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Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time

A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday

Main feature

March 15, 2024

in “3 a.m. and Taking the Puppy for a Pee Beneath a New Moon.”

from This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye

by Kathryn Winograd

 

“It was the 3:00 a.m. mewling, the new puppy nudging me into suburban dark and moon milk, that made me think of the moon snail propped on my study window sill...”

 

—Kathryn Winograd

 

 

Kathryn Winograd is a poet, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of three books of poetry and two essay collections:  Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children. She is married to the playwright Leonard Winograd, and they divide their time between a home outside of Denver and a cabin in the Colorado mountains.

 

The Paragraph of the Week is the prose poem “3 a.m. and Taking the Puppy for a Pee Beneath a New Moon.” It is from her collection released on March 15, a book of her photographs and ekphrastic prose poems called This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye published by The Humble Essayist Press.

 

Like most Humble Essayist Press books it comes with a study guide for teachers. For our feature, I thought it would be fun to take a question from Winograd’s study guide and answer it in my commentary. You can find more about This Visible Speaking and read the Study Guide including question 6 that I answered in my commentary at the press website here.

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PHOTO: KATHRYN WINOGRAD

PHOTO: KATHRYN WINOGRAD

The Paragraph of the Week

 

It was the 3:00 a.m. mewling, the new puppy nudging me into suburban dark and moon milk, that made me think of the moon snail propped on my study window sill between the photos of the moth orchid and Wilson’s snipe I fashioned into postcards. How long has this moon snail gathered dust there, shifted my afternoon sun to richest shadow? Nameless to me once at the edge of tidal spume and broken cockle shells but now a spiral perfect of nipple-brown apex and hollow umbilicus. Leonard keeps asking me why we are here. Why this cup of tea? Why this pen beneath a soda straw width of galaxies uncountable? Nights, the predatory moon snail plows nocturnal shores, drills the shells of clams with holes we string and wear. It lays a thousand eggs into collars of sand, shaped, we say, into ones our priests wear. For this puppy, unlike us—everything is new: the curly cues of dried snail and earthworm beneath the gutter spout, the blue bachelor button in bloom it chews happy at the driveway’s edge. Once conjured by my camera into dark and shadow, this moon snail pixelated into swirls of pigeon-blue and rose-flesh: somewhere, someplace else, there is a constant sea rain of tiny moon snails and this moon, too, where beneath my puppy and I, just us, blink.

—Kathryn Winograd

Commentary

So what is the answer to Leonard’s question? Why are we here? “Why,” I picture him saying, “this cup of tea,” spreading both hands in exasperation? And Kathryn Winograd is careful to honor the apparent randomness of the things in their world: the “mewling, new puppy” sending her out into the night, the moon snail stuck on a window sill between postcards of a “moth orchid” and a “Wilson’s snipe,” the pen shaped like a soda straw which when focused on the night sky encircles “galaxies uncountable.” But the author likes to gather random things that catch her eye in boxes, and that gathering connects them, puts them into relationship with one another, thrown together, yes, but given meaning by her selection. She names the nameless and connects them with metaphor, the moon snail becoming “now a spiral perfect of nipple-brown apex and hollow umbilicus.” She learns about them, the snails’ predatory ways and nocturnal habits, through careful study propelled by a curiosity her bloom-chewing puppy shares. She recreates them lovingly, the moon snail emerging from shadows in her photograph “pixilated into swirls of pigeon blue and rose-flesh,” according to beauty in the eye of the beholder. Gathering, naming, learning, studying, loving—that’s why we’re here. That’s why she and her peeing puppy standing “in suburban dark and moon milk” at 3 a.m. blink in wonder like her camera.

 

—THE

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Announcements

Announcements

Listen to the Dan Hill Podcast on The Beloved Republic 

at The New Books Network

Dan Hill interviews author Steven Harvey about politics, family, race, and being The Humble Essayist on his radio program at the New Books Network.

 

Here.

Return to main feature here.

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News from The Humble Essayist Press

 

Beware poets writing prose? Nah. Check out the new releases from The Humble Essayist Press! Essay collections by two award-winning poets. Learn more here.

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The Beloved Republic Review

Thanks to Tarn Wilson for her review of The Beloved Republic at the  River Teeth website. She writes: “In his titular essay 'The Beloved Republic,' Harvey makes this heartening promise to those who feel worried and wearied, helpless in the face of 'war and tyranny,' that by devoting ourselves to lives of steady kindness, creativity, and friendship we are joining an invisible, benevolent army.” Read the full review here.

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Brevity

Thanks to Brevity magazine for publishing the short prose piece “The Hermit Thrush.”

You can read the entire piece at Brevity here.

Hunger Mountain

Thanks to Hunger Mountain for publishing “Aubade,” my exploration of perception in lyric prose. It begins with this epigraph from the artist Paul Cézanne: “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” 

 

You can read the entire brief piece here.

Zone 3 Interview on The Beloved Republic

 

Thanks to Amy Wright and the folks at Zone 3 for granting me an interview about my new book. Amy reads with discernment, asks great and surprising questions, and listens carefully to the answers. Check out the question she opens with in the sidebar--it goes right to the heart of the matter! See the full interview here.

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The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey

Available at Bookstores and Online

See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.

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The Beloved Republic

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The Beloved Republic

 

I am pleased to announce that my fourth collection of personal essays  won the Wandering Aengus Press nonfiction award and has been nominated for two PushcartsThanks to the Press for this honor.

What is the Beloved Republic? E. M. Forster, who coined the phrase, called it “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who “have the power to endure” and “can take a joke.” Pitted against authoritarianism, the Beloved Republic is the peaceful and fragile confederacy of kind, benevolent, and creative people in a world of tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies. Taking Forster’s phrase for its title, my book can be read as dispatches from that besieged land.

Available online and at bookstores. Learn  more at the author's website 

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Folly Beach 

Folly Beach is a book-length personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. It never loses sight of the inevitable losses that life brings, but doesn't let loss have the last word.  In the face of the grim, Folly Beach holds up the human capacity to create as our sufficient joy.

—THE

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In a world of loss, creativity is the best revenge.

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You can learn more about the recent work of Steven Harvey at his author's page here.

THE Mission

We at The Humble Essayist are in love with the paragraph, that lowliest of literary techniques.  A sentence stands out as a noble thing: a complete thought.  But what is a paragraph?  And what, in particular, is a good one?  You know it when you read it--that is our article of faith.  So on Friday of each week, beginning on Independence Day 2014, the very day 169 years earlier that Henry Thoreau moved to Walden Pond, we will select a single paragraph from an essay or a reflective memoir and print it here along with a paragraph of commentary.   We will choose paragraphs that are surprising, beautifully written, and, above all, thematic--illuminating the author's comment on life.  Each paragraph of the week is, in short, a concise review of the writer's work.  We hope that this page will introduce you to many exciting authors and their ideas.

 

The Humble Essayist thanks Clipartpal for the public domain artwork of "The Old Man Reading" that is the logo for the site.

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