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Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women
Waveform celebrates the role of women essayists in contemporary literature. Historically, women have been instrumental in moving the essay to center stage, and Waveform continues this rich tradition, further expanding the dynamic genre’s boundaries and testing its edges. With thirty essays by thirty distinguished and diverse women writers, this carefully constructed anthology incorporates works ranging from the traditional to the experimental.
Waveform champions the diversity of women’s approaches to the structure ofthe essay—today a site of invention and innovation, with experiments in collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs, and diptychs. Focused on these explorations of form, Waveform is not wed to a fixed theme or even to women’s experiences per se. It is not driven by subject matter but highlights the writers’ interaction with all manner of subject and circumstance through style, voice, tone, and structure.
This anthology presents some of the women who are shaping the essay today, mapping an ever-changing landscape. It is designed to place essays recently written by women such as Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Margo Jefferson, Jaquira Diaz, and Eula Biss into the hands of those who have been waiting patiently for something they could equally claim as their own.
Marcia Aldrich, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Chelsea Biondolillo, Eula Biss, Barrie Jean Borich, Joy Castro, Meghan Daum, Jaquira Díaz, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Patricia Foster, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Margo Jefferson, Sonja Livingston, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Brenda Miller, Michele Morano, Kyoko Mori, Bich Minh Nguyen, Adriana Paramo, Jericho Parms, Torrey Peters, Kristen Radtke, Wendy Rawlings, Cheryl Strayed, Dana Tommasino, Sarah Valentine, Neela Vaswani, Nicole Walker, Amy Wright
287 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 15, 2016
13 people are currently reading
924 people want to read
About the author
Marcia Aldrich
16 books24 followersI was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in that very spot by my parents and half sisters, a story told in "Girl Rearing." I graduated from Pomona College, earned a doctorate in English at the University of Washington, and now teach creative writing at Michigan State University. From 2008 to 2011 I edited "Fourth Genre," one of the premiere literary journals featuring personal essays and memoirs. In spring 2010 I was the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in Claremont, California (where I lived in the Hut with goldens Omar and Quin), and in that same year was named Distinguished Professor of the Year by the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 1, 2019
Note: I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley.
With the rise of the internet and the subsequent explosion of online publications, the essay has gained newfound importance in the literary landscape. On a daily basis--more than books or short stories or poems--I read essays. Those essays tend to be about pop culture, films, books, and everything in between. So I was intrigued when I came across Waveform. I thought it would be something that I’d like, and I was definitely right.
Waveform collects trenchant essays written by women in the nearly two decades that have passed in this century. No book can be all-encompassing. No book can capture every experience of the age we are living through. What Waveform does well is offer diversity and a good mix of the famous and the obscure. There are the major names--Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Margo Jefferson. And there are the names that I, at least, was not familiar with. So Waveform gives us essays we may have already read and also gives us a chance to discover other voices that write about gender, race, and class.
I started reading Waveform after the 2016 election. In my heartbreak, I felt myself in need of feminist company because, for me, feminism has always been salvation. It gives us tools to analyze the world in which we live and it also gives us the ability to envision how else the world could be. Feminism tells the untold stories, it offers alternative narratives. In dark times, we need to think critically. We need writing that is honest and complex, writing that humanizes and scrutinizes. The essays in Waveform are written from a personal point of view but they also, for the most part, engage with larger political issues and realities, like Neela Vaswani’s “Dumb Show,” and Laurie Lynn Drummond’s “The Girl, the Cop, and I,” which both confront rape culture and the trauma of rape. Or Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s stunning “They Didn’t Come Here Cowboys,” which illuminates the injustice and degradation of mass incarceration through the story of the rodeo held at Angola prison in Louisiana where prisoners are forced to perform for spectators. Or Torrey Peters’s heart-wrenching memorial to trans people killed around the world in “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay.” Peters created the essay from a document that listed all the deaths of transgender people from 2013 to 2014. All of these essays continue to haunt me. I keep thinking about them and I suspect they will always stay with me.
While I did find myself skipping some of the essays in this collection because they either didn’t grab my attention or didn’t seem to be going anywhere, that was the exception not the rule. For the most part, I found essays that spoke to me, that moved me, that made me think, that made me highlight passages. And it’s probably true that some of the essays I skipped might speak to someone else. Furthermore, not every essay is serious. Some were clever and interesting, like Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You,” which is written as a series of rejection letters from the author to herself, or Kyoko Mori’s “Cat Stories,” which is about Mori’s relationship with cats throughout her life; it’s about how cats helped her and saved her (something I can definitely relate to!).
