After reading essayist and editor Judith Kitchen’s observations about effective essay endings for last week’s article, I turned to In Brief, the second of two creative nonfiction anthologies Kitchen co-edited with Mary Paumier Jones and published with W.W. Norton. In the introduction to this 1999 volume, Kitchen and Jones write that in addition to an essay’s brevity, they were going for “quality of personal reflection and speculation,” in their selections, something they described as “the power of the personal–a single voice conveying individual experience.”

According to Kitchen and Jones:

The personal goes beyond the simple first-person retelling of a story or anecdote. The personal is a way of seeing the world, of examining its meanings, of exploring and expressing an interior life. It is intimate without being maudlin. It is private without being secret. It allows the reader into the heart and mind of the writer, connecting us to each other.

With Kitchen’s thoughts on endings in mind, when I opened the collection, I wondered: In what ways did the endings of the included essays enhance a “quality of reflection and speculation” and in what ways did they help the essays connect me to the writer? How did they accomplish this by utilizing the techniques Kitchen labels retrospection, introspection, meditation, intrusion and imagination and by completing a “pattern of thinking and reflection?”

As I read through the essays, I stopped after each and thought about which techniques I saw put to use in the ending. Then I thought about how the endings affected me emotionally, how they made me feel connected to the writer of the essay by bringing up similar experiences in my life. Next, I considered how a completion of a pattern of thought and reflection helped in the essay’s discovery and evocation.

Here’s some of what I found and considered as I read the 73 excellent selections in In Brief:

In “Low Tide at Four,” an essay by Harriet Doerr, the author announces, “What I remember of those summers at the beach is that every afternoon there was a low tide at four.” She then immediately writes that of course she is wrong, that it is memory outstripping reality that makes her believe this. But she goes on to describe those afternoons when her children were young and the family lived in California and she sat on the beach watching her children at play or reading and talking to others as well as observing them. Her penultimate paragraph contains the memory she thinks back to:

It is four o’clock. We are standing in shallow water at low tide. The children dig with their toes and let the waves wash in and out over their feet. They are sinking deeper and deeper. During the summer, their skins have turned every shade of honey: wildflower, orange, buckwheat, clover. Now they are sage. I look into my husband’s face. He reaches over their heads to touch my arm.

 And she goes to her final paragraph:

At this time on this August day in 1939, I call up my interior reserves and gather strength from my blood and bones. Exerting the full force of my will, I command the earth to leave off circling long enough to hold up the sun, hold back the wave. Long enough for me to paint and frame low tide.

“Aha,” I said to myself. “Here we have the kind of ending Kitchen named retrospection–‘a looking back, an assessment.'” First, the author looks back in time and realizes that all those years ago, she froze this moment with the memories of a day inside it. Although this required an act of imagination–stopping the circling of the earth at the moment of low tide at four–remembering that she did this is what the ending is about.

When I think about the effect of Doerr’s retrospection and imagination on my sense of connectedness to her and to life, I see that by ending her essay with these two techniques, she exposes a pattern of actually wanting to figure out why she has the memory of every beach day having low tide at four. She writes her memory until it is not only fully evoked but until it is spotlighted. With the consciousness of willing a memory to be born and live, she unites past, present and future. We have been reading memory and then we read about the day she made her memory. We go back, then further back and when her pattern of thought is realized, we are in two simultaneous presents–the one when she made the memory and the one when she is writing.

“Isn’t life like that?” I think to myself. When I think of my children’s young years, their arms are always chubby and they are always lovingly and playfully around my neck. Now I “command the earth to leave off circling long enough to hold up the rising moon, hold back” the coming midnight. “Long enough for me to paint and frame” the lighted room.

When I insert my images into Doerr’s syntax, her song of retrospection and imagination allows me to associate young motherhood with a fragile sense that all is well, a sense that I know is washed away and returns, only to be washed away and to return.

In an essay called “Good Workers,” John T. Price writes about his grandfather’s work with trucks and about the fact that the “belief that a man who works hard can erase all his sins runs deep into the folds” of his family. He says that three months before his high school graduation when he believed his future would hold nothing but failure and sin, he called up the owner of the local truck line and asked if he could have a job washing trucks. He shows up and fills the buckets and begins the washing. He washes the trucks, a high school senior sure he will come to no good as so many men in his family had and asks:

Did I recall at that quiet moment, all those men, all those workers that haunted the winters of my childhood? Did the soapsuds in the buckets smell like so many old lemon rinds, sucked dry and scattered on the front seat of my grandfather’s truck? However it really was then, I see this now: I am scrubbing the trucks furiously, washing the grime from the white metal, pausing to watch it slide down, slowly in a gray stream over the tires, along the cement, and finally, into the drain as if it carries along with it all my future transgressions.

I read this ending and I am sad and inspired at the same time by the speaker’s introspection (self-examination, honest appraisal and discovery, as Kitchen defines the introspection ending style). I feel ancestral bonds and chains. I understand that coming of age includes the risk of behaving badly. I feel the poignancy of doing the penance before the sin, of admitting human frailty, of saying one will be conscious of oneself.

