Issue 14 / 2000
14 / What Men Think, What Men Write
Crows, credit-card companies, and a single moment in Manhattan
The themes of the eleven essays collected in this issue are curious to consider and embrace a rich brew of topics. Although the themes of “What Men Write, What Men Think” significantly differ from those in our “Emerging Women Writers II” issue, what is worth noting about good narrative nonfiction is not so much what distinguishes the men writers from the women, but more what doesn’t. The best of this work tells a story, defines character, provides (journalistic) information, and allows for reflection and the establishment of a personal voice.
In this issue, Orman Day relates his encounters with credit-card companies; Norman Farrell Jr. describes his transition to Japan and his fascination with plant life; J. David Stevens explores his mania for driving and storytelling; Robert Vivian ruminates about crows; and short-story writer Peter LaSalle freezes a moment in Manhattan.
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What’s the Story #14
The themes of the 11 essays collected in this issue, What Men Write, What Men Think, are curious to consider. Men, it seems, write about their fathers, their heritage, their professions and their cars, not about their mothers, their wives or their children.Not in the Cards
In my early 20’s, fired by the experiences of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and my mother, I embraced financial austerity, taking a path that would produce unforeseen difficulties years later when I would try to get a credit card.The City at Three PM: An Essay on Writing
The bars on Ninth Avenue are empty in the warm October sunshine. If you walk along the grimed sidewalk past the narrow cross streets, you can look down any one of them and right across the fragilely blue Hudson, to the other side and New Jersey, where the trees have already turned to pastels, soft red, soft yellow.Void and Voice: Notes from Poland
Two years ago I traveled to Poland. In a sense I was traveling backward in both time and space, making the reverse trip my grandfather had made 93 years before, when as a young teenager, he left his small town and worked his way as a tailor across Europe.Traps
“Hold it still,” my father told me. We were in the barn, setting steel traps for the raccoons and groundhogs that came to feed on our corn and beans. “Easy now,” he said.Misgivings
You sell yourself, not what you’re selling: to all the salesmen who ever worked for him, including, for one dreadful, interminable summer, me, my father promulgated that bit of advice. “The products are pretty much the same,” he’d say.I Haven’t Been That Far, But I’ve Been to Norwood
When I was about 10 or 12, there were four places in my town of Norwood, Massachusetts, that stuck, and still stick, in my mind as defining compass points of home and who I was.Drive
Boyd White’s car has been stolen. My friend and a fellow writer, Boyd drives an ‘85 Monte Carlo that he works on when he has the time and the money.Cutting the Snow
It is just after 5, the busiest time of day for the store, and my cousin Graham and I are up at the front ringing up customers. I’m running the register, and Graham is bagging groceries.The Dark Hangnails of God
Last winter I was followed by crows.Nyssa Sylvatica
It’s raining outside, a soaking March rain, and my countryman stands there in the garden getting wet. This is fine with him after these days of blue sky and winter dryness, I suppose, since he is rooted in this country as I am not, he being a blackgum, the tree known to science as Nyssa sylvatica.Soul in a Bottle
It was normal and usual for a foreigner, a blan, to go through a period of anxiety and fear while planning a trip to Haiti. Perhaps it was even sensible. For Haitians of the diaspora, the risk of visiting their country was much greater, but I had taken to observing certain Haitian practices before I bought my ticket: consulting all available oracles and examining the bird entrails with great care.