When Judith Kitchen, who is Assistant Program Director of Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, suggested I might want to read a paper by graduating MFA student Hilary Schaper on organizing a collection of personal essays, I was delighted.

I enjoyed reading the account of how Hilary studied the structure of such a collection. Believing that others will find her thinking and analysis helpful, I interviewed Hilary about her study.

Sheila
Let’s start our conversation with a question about your collection’s content. What is your subject matter or the theme in your collection of essays?

Hilary
Most of my essays address my family of origin and my relationship to its members. One of my essays explores my discomfort over being with my father, another my relationship with my father-in-law. “The Prodigal,” my longest essay, investigates my family through the lens of the disappearance and return of a younger sister. Still others touch on obsessive-compulsive disorders and my journey toward a creative life. Many of these pieces share the themes of distance and separateness, seeing and being seen, and fear and obsession.

Sheila
How did you start your study of possible ways to order them in a collection?

Hilary
In thinking about ways to organize the essays for a book, I read and studied other collections from the perspective of structure, specifically, the overall framework of a collection, the form each individual essay or piece takes, the order in which it appears, and its relationship to the others.

Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers (Family), Mary Gordon’s Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (Seeing through Places), and Terry Tempest Williams’ Leap have influenced my thinking about how structure allows the writer to explore her material and how it can extend the scope of her inquiry beyond her own narrative to become more universal, perhaps suggesting to the reader parallels in his or her own life.

 Sheila
What were the first elements you noticed in your reading of those collections?

Hilary
I realized that a part of the structure is built from an author’s use of titles, epigraphs, and imagery that support her themes. Titles works to unify each of the three memoirs by setting tone and introducing central ideas or themes. A Family of Strangers, for example, comes from a sentence in Osip Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp, “Someone has attached me to a family of strangers.” The title suggests the dilemma at the heart of Tall’s life and provides the impetus for her search for identity through her ancestry.

Through her title, Seeing Through Places, Gordon announces her intent to examine the significance of places in her life. Each of her eight essays explores a different physical or psychic space she inhabited and its role in shaping her life.

In Leap, Williams found a particularly apt title for exploring her spiritual heritage, identity, and evolution. Using the metaphoric landscape of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, “El Jardin de Delicias” or “Garden of Delights,” Williams refers equally to: 1) a “leap of faith”–the act of believing in something, which cannot be proved with certainty, 2) the memoirist’s own “leap”–her conversion from her religious tradition to the “middle way,” and 3) the “leap,” on the threshold of which Bosch painted–from the Middle Ages to the Reformation, a period in which Williams writes, “Martin Luther, Erasmus, da Vinci and Michelangelo offered a personal vision of what was to come, the inevitability of a free, sovereign mind.”

Sheila
How did what you noticed come to bear on the title you chose for your collection?

Hilary
My title, The Smallest Part of Things, comes from Rainer Maria Rilke: “The artist’s task consists of making one thing of many, and the world from the smallest part of a thing.” I discovered Rilke’s words in his book Auguste Rodin, while researching Rodin’s “The Prodigal Son,” an image central to one of my essays. I believe my exploration in writing is like Rodin’s exploration in sculpture. Also, because most of my essays include a piece of visual art as a springboard for a personal story, I decided that this quotation captured the nature of my creative endeavor. Through my essays, I work to cobble together a coherent expression of many aspects of my world.

Sheila
What was the next thing you noticed about the structure of the collections you were reading?

Hilary
Apart from the titles of the entire work, each writer I studied names her book’s sections as well, and I saw that their section titles function in conjunction with the way their epigraphs function.

Sheila
Tell us more about this.

Hilary
I saw that just as epigraphs help to create a structure for a collection (in Family and Leap, they foretell and summarize the dominant issue of each section, and they stitch the various parts together in an abbreviated way), the same is true of the titles of the individual sections in each of the books I was reading.

In Family, Tall titles Part I, “Secrecy: Secrets Kept and Unkept.” She writes what she knows and does not know about her silent, secretive father and lays out the impetus for her search as well as the risks in taking it. She has an epigraph for this part: “Secrecy guards against unwanted access by others against their coming near.”

