Turns in Nonfiction

Karen Babine | September 2023

Karen Babine

On the screen in front of me, the black swan performs the magic of thirty-two fouetté of Swan Lake. In the fouetté, French for “whipped,” she spins in one of the most difficult sequences in ballet, thirty-two turns en pointe. A 2016 New York Times article celebrating the return of Swan Lake to the American Ballet Theater’s repertory complained about the dancers who could not achieve thirty-two, sometimes managing sixteen before using a different step to finish the sequence. For the casual observer, it is magic, the same way that ice skaters performing scratch spins may inspire young watchers of the Olympics to put family breakables in danger. As children, we believe that we are witnessing magic. Later, we realize that it is not magic: it is physics, the quantifiable movement of a body in space. We would rather believe in the magic of the fouetté, rather than my father’s voice reminding me to torque the lug nuts after fifty miles on the tires I have just had rotated.

The idea of torque in nonfiction follows the same physics principles, the rigid body of an idea or a story or language, the force applied by a contrasting idea, and the angle between the two. Turns in nonfiction are more than transitions, more than the simple movement of narrative or lyric. They are the essential torque of the page, the force of the author on the subject matter, a deliberate shift of consciousness. Turns do not create energy—because energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred—but turns manipulate existing energy. Without this work, the nonfiction page is a Wikipedia entry, or an amusing Monday morning weekend recap, and nothing more. The torque is consciousness-shifting, not the movement of subject matter, because the dancer doesn’t move from her position, yet creates energy in the spin.

Rebecca McClanahan, in “Literary Gear Shift Moves” for Essay Daily, identifies seventy-two shifts that can be employed, including “narrate, describe, record, persuade, quote, document, ask a question, argue, inform, make a scene, weave, collide, list, sidewind, sidestep, skip a step” 1 and in the comment section, Jill Talbot writes of challenging her “graduate students to write a 300 word experiment in which they employed as many of these shifts as possible and used footnotes to identify them (the record was 15). I don’t usually use prompts, but this turned out to be an incredibly effective exercise. Every student’s writing experienced a significant shift in voice, rhythm, form, and playfulness.” The larger effort of identifying and using torque in nonfiction has its corollary in structure: if I find the turns in a piece, it helps to get closer to finding the energy in that piece and the eternal questions of what is an essay really about? What are the main threads of this piece? It becomes obvious which threads Judith Kitchen once wrote about moving “from mere anecdote into the territory of idea and the realm of emotion” 2 and so in this way, the most obvious turns are interruptions on the sentence level—the linguistic moves of but, however, etc—but as an author twists into a new vocal register, or turns from narrative into research, or one of a thousand options, what we are seeing is the writer’s active mind on the page. It’s the beginning to Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which starts with an epigraph from Eric Shipton’s 1938 Upon that Mountain, which turns into white space before sliding from Shipton’s voice into Krakauer’s:

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I’d been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon the energy to care. 3

In the book’s first paragraph, excepting the turn from epigraph into the book, we have three major turns. We start in narrative. Krakauer is standing at the top of Mount Everest. In the second sentence, he turns from action into contemplation for the next two sentences, and then we get the grammatical turn of but before he slides into the final sentence, which sets up the release of narrative tension we didn’t realize he was building. We expect that humans will have a particular emotional reaction to standing at the top of Everest. Because Krakauer just couldn’t summon the energy to care, he removes the tension from the narrative itself—we know from the back matter how many people died before we even start—and places the central tension of the book elsewhere. We don’t read Into Thin Air to find out if he made it to the top, the exotic experience of doing something few of us will ever do. The subject matter has momentum, but not force. Within that first paragraph, we’re suddenly reading for another reason entirely. To paraphrase Kim Addonizio: “In any good [piece of nonfiction] there are various kinds of energies at work. Syntax. Rhetoric. Reversals and juxtapositions. Verdurous gloom and viewless wings.… The leap from one synapse to another, one thought to a further thought, one level of understanding or questioning to being in the presence of mystery.”4 Later, she writes: “Craft isn’t about craft, per se; it’s about releasing the magic.” Or, to return to the fouetté, it is about finding the physics that underlie the magic on the page, because if it’s magic, it’s impossible; if it’s physics, anybody can do it with enough practice. Paul Fussell considers this moment as “the place where the intellectual or emotional method of release becomes clear and possible.” 5 I just couldn’t summon the energy to care. The author causes the page to speed up, slow down; it is not the subject matter which creates the momentum of the page.

