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Bill Dowling Kim Dana Kupperman

In the Book Review on Sunday, Mary Jo Murphy reviewed “I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives From the Other Side of Silence,” a first book of autobiographical essays by Kim Dana Kupperman. “Her sentences can be as ethereal and elusive as her subjects,” Murphy writes, “but their descriptive power makes them worth the chase.”

Kupperman has been a writer and editor for over 25 years, and is the founder of Welcome Table Press, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing the essay form. In this interview, which appeared in 2008 on Beth Blevins’s blog Writing Home, she explained why she writes and specifically why she’s concentrated on the personal essay. She’s been doing it since she was a child:

My mother, when I lived with her, left me alone to the point of neglect. And so I learned to amuse myself, seeking refuge in my imagination, which was a territory of unending possibility and joy. It was also a place where I resolved my fears and this is very much akin to what writing is all about, especially writing personal essays that seek to examine the unexamined life.

Kupperman is also the managing editor of The Gettysburg Review, and in the same interview she describes her job as a literary-journal editor. But especially fun is her response about what she dreamed of accomplishing in the next five years: “I hope to get my first collection of essays published, a scary proposition considering how essay-phobic the publishing world is.”

Fast-forward less than a year and “I Just Lately Started Buying Wings” won the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for nonfiction, bestowed by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Sue Halpern chose the winning manuscript, and the award assured Kupperman publication by Graywolf Press. Halpern writes in her introduction to the book that Kupperman’s “is a voice we trust implicitly. It is unsentimental, undramatic, curious, wounded, poetic. … Suicides, drug addiction, adultery, custody battles, AIDS and all the other modern plagues that supplanted the boils and locusts and killing of the firstborn of the Bible are part of her story, yet none are the story itself.”

I recently asked Kupperman to look back on 2008, and to consider how soon after that interview with Blevins everything seemed to fall into place. She was “stunned” to win the Bakeless Prize, she wrote in an e-mail, particularly as prizes in nonfiction so often go to memoir-writers. She added:

Collections of discrete essays, especially by unknown writers, are still rare. And before I won the prize, I was sending out the manuscript and having it rejected. I was, frankly, ready to give up on the entire project. Winning the prize was a vindication of sorts. And then I had the great honor of Sue Halpern’s introduction, in which she praises the form of the essay, and that sealed something for me.

So are things looking up for the essay these days? “People are reading essays all the time,” Kupperman noted:

They are sometimes called other things, including the generic “creative nonfiction,” “literary journalism,” articles, blogs. … I’d say that the public is hungry — and always has been hungry — for the essay. One goal of Welcome Table Press is to reach out to people who aren’t necessarily circulating in the world of arts and letters and urge them to think beyond the five-paragraph essay that most folks think of when they hear the word “essay.” To remember, for example, that our country is founded on an essay (called a “pamphlet” in those days) and that all social justice movements have been guided by the works of essayists (think of Thoreau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass).

Kupperman’s observations about the public’s interest aren’t based on mere speculation, she points out. Earlier this year, she was on a panel called “The Essayist’s Dilemma” at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Denver, in which the panelists “addressed the trend, in mainstream publishing, of repackaging as memoir books that were originally essay collections.”

“I was amazed by the number of people who attended (close to 200, I think),” she wrote, “and I was cheered that Phillip Lopate was in the audience.”

That same month, Welcome Table Press sponsored a symposium with Fordham University called “In Praise of the Essay: Practice and Form.” “We were close to capacity,” she said, something that signals “a love of the essay among writers, readers and teachers, all of whom composed our audience.”

In the next three years — the remainder of that five-year projection Blevins asked her to make — Kupperman said she’ll be wrapping up a second book of essays and hopes to start work on a third. In addition, Welcome Table Press is compiling two anthologies of essays, for which she says she’s still trying to raise funds.

(For more on Kupperman, see the “nonfiction self-interview” she recently gave to The Nervous Breakdown.)





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