Hi Crafters!

Confession: syntax intimidates me. I consider myself the writer equivalent of a musician who plays by ear rather than reading sheet music. A lot of what I’ve learned about what “sounds” right when writing comes from a foundation in oral storytelling and massive amounts of reading across many genres in my youth.

I once tussled with a Facebook friend who insisted college students were impossible to teach writing to because they have weak foundations in syntax and there’s no shared language. But there’s a shared language — it just isn’t syntax terminology. I was confused by this statement because I’ve taught a lot of writing classes and attended a lot too and rarely do the lessons hinge on a shared understanding of syntax.

So just like they ain’t about to toss Aretha Franklin — the first woman to be inducted — out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because she can’t read music, your writerly bonafides aren’t at risk for not knowing how to properly place a colon. There’s overlap, but there’s also a gap between what one must know as practitioner and what one must know as professor. I have no idea, which of my favorite writers know what a prepositional phrase is and which ones will go deer in the headlights if you ask.

I share this just in case you too are feeling a little overwhelmed by trying keep your subordinate clauses straight from your dependent clauses while following along with Jane. It’s okay to give yourself a refresher (or introduce yourself to a term for the first time…) as you go. It’s also okay if you don’t quite get everything. You’ll still close the book having gained enough to make it worth your while.

Happy reading,

Minda

One of my missions for this session of Craft Club was to provide nonfiction examples and pull from more contemporary works to support the points Jane Alison makes in “Meander, Spiral, Explode.” It’s been a few years since I read this book, so I was operating off my memory of the experience. Re-reading chapter one made it evident there are more issues about the examples that need to be addressed.

I’ve never worshipped at the altar of David Foster Wallace. Never held vigil for his legacy. I find it appalling that so many other writers are willing to casually over look his racism and abuse against the memoirist Mary Karr. Here’s an abbreviated list of his actions:

And as The Atlantic notes, these are not unknown acts, they’re part of DFW’s “lore.” Mary Karr kept quiet about these abuses for 20 years, then was inspired by young women of the #MeToo movement to come forward. Imagine waiting 20 years to tell your story and the world giving a big shoulder shrug.

To some extent, who we choose to reference in books and place on syllabi as instructors is a political act. You are curating the writers who will inspire current and upcoming generations of writers. You are making a choice. You are setting a standard and deciding who gets to be a standard bearer.

This doesn’t mean you have to burn all the DFW books on your shelf or do a full background check on every writer you enjoy, but there is a different degree of responsibility a professional writing instructor has when publishing a book than when interrogating their personal reading list. I think, at minimum, you should acknowledge the writer is problematic.

DFW’s abuse against Karr has been public knowledge since at least 2012 when his biography dropped. “Meander, Spiral, Explode” was released in 2019. That gave Jane Alison six, maybe seven, years to find another example. It seems in rather poor tase to use the scene about a teenage boy’s night emissions as an example when said scene was written by a man who stalked a woman. You want to point to a sentence that is a syntactical feat? (Alison, 30) Open up any page of a Toni Morrison book and drop your finger.

In addition to being an abuser, DFW was a reckless, racially insensitive professor, which further makes me question why anyone would continue to draw on his writing when teaching craft.

In 2016, David Mura took DFW to task in the “Journal of Creative Writing Studies,” in a piece titled, “White Writing Teachers (or David Foster Wallace vs. James Baldwin)” (Ironically, the piece references Junot Díaz). In this piece, he writes about an essay DFW wrote about a spiel he gives to Black students about the need to adhere to “standard white English” to succeed as writers and his arrogance at their — and his colleagues’ — taking offense to his so-called advice because he’s keeping it real. The Mura’s piece goes into who gets to be canon and who white writers feel are necessary to read to consider themselves “well-read.”

There are degrees to terribleness. We all have to personally decide where we draw the line and how that line changes how we engage with art by the individuals on the other side of the line. (See Claire Dederer’s “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” for The Paris Review, the precursor to her book on the same topic.)