I found what I was looking for when I chose to read Waveform. I found a collection of essays that spoke to me, that centered voices that have something profound to say about the time in which we live, that offered comfort, knowledge, warmth, rawness, and honesty. In the years to come, I will return to many of the essays I discovered in this collection.
With the rise of the internet and the subsequent explosion of online publications, the essay has gained newfound importance in the literary landscape. On a daily basis--more than books or short stories or poems--I read essays. Those essays tend to be about pop culture, films, books, and everything in between. So I was intrigued when I came across Waveform. I thought it would be something that I’d like, and I was definitely right.
Waveform collects trenchant essays written by women in the nearly two decades that have passed in this century. No book can be all-encompassing. No book can capture every experience of the age we are living through. What Waveform does well is offer diversity and a good mix of the famous and the obscure. There are the major names--Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Margo Jefferson. And there are the names that I, at least, was not familiar with. So Waveform gives us essays we may have already read and also gives us a chance to discover other voices that write about gender, race, and class.
I started reading Waveform after the 2016 election. In my heartbreak, I felt myself in need of feminist company because, for me, feminism has always been salvation. It gives us tools to analyze the world in which we live and it also gives us the ability to envision how else the world could be. Feminism tells the untold stories, it offers alternative narratives. In dark times, we need to think critically. We need writing that is honest and complex, writing that humanizes and scrutinizes. The essays in Waveform are written from a personal point of view but they also, for the most part, engage with larger political issues and realities, like Neela Vaswani’s “Dumb Show,” and Laurie Lynn Drummond’s “The Girl, the Cop, and I,” which both confront rape culture and the trauma of rape. Or Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s stunning “They Didn’t Come Here Cowboys,” which illuminates the injustice and degradation of mass incarceration through the story of the rodeo held at Angola prison in Louisiana where prisoners are forced to perform for spectators. Or Torrey Peters’s heart-wrenching memorial to trans people killed around the world in “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay.” Peters created the essay from a document that listed all the deaths of transgender people from 2013 to 2014. All of these essays continue to haunt me. I keep thinking about them and I suspect they will always stay with me.
While I did find myself skipping some of the essays in this collection because they either didn’t grab my attention or didn’t seem to be going anywhere, that was the exception not the rule. For the most part, I found essays that spoke to me, that moved me, that made me think, that made me highlight passages. And it’s probably true that some of the essays I skipped might speak to someone else. Furthermore, not every essay is serious. Some were clever and interesting, like Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You,” which is written as a series of rejection letters from the author to herself, or Kyoko Mori’s “Cat Stories,” which is about Mori’s relationship with cats throughout her life; it’s about how cats helped her and saved her (something I can definitely relate to!).
I found what I was looking for when I chose to read Waveform. I found a collection of essays that spoke to me, that centered voices that have something profound to say about the time in which we live, that offered comfort, knowledge, warmth, rawness, and honesty. In the years to come, I will return to many of the essays I discovered in this collection.
November 11, 2016
In the preface to Waveform, the editor writes, "This book is not a memorial. Although we need to remember the women writers who have come before, this book is about women writing essays now. The wave is an image that catches the sense and motion that define the current movement, its fluidity and momentum." This essay certainly has momentum-- so much, in fact, that I would sit down to peruse just one essay and find myself dragged into the current of two or three.
A few things to appreciate about the collection in general. First, there is a wide variety of form here. As an educator, I value this and if I find a need to bring in an essay collection in the future for a course, you can bet I'll be looking to this one. Some essays are sandwiched with two images, some forms are restrictive (one for every letter of the alphabet), while some are based around found words (such as the heartbreaking "Transgender Day of Remembrance.") The variety of forms kept me reading.
The variety of stories here, too, showed a wide range of women's experiences-- yes, essays about motherhood, sexual violence, and girls growing up, but also essays about gun ownership, race, and leaving. Some of the highlights for me in this collection were "Portrait of a Family: Crooked and Straight" by Wendy Rawlings, "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" by Leslie Jamison, "The Girl, The Cop, and I" by Laurie Lynn Drummond, and "Girl Hood: On (Not) Finding Yourself in Books" by Jaquira Diaz.
