In “Endings,” an instructional essay for the literary journal Fourth Genre, Fall, 2001, Judith Kitchen asserts that in a piece of creative nonfiction, “the building of thought is what interests the reader.” “We look as much for how an author approaches a subject,” she writes, “as for the subject itself.” In reading and writing essays, it is understood that “the end of the story (or the narrative line) is not necessarily the end of an essay. Rather, essay endings “reveal…a pattern of thought and reflection… [They are] the place where the pattern is fully disclosed.”

Kitchen lists and illustrates five ending techniques that she has observed authors employ to “deepen a piece, add complexity, open an issue to further examination, [or] surprise with the unexpected.” Kitchen adds that her “remarks…reveal that patterns were emerging long before the author reached the final sentence,” but the end “is the place where the pattern is fully disclosed.”

Here are excerpts from “Endings,” which Judith Kitchen has given me permission to reprint for Writing It Real subscribers:

Retrospection — a looking back, an assessment

In “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean from A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, University of Chicago Press, Maclean writes:

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. . . .

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

 “Here we see how something very real–the river, in this case the Big Blackfoot River — reaches metaphorical proportions,” Kitchen says. “Metaphor works very differently in nonfiction from fiction: it emerges from within the material; it cannot be imposed on the material. It does not so much shape or affect the action as rise from it, recognizing its own significance. The river has been working toward metaphor. Now, at the end of the story, the author allows himself to realize what everything has meant. In the newly metaphorical river, such words as ‘timeless’ are possible.”

Intrusion — a stepping in, a commentary

In “A Snapping Turtle in June” by Franklin Burroughs, from Bill Watson’s Croker Sack, W.W. Norton the essay “begins with the narrator seeing a snapping turtle on a dirt road in Maine and calling his five-year-old daughter out to see it. At the end of an essay that moves back and forth from New England to South Carolina, from idyllic childhood to the hint of Vietnam, from innocence to violence, from story to myth to memoir to mystery,” Burroughs “circles back to the originating turtle” and comments about what he thinks concerning memory:

I found myself wishing that Hannah had stumbled upon this morning’s turtle herself and had confronted the potent oddity of the beast without having it all explained away for her. It might have stood a better chance then that it did now of becoming a fact in her imagination: something she would eventually remember and think about and think with from her days as a country girl. But what any child will think or remember is beyond anybody’s knowing, including its own. The turtle had disappeared down the ditch; its hole had been filled. Meanwhile, Hannah let us know that we had on our hands a Tuesday morning in June, which was, with kindergarten over, a problem to be solved. Could she have a friend over? Could we go to town?

Meditation — a thinking through and around, finding a perspective

In “A Wind from the North” by Bill Capossere, from In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, W.W. Norton, the author, as Kitchen points out, “begins with the end of the ‘story.’ His uncle has died, a death that went unnoticed for three days as snow accumulated on the roof of the car and the doorstep. What kind of a life led to this kind of a death? In thinking back on the relationship, the writer discovers that the uncle is more alive to him as he thinks of his death than he ever was in ‘real life.’ Because the essay begins with one ending, Capossere is forced to find a new ending, a conclusion to the thoughts that the death has engendered. At the end of three short pages, he takes the essay into new territory, redeems both the life and the death.”

Here is Capossere’s mediation on snow:

The Eskimo, it is said, have many words for snow, different words for snow falling and snow already fallen. They use muruaneq for soft deep snow, natquik for the snow which covers the ground and clings to the feet, kanevvluk for fine snow, and quaniisqineq for snow floating on water. But, as far as I can find, they have no word for the snow that covers a man’s death so that even the wake of his passage is obliterated. Unless it be natquigte, snow that drifts perpetually along the ground, resting nowhere, holding to nothing, ever-moving particles aloft on the wind.

“By giving us the specific words and their translations,” he forces us, Kitchen asserts, “to contemplate not only the underlying question of his uncle’s life, but the larger question of how we speak about such things.”

Introspection — a self-examination, honest appraisal and discovery

In “Hose,” by Emily Hiestand, from Angela the Upside-Down Girl, Beacon Press, the author, Kitchen says, “pushes past closure, allowing herself more than one ending, trying out possibilities, building on their cumulative effects. In this way, she gives herself time to savor several alternatives,” the last of which employs introspection.

“The story is simple,” according to Kitchen, “as a child, she and a friend squirted a woman with a hose–not once, but three separate times–as she tried to go downtown shopping. Of course, the child was made to apologize. The story ends:

The only lesson that I learned at the time, if you can call it a lesson, was that for an exquisite joy, for the ineffable feeling of surety, of being perfectly in tune with nature and the gods, there will be a price to pay, and it will be worth it.

But the essay reaches further, goes beyond the moment of the story. Hiestand gives us the pleasure of yet another round in her imaginative thinking–and a corrective view supplied by another of the protagonists:

Recently I asked my mother, now seventy-five, about this long-ago event and what her point of view was at the time. “My point of view,” she replied, the incident coming rather easily to mind, “was the point of view of a mother who wants to crawl under the foundation of the house and never show her face again.” My mother also claims that Mrs. Bayliss was neither old nor frail at the time of her soaking. In fact she was not much older than my mother herself, which would have put Mrs. Bayliss in her early forties (younger than I am now). Nor was she a widow–there was a Mr. Bayliss! “And,” my mother continues, the ripples of corrective memory sweeping her on, “the dress”–she means dresses–“could not have been silk. In summer, dear Mrs. Bayliss would have been wearing voile.”

About these variances, I doubt neither my mother’s memory nor her greater apperception of the victim’s character. I can only say that the person she describes is simply not the person I squirted, though I grant that the dresses were very likely voile.”

