pagesofjulia

Bayou, from the University of New Orleans, is one of the briefer lit journals, which I confess leaves me sort of relieved: easier to get through in a sitting. In turn I’ll pass that brevity on to you.

Three essays grace these pages. “Holiday” by Ann Hillesland is, again, brief (a theme!), and takes a look at a movie that interested the writer when she was a teen, its commentary on her life; she comments in turn. I am sympathetic with this kind of writing, as a book reviewer. “Lifeline” by Patricia Feeney recalls Pat Conroy’s The Death of Santini, for its elegiac look at a rather unloveable family member. In ten pages, it manages a great deal of pulled-back perspective and passage of time; there’s a lot of movement.

My favorite was “The Mending Wall,” by Andrew Bertaina, who is undertaking something like what I hope to undertake in writing about my own mother: seeking the parts we can by definition never know. It also yielded the remarkable lines,

Perhaps you cannot mend things when you are still broken. I will never understand love or people: we are collections of moments, of opinions, of thoughts, not whole.

Overall, these pieces feel a tad less polished than the essays that appear in The Believer or Oxford American, which is not all bad: I’ve written before about the value of amateur art, the feeling of community and of real people efforting, and of movement and progress: we start here, and we improve. It can’t all be Broadway and the NBA; it is heartening to see community theatre and Division III college ball. Also, there has to be somewhere for us amateurs to submit to. I hope this doesn’t sound like faint praise: I enjoyed my time spent with Bayou, and you’ll see more of it here.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, essays, lit journals, nonfiction |