Written by the adult remembering, the essay connects the past to the future, with an image of a line and with the idea that we may know exactly when we stepped in. I understand the writer’s articulation of how that worked in his life because of his introspective questions at the end. The pattern is one of retrieval of the first moment that he was aware that he would have to take his place in line. I feel close to the speaker in his adult life as well as his teenage life. This feeling of closeness makes me aware of the richness of elements of my younger self as well as of my older self.

In Cecile Goding’s “How to Tell One Bird from the Next,” the author remembers her neighbor, who was a postman, talking throughout her childhood about the habits of birds that distinguish one kind from another. She wonders when she started to write, to particularize what she saw and heard. Doing so, she reports much about birds that she observed and much about images she imagined. In the end she writes:

When you throw out your mist nets, you start with what flies in first. So I start with a man in a field, with what a person can teach a child to whom he is not any way, shape or form related. I might begin with the shapes of the head, the mouth, the throat. And with the single spot of red which can only be seen upside-down, so that the name might descend from the man who first noted down that single spot of red. I might begin with the definition of a body against the sky, at day-break, in a blackwater swamp for example, glimpsed through the cypress, through a pair of inexpensive binoculars.

The act of throwing “out your mist nets” is a way to begin a meditation (to find a perspective as Kitchen says is the function of this kind of ending). She allows a man in a field into her thoughts. And then an image of a bird in need of a name and then an image of how she is seeing that bird, standing there holding binoculars.

Goding meditates her way to seeing herself in the quiet inner actions of her life as a writer. I am fulfilled as the reader, and I am eager to throw out my own mist nets and to pay attention to the images that swim in. I am grateful to the author for this notion of a mist net, for this model of how to use it and I feel connected to a long tradition of writing as she feels connected to the neighbor and his tradition that influenced her. I see a pattern of orbits. The postman is in the center, and the speaker is orbiting around his meticulous sharing of observation. As a reader, I in turn orbit around the speaker’s observational ability.

In search of endings that used the technique Kitchen calls intrusion (“a stepping in, a commentary”), I found some included in the book that are only one sentence long and sum up the author’s gained insight. These essayists recount family events or stories and end with a view of how they impacted them. For instance, Brady Udall writes in “One Liar’s Beginnings” about being three and lying to his mother. He had eaten all the cinnamon red-hots his mother was about to use to decorate cupcakes for a funeral luncheon. When she asks all of her children, and Udall the youngest, he realizes that saying no will save him from being banished to his room and left out of eating the left-over cupcakes with his family. When she thinks he is cute, she offers him a cupcake. He realized that this simple “no” asserted, “it’s not me who deserves a swat on the butt or no cartoons for the rest of the afternoon. What I deserve is a cupcake.”

And the speaker goes on to end his essay with this one sentence paragraph, “It’s a wonderful epiphany: with a lie I can change reality; with a lie I can change the world.” He has intruded with a commentary that articulates his insight and fulfills the mission of his essay. He had announced he is a liar in his first paragraph and he is writing to figure out how he came to be this way. I feel connected to the author, not only because his memories of his three-year-old self are entertaining and well-drawn, but because he sets himself a task and accomplishes it. To discover a truth about himself, he confesses first, as he says any clergyman tells you must. Lying was a tool the speaker’s psyche forged and carried handily for years. He illustrates the way we carry with us ways of coping to keep ourselves from the dangers our impulsive behaviors open before us.

“Dream Houses,” by Tenaya Darlington, is an essay that ends with imagination (which Kitchen proposes allows for projections that make a larger frame). From the beginning of the essay, the author relates growing up hearing her parents refrain: “we’re waiting for our dream house, we’ll probably move next year.” After “twenty temporary years,” the author’s parents moved into the “perfect house in the woods.” Darlington describes visiting her parents in the beautiful new house and then she recounts the starter home she grew up in with her brother, what memories and feelings the dents and marks and peculiar spaces held.

At the essay’s end, the author imagines her parents “rattling around in a house as empty as it is beautiful.” She sees them “spread out in distant corners, my father downstairs in his office, my mother upstairs at her desk, both of them looking out through binoculars at a pheasant or a grouse and seeing only snowflakes magnified many times to look like moths. And beyond that, nothing….”

In her imaginings, the author is telling us that to relate fully to her parents’ pleasure in their dream house in the woods would diminish the pleasure she took in her happy childhood, crowded with her parents and brother into a tiny house. She must imagine what she imagines about her parents in their new house to explore the divide that realized dreams create. Darlington’s act of imagination raises the notion that children cannot hold on to their parents as life continues.

I leave the essay aware that in speaking of the change in houses (a pattern of contrasts), Darlington is speaking in some way of the future when her parents move on again, beyond what she knows, beyond what they ever spoke of (an even larger contrast). In the moment that the essay ends, I am made to glimpse through binoculars and see despite the snowflakes, which are blocking the view, that I am aware of the transitory nature of lives.

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As essayists, we rely on our words to lead us to the emotional and spiritual places that lie just over the edges of our consciousness. Reading the exquisite collection of essays in In Brief and studying ending forms in the way Judith Kitchen distinguishes them will help you gain the dexterity you need for such travel.