Honestly, many of these essays touched me deeply, and I felt myself wanting to be a fly on the wall during the meeting at AWP a few years ago when this project (according to the preface) was first envisioned. It's a fine collection, and one I highly recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review of the book.
A few things to appreciate about the collection in general. First, there is a wide variety of form here. As an educator, I value this and if I find a need to bring in an essay collection in the future for a course, you can bet I'll be looking to this one. Some essays are sandwiched with two images, some forms are restrictive (one for every letter of the alphabet), while some are based around found words (such as the heartbreaking "Transgender Day of Remembrance.") The variety of forms kept me reading.
The variety of stories here, too, showed a wide range of women's experiences-- yes, essays about motherhood, sexual violence, and girls growing up, but also essays about gun ownership, race, and leaving. Some of the highlights for me in this collection were "Portrait of a Family: Crooked and Straight" by Wendy Rawlings, "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" by Leslie Jamison, "The Girl, The Cop, and I" by Laurie Lynn Drummond, and "Girl Hood: On (Not) Finding Yourself in Books" by Jaquira Diaz.
Honestly, many of these essays touched me deeply, and I felt myself wanting to be a fly on the wall during the meeting at AWP a few years ago when this project (according to the preface) was first envisioned. It's a fine collection, and one I highly recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review of the book.
December 16, 2016
GNAB I received a free electronic copy of this collection from Netgalley, editor Marcia Aldrich, and University of Georgia Press. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.
This collection of short stories is a fast read that will have your quiet time filled with the thought of new perspectives. There was not a story in here that did not require time to absorb and bend your brain around. I was very impressed, and found a couple of new authors to add to my list of must reads. Thank you!
pub date Dec 15, 2016
University of Georgia Press
This collection of short stories is a fast read that will have your quiet time filled with the thought of new perspectives. There was not a story in here that did not require time to absorb and bend your brain around. I was very impressed, and found a couple of new authors to add to my list of must reads. Thank you!
pub date Dec 15, 2016
University of Georgia Press
July 22, 2018
These thirty essays by contempory authors gives us a wide girth of women's writing. Excellent and I highly recommend this book with so many moving essays.
A couple of quotes:
"Real fear is quiet when it comes." Alexandria Margano-Lesnevich writing about the bull fights at Angolia prison outside of New Orleans.
"SUPPLE. Fiction is the unreeling of action, obstacle, and change."
"LOAMY. Poetry is internal awareness opening through language."
"BRIGHT. Nonfiction is the attention and illumination of reality." These three lines from Barrie Jean Borich in her essay "The Truth"
I could say more, but I simply suggest you read the book and find your own gems.
A couple of quotes:
"Real fear is quiet when it comes." Alexandria Margano-Lesnevich writing about the bull fights at Angolia prison outside of New Orleans.
"SUPPLE. Fiction is the unreeling of action, obstacle, and change."
"LOAMY. Poetry is internal awareness opening through language."
"BRIGHT. Nonfiction is the attention and illumination of reality." These three lines from Barrie Jean Borich in her essay "The Truth"
I could say more, but I simply suggest you read the book and find your own gems.
December 5, 2016
I enjoy essays - they give you a quick insight into usually deep subjects and in this way this book delivers. Thirty women have composed thought provoking stories. However, most of the essays I found to be depressing. The thought that women of today have so much negative in their lives made me wonder why the women in my life do not - maybe we are all just very lucky.
March 8, 2017
Here is the interview I conducted for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies with WAVEFORM's editor Marcia Aldrich and contributor Jocelyn Bartkevicius. It's a wonderful anthology! Thank you.
https://assayjournal.wordpress.com/20...
https://assayjournal.wordpress.com/20...
July 17, 2017
I loved this anthology and the diverse range of stories and voices it represented- it took me so long to read because I really wanted to savor each one. My favorites are as follows, but altogether I think this is a great anthology. There were really only a few essays I found myself breezing through, which is impressive in a collection this big. The essays I loved the most were (the asterisks are my absolute favorites):
- Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed (One of my favorite authors, and I own Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, so this one is kind of cheating for me.)
- This Is How I Spell My Body, by Adriana Paramo (A series of vignettes depicting a series of encounters from one woman's point of view.)
