Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction

by Dustin Parsons

In Exploded View "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. As with a graphic novel, the story is not only in the text but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it.

Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons's childhood. Parsons's father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic, a welder, and an artist. His shop had countless manuals with "exploded view" parts directories that the young Parsons flipped through constantly. Whether rebuilding a transmission, putting together a diesel engine, or assembling a baby cradle, his father had a visual guide to help him. In these essays, Parsons uses the same approach to understanding his father as he navigates the world of raising two young biracial boys.

This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its "graphic" elements--the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and "exploded view" inventory images--that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader's understanding of the piece, giving them a visual anchor for the story, and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader understand the author's world more fully--a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, and where delineating between right-brain and left-brain thinking isn't so easy.

Genres: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

214 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2018

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is so much love in this collection of lyric essays, each section so tenderly rendered.

The back of the book states, “This memoir distinguishes itself from others in its ‘graphic’ elements—the appropriated diagrams, instructions, and ‘exploded view’ inventory images –that Parsons has used. They help guide the reader’s understanding of the piece, giving the reader a visual anchor for the story, and add a technical aspect to the lyric essays that they hold. This mixture of the machine-like and the lyrical helps the reader understand the author’s world more fully—a world where art comes in the form of a welding torch, where creativity involves finding new ways to use old machines, and where delineating between right-brain and left-brain thinking isn’t so easy.”

I think the above statement is very well said. At first I found the diagrams difficult, most likely because they depicted machines that I have absolutely no experience with. I struggled with finding connections between the technical and the poetic. But, as I moved through the book and I encountered more familiar images, I also found a rhythm, and definitely a balance. I had to learn how to engage with this book in a way that was meaningful to me. There is the hard edgedness of the lines in all pictures, even those that represent animals, those that fly—a bat, an owl, a crane, a cardinal—and dogs, all of which counter the soft threads and loops of the essays. This is a collection of contrasts: the machine and the organic, masculine and feminine, yin and yang, flights of fancy and the ground at our feet, and it is a restoration of equilibrium.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams by Dustin Parsons is a collection of intertwined essays that explore a variety of landscapes: the landscapes of a working-class life; the landscape of fatherhood; and the landscape of the natural world (ranging from the Kansas prairies to the Snow Belt of Western New York). Often accompanied by diagrams and pictures, as both were important parts of Parsons' life, the lyrical essays examine the ordinary, such as building a birdhouse, to the not so ordinary, such as witnessing a prairie fire, in a lyrical voice that somehow captures both the practical and the magical. A wonderful collection!

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays thoughtfully detail coming-of-age and parenting. Paired with diagrams of machines, animals, etc, the essay invite you to analyze the small in order to understand perspective on the whole.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finely calibrated and beautifully rendered

[Tim Bascom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using diagrams and short, lyric essays, Dustin Parsons offers the reader a fascinating look inside the head of a young father, with all the attendant shadows of his own childhood present as he moves into marriage and parenting. This is not a book that builds a narrative arc, pulling the reader forward by dramatic action or suspense. It's a quiet, thoughtful book full of reflective insight and lovely language. Read it like you would read a collection of poetry, and you will be satisfied.

[Macy Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am thankful for the beautiful, poetic collection of essays. Parsons writes about Kansas in the same way that I hope I do, openly and unapologetically. The mixing of text and image is incredible, and though I mentioned the essays about western Kansas, all of the essays in this collection are touching and poignant.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

So creative; loved it! Might have to buy the Todd McLellan print on 20x200 as a constant reminder

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

While these were uneven, overall I found this moving and delightful. The models were fantastic.