Part II is called “Phantoms”: “What is your substance, whereof are you made that millions of strange shadows on you tend.” In this section, Tall mines the depths to discover the substance of the phantoms haunting her life—”the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,” and imagining her ancestors, begins to realize their emotional legacy to her.

Part III is called “Post Mortem Facts” and because the facts—physical items, family members, documentary evidence—Tall learns after her father’s death do not satisfy her, she embarks on a genealogical search. Her epigraph for this part is a quotation from John Berger and Jean Mohr, “Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning.” This notion leads to Part IV, titled “Genealogy of the Missing.” Its epigraph is “We have to inventory the archives of silence,” which foreshadows finding relatives of whom she was unaware. Part V, the last section of the book, is called “Geographical Genealogy,” and the epigraph looks forward to Tall’s travels to the Ukraine, her father’s ancestral land: “There are no compasses for journeying in time.”

Sheila
How did this conjunction of titles and epigraphs work in Williams’ book?

Hilary
Williams memoir Leap contains four sections, the first three of which correspond to and take their names from the landscapes of Bosch’s triptych: “Paradise,” “Hell,” and “Earthly Delights.” The fourth section, “Restoration,” refers both to the physical restoration of the “The Garden of Delights” and to the writer’s own personal restoration after journeying through its landscapes. An epigraph prefaces each section, charting its narrative arc. Paul Tillich’s words provide the touchstone for the first: “The new can bear fruit only when it grows from the seeds implanted in tradition.” Here, Williams shares her tradition of Mormonism with her readers—rites such as baptism and marriage—and introduces the connection between nature and spirituality, and art and spirituality, themes she will explore later.

The epigraph, “I am asking you to study the dark” leads readers into “Hell,” Bosch’s bleak landscape of damnation: “the mind of the mad, dark and duplicitous.” In this second section, Williams suffers a crisis of faith after abandoning Paradise. An excerpt from Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch prefaces the third section, “Earthly Delights”:

Paradise or not paradise, I have the very definite impression that the people of this vicinity are striving to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such an integral part of the setting. . . .There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, The tendency is to set about improving oneself.

After journeying through the misery of Hell, Williams awakens to the beauty and pleasure of the Garden of Delights, where realizing the union of all beings, she sets about trying to live up to the Garden’s “grandeur and nobility.” It is here that she takes the “leap,” converting from Mormonism to a faith of her own creation.

The epigraph of the final section, “Restoration,” comes from Ether13:9, Book of Mormon, “And there shall be a new heaven and a new earth; and they shall be like unto the old save the old have passed away, and all things have become new.” Her journey–the flight from Paradise, the trek through Hell, and arrival in the Garden–necessarily precedes her own personal restoration, the “renewal” of the old.

Sheila
And how did the conjunction you noticed work in Gordon’s book?

Hilary
Gordon does not use epigraphs to introduce her essays and her book is not presented in parts. Instead, each essay title refers to a place–the first, “My Grandmother’s House,” to a specific physical location, the others, to more metaphoric spaces, such as “The Country Next Door” (a house inhabited by men), “The Architecture of a Life of Priests” (a monastery but also “transportable, or portable” spaces sanctified by a priest’s visit), and “Boulevards of the Imagination” (a love song to her lifelong relationship with New York City).

Sheila
How have you used your study of epigraphs and section titles in your collection of essays?

Hilary
In addition to the opening epigraph of my collection, I use three other epigraphs. The first by Joan Didion, appears at the beginning of the first essay in my collection, “Counting on Fingers,” and the other two, by Robert Irwin and Maya Lin, respectively, appear at the beginning of “Standing,” the last essay in the collection, thus framing my book’s narrative. Didion’s words, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” work well as both an introduction to “Counting” and to the collection as a whole. The image of a gigantic, sculptural eye looms at the opening of “Counting,” a piece which examines the debilitating phobias I experienced as an adolescent, ones which demanded that I create a protective mantra. Also in this piece and others, themes of seeing (and not wanting to see) and fear and obsession emerge. Finally, like Didion, I, too, write as an exploration of myself– to make sense of what I see and think.

