Between Song and Story

by Sheryl St. Germain (Editor), Margaret L. Whitford (Editor)

Between Song and Story celebrates the contemporary essay's capacity to live between the two worlds of lyric and narrative. The editors have sought to capture that duality in this anthology, a collection of writings that exemplifies the diverse, exuberant, and intrepid forms of the contemporary essay. Designed for use in any writing course focusing on the craft of the essay, the anthology includes healthy selections of lyric and formally adventurous essays, as well as those focused on nature and travel writing, and more nuanced explorations of place. This anthology tells a rich story about the wealth of experimentation and diversity of approaches to the essay in the twenty-first century. Readers will be engaged and surprised.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2011

Reviews

[Teresa]

Last October I attended a panel on this anthology with Sheryl St. Germain, one of the editors, and a writer of an essay included in it. From what I remember Sheryl saying this book was conceived as a textbook for her essay (due to its etymology, she prefers this word over the newer 'creative nonfiction' term) writing classes. According to my notes, she's more interested in lyricism than narrative, which she loves but gets tired of -- thus the meaning of the title of this book, as she believes the best essays employ the best tools of both fiction-writing and poetry. I've loved Sheryl's writings since reading her Swamp Songs, a book of lyrical, autobiographical essays, so I had no doubt she knew what she was doing.

While I do see that this book can be an excellent teaching tool, I think it is also a great introduction to all the different forms the essay can take, especially for someone, like me, who is mostly a fiction reader, and perhaps thinks that 'essays' are mostly dry and boring. Of course, I enjoyed some of these essays more than others, but they were all engaging and very much worth reading. And they all meet Sheryl's criteria of what a personal essay should be -- that the writer is not just writing about him/herself, but using him/herself as a lens onto a wider issue.

Something I noticed while reading: Though the essays are arranged alphabetically by author, many of them (and several that are 'near' each other) seem to 'speak,' thematically, to another, which made it all even more interesting.