Last week's reads: Amish witches, deep sea dives, EMDR

Monday reading #1

I’m hoping to write more regularly, and I thought a weekly email with reading recommendations might be a nice place to start. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription, you can snag one for a big discount this week! Either way, I appreciate you.

Last week I read three really long pieces, all of which I liked, and they also inspired some thinking about nonfiction writing & long feature stories.

“In the Glimmer,” Rachel Yoder, Harpers, July 2023, about her family’s Mennonite and Amish roots and her search for practitioners of Pennsylvania Dutch witchcraft.

“Submersion Journalism,”Matthew Gavin Frank, Harpers, also July 2023 (this issue kinda slaps, cover story notwithstanding). This is about a deep sea obsessive who builds his own submersibles & takes the writer on a 2,000 ft. dive.

“The Enigmatic Method,” Meg Bernhard, VQR, S/S 2023, about the therapeutic modality known as EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)—where it came from, whether it works, why questions about trauma treatment have become so salient in current discourse.

These shared a couple of broad, but striking, similarities.

The first is that each piece is written from the perspective of a writer seeking. This is most obvious in the Yoder story, but Frank and Bernhard both write that their work on these stories was partly about personal matters: whether, in the latter case, EMDR would work for her; in the former, Frank seeks a remedy for lifelong, perhaps intergenerational, anxiety and relief for a recurring dream of drowning:

I needed to map my own fears; Karl’s obsession could provide the relief. I wanted to unhook from my dream, and from the way I’d gone about living—fixated on, almost lionizing, the origins and qualities of my anxieties. A journey to the depths of the ocean had come to seem necessary. I wanted to differently greet the land, and my remaining time upon it, when I returned.

What happens to these stories without those impulses? I suspect that this type of feature-length reporting will only become more common because it seems to add an imprimatur of authenticity, of writerliness, in an age of profound anxiety about whether or not artificial intelligence’s large language models can produce complex reported prose.

The second thing I noticed is that each, to greater or lesser degrees, follows the structure of the “braided essay,” a creative nonfiction form that blends three (or two or four) storylines, balancing memoir or personal narrative with research and reporting. That isn’t all that remarkable—it’s very common now!—which is, maybe, the interesting thing. Not every story is served by that structure (which is a general comment, not specific to any of these pieces), but it occurred to me that one reason the form is so popular is that it’s a mirror of the experience of consciousness and personal subjectivity in the internet age. We all do some version of this, or we can, anyway, right? It’s easy and, I think, a culturally conditioned practice, turning to internet research to amuse ourselves or understand what’s happening to us and where our personal histories fit in the bigger sweep of history. You can go very deep on any subject at any time, from anywhere, whether you’re going to write about it or not. And I think that’s why writers do it whether or not a story needs it—it’s both a convention of genre and an everyday practice.

More things to read & think about next week. Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these pieces in a comment!