Irwin’s words, “I would propose that art is a continual examination of the human being’s potential to perceive, know, understand and act in the world,” resonate for me with Rilke’s words at the start of my collection, with a slight twist as they discuss the nature of art rather than the artist’s task. Appearing at the end of my collection, they provide a kind of affirmation of my artistic endeavor and the creative journey that these essays represent. This epigraph is particularly relevant to “Standing,” an essay in which I directly address my difficulty in allowing myself the freedom to create, and my development as a writer. As with Irwin’s words, Lin’s words also serve to launch the last essay and to conclude the collection. In essence, “Standing” is about trying to find a form–a shape to describe the paralyzing obstacle I confront in writing that piece—and the desperate need I have to write. In a way, too, this essay “breaks out,” by creating a new kind of form—one that integrates several of my other pieces and serves as an appropriate conclusion to a collection chronicling my personal and artistic quest.

The titles of each of my essays, like those of Tall, Gordon and Williams, provide a kind of road map to their central threads. In “Double Portraits,” for example, I explore the relationship between my parents through several of David Hockney’s double portraits. I use the prism of three of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings to examine the unspoken aspects of my relationship with my father in “Beneath the Surface.” In “Reflections on Red,” I free-associate with the color red in one of Mark Rothko’s abstract red paintings

Sheila
What else did you find aided the structure of the collections?

Hilary
Another source of structure in the organization of essay collections is the use of imagery, which I observed plays an important role in unifying Tall’s, Gordon’s and Williams’ memoirs. The images they use emphasize the nature and quality of their experiences and feelings, and I believe make them more accessible to the reader. In Family, Tall describes the ubiquitous silence surrounding her father and his family as defended and forbidding: “Silence rises around our house like a wall, studded across the top with broken glass;” her mother has a “mantle of secrecy;” Tall describes “the fenced-in acreage of the unsaid.”

In Seeing Through Places, Gordon writes of the dark interiors she inhabited as a child and darkness becomes a metaphor for emotional gloominess, and light, for understanding and liberation. This example is from “Girl Child in a Women’s World”:

The darkness of her house was in itself a kind of architecture. What could have made a house so dark? Perhaps it was the bushes that grew up, dense, shaped, around the window. And it was the blackout shades, pulled down in the early afternoon. Still, there must have been some place, some part of the room, a corner of a hallway, where light struck, where a yellowish patch, transected by striped shadows, came to rest on a wooden floor. Some moment of a day when the windows were let open that the house must have been not dark. But I do not remember such a place or time.

In Leap, Williams forges a newfound faith/spirituality to integrate the landscapes of her childhood and her traditions with her senses and experiences. Studying the painting “hell,” she imagines herself in the painting:

count[ing] the rungs, every one, as I walk up the ladder to the Tree Man’s body, his eggshell body, one, two, three, four, who is holding the ladder for me, don’t look down, keep rising, keep counting, five, six, slowly to seven, there are no cherries in Hell, eight, nine, I must suffer this heat, steady my feet, and here I stand, I am standing inside the body of a hollow man, brittle and dry, dry heat, I look down as my hands blister at the thought of all that is burning.

From the “Garden,” she writes of the melding of the sensual and experiential with the spiritual, epitomized by “knowledge transmitted through a blackberry placed on [one’s] tongue.”

Sheila
Thank you for the thoughtful analysis! How did you put your thinking about imagery’s role in structuring a collection to work in your own?

Hilary
Perhaps the strongest images in my essays involve bondage and restriction. In “Meditation,” I write of the refuge I sought at an ice rink as a child, and then of its loss as a result of injury. I use the imagery of mummies and gauze dressings to make this psychic bondage palpable. A never-ending game of musical chairs in “Round and Round,” speaks to the entrapment I feel within my family. Later, in “Standing,” three sets of photographs by feminist artists—one in which a woman wraps her face in string, another in which an artist paints over her image, or mirror-image, and a third in which a woman appears folded inside a box—visually convey the constraint I feel, struggle against, and eventually overcome.

I saw that in all three memoirs, the authors chart their journey from a place of discomfort or detachment–real or metaphoric–to a place of relative peace, learning something valuable along the way, something, which has contributed to personal development. I very much like this model as it rewards introspection and insight.

