Seven Essay Collections that Changed My (Writing) Life, in Chronological Order

Somehow, my parents met a man who taught at University of Iowa and they told him high-school-aged Sherrie wanted to be a writer. This man suggested they give me this absolutely mind-altering collection by Dillard, which, really, was like receiving a book from outer space for a 17-year-old living in a mill town who hadn’t read much contemporary literature.

As an undergrad I studied poetry with Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire. But his essays were the first that helped me understand the important, singular connection between friendship, family, and food. Simic’s writing showed me that an insistence on joy can be the end experience of a life informed by trauma.

I was a reader at Prairie Schooner journal in grad school and JoAnn Beard’s essay submission “Cousins” came through the slush pile. We grad student readers hugged that hard copy essay. We passed it around again and again. The sassy strong women, the deer perched beside the road ready to jump. We whispered about its excellence. That essay made its way into this iconic collection. Reading JoAnn Beard felt like discovering a new civilization.

I’d read Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, of course, but I hadn’t encountered her essays until I was a professor myself in the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Her ideas about grace made me reconsider how I stand on planet Earth and how I can challenge myself to consider all the others who stand beside me.

For a decade in the early 2000s I ran a reading series in Pittsburgh and a very young Ross Gay read poetry there. His poems were sweet and sublime and when this essay collection came out I heard him read from it. It was clear older Ross Gay had really just gracefully, joyfully taken charge of the world. The way these essays guide the reader to consider delight in the fallout of disappointment is a gift to us all.

I read with Sarah Viren at the University of New Mexico in early 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Her concern with truth, the way she turns it this way and that in this collection—really makes a reader reconsider intent. Viren writes about people beyond herself, while mining emotions that snap us back to her own experiences.

I “met” Sarah Polley in reverse chronological order, first watching her film adaptation Women Talking in a real movie theater, post-pandemic, and then consuming all of her film work in giant streaming gulps. This essay collection fills in the gaps that we don’t see in her amazing documentary "Stories We Tell." The essays deftly examine the flaws of memory and how the past, present, and future can be in constant flux within a person’s lifetime.