Now, where we draw our personal lines doesn’t necessarily dictate where the world has decided to draw theirs. I’m not delusional. The multitudes of Picasso museums around the world have no intention of ever closing up shop and I can’t pretend, despite knowing his history, like I gag every time I pass a painting of his in a museum. Some legacies, one might argue, are too cemented to be dismantled (but, hey, the Berlin Wall came down didn’t it!?). But should we assume we have a duty to play an elective role in galvanizing the legacies of each new generation of problematic men…? Can we not play a different role, do our part in aiding their writing in falling out of print, lost to the annals of time?

You might say, Minda, the ship on DFW legacy has sailed. Fine. But do note that 10 pages later, Jane excerpts Tao Lin (40), born in 1983, as an example of sparse prose. Tao Lin was a major figure in a minor 2010’s literary movement, Alt Lit. Rape allegations were made against him, to which he responded,

Is this a person whose legacy you’re comfortable in playing a role in cementing or should we begin the work early of letting his writing drift into obscurity? Draw your line.

Early on in my writing career, I would read the work of writers I admired and question why their pieces felt “lively” and my language felt “dead.” I didn’t know it then, but it was because there was no movement in my prose. Jane opens the chapter talking about the difference between movement on the textual level — “[O]ne-way motion, word after word until the end.” (27) — versus the more complex movement that moves the plot of the story forward.

Ch. 1 focuses on the textual level with a promise we’ll get to, what Jane calls, “storyworld” movements later in the book.

Texture is built up beginning at “the tiniest particles.” Jane says letters and phonemes building into sentences and paragraphs which build into crots (prose stanzas). This texture is what brings your prose to life.

The why behind this, Jane explains,

Jane continues,

I agree with Jane that the best kind of sentences swoop you up, whirl you around and fling you free when they’re done with you. Let’s look at some nonfiction examples that parallel the fiction examples she shares in the book.

I’ll begin with a text I’ve dissected in my newsletter before, Ross Gay’s “Tomato on Board.”

In this example, we have the long sentence followed by the fragment (versus the other way around in the example Jane provides).

For me, a long sentence followed by a short one (or the other way around) reminds me that the writer is in control of this ride, much like a DJ moving the energy of a crowd up or down or a maestro instructing an orchestra to roar or whisper with a flick of the wrist. It reminds me that I am in control of how quickly my reader moves through my narrative and the sensations they experience along the way.

Jane asks us to play with sentence patterns,

The reason a series of sentences all beginning with “the” thud along is because they lack any texture. It’s like how on a road trip driving down a long stretch of two-lane freeway hypnotizes you into a drowsy stupor from the monotony. There’s not enough stimuli to keep your brain active. Your brain lusts after jungle gym, not a walking pad. Let it have a whirl on this excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s Vanity Fair essay, “On Witness and Respair,” (the book this essay gave rise to was recently released!)

As Jane says, a bouquet of complex sentences “can not only take longer to wade through but can almost be a mini-story.” (33) This paragraph is the story of Jesmyn’s family’s long, hot, listless, grief ridden Pandemic summer.

In this chapter, Jane also gives us examples of sentences that front load the action but continue to be rollicking good time, sentences that play with white space and sentences that function as narration and those that function as portraiture. I’d like you pull up one of your favorite essays. Give it a read with an eye on what the work is doing at the sentence level. What sentence patterns do you notice? How would you describe the complex sentences within the essay?

Share the sentence and your analysis in the comments.

In this chapter, we get some helpful terms when discussing narrative “Speeds.” (45)

And a handy-dandy speed chart made by the narratologists Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman. (Reformatted for this newsletter.)

Gap = Fastest (No text/much story time)

Summary = Fast (Little text/much story time

Scene = “Real time” (text time = story time)

Dilation = Slow (much text/little story time)

Pause = Slowest (much text/no story time)

With speeds, you can also create patterns beneath the surface of a narrative,

Jane provides some examples over a series of pieces, but let’s see if we can locate them all within one piece of nonfiction.

The first word that came to mind when I read Aaron Parsley’s “The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.” was harrowing. The Texas Monthly piece describes the Parsley family’s experience during the 2025 Guadalupe river flood.

Aaron summarizes what happened earlier in the evening the night of the flood.