When essayists learn to listen closely to the music they are making on the page and examine what the changes in the music mean, they learn to make the sounds of exactly what they have experienced and of exactly what they have learned. That is when essays reach true depth and speak most clearly — both to their authors and to their readers.

Whitney Potsus, who is the managing editor of T-Zero’s “Craft of Writing” section, sent me an essay she’d written with a note saying that although many people had read and enjoyed it, she wasn’t satisfied with it. She had written about her mother’s quilting, about how she valued the quilts her mother had made and about how she admired her mother’s ability to form meaningful patterns out of scrap after scrap of fabric. In the essay’s first sentence, she announced, “I can’t sew.”

The difference between her mother and herself seemed very big — at least until Whitney took up beading, a hobby her mother arranged for her when Whitney announced she needed one as an antidote to work and school:

When I was in high school, in a fit of acknowledged masochism, Mom started a quilt with an ocean wave pattern — triangles composed of 88…no, I’m not kidding…88 smaller triangles. I’d sift through the piles of triangles, not seeing a pattern, but deciding that if Mom pulled this one off, she’d surely qualify as a master quilter. Originally intended for my parents’ queen size bed, it was downsized for my twin bed after Mom spat and fumed over one too many 88-piece triangles. More than once, while watching her try to fit together pieces that wouldn’t cooperate, I asked why she didn’t quit.

“Oh,” she replied, “it’s not that hard if you take your time.”

The 88-piece triangles, deceptively simple when you see the completed product, were joined together by larger pieces of peach fabric with seashells stitched on them. When completed, it was another testament to Mom’s ability to take unremarkable pieces of fabric and turn them into something extraordinary. I was suitably impressed, and ever more chagrined that I couldn’t sew.

 A little more than a decade later, Mom gave me the gift of a hobby: beading. Partly in response to my obsession with jewelry, it was also in response to my declarations of desperately needing a hobby after school and work had consumed my life for too many years in a row. Beading was so natural a choice for me that I still wonder why it took me so long to discover it.

Do you hear the sound of admiration in the author’s words, as they keep up a steady momentum in the first paragraph? This paragraph has the beat of conviction — I recognize it in “mom…a…master.” I go through the paragraph and look for other phrases and words that hit my ears the same way: “In high school,” “masochism,” “ocean wave pattern,” “88 triangles,” “downsized,” “for my twin bed,” “suitably impressed,” and “pieces of fabric” are among the phrases that seem to go boom, boom, boom — this is the way it is, this is the way it is, this is the way it is.

But something in the sound changes in the last line of Whitney’s third paragraph when she says: “I was suitably impressed, and ever more chagrined that I couldn’t sew.”

Notice how the opening phrases in this sentence lack the emphatic beat. Emotionally, these words are going somewhere new. While this sentence sums up something that we have already experienced in the beat and momentum of the earlier words, in the new sound, we hear the speaker turning her attention to another quality of her life as daughter to the master quilter mother. The words that sum up do not, however, convey any emotion about where the speaker is turning.

Something very soft-spoken lies beneath this sentence’s report of the speaker’s admiration. There is an up and down sort of sound to the phrasing as if it is asking the speaker to consider something. What does “suitably impressed” mean vis-à-vis a child who has grown up with a “master” quilt-making mother? In her essay, Whitney had not heard this question in the sound of her sentence, but that up and down sound provides an opportunity. The writer can follow it and take a deeper turn than merely using time, as she did:

A little more than a decade later, Mom gave me the gift of a hobby: beading. Partly in response to my obsession with jewelry, it was also in response to my declarations of desperately needing a hobby after school and work had consumed my life for too many years in a row. Beading was so natural a choice for me that I still wonder why it took me so long to discover it.

In this paragraph, I hear the sound of someone filling me in without really letting me in. What do “declarations of desperately needing a hobby” sound like? The near alliteration here with the words that start with “d” are a hint that there is emotion in the declarations, emotions that could be evoked with more information on the page.

In her essay, Whitney wrote, “Beading was so natural a choice for me that I still wonder why it took me so long to discover it.” The repetition of the word “so” creates a sound parallelism as does the fact that the two phrases “so natural a choice for me” and “so long to discover it” have almost the same number of syllables. But what is parallel emotionally? We don’t really find out, although the sound here invites us to ask: Why is beading a natural choice? Had she ever asked for a hobby before or thought about one for herself? Why had she turned to her mother when she wanted a hobby? Why had her mother thought beading would be good for her daughter? The answers to these questions would help Whitney mine the emotions of her experience for the page. Instead, in the next paragraph, she described her beading experience with a difficult pattern, which draws a comparison to the way her mother took on the pattern of triangles with 88 smaller triangles inside each of one and dealt with frustration:

Eighteen months into the hobby, in a fit of acknowledged masochism, I tackled a Bead & Button cover project: a monster of a twist necklace with some two dozen strands of seed beads — one of those projects that makes your hands cramp and your eyes squiggle. I spat and fumed over the knots created when I joined a new line of beading thread to the one that had just run out at a most inopportune spot in the necklace, eventually taking the whole thing apart and starting over again with an enormous length of beading thread. (Was that the right thing to do?  Probably not.  At this point, I’d just as soon not know.) Spat and fumed when things didn’t come together under the end caps like they did in the magazine’s photos, irritated enough that I dragged the whole thing  project and magazine to the Beadworks shop in Norwalk, Connecticut, where one of the shopkeepers assured me that I’d done everything right.

I took the project home one weekend to show my parents — it was the most ambitious thing I’d tackled to that point, and I was eager to show it off. My father, who’d done some pretty impressive needlework projects (all of which hang on the main wall of my parents’ living room), was impressed. But would my mother be?

Fingering through the individual strands in the necklace, silently counting to see just how many there were, she eventually looked at me over her glasses. “How in the world did you ever do this?” she asked, clearly impressed.

“Oh,” I replied, “it’s not that hard if you take your time.”

I think if the answers to the questions I asked were in the essay, they would heighten an underlying theme that Whitney wanted to pull together by the repetition of her mother’s words, but didn’t fully. In the essay, Whitney waits for her mother’s response to the beading with some tension as the word “eventually” makes clear — five syllables drawing time out for us. It is most important that her mother be impressed. But why? What is at stake? There seems to be something Whitney wanted to learn — that she has an attribute she admires — and it’s not the pattern-making alone. But more than learning it about herself, she wanted to have something seen by her mother. So much so that we wait those five syllables for a big release when her mother admires the work and asks how Whitney had accomplished it. This raises the following questions for me:  Was Whitney thought to be an impatient person? Did her mother have doubts that she could do what she set out to do?

It is fun when Whitney repeats her mother’s wisdom at the essay’s end, but this repetition will resonate deeply when Whitney shares more about her relationship with her mother.

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In slightly different form this essay appeared in the November, 2003 T-Zero, The Writer’s E-Zine