In his vignette, The Moment of the Essay, Daniel Juckes breaks down the personal essay into its core aspects in an attempt to highlight how it offers readers the opportunity to reflect, alongside a thorough interaction with literature on the subject. In this interview, Daniel talks with UWAP intern Maria Kakani about the tradition of the personal essay and reveals the process of writing his book.
Daniel Juckes is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA, Editor at Westerly Magazine, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Curtin University. His creative and critical work has been published in journals such as Axon, Kalliope X, Life Writing, M/C Journal, Meanjin, TEXT, and Westerly. He was highly commended in the 2021 Fogarty Literary Award, and recently recorded a talk at TEDxYouth@KingsPark.
Maria Kakani: What was your motivation for writing this book?
Daniel Juckes: I thought it was a good opportunity to capture a lot of the conversations I've been having with students and colleagues over the past 10-12 years. We spend a lot of time pontificating about what the essay is – why it happens, or how it happens – but without the opportunity to really try to capture some of that dynamism. And I think the series itself offers a really good opportunity to do that, to pin on the page something that’s a bit more moving than the usual work we do. This is stuff I talk about in classrooms, in supervisions … those kinds of things.
M: What is the ideal impact you hope this book will have? Why do you think it is particularly relevant now?
D: I hope that it takes people to the kinds of writing that I have spoken about. I hope it makes them curious and makes them pick up a book. [The book] was described to me by somebody who had read it as having a kind of self-help angle, and I think I agree with them. I wanted to encourage people towards what I believe the value of reading is, which is some stillness, some slowness, some connection, which is a key theme in the book. And I hope it does that.
M: What do you believe makes personal essays stand out from other forms of creative nonfiction?
D: I think for me, the personal essay comes before creative nonfiction. So, it kind of sits underneath it, as what creative nonfiction should or could be, or what it has always been. And I think the thing I like the most about the personal essay, at least in the understandings of it that I've read, is that it requires you to make meaning from the things that happen. So, it's not just about recording the things that happened and saying what occurred. It is about saying "This thing had been done to me, or happened to me, or I saw this. What does that mean? How can I understand it or offer it to somebody else?."
M: Do you have experience writing personal essays prior to this book? If so, how has that shaped your approach?
D: I haven't actually published a huge amount of personal essays, but I have been working on the same one for about 10 years. That's the manuscript that I began when I started my PhD, and I have always described it to myself as a book-length essay. So, I've been thinking concertedly on that for a long time now. How I can tweak it, how I can push it, how I can edit it … what it needs to do to make sense to a reader. So, I think I've learnt a bit from that.
What's interesting is when I do try to write a personal essay, my editor will often say, "I'm not quite sure this is an essay. [It is] more like a story." So that has taught me something about essay writing, as it is a very flexible thing.
M: What was the process of choosing the chapter topics/key aspects of the essay to explore?
D: I guess a kind of foundation stone of inspiration was actually Tony Hughes-d'Aeth's title [Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era, UWAP 2024] in the same series. I tried to model my book on that one, as I was aware it was probably going to be in conversation with it. Some of the one-word chapter titles stood out for that, and Tony's book directed me towards the form. The themes themselves were just the things that kept coming to the surface in those conversations that I mentioned. The things I talk about with my students are the chapter titles. Connection is a bit of an interest of my own, but objects, memory, bodies … it’s the stuff that keeps coming back. And I think they are the things that we are perhaps more interested, but certainly my reading of the essays I have encounter would suggest so. It took a while to sift through.
I'm not sure I could give you an easily parse-able answer. I guess that's part of the literary method, isn't it? You approach a text, you look through its themes, you try to understand it in a way that you can then communicate to somebody else. Beyond connection, which I think is a very important part of the essay, the other aspects are certainly concerns of my own writing. I'm really interested in memory and how it is represented. I wrote my PhD on objects, and there was a much longer draft of the 'Bodies' chapter in the first version of the book. I talked a lot about my own body, and my struggles to realise it. Wisely, that was edited back.
M: Why focus on the essay’s current movement instead of traditional personal essays?
D: Again, partly practical. To try and do what Vignettes is trying to do, and to talk about the things that we are talking about at university. To be excited about the writing that's currently being done, as well. A lot of my students are contemporary writers. They are writers who are trying to push forward more ideas in new ways. And those are just the conversations that we've been having. I'm also really excited by the contemporary in writing and in teaching. It's what we mainly talk about, especially in the classroom but in editing as well. Part of my job at work is editing Westerly, and it's the contemporary, the avant-garde, the innovative, and the fresh that really makes us excited when going through submissions.
M: How did your idea develop as more literature/sources emerged?