- Cat Stories, by Kyoko Mori (A woman whose cats intertwine with stories of her family and growing up.)
- Portrait of a Family, Crooked and Straight, by Wendy Rawlings (How the protagonist's mother coming out changed her conception of family.)
- They Didn't Come Here Cowboys, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (A truly fascinating story about a rodeo run by a state penitentiary.)
- We Regret to Inform You, by Brenda Miller (Honestly one of the most powerful essays with one of the most clever framing devices I've ever read. A lifetime told through rejection letters.)
- The Girl, The Cop, and I, by Laurie Lynn Drummond (How a cop's perspective of her job and the people she deals with changes after she is raped.)
- There are Distances Between Us, by Roxane Gay (A fantastic, singular paragraph about family and distance.)
- *Difference Maker, by Meghan Daum (An incredibly personal account of fostering children.)
- Good-Bye to All That, by Eula Biss (The title is referencing the original Joan Didion essay, which the author uses as a lens to describe how her experience living in New York was both more and less romantic than she and others imagined.)
- Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed (One of my favorite authors, and I own Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, so this one is kind of cheating for me.)
- This Is How I Spell My Body, by Adriana Paramo (A series of vignettes depicting a series of encounters from one woman's point of view.)
- Cat Stories, by Kyoko Mori (A woman whose cats intertwine with stories of her family and growing up.)
- Portrait of a Family, Crooked and Straight, by Wendy Rawlings (How the protagonist's mother coming out changed her conception of family.)
- They Didn't Come Here Cowboys, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (A truly fascinating story about a rodeo run by a state penitentiary.)
- We Regret to Inform You, by Brenda Miller (Honestly one of the most powerful essays with one of the most clever framing devices I've ever read. A lifetime told through rejection letters.)
- The Girl, The Cop, and I, by Laurie Lynn Drummond (How a cop's perspective of her job and the people she deals with changes after she is raped.)
- There are Distances Between Us, by Roxane Gay (A fantastic, singular paragraph about family and distance.)
- *Difference Maker, by Meghan Daum (An incredibly personal account of fostering children.)
- Good-Bye to All That, by Eula Biss (The title is referencing the original Joan Didion essay, which the author uses as a lens to describe how her experience living in New York was both more and less romantic than she and others imagined.)
January 23, 2017
Waveform is a collection of thirty essays by women writers. Although these aren't all necessarily your typical version of the essay—some follow traditional form while other present their stories in an array of non-traditional forms. This speaks to the diversity of the women included in this collection.
The essays cover a wide range of topics, from things you would expect from specifically women writers such as the experience of childbirth, understand relationships, etc., and to other topics that aren't specifically related to women, but provide just as much thought-provoking stimuli while absorbing each essay. Many of the topics are serious, though they don't all leave the reader with a sense of dread at the end. More often than not, these essays explore suffering in a way that acknowledges it, tries to understand its existence, and moves on from there.
If you enjoy reading essays and enjoy the work of women writers, this collection is for you.
*Copy of book provided by NetGalley
The essays cover a wide range of topics, from things you would expect from specifically women writers such as the experience of childbirth, understand relationships, etc., and to other topics that aren't specifically related to women, but provide just as much thought-provoking stimuli while absorbing each essay. Many of the topics are serious, though they don't all leave the reader with a sense of dread at the end. More often than not, these essays explore suffering in a way that acknowledges it, tries to understand its existence, and moves on from there.
If you enjoy reading essays and enjoy the work of women writers, this collection is for you.
*Copy of book provided by NetGalley
February 7, 2017
this is a phenomenal collection of essays & I am so glad I got to read it.
overall I really enjoyed reading all essays in this collection - which rarely happens with me - and I also noted down the names of a number of the contributors as I was reading because I was loving their essays so much that I wanted to read something more by them.
if you enjoy reading essays or have enjoyed the work of some of these contributors in the past then this is definitely the book for you & if you haven't read many essay collections but want to pick one up I encourage you to read this one because there is such a wide array of material in this one & I'm sure something will stand out to you.
thanks again to the University of Georgia Press & NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book to read
overall I really enjoyed reading all essays in this collection - which rarely happens with me - and I also noted down the names of a number of the contributors as I was reading because I was loving their essays so much that I wanted to read something more by them.
if you enjoy reading essays or have enjoyed the work of some of these contributors in the past then this is definitely the book for you & if you haven't read many essay collections but want to pick one up I encourage you to read this one because there is such a wide array of material in this one & I'm sure something will stand out to you.
thanks again to the University of Georgia Press & NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book to read
December 12, 2016
This is a collection of personal experiences written by women. Some of these are really good and some I could really leave. Overall, I found it incredibly depressing. I get that these are stories that need to be told. Perhaps, I am just not the target reader. I could only take so much of this at a time.
