Abstract: "Rabid" is a personal essay threading the narratives of a fox attacking husband and wife in Central New York and the couple's trip to Canada to visit a dying parent. The poignantly humorous piece explores the symbiotic relationship between fear, death, and love.

This personal essay takes shape around short descriptions and images of recent community arts and cultural events of Hawaiʻi. Reflections by the authors bring additional layers of meaning to the text. Through the interweaving of these different elements, the essay proposes family stories of Native art, culture, education, and healing in Hawaiʻi as antidotes to art-historical canons, especially those reinforced by settler colonial museums and Westernized higher education systems in the Hawaiian Islands.

This personal essay explores the partly autonomic, partly behavioural process of thermoregulation in relation to everyday life. Queer feminist and materialist life writing regularly examines how socio-economic systems and cultural norms relate to the desiring self. I build on this tradition by reflecting on how experiences of extreme heat and cold can influence thermoregulatory processes and seed new desires. Although the non-human meteorological elements of heat and cold feature in a narrative representation of a formative decade in my adult life (24–34), this piece does not adopt a strong post-human or eco-sexual stance. Rather it questions whether the messiness of human desire, combined with our animal need for thermoregulation, can collude with the variabilities of weather in queerly anti-imperalist forms of ecological embodiment. What takes this life writing beyond the human is the attempt to document the possibilities in the human-weather relation: the human potential outlined here cannot be separated from the aliveness of the body and the energetic force of the weather.

ABSTRACT This article considers the object-essays of Vanessa Berry, Rachel Robertson and Brenda Miller, along with my own practice-led research, to suggest the personal essay has key affordances that make it useful for creative writers seeking to represent the active or agential quality of objects – what Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’. Using the conceptual framework of the object itinerary, it contends that essaying the active object also provides insight into the ways the essay itself can be ‘object-like’.

In this personal essay, I recount my lived experience of childhood tuberculosis, highlighting the physical, emotional, and psychological toll on myself and my family. I reflect on how tuberculosis care has since improved, but also how certain critical gaps persist, especially the challenges of inadequate financial support, post-recovery social reintegration, and insufficient psychological care for persons with tuberculosis. Drawing from my experience, I advocate measures to address stigma, invisible costs, and discrimination. Holistic care for tuberculosis must go beyond just medical recovery and ensure dignity and meaningful social healing for all.

This article pursues the connections among experiences of disorientation, methods of political thought, and the genre of personal essay. Its contributions are threefold. First, it reads three personal essays published in The Village Voice in the 1970s. Although recent scholarship has revisited feminist political thought and activism from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, little attention has been given to the genre of personal essay frequently engaged during that time. Second, this article considers how these essays partake in a queer phenomenological method of thought. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I contribute to feminist theorists’ interest in the fruits of phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to the political. Such approaches help to explain how political structures shape gendered and racialized experiences of embodiment, temporality, and spatiality. My third contribution is to demonstrate how the queer phenomenological approach of these essays emphasizes disorientation as a political experience and reorientation as a potential avenue for pursuing political change. These essays not only narrate moments of political disorientation, but they also show how such moments urge the authors to reorient toward the recurrence, emotion, and ambivalence that they experience, respectively. Reorientation is not final and thus cannot be reduced to the kinds of conclusive argument one might expect of political writing. This last thread of my argument helps to elaborate how essays may (1) facilitate the reorientation of their contemporary readers toward new directions for politics and (2) instruct present-day scholars on the potential for disorientation to offer insights for political theory.

In this deeply personal essay, communication scholar Inger Stole shares with readers a glimpse into her life with Robert W. McChesney, her husband of 37 years. Stole reveals the depth of feeling with which McChesney approached all aspects of life, from his work as an intellectual and advocate to his role as a father and life partner.

This personal essay explores the core of the author’s analytic way of being and relating. This fundamental place he calls the “analytic true self for another,” an aspirational engagement that embodies two ethical intentions: being present and relating with true feeling. To be present is what Gabriel Marcel names presence and availability: a porousness in the analyst, an openness to the influx of the patient’s emotions and states of mind that the analyst inhabits. True feeling, a phrase after the painter Robert Motherwell, describes the creative process of acting from a place of freedom, honesty, and at times spontaneity. The analytic true self for another is a relational modification of Winnicott’s idea: being and acting in a way that represents who one is as a person and as an analyst for the patient. The author explores the therapeutic value of practicing from these values. Two clinical situations illustrate these two ethical modes of being and relating. The essay intends to engage the reader in a dialogue of self-exploration, searching out a foundation from within, in each of us, in the practice of psychoanalysis.

