Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
We Are Now on Threads as wll as Facebook
Learn More here
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders here
January 16, 2026
from “Best Pals”
by Rachel Cline
in River Teeth Fall 2025
“I learned several new pleasures...the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.”
—Rachel Cline
Last fall, I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” of River Teeth magazine, and for the month of January we are featuring four essays from this issue. I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. Rachel Cline’s essay “Best Pals” shows how experiences in our youth shape our emerging voices.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
The following summer, Nancy taught me a game she called “Body Comfort.” After lights out, she sat down on my butt and explained the rules: we each had a bank of 100 requests. For example, you might ask for ten shoulder rubs and when those were done, five arm tickles, and then fifteen karate chops. When you got to 100, it was the other person’s turn. You could ask for anything you wanted. I learned several new pleasures from her requests: the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump. Trading off meant that one gave generously in order to receive bounteously in return, and the countdown added an undercurrent of suspense. It was a game of never-ending interest.
—Rachel Cline
Commentary
Reading no doubt influences our writerly voice, but the experience with language as we grow up largely shapes it because that is when we first see and feel the effect of words in action. We glimpse this process at work in “Best Pals” by Rachel Cline when she and her camping friends practice the art of being snarky after lights out by playing games such as “Body Comfort,” with silly names for ways to “pleasure each other” including “the tushy rub, the earlobe flutter, the big thump.” Such verbal play—and the snickers and cringes it induces—is the real-life laboratory in which we learn how words work. Unfortunately, the hidden reality behind such wordplay is not always benign, and over the course of Cline’s essay we learn that a seemingly innocent game of naming bodily pleasures is the symptom of an unspeakable evil suffered by her “best pal” who became the victim of it.
—THE
~ ~ ~
Weekly Reminders from
The Humble Essayist
We are now on Threads and will begin posting weekly reminders there. If you are on Threads, please follow us there. We are still on Facebook as well. Due to the toxic nature of X we no longer promote our site there.
The best way to keep up with us is to add your name to our growing list of subscribers, and we will send free, brief, weekly reminders of our features with a link to the page directly to your email. Please click on the blue button to subscribe.
Unsubscribe Here.
~ ~ ~
Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
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.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
