Mara Naselli is an editor and writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She teaches manuscript development at the University of Chicago Graham School. She has a husband, two small children, two horses, and a cat. Email: [email protected]
by Mara Naselli The literary debate over the role of fact and invention in essay now appears to have foreshadowed our own post-fact moment. Suddenly this is not an idle matter. When writers knowingly take liberties with the facts in the name of art, they demote the reader from fellow traveler to spectator. Trust me,…
by Mara Naselli In the spring of 1917, Alfred Kreymborg brought Marianne Moore to a baseball game. In his autobiography, he recalls how they stood on the crowded elevated on the way to the Polo Grounds, holding the straps as the train lurched. Moore held forth on technical matters of poetics, undisturbed. Kreymborg, the editor…
by Mara Naselli The Soviet writer Isaac Babel is well known for his relentless scrutiny in revision. He and his young wife retreated to the mountains to work on the stories that would become The Red Cavalry, published in 1926. “Achieving the form that he wanted was endless torture,” writes Nathalie Babel. “He would read…
by Mara Naselli One evening in February 2012, I was in a Chicago noodle shop looking for a table for one. The television was on—a news report from Syria. The Syrian Army had begun its attack on Homs. The frame of the screen, jostling in the confusion, captured the faces of a woman and a…
by Mara Naselli Around 1860, shortly after the James family returned from Europe to Newport for William’s painting apprenticeship, Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son), came for a visit. He experienced firsthand the vigor of a Jamesian family debate over dinner, hands gesticulating and brandishing dinner knives: “Don’t be disturbed, Edward,” Emerson recalls Mrs. James…
by Mara Naselli One evening in early March, my husband and I ventured into the French Quarter in New Orleans. We were merely tourists, exploring that old settlement at the elbow of the Mississippi River, its strange contradictions of high and low, youth and age, Old World and New World—shop windows of silver sets and…
by Mara Naselli Rembrandt in America, an exhibition shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a couple years ago, displayed several portraits by Rembrandt as well as works painted by Rembrandt's students and contemporaries. Curators had posted labels that highlighted the provenance of the paintings, many of which have been collected in the United States…
by Mara Naselli When my children entered the gallery at the Grand Rapids Art Museum that contained Anila Quayyum Agha's installation work, Intersections, they took off at a run. The sound of their little feet filled the space. I felt that cinch of parental panic and scanned the room for what they might inadvertently destroy.…
by Mara Naselli Osip Mandelstam spent a lifetime moving from one place to another. His family moved often during his childhood; his exile, however, began after he recited to a gathering of friends a poem he had composed in the fall of 1933. The poem mocked Stalin and his totalitarian rule: “He forges decrees like…
by Mara Naselli “However insipid and perhaps superfluous details so well known may appear,” writes Duc de Saint Simon of his recollections of court life at Versailles, “lessons will be found therein for kings who may wish to make themselves respected, and who may wish to respect themselves.” Saint-Simon claims his formal purpose is to…
by Mara Naselli Minds cannot help but make meaning, even with only a suggestion of direction. When I taught manuscript editing, to put the mechanics of the work in perspective, I would write out a line of taspyograpgucal noasihfsnesnse theat qwe kcgan reasdsdo to illustrate the point. Your eye, reading the jumble above, found the…
by Mara Naselli In an introduction to a seminal collection of Faulkner’s work, published in 1946, Malcolm Cowley called William Faulkner’s story “Spotted Horses” “wildly funny”—“the culminating example of American backwoods humor.” The collection resurrected Faulkner’s career and made his work teachable, part of the American canon. Nearly forty years later Cowley called it the…
by Mara Naselli “A foolish consistency,” Emerson famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I memorized this line in high school. It was one of those Emersonian zingers that gave me momentary purchase in my otherwise bewildered adolescent state. Nothing cohered in those days. I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged.…
by Mara Naselli Narrative omniscience in storytelling has often been described as God's point of view, but we can hardly take for granted God's existence anymore, let alone what we know of God's scope of vision. If we cannot imagine God's all-seeing, all-knowing perspective, then what becomes of the nature of omniscience in storytelling? There…
by Mara Naselli Montaigne's essays are famously voluminous. He didn't cut text; he added it. The book is a monster. He said so himself: “What are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques, botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order, sequence, and proportion which are purely fortuitous.” Despite…