Essaying The Essay

or many years I have written essays -- some for publication, as in The American Atheist or The Christian Science Monitor -- some as an exercise to keep the writerly muscles in shapes, some done as short radio commentaries -- and even some done for fun!

I've separated them here more for convenience than anything else. The WEVO commentaries are short pieces (2 to 3 minutes, or about a page-and-a-half, in length) done for WEVO-FM, the public radio station in Concord NH. The Essays 1983 were written in the summer of that year while I was teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy (in Exeter NH). I would set myself the task of writing an essay a day in the two hours I gave myself as daily writing time before trundling off to teach classes.

A more extensive collection is found in Further Essays, Vol. 1, where many of the essays are longer and include more involved arguments and research (and even a few with footnotes!). Some of the topics: why English-only laws will never work, right-wing summer blockbusters like Indepenence Day, accounts of trips to the Bread and Puppet summer festival and Arizona, a memoir of my good friend (now deceased) Jonatha Newcomb (of "JFN"), and play Pop Warner football on late autumn evenings. Volume 2 continue the trend.

I have other essay collections that I will be uploading as I clean them up for public presentation (they all carry many dings and nicks from being carted around for years in various, and often now-defunct, word-processing formats).

You will also notice what might politely be called “overlap” or less politely called self-plagiarizing. At least there are no legal repercussions from doing that, and I hope a slight boredom will be the only offense.