Abstract Throughout her vast body of non-fiction, Hilary Mantel’s narration is interwoven with personal perspectives, and experiential details, enriching “the life story she began in her [2003] memoir, Giving Up the Ghost” (Pearson 2023, p. xiii). As Mantel’s editor, Nicholas Pearson puts it, “a patchwork of a life revealing itself” emerges “in her journalism and essays” (2023, p. xi). Focusing specifically on Mantel’s portrayals of memory in selected passages from two inter-related non-fiction genres—namely, her memoir and two personal essays—this interdisciplinary discussion demonstrates how her self-narration in these differing contexts conveys this personal, experiential patchwork via varying viewpoints on the integral mnemonic components of autobiographical knowledge, prospective memory and human recall’s inherent creativity. The introspective, self-narrational content of memoir—which “derives from the French word for memory” (Couser 2012, p. 19)—is largely constituted by the author’s “memory-bound sense” of self-interpretation (Bartkevicius 1999, p. 134). My analytical framework thereby positions Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2013), as the primary textual vehicle for her self-narration of personal memories and her understanding of memory processes more broadly. My analyses compare examples of Mantel’s mnemonic viewpoints in the memoir with other insights about memory that emerge in two of her personal essays—a genre widely perceived as the cousin of the memoir. These essays—“Touching Hands with the Lost” (2007) and “The Day is for the Living” (2017)—have been specifically chosen for their thematization of memory. Given the memoir’s analytical framing as the primary self-narrational source of Mantel’s mnemonic perspectives, I position her personal essays’ self-narration of memory processes within the realm of the paratextual—texts that surround, and have connections with the focal text, but are not constituent components of it. Drawing on cognitive research into the processing of memory—particularly autobiographical knowledge, prospective memory, imagination’s role in remembering, and the creativity of memory—my literary analyses highlight mnemonic congruences and discrepancies that emerge in these inter-related self-narrational contexts. I show how perspectival shifts in Mantel’s personal narration can both create possibilities and impose potential limitations pertaining to the textual representation of one’s personal memories and memory function more broadly, while also suggesting how these shifting self-narrational viewpoints may potentially impact the reader’s understanding of memory and remembering. Having highlighted some of the benefits and possible downsides of Mantel’s varying mnemonic viewpoints, my concluding analyses underscore the advantages of adopting a broad, dialogic readerly approach, wherein the memoir’s and the paratexts’ differing narrational mnemonic perspectives are perceived as neither didactic, nor discrete representations, but as an interwoven, self-narrational ‘patchwork’ of insights that collectively shed light on the hidden recesses of memory cognition and the subjective complexities of remembering.

Abstract: “Lariat” is a personal essay that explores the concealed origin story of the author’s father, and how the father’s buried childhood trauma affects the relationship between father and son.

Abstract: This essay combines scholarship with personal essay to consider a politics and poetics of pain and what pain can be and do. Drawing primarily on queer, crip, and feminist of color writing as well as my own experiences of chronic illness and its attendant pain, I propose the idea of “paincraft” as a mode of tending our somatic archive and caring for pain’s bodily, historical, political, and affective intersections, opening space for new ecologies of being and relation. I suggest that through insisting on pain’s very shareability, as well as cultivating practices of kinning with pain, we might divert from assumptions of pain’s effects as being only that of suffering and obliteration and cultivate generative possibilities for liberatory worldmaking with and through our individual and collective pain. Ultimately, I ask, “What is a relationship to pain that frees us all?”

This personal essay details a psychiatrist's experience of her female patient's dissociation, which led to questions about the role of women in society. A brief review of societal norms reveals that women have always presented in medicine with disguised disorders. Collaboration with a neurologist and a team of like-minded providers leads to the development of a nonepileptic seizure (NES) disorder clinic.

Abstract This personal essay, first presented at the Sixteenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society on 27 June 2023 in Växjö, Sweden, reflects upon the experience of listening to the Audible audiobook version of The Great Gatsby narrated by actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Audiobooks began in 1931 with the Pratt-Smoot Act, which authorized the U.S. Library of Congress to record readings of books for the vision impaired. Ninety years later, the medium has grown into a popular alternative to reading that generates some $1.8 billion per year and that 53 percent of the U.S. population has tried at least once. The differences between reading and listening begin with the dreamlike immersion into language the latter affords, wherein we relinquish the narrative momentum of the eye scanning printed lines to the immanence of the spoken word. As this article argues, readers can discover new thematic connections by hearing Fitzgerald’s sonorous prose.