So, my challenge in ordering the essays in my collection was to create a similar sense of movement from one point to another, to reach, if not a sense of peace, at least, one of temporary accommodation in which I, too, have grown. In “Conversion,” though I convert from one religion to another, I realize that my reasons for doing so were not informed by a true hunger for a spiritual life. Later on, I reject my newfound faith but do not reclaim my old one. My journey has taken me from one point to another and not quite back again. In “The Prodigal,” I move from being an insider in the family to becoming an outsider, yet, at the end, I reach no resolution with respect to my status. My journey is more satisfying in “Paterfamilias.” There, I stand outside, a daughter-in-law to a man with whom I do not feel particularly close. By the end of the essay, I become a true member of the family and am able to help him in his time of need. “Standing,” which occurs in the present, commences with images of psychic bondage and moves to a kind of liberation–if only temporary. I also wrote two essays addressing obsession– “Counting,” an account of my debilitating adolescent phobias of disabled persons and of becoming disabled, and “Bearded Spirits,” a humorous treatment of an adult infatuation with bearded “spiritual” men. These pieces examine obsession from different points of view, and, through my ability to see the whimsy in the latter, I achieve a kind of liberation.

Sheila
Were there any another elements you used in structuring the organization of your collection?

Hilary
In addition to working on my title, epigraphs and the themes images build, I borrowed the organizing devices of chronology and artwork from Gordon and Williams to provide my collection’s narrative arc. More than half of essays take place, at least in part, during my childhood (though some also move into my adolescence or adulthood). Like Gordon, I organized my essays through time, in my case, beginning my collection with the essays that treat my earliest years and then moving into adulthood with later pieces. Like Williams, I used visual art as a device to structure my essays. In Leap, Williams takes one piece of art and uses it as a metaphor for her spiritual search. I’ve taken a variety of pieces of art—a painting, piece of sculpture, or photograph—to launch the various essays of my personal story. A Renaissance sculpture of God, the Father provides the impetus for a piece about my obsession with “spiritual” men in “Bearded Spirits.” An Auguste Rodin bronze is the starting point from which to explore my feelings about my sister’s disappearance. A canvas and wire relief introduces the central image in “Counting on Fingers.”

Sheila
Do you think that your collection resembles one of the three books you studied more than the others or does it owe an equal debt to all three?

Hilary
Although my essays and their order owe much to my three “mentors,” Tall, Gordon and Williams, I believe my collection most resembles Gordon’s because my essays, though collected, can stand alone as individual entities outside of the collection. In contrast, each part of Family derives its importance in relationship to the book’s other parts and each needs a context for evoking the book’s sense of her inquiry and for reaching resolution. Similarly, in Leap, only within the context of the other essays does each one’s full significance become clear (just as one panel of Bosch’s triptych, taken alone, fails to convey a sense of the entire painting). Gordon’s essays certainly do benefit from being in a collection, each providing a more detailed and nuanced portrait of the writer and her life and each building upon the essays that have preceded it; nevertheless, each essay addresses a place understandable without reference to the places explored in the others.

Sheila
Where are you in the process of getting your book published?

Hilary
I’ve recently begun sending my essays out separately. I am also working on several ideas for new essays and am revising and rewriting another essay on silence, which didn’t make it into my collection.

Sheila
I am a believer that building up a publication history is very helpful for first time authors and for any author of a collection of essays, it is almost mandatory that individual essays in a new collection were previously accepted by editors. And of course, when one body of work is done, we must investigate our next area of interest. I congratulate you on being able to forge ahead!

Before we close our conversation, do you have anything to add for others working on personal essays? Something inspirational that helps to believe in oneself as a writer?

Hilary
I love this passage from Leap:

It is the nature of art to offend. It is the nature of art to offer. It is the paradox of the artist to both widen and heal the split within ourselves.

We can reject or accept art. We can criticize or lionize an artist’s work. What remains secret is the private intention, the nightmares that accompany the artist, the ecstasy each touches in the dark-bright florid landscapes they travel. And in the end, it doesn’t matter. They leave their images behind, their words, their dances, behind. Tracks to follow. But they are not to be found. They are miles away–on to the next scent. Hieronymus Bosch painted what he smelled. Then he moved on. The artist is the traveler.

Sheila
Thank you so much for sharing what you learned in your investigation of how to structure a collection of personal essays. Good luck in placing the essays quickly and in having that book published someday soon.