February 28, 2018
For the most part, painfully mediocre.
January 7, 2019
4.5/5 Filled with a delightful collection of old and new talent, I'll definitely make a point of revisiting several of these essays.
May 19, 2024
I started this with a very optimistic mindset: look at all the authors I love listed in the table of contents! that means it has to be a good collection! and maybe all these great essays will inspire my own writing! What actually happened is that I fell into a reading and writing slump, which I can't blame entirely on this book, but I can mostly blame on this book.
Here's the thing.
As a rule, I don't like "personal essays." Elijah supplied me with a helpful definition. What I mean by a personal essay is an essay whose primary purpose is to interrogate the self. I think that personal essays should be considered a different genre from the "essay," which I would say has a purpose to interrogate something outside of the self. This collection was primarily personal essays, which made it pretty tiresome to read after I got about 20% in. That being said, I'm also pretty picky about the essays that I read, because I don't want them to be lacking in complexity or novelty, but I also don't want to read something that is so academic or experimental that I would have to spend hours reading it just to start understanding it.
My plan was to read one essay a day. That did not happen. I read one a day for the first five days or so, then I stopped reading it for a long time, then I got it done this weekend since I'm sick and bored out of my mind in my mini-quarantine.
Personal Essays that I thought were good:
- "Breaking and Entering" by Michele Morano. The author describes breaking into her home, as a child, shortly after her parents' separation. "After a month away, I saw the room as a stranger might have. The narrow bed with its floral spread tucked over the pillow, the white dresser with gilded trim, the frosted glass light-fixture on the ceiling, all of these were overshadowed by a riot of images. On every wall, from the floorboards to ceiling, there were faces, bodies, plaids, stripes. Head shots, group shots, color centerfolds, and black-and-white pinups, so close they nearly overlapped. I blinked and shook my head. This, I thought, was the room of a crazy person." 8 pages.
- "Cat Stories" by Kyoko Mori. Might have been my favorite in the collection, and was definitely the most memorable. A very touching story about how pet cats helped the author come out of her shell upon immigrating to the United States. "Neko-chan hid out in the nursery, knowing my father wouldn't set foot there. I was not important to my father. Even a cat could tell he was a liar and a cheat." 14 pages.
- "We Regret to Inform You" by Brenda Miller. I'd read this before, even used excerpts as a mentor text with seniors. My favorite part is the rejection letter for her application to be a girlfriend to one of the boys on the championship basketball team. The line, "Please do try out for one of the rebound girlfriend positions in the future!" is so cold. 8 pages.
- "Readings" by Patricia Foster. Anything foster-care system related is going to grab me, but I liked the lens of this one: her husband learns more about his forgotten time spent in the foster-care system prior to the age of seven, she observes and supports him from the sidelines. "It's taken me years to recognize that he wasn't being intentionally evasive or simply bullshitting and that the right term for what he was doing is flirting. It doesn't matter the gender because flirting is about winning favor, making yourself charming; it's the ability to improvise, a natural instinct for many, but a heightened one, perhaps, for a man who seems to have learned so early in childhood that acceptance is conditional." 11 pages.
Essays that I thought were good:
- "They Didn't Come Here Cowboys" by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. Have you heard of the Angola Prison Rodeo? I certainly hadn't. Fresh off reading Chain Gang All-Stars, the parallels were all too easy to draw. Would highly recommend a Wikipedia search on this one. Learning about the prison system in this country makes me deeply ashamed to be an American. "And today - just for today, for the rodeo - a pink and purple bouncy castle, the kind found at children's fairs and rented for birthday parties, pressed up against one of the towers. The castle sways airily; the children inside it laugh and shriek. Above its gray balloon turrets,in the guard tower's perch, a gun's long neck is visible through the railing." 10 pages.