This creative critical essay initiates from the writer’s existential question about the use of pronouns as expression of one’s own identity. Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn and Primarily Women (original Dutch title: Voornamelijk Vrouwen) by the renowned Dutch novelist and philosopher Connie Palmen, are the essay books that guide her through the quest for one’s own voice. As Sontag’s writings on theory are brought into dialogue with Palmen’s autotheoretical personal essays to gain new insights into the styles of both, the question of pronouns and identity is explored through the contribution to knowledge and self-knowledge from these two major sorts of essay writing.

ABSTRACT In her 2021 essay, Bodying the Journalist, Chantal Francoeur acknowledges that journalists’ bodily experiences – “that complex assemblage of impulses, reactions, senses, emotions, energies and physical states” – are not easy to categorise or analyse. She argues that foregrounding the body both as an object of study and as a key resource for conducting research lies in part with journalists themselves investigating how they use their bodies as sense-making tools. This article operationalises Francoeur's three-dimensional framework for understanding how journalists deploy their bodies through the creation and analysis of a personal essay about the lived experience of a Reuters staff correspondent who was assigned to Afghanistan in 2011. The essay was written by one of the authors in journalism's creative non-fiction genre to explore her everyday encounters and embodied routines during a key period in the conflict that saw a surge in violence and coincided with the major news event of Osama Bin Laden's death. The personal essay's focus on how the journalist mobilised her body in her daily encounters with the new environment and interactions with others contributes to growing recognition of the emotional and physical work performed behind news headlines.

Abstract: This personal essay explores the creative and intellectual partnership between Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, from their meeting in Paris to their years in California. It traces how their collaborations—including Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes —emerged alongside a deep connection to landscapes, from French gardens to redwood forests. Chronicling Wittig’s intellectual legacy in the U.S., the essay highlights how her theoretical work evolved alongside a profound engagement with natural environments, revealing understudied dimensions of her writing process and materialist feminism. This essay was drawn from papers or introductions given at the conference on Monique Wittig at UC–Berkeley and at the Inauguration of the Monique Wittig Garden in Paris.

In this scholarship-informed personal essay, I examine the profound personal and social transformations that follow adult-onset disability. Drawing on both academic research and lived experience, I reflect on the fracturing of long-standing friendships after developing multiple chronic illnesses, including long COVID. I explore how public health crises can magnify social exclusion for immunocompromised and disabled individuals, and I critique ableist assumptions embedded in social norms to attempt to offer a meditation on grief, isolation, and the search for meaning amidst unresolved loss. The piece contributes to disability studies by illuminating the emotional toll of exclusion and the invisible labor of disabled self-advocacy during a prolonged public health emergency.

Abstract Research demonstrates how entertainment can promote self-exploration and coping through portrayals that resonate with audiences on concrete, biographical levels (i.e., social resonance). We contend that entertainment can also foster resonance through abstract content and themes that celebrate aspects of an individual’s global meaning system (i.e., existential resonance). We first tested this idea through a thematic analysis of personal essays (n = 54) describing eudaimonic experiences with films featuring portrayals of moral beauty. The results provided initial support for our contention, revealing that many respondents resonated exclusively with themes that venerated their core values. Inspired by the qualitative insights from Study 1, we examined the intercorrelations among moral identity, existential resonance, elevation, and the moral ideal self in a second study (online survey; n = 236). The findings revealed significant positive intercorrelations, offering preliminary insights into potential upward spirals of moral functioning in the context of positive media psychology.

This personal essay, offers an introspective narrative that examines the dual forces of arrogance and imposter syndrome through the lens of a paramedic’s journey. The author recounts the rigorous training, intense pressures, and emotional challenges encountered during paramedic school, field internships, and early career experiences. The narrative explores how these experiences fostered both moments of crippling self-doubt and dangerous overconfidence. Through vivid anecdotes, such as the missteps and lessons learned on a critical call, the author illustrates the profound impact of mindset on professional performance and patient outcomes.

This personal essay explores how the simple choice between using a pen versus a pencil in math courses reveals deeper insights about learning, mistake-making, and educational growth. Through examining the physical and symbolic aspects of writing tools, the essay reflects on how preserving our mathematical mistakes, rather than erasing them, can lead to deeper understanding. The essay weaves together personal experience with broader observations about educational norms, the nature of learning, and the unexpected wisdom found in embracing imperfection.