Today’s Literary Journalism and American Belief class went in all different directions, inspired, at the start, from an email from a student interested in reading and writing in fragments. He sent a link of some writing he admires, Now and at the Hour of Our Death, literary journalism by Susana Moreira Marques, published by Tin House Publishing. Just getting the email, with the reference to fragments, led me to a conversation I love between writers Leslie Jamison and Charles D’Ambrisio (originally published by Tin House), and another about James Agee between Jamison and the journalist Jeff Sharlet, the editor of the book we’re reading in class.

Here’s something about fragments from D’Ambrosio, who writes essays this way, he says:

As notions come to me, I try to treat them as if each had its own, valid, rightful place in the world. As insurance, I write the “first draft” of an essay on three-by-five cards, typing sentences in no particular order, taking my own dictation. Throwing things down in a nonlinear fashion breaks habitual connections, tearing up those old agreements, and lets me think unlikely thoughts without worry or concern. The discrete and confined space of a note card makes every sentence I write seem equally destined, a legitimate thing in its own right, free from any narrative intention I might have. Eventually, I pin those cards to an actual (not virtual) corkboard and begin a search, not so much for order but movement, ways to move from card to card.

And this all led me to think about the lines from Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where writing is not enough and fragments are all, and yet writing is a matter of life and death.

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food, and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live.