D: It was a funny process. First of all, I got to do a lot of re-reading, which is not something I do a lot. But for this project, I knew I would have to, and I was excited to. It produced some interesting double-takes on my first impressions, or which essays I might focus on. When I was reading through Eloise Grills' book, for instance, I knew beforehand which essays I would focus on. But after re-reading, I chose different essays. The other thing I'd say is I actually held back some essays that I didn't want to read until it was time to write about them, because I wanted some of the freshness of my encounter with them to be there in the text.
I guess I played it two ways. I enjoyed that fact that I could be slower with works, but I also tried to embrace the fact that this was a book that was supposed to capture something current and contemporary. If I wasn't reading works for the first time and trying to make sense of them, then I wasn't necessarily doing the job of the series. That kind of circular talk about reading about writing about reading about writing irritates some people, but for me, that's where it begins to feel like you are talking to somebody.
M: What does your writing routine look like? How do you balance writing with your lecturing and teaching commitments?
D: My writing routine is chaos. This book, the bulk of it anyway, came together in the space of 2–3 week blocks of writing. I don't get a lot of time during the semester, because of various other commitments, to really settle into a writing space. I need structure when it comes to writing, and the only way I could get this was to work during semester breaks. The same goes for creative writing, actually. For me, writing is something that is rewarded by momentum and by routine. That might seem antithetical to a kind of chaos, but the chaos comes in where you try to fit it in whenever you can. In short, I don't think I have any useful practices to impart to anybody. When I get the chance to write now, it feels very precious. So, getting the excuse to write this book was really good.
Daniel Juckes photographed by Jarryd Gardner
M: Does your familiarity with personal essay writing influence your teaching methods? If so, how?
D: Quite directly. I could talk about specific pedagogical philosophies, but I'll try to limit that. An academic called Brantmeier from the States talks about something called a pedagogy of vulnerability, and I guess in a sense, that is you bringing yourself to the classroom in the hope that students can then feel able to bring themselves. That for me is the key principle to the personal essay; bringing yourself honestly in the hope you find words to share. I'm actually trying to write a paper linking the personal essay to the pedagogy of vulnerability, so it's something that I'm thinking a lot about. I don't think I could have sat with this genre as long as I have without it seeping into my life in strange ways.
M: Has your research on personal essay writing impacted your own writing style?
D: I'm sure it has. Writers are absolute sponges. I know I am. If I read somebody, then it's actually really dangerous that the next thing I write will sound like them. The way that I approach it now is I often will call it loading up. If I know that the next bit of writing I do needs to feel a certain way, then I will go to some books that I feel constellate that feeling and find that right cocktail [of authors]. I think that practice comes from essay writing.
Essay is a genre that draws actively on all other texts, all other influences. So, I've tried to embrace that rather than be scared by it. I do tease some of my students that they’re too 'spongey,' but we're all learning how to write. We're all trying to 'do' writing.
M: What essayists and/or writers influence your writing style?
D: For this book, it's Virginia Woolf. I just can't get away from her, and I wouldn't want to. If I want to be challenged or confused, I'll go to Woolf. If I want to remember that writing is beautiful, I'll go to Woolf. She seems to anticipate most of the things I write about in this book in ways that I find quite spooky, as somebody who was writing 100 years ago. So, I think she would be first and foremost. I tried to acknowledge that in the book as well.
When I was doing my PhD research, I was spending a lot of time reading Woolf and emerged from that with a teaching job, and filled with a sort of zealous, ardent, Woolf-ness that I wanted to communicate to everyone else. I've also been reading a lot of writing that might be both fiction and non-fiction, which is also something I find interesting. I guess the personal essay is one end of that because it is clearly non-fiction, but along that spectrum.
M: How do you see the role of the essay as a literary form evolving?
D: I don't know, is my first answer … but that's good. If I thought I knew, then I would be wrong. I think that's why the avant-garde is so exciting, like when you read something, and it feels fresh. But I do have a sort of non-cop out answer, which I allude to in the book. The personal essay, as a form, is infusing lots of other ways of writing. You see it in journalism prominently, even problematically sometimes. You see it in the American College system, which requires all of its entrants to write a kind of personal statement, which I think is a co-option of what the personal essay is supposed to be doing. I also think it's there in the writings by contemporary and younger writers who have grown up reading lots of non-fiction personal accounts.
The essay is sort of spreading its tendrils. There has never been more written, which is maybe another reason why I wrote the book. There is a slightly crotchety angle in the book about writing well or privileging the kind of innovation of a form, and I guess that's my slight elbow to a reader, saying be ambitious for the work that you read, and if you're a writer, be ambitious for the things that you write.
Maria Kakani is a student at Murdoch University completing a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major in Sociology, and English & Creative Writing. In her final semester, she plans to move on to do her Honours in Creative Writing.