The Moment of the Essay: Australian Letters and the Personal Essay

The Moment of the Essay: Australian Letters and the Personal Essay

Author: Daniel Juckes

Publisher: UWA Publishing

Published: November 2024

In The Moment of the Essay, lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA and Editor at Westerly Magazine Daniel Juckes contends that contemporary essay writing is experiencing a significant renaissance, particularly in Australia, where writers are increasingly using personal narratives to explore ‘the ways we connect, remember, and live.’ The explosion of personal essays over the last 20 years has created a rich landscape for examining both human relationships and our connections with the nonhuman world.

The book therefore examines how this literary form serves as a tool for processing and understanding experience. Juckes argues that essays create a unique space for connection – when a reader engages with the text, it opens up what he calls a ‘crucial opportunity’ for meaningful interaction, providing a counterpoint to our culture’s constant demands and distractions.

In four chapters – Connection, Memory, Bodies, and Objects – and an introduction and conclusion, Juckes provides numerous insights into, and observations about, specific writers and essays as well as the form overall. And while Virginia Woolf is a ‘touchstone… in thinking about the essay,’ Juckes’ focus is on the contemporary Australian (personal) essay, to which this book may also be seen as an introduction (and in this context the Chapter Notes and Further Reading section at the end will prove invaluable).

In the introduction, Juckes lists some of these Australian essayists – Timmah Ball, Vanessa Berry, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, Anwen Crawford, Eloise Grills, Eda Gunaydin, Sally Olds, Mykaela Saunders and Elfie Shiosaki – while outlining the central arguments of the book: that ‘we are living in the moment of the essay’; and that ‘we can live in the moment of the essay’.

He then proceeds to discuss the essay form and some of its chief exponents, and dive into some close readings, from multiple perspectives, applying different aesthetic, historical, psychological and ideological lenses along the way.

For example, in the Connection chapter, Juckes writes that, ‘The power to be nudged into feeling by the gestures of another is a distinctive feature of the essay as I’d like it to be thought of.’ And in the Bodies chapter, he acknowledges that ‘Writing about the body, and embodied experience, is a site of conflict even for essayists themselves.’

It’s bracing, provocative writing and itself an example of the long-form critical essay less as form, more as texture, in the same way a musical fugue is not a form but a texture, a strategy, a risk. An attempt.

This is the second book in UWA Publishing’s Vignettes series, which according to the publisher aims at ‘sharing the knowledges that are emerging in the contemporary university and that consider the complexities of modern life. Each book provides an image, or a vignette, of a particular phenomenon and how this is being though through by intellectual practitioners in today’s academy.’

The first book in Vignettes was series co-editor (the other editor being Sarah Collins) Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Age. Forthcoming titles include Catie Gressier’s Saving Heritage Breeds: a Love Story and Artificial Life by oron Catts, Sarah Collins, Elizabeth Stephens and Ionat Zurr.

On the strength of this and the previous book, Vignettes is already shaping up to make a significant contribution to bridging the still-existing gap between the academic world of the specialist and a more general readership.

 

Reviewed by Will Yeoman