerability or uncertainty that makes for a really rich meditation. Maggie Nelson, that great contemporary essayist, talks about the essay as being a space that rails against our culture’s “frantic drive for resolution.” I think the essay can be anarchic and deeply political in that sense – it doesn’t need to follow all the trappings of narrative, with plot and character development, story arc and denouement, for example. It doesn’t need to be tidy or resolute; I love an essay that says, “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.” It’s so much more human than a watertight exposition.
Do you have favourites – local and international?
A lot of poets have turned their hands to essays in recent years, which may lend their work a quality that I gravitate to. I will always love reading the greats – Susan Sontag and Joan Didion – but more contemporary writers I have been reading a lot of are Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Brian Dillon, and I fucking love Kate Zambreno (so much so that my latest writing project is kind of a love letter to her). Closer to home, I think Airini Beautrais has a wonderful essayistic style that really exhibits the kind of vulnerability I mentioned above. So too some of the essayists in Strong Words 3, like Maggie Sturgess, Tina Makereti, and the 2023 winner of the Charles Brasch Young Writers Essay Competition, Xiaole Zhan. I think what all of these writers share, and what makes their work so good, is that rare combination of fierce intellect and a very humane tenderness.
What are your thoughts on the personal essay? Not everyone is keen on them … there is an argument that we’re a bit inundated?
The personal essay is, like observational comedy, concerned primarily with just that – observation – and largely through the lens of the subjective. While personal essays might be funny and entertaining, satirical and incisive – and often very accurate – I must admit they regularly leave me wanting. Merve Emre recently wrote in The New York Review of Books that the personal essay is “the genre whose formal conventions—the ‘capital I’ of ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ – not only draw the individual into public view, but also insist upon the primacy of the individual.” It’s the self as subject; the subject as self.
I think there is still room for the personal essay, and there is definitely an appetite for them. But as the essay becomes more popular in Aotearoa, we’re starting to see different subgenres emerge. There is the personal essay, and there is the personal essay that goes a bit further. I think there is room for both, just like there is the observational comedian and then there’s the conceptual comedian, where the latter does more than just observe. I personally (!) prefer the latter, but that’s not the case for everyone.
What advice would you give to anyone wanting to write an essay?
This is such common advice that it’s almost a cliché, but it always bears repeating: if you want to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. Read lots of essays of all different types. Go to your library and get the last few volumes of Best American Essays and other anthologies. Read everything in them. Pick your favourites and ask yourself what you loved about them. Are they personal or universal, or do they manage both? Are they lyrical or factual? Do they tell a story or do they shirk narrative devices? Research/stalk those writers and read every essay they’ve ever published. By the time you’ve done that, a new issue of Best American Essays will be out, so you can start all over again.
How long has the Landfall essay competition been running? What has changed over the years in terms of the kind of writing you’re seeing?
The Landfall essay competition was started in 1997 by Chris Price, who was the editor at the time. It was initiated to mark the 50th anniversary of Landfall and has been running as an annual competition since 2009. I’ve only been at the helm for two years, so this year’s competition will only be my second time as judge. Towards that, I can’t really comment on how it has changed. I do know that the number of entries is increasing, year upon year, and that it continues to be a pretty heady battle for the top prize. The quality of the writing that is entered into the competition is generally really high, which Strong Words illustrates. There are so many essays that come in every year that deserve to be published, regardless of whether they win the competition or not. And I think this is also a testament to the larger essayistic turn we’re seeing in Aotearoa today.
You can purchase Strong Words 3 (University of Otago Press, $35) at Unity Books Wellington and Auckland and find out more about the annual Landfall essay competition here.