“And, then,” Kitchen says, the author inserts “a further coda” (the ending that employs introspection):

The savage glee of that afternoon lodged firmly in mind and body, where it seems to contrast completely with my present moral life. I am often these days trusted not only with hoses, but with several hearts, sharp knives, and jumper cables. Recently I traveled from my home in New England to Gordon Road, and the woman who answered the door let me wander a while in a yard where the hemlock planted for my birth has grown taller than her house. I stood under the maple where Kevin and I liked to open wing-like seeds, stick the cases over our noses, walk around like that. Mrs. Bayliss, I was sorry to learn, had died, only the year before. How I would like to have visited her once more, or taken our chances on a walk down the hill to Jackson Square. Could I have found a way to thank her? It would have been a delicate undertaking, involving the risk of appearing completely unreconstructed. But I might have tried, for by her person, by her profoundly misplaced trust, the lady Mrs. Bayliss provided me a singular and pristine happiness, undimmed across four decades.

Imagination — allows for alternatives, projections, juxtapositions

In “Tommy Two” by Mark Spragg, from Where Rivers Change Directions, University of Utah Press, the author uses “imaginative closure,” according to Kitchen, to find “aesthetic closure.” This works because of “the unfinished nature of the material in nonfiction,” Kitchen writes. “The story goes on, even after the writing has ended. There is a temptation to try out alternatives.”

Here “a cat has gone missing in circumstances so peculiar that the logical conclusion can only be that it has been eaten by coyotes. Spragg re-enacts his adolescent imagination”:

Before I sleep I see him hitching to the Gulf of Mexico. The picture is clear. There is no mistake. He lounges in the well of a convertible’s downed top, the wind catching in the cup of his one good ear. I see him signed aboard a cargo ship, respected by its crew, mousing out its hold for work. On moonlit nights I see him sleeping on the open deck. He’s nestled in the lap of a drunken sailor. An old man and an old cat. They rise and fall against the sea. The cat bows his neck and grinds the scarred fist of his forehead into the heel of the old man’s hand. I smile with my eyes still closed. I can see the hand. It is calloused, and broad, and smells of fish and sun and rum and salt.

Kitchen points out, “This is a fictional gesture–and it is recognized as such. Spragg moves to imagination only after both writer and reader know the stark reality. It remains in the realm of wishful thinking–not a movement away into fantasy, but an imaginative alternative to a fact we’ve already accepted.”

Another essay Kitchen discusses to illustrate the use of imagination in endings is Albert Goldbarth’s “The Lake” from Dark Waves and Light Matter, University of Georgia Press. The essay utilizes “the posture of imagination” for its ending. The essay is “built around a fictional meeting between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harriet Monroe on the shores of Lake Michigan in the year 1913–the year of the Armory Show that changed our way of thinking about art.”

Kitchen emphasizes that Goldbarth “sets this imaginary dialogue against a plethora of facts from 1913: Joyce, Freud, Duchamp, Chaplin, tornadoes in Omaha, the invention of the paper clip, the US income tax law, the first crossword puzzle, the first appearance of Krazy Kat, all in service of an idea–how a year can be life-changing, can alter our perceptions.” She quotes the essay, “Show me a year, and I’ll show you a human need to systematize its contents. Show me eternity, and I’ll show you a human need for ‘years.’ Show me a year . . . ”

“In one nearly-buried sentence, the essay reveals its origins: ‘The year the call came saying the cancer had spread from my mother’s lungs to her shoulder and back, I saw the world in terms of cancer: that was my template.’”

“In this case, the purpose of the imagination is twofold: it opens up avenues of thought and, at the same time, it acts as a deflection. If we go into our heads, we can escape our hearts. Or can we? For all its twenty pages of seemingly-indiscriminate ‘facts,’ for all its playful teasing, for all its deflections, ‘The Lake’ is struggling to find a pattern: It’s what we always, always do, it’s what our brains are wired to do from even before our natal push down the chute: take welter, and force enabling order into its details. From out of its welter of words, one paragraph out of all its fact-filled paragraphs rises to the surface. At the core of the essay is something so serious it must be downplayed; the essay pivots on its unstated emotions:

You see? “Breath,” “lung.” My mother is coughing herself away in respiratory units. And I’ll sleep in the basement under that sound, and I’ll visit her chemotherapist on Wednesday, and I’ll wake from my sleep with my heart like a fist at my sternum, and I’ll smile reassuringly for her as the burn of pain takes over another inch she abdicates, and I’ll utter the usual pieties, and I’ll see the year this way, this only way, I’ll force everything into that seeing.

The essay should end there–does end there emotionally. But then the deflection would not have been given its due, and it served a significant purpose. Because of the need to deflect, we understand more about how 1913 is representative–a year when everyone had to make an equivalent adjustment in order to go on into the future. So the essay moves away from its essence to its playful pretext:

Snapping pennants! Vendors waving sugar-wafers and wursts!

At Griffith Field in Los Angeles, Georgia “Tiny” Thompson Broadwicke makes her final inspection of every last buckle and strap.

The year is 1912. She’s about to become the first woman ever to parachute from an airplane.

The excitement tongues her skin. Her name is going to live forever.

The irony is not lost on us. The reader’s imagination expands. Nothing will be remembered forever, not even the death of our parents. No, not even our own.”

****

After reading Judith Kitchen’s take on endings, look at your own endings. If they don’t feel satisfying, take the time to try one or more of the five techniques Judith Kitchen points out. Is there a sudden richness a new ending brings to the essay? If not, try another of the techniques or a blend of two or more. When we skillfully accomplish the disclosure of a pattern of thinking, we create an essay that leaves an impression, both in our readers and ourselves.