- "Good-bye to All That" by Eula Biss. I'd also read this before. Basically it's saying, New York City, it's not great, but even when you hate it and you're miserable at least you can say you're in New York! An unoriginal idea, but I love reading Biss. "New York took everything I had. I moved four times , and each time I owned less. I left New York without even a bed. I no longer had potted plants, or framed pieces of art, or a snapshot of my father. I remember the moment I threw that snapshot out...thinking, I don't really need this -- he still looks almost the same." 9 pages.
Here's the thing.
As a rule, I don't like "personal essays." Elijah supplied me with a helpful definition. What I mean by a personal essay is an essay whose primary purpose is to interrogate the self. I think that personal essays should be considered a different genre from the "essay," which I would say has a purpose to interrogate something outside of the self. This collection was primarily personal essays, which made it pretty tiresome to read after I got about 20% in. That being said, I'm also pretty picky about the essays that I read, because I don't want them to be lacking in complexity or novelty, but I also don't want to read something that is so academic or experimental that I would have to spend hours reading it just to start understanding it.
My plan was to read one essay a day. That did not happen. I read one a day for the first five days or so, then I stopped reading it for a long time, then I got it done this weekend since I'm sick and bored out of my mind in my mini-quarantine.
Personal Essays that I thought were good:
- "Breaking and Entering" by Michele Morano. The author describes breaking into her home, as a child, shortly after her parents' separation. "After a month away, I saw the room as a stranger might have. The narrow bed with its floral spread tucked over the pillow, the white dresser with gilded trim, the frosted glass light-fixture on the ceiling, all of these were overshadowed by a riot of images. On every wall, from the floorboards to ceiling, there were faces, bodies, plaids, stripes. Head shots, group shots, color centerfolds, and black-and-white pinups, so close they nearly overlapped. I blinked and shook my head. This, I thought, was the room of a crazy person." 8 pages.
- "Cat Stories" by Kyoko Mori. Might have been my favorite in the collection, and was definitely the most memorable. A very touching story about how pet cats helped the author come out of her shell upon immigrating to the United States. "Neko-chan hid out in the nursery, knowing my father wouldn't set foot there. I was not important to my father. Even a cat could tell he was a liar and a cheat." 14 pages.
- "We Regret to Inform You" by Brenda Miller. I'd read this before, even used excerpts as a mentor text with seniors. My favorite part is the rejection letter for her application to be a girlfriend to one of the boys on the championship basketball team. The line, "Please do try out for one of the rebound girlfriend positions in the future!" is so cold. 8 pages.
- "Readings" by Patricia Foster. Anything foster-care system related is going to grab me, but I liked the lens of this one: her husband learns more about his forgotten time spent in the foster-care system prior to the age of seven, she observes and supports him from the sidelines. "It's taken me years to recognize that he wasn't being intentionally evasive or simply bullshitting and that the right term for what he was doing is flirting. It doesn't matter the gender because flirting is about winning favor, making yourself charming; it's the ability to improvise, a natural instinct for many, but a heightened one, perhaps, for a man who seems to have learned so early in childhood that acceptance is conditional." 11 pages.
Essays that I thought were good:
- "They Didn't Come Here Cowboys" by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. Have you heard of the Angola Prison Rodeo? I certainly hadn't. Fresh off reading Chain Gang All-Stars, the parallels were all too easy to draw. Would highly recommend a Wikipedia search on this one. Learning about the prison system in this country makes me deeply ashamed to be an American. "And today - just for today, for the rodeo - a pink and purple bouncy castle, the kind found at children's fairs and rented for birthday parties, pressed up against one of the towers. The castle sways airily; the children inside it laugh and shriek. Above its gray balloon turrets,in the guard tower's perch, a gun's long neck is visible through the railing." 10 pages.
- "Good-bye to All That" by Eula Biss. I'd also read this before. Basically it's saying, New York City, it's not great, but even when you hate it and you're miserable at least you can say you're in New York! An unoriginal idea, but I love reading Biss. "New York took everything I had. I moved four times , and each time I owned less. I left New York without even a bed. I no longer had potted plants, or framed pieces of art, or a snapshot of my father. I remember the moment I threw that snapshot out...thinking, I don't really need this -- he still looks almost the same." 9 pages.
