‘Caught up in the Jaws’: Writing for Theme

In our latest Craft Essay offerings, Aaron Gilbreath demonstrates how “theme” in nonfiction can “expand the gaze of one person’s life to reveal something larger about our culture, our times, or human relationships.” Here’s an excerpt from Aaron’s wonderfully useful essay:

Without a universal theme, personal essayists can end up writing anecdotes or catalogues of events that lapse into myopia and fail to connect our experience with readers’ experience. An anecdote is defined as “a short an...