My essay on the essay (from Beyond Walls)

This summer I am going to be teaching at a Kenyon College writing workshop designed for clergy who want to hone their writing skills for conversations beyond their congregations and denominations. The program, Beyond Walls, is envisioned as an interfaith conversation with writers and clergy from both Jewish and Christian traditions. I will be teaching essay writing along with Rodger Kamenetz, and he and I each have an essay in this month’s Beyond Walls e-mag. Mine—an attempt to say what I think essay writing is—is reposted below.

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In 1983, a geneticist named Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize for medicine for her discovery of principles of genetic transposition, the way that genes communicate between organisms. McClintock had begun her research fifty years earlier, and she chose as her subject for observation corn—ordinary field corn. Cheap, plentiful, relatively easy to grow, and largely uninteresting to other geneticists of her time.