In my first life, I was a freelance writer. We ate my words at every meal and they paid the mortgage, too. Prolifically not myself, I wrote countless pieces of promotion for clients like New York, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, PBS, Disney, and Vogue. More a story seller than a storyteller, I was a tool like a broom or a mop. I wrote about places I didn’t go, and things I didn’t do, for legends I didn’t know.
Then a drunk driver stole a truck, jumped a curb, and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. It was an accident.
Strange as the 21st century is, I admit I didn’t imagine “cloned monster sheep” is something we’d be dealing with.
As someone who had previously only flirted with the idea of making sausages, I surprised myself when I came home at the start of February with a three-pound slab of pork belly and a $20 sausage stuffer. Perhaps it was a particularly celebratory Lunar New Year that enticed me to make my own fragrant and fatty slices of lap cheong to wok-toss into my favorite rice dishes. Or maybe it was my inner desire to see how the sausage really gets made.
There is something slightly ironic about a writer who doubts the power of the literary novel writing a book like James. But maybe he's right. That first warning in Twain's original did read "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." And look how that turned out.
In part that may be because essays have never commanded the interest or respect that fiction has, but it may also be because the reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Stevenson as a romantic fantasist. Now Trenton B. Olsen, an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University, has pulled together the most copious selection so far, reproducing not only Stevenson’s dozen or so celebrated essays but also his uncollected published essays and his undergraduate ones. All this gives us the chance to assess the range and stature of a writer who, according to Olsen, was in his day “considered the most successful essayist of his generation.”