Sean Patrick Cooper

3 Things About Carl Klaus

1. Just wrote “The Made Up Self”—a book about voice/persona in personal essays
2. Founder and former director of Iowa Non-Fiction Program. (i.e. “The #1/#2 program in U.S.” according to the people who rank these things)
3. Was interviewed by The Millions (in large part b/c of 1 and 2)

On the impossibility of “true” representation of the self in a personal essay:

CK: Well, I do think there’s some double-edged quality in writing personal essays – because despite the fluid nature of the self, we do in the long run develop a conception of our selves that we aspire to be true to in our own writing.  And yet I know that such a thing is impossible.  To think that I could in fact create a style that was an echo of such a multi-sided thing as the self – that’s simply a cuckoo notion.  So what can I say?  We do, in fact, aspire to write like ourselves even though we know that in some sense this is an impossibility – much as it’s a difficult notion to imagine never being yourself and yet always being yourself.

“The real masters of the essay are masters at weaving those two stories together.”

One of the pieces is on the whole notion of show-and-tell.  You know, the familiar maxim of writing teachers – TM: Show, don’t tell. CK: Right, and this is a piece arguing against that.  Because when you say “Show, don’t tell,” then you can’t really bear witness to anything but the facts of an experience.  You can’t go into what I call the story of thought.  I think that in every essay of consequence there are two stories – there’s the story of experience, and there’s the story of thought, what you might call the outer story and the inner story.  The real masters of the essay are masters at weaving those two stories together.

Agreed. And I’m thinking of Michael Lewis as being close to / or @ the top of the list of master writers who are (1) currently publishing essays and (2) who are properly skilled at weaving an idea story w/ an entertaining narrative story. FWIW, I’d guess that list to be under 50-writers long. Some of those 50 lean to the ideas, others to the narrative; few do both as well as Lewis.