May 11, 2021
Will add full review in a few
ETA Review:
I knew I wasn't going to love every entry in this collection because that's what always happens when I read things by multiple contributors, but at least the essays I loved, I loved enough to not give the collection an overall poor rating. I really, REALLY loved the following:
- Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (absolute fave, 11/10)
- Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison (this one was really long and sort of hard to read and really almost came off as pretentious but I decided I loved it)
- Here by Kristen Radtke (this was actually a short graphic essay, which was a nice palate cleanser among all the wordiness)
- There Are Distances Between Us (by the GOAT Roxane Gay)
- Good-Bye to All That by Eula Biss (10/10, what I took from this is that NYC doesn't have to be everyone's favorite city on earth and a lot of people come out of it jaded and it helped me overcome the regret that I never made a Big City Move in my life while I was still a young adult)
- and finally, The Art of Being Born by Marcia Aldrich, who also edited the collection.
Sensitivity Warning for readers - there are a lot of sensitive topics featured in these essays so please read at your own discretion!
ETA Review:
I knew I wasn't going to love every entry in this collection because that's what always happens when I read things by multiple contributors, but at least the essays I loved, I loved enough to not give the collection an overall poor rating. I really, REALLY loved the following:
- Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (absolute fave, 11/10)
- Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison (this one was really long and sort of hard to read and really almost came off as pretentious but I decided I loved it)
- Here by Kristen Radtke (this was actually a short graphic essay, which was a nice palate cleanser among all the wordiness)
- There Are Distances Between Us (by the GOAT Roxane Gay)
- Good-Bye to All That by Eula Biss (10/10, what I took from this is that NYC doesn't have to be everyone's favorite city on earth and a lot of people come out of it jaded and it helped me overcome the regret that I never made a Big City Move in my life while I was still a young adult)
- and finally, The Art of Being Born by Marcia Aldrich, who also edited the collection.
Sensitivity Warning for readers - there are a lot of sensitive topics featured in these essays so please read at your own discretion!
July 26, 2023
For creative nonfiction essay writers (particularly writers who identify as female), this is a terrific anthology that looks at women's issues through a variety of forms: collage, fragments, segmentation, braids, triptychs, and diptychs. Thirty essays by some of the best women essayists today dive into a broad range of topics, from whether or not to have children to body image, female pain, fear of guns, foster care, coming out as transgender, aftermath of rape, and much, much more. Some of the writers include Joy Castro, Adriana Paramo, Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Brenda Miller, Sonja Livingston, and more. Each essay is it's own micro-world of creative ideas and contemplation. I highly recommend this collection to anyone who's interested in innovative, feminist, creative nonfiction writing.
April 19, 2019
I loved this diverse collection of modern essays. My only complaint is that most of the subjects were middle-aged or older. As a woman in her 20’s, it would have been nice to hear from a woman in her 20’s!
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April 29, 2022I read There Are Distances between Us by Roxane Gay for class. Very good short story utilizing the theme of structure.
April 23, 2020
This is one of my favorite book of essays I have read. The content while all following the same theme are written so beautifully and each author takes a fantastic approach to the theme of the women’s body.
One of favorite essays in “Waveform” is “This is How I Spell My Body.” Paramo takes a beautiful abecedarian approach to writing about all the beautiful and not so beautiful parts of her body.
One of favorite essays in “Waveform” is “This is How I Spell My Body.” Paramo takes a beautiful abecedarian approach to writing about all the beautiful and not so beautiful parts of her body.
April 30, 2017
I like reading essays. I like that most essays I read give me access to a world that I usually have no concept of or have never experienced. This is why I chose to request Waveform from NetGalley. As expected, the essays featured in Waveform opened up doors to the writers minds and let me be privy to events that I didn’t previously have access too.
What I found was that some of the essays were so beyond my ken that I struggled to actively follow along whereas others had be turning the page so quickly so that I could absorb more. I realised that essays, like great novels can be read at any time but there are certain times when a great piece of writing finds you when you need it most. I think that is what is special about Waveform. It is that kind of collection.
Waveform by Marcia Aldrich is available now.
What I found was that some of the essays were so beyond my ken that I struggled to actively follow along whereas others had be turning the page so quickly so that I could absorb more. I realised that essays, like great novels can be read at any time but there are certain times when a great piece of writing finds you when you need it most. I think that is what is special about Waveform. It is that kind of collection.
Waveform by Marcia Aldrich is available now.
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