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January 5, 2024
from “Story”
in Slow Learner
by Jan Shoemaker
“In Jan Shoemaker’s view we live in a miracle and are enacting a tragedy. ”
We end our celebration of the first decade of The Humble Essayist with a reprise of the 2024 Paragraph of the Week from Slow Learner by Jan Shoemaker, one of our finest prose stylists. I admire Shoemaker's range, her seemingly effortless eye for literary effects, and her complete control of tone throughout her essays. By range I mean she can go from meringue to mystery in a phrase. She successfully pulls off more stylistic surprises in a paragraph than most writers do in an entire essay. And as for tone she can move assuredly from ridicule to reverence and back at will. I have written that I laughed all the way through this heartbreaking book, but it is heartbreaking in the end, so I set her humor aside in my choice for The Paragraph of the Week and in my comment try to honor the darker truths of her achievement.
The Humble Essayist takes off the month of June, but will be back on the Fourth of July to kick off year eleven with our annual tribute to Henry David Thoreau.
The Paragraph of the Week
By any thinking person’s estimate, our actual 3.5 billion-year-old story is not headed for a happy ending—not for humans or starfish or the beautiful Sally Lightfoot crabs Steinbeck tried and failed to surprise. Billionaire global overlords and their apparatchiks aside, I think lots of us will concede that we are approaching the conclusion of what’s turning out to be a tragedy. And guiltily, bemusedly, anxiously, we wonder who, if anyone, can write the twist that will turn the plot around. There’s long been a buzz among editors, who’ve been scribbling for decades, “Don’t shit where you eat.” I drag my recyclables to the curb, overcome with the feeling of being small, smaller than I’ve ever felt before. From the dread of staring ahead, I turn back and look behind, and wonder about the narrative arc that landed us where we are. Did the engine of evolution, our author writ large, leave any wiggle room in our decisions at all?
—Jan Shoemaker
Commentary
In Jan Shoemaker’s view we live in a miracle and are enacting a tragedy. The miracle is the natural world around us that she describes in deliriously joyful and at times hilarious prose. I’ll choose one example for the delightful surprise that turns “elvis” into a verb. “From their pulpits in the creaking tree canopy, crows bellow their wild heresies with the bombast of Baptist ministers and, riding half-submerged logs, frogs elvis their velvety love me tenders. It’s a better noise than I get from the news.” Unfortunately, the news isn’t good. When she turns it on, Trump “redder and more bloated than usual...spread into the TV screen like a batter finding the edge of its pan, as he lobbed blame for our country’s slow response to the pandemic out into the world, trying to get it to stick somewhere.” We are, she believes, on a train headed for disaster from the beginning, and the end is at hand. I don’t know if there has ever been a sadder paragraph about the human condition than the Paragraph of the Week, with the word “shit” at its heart. The stories we create to buffer the pain of this unhappy end—including her own celebratory ones which she takes to task for aiming to please—will not change that hard truth, our only hope the question mark begging mercy from the “engine of evolution” that she leaves us with at the end.
—THE
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Announcements
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.