As Michael Theune points out in his introduction to Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, turns are more than simply a feature, more than a formal demand. He cites Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Flexible Lyric, in which she argues that “all kinds of poems turn and these poems can be classified according to the ways they turn, regardless of form” 6 (1–2, italics added). It’s useful for my purposes to borrow this work from poetry and apply it to nonfiction. This inquiry started with Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras,” back before I had any vocabulary for this, wondering how in the world we got from hummingbirds to that final, stunning moment, but when we look back, the path makes absolute sense. As readers, we recognize torque before our writer’s mind does. Doyle begins “Joyas Voladoras” with “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment, 7 and so deftly twists and turns from birds to whales to hearts to chambers to the final long sentence of 

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. 8

What’s interesting here is that the turns are so incremental that the essay creates distance without space without readers realizing it. We haven’t moved far, but we’re not anywhere close to where we started, either emotionally or logistically—and he’s torqued the page so tightly that the release we feel when the essay ends feels like wings.

What’s particularly interesting about “Joyas Voladoras” is that there is no plot, no narrative to provide forward movement. The movement of the page starts with the sentence level, the command to “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment,”9 followed by three short, declarative subject-verb facts about a hummingbird’s heart, followed by another short, declarative shift from research into observation: “A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird.” 10 Constructing sentences in this way requires the reader to start fresh each time they begin, because the momentum has been completed. The narrative distance in this essay is a canyon, the author so far an observer to the page as to be nearly invisible. The author is the choreographer, not the prima ballerina. 

The paragraph—section?—builds then into a monumentally complex sentence of 77 words, unexpected constructions, unusual use of commas and building verbs—“whirring and zooming and nectaring” 11—into a collective we. The narrator has allowed the reader to participate in the page. In “Success in Circuit: Lyric Essay as Labyrinth,” Heidi Czerwiec writes:

If this were a maze, we would need Ariadne’s clew—a ball of thread and source of our word clue—to follow. But this is a labyrinth, and if the way in is the way out is the way through, then in a well-constructed lyric essay, we don’t need a clue. Or, rather, the path is the clew, the thread unspooling. […] The careful writer keeps that path open, if not always apparent—an intention that can be traced, though not always at first reading. There will be clues. The author means to lead, not lose, you. 12 

We don’t often talk about the volta in nonfiction, with its origin in poetry. And yet, there is a clear volta at the end of “Joyas Voladoras.” As in poetry, turns in nonfiction can be situational or structural—and that’s not to say that the structural turns, which happen on the micro level, can never be situational (which often appears as the and then I realized kind of epiphany at the end, which is rarely satisfying to readers). As a result, turns serve several situational functions: epiphany / realization; to accrue / release tension; to change the length of the nonfictionist’s lens (wide angle, microscope, telescope), to fill in gaps in understanding with imagining and perhapsing. It’s Eva Saulitis’ “Wild Darkness,” in which turns the subject itself into the lens she will use. There’s no epiphany here: we know how this will end. What we don’t know is how we’ll get there. What’s interesting about the epiphany / realization function is that on the page, the reader appears to come to a realization at the same time as the author, but on closer inspection, the writer led us right where they wanted to go all along.

When my students and I come to Kathy Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” we are already familiar with the basic idea of collective nouns, the delightful and the odd, the murmuration of starlings and a glaring of cats and a prickle of porcupines and that sets our minds to a particular reading. Fish knows this. As a result, the force being applied here is the experience readers bring to the page about collective nouns, their delight, their trivia, the sheer absurdity of them. And so, the piece starts out innocuously enough: “A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: a bewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is—a band.” 13 Most students have written smiles in their margins, and for good reason: this is clever, this is delightful. The piece is starting to move, because the reader’s mind is also starting to act on the fixed point of the sentence and its content, even as the sentencing remains simple and declarative.

Then Fish creates a turn with white space, a moment to breathe, followed by three single lines: “A resplendence of poets. A beacon of scientists. A raft of social workers.” 14 We are still in familiar territory, but the movement from a paragraph to three single lines puts us a bit on edge. An undergraduate mentor once told me that “white space should never be the transition you didn’t know how to write.” But what is happening on the page right now isn’t a transition, but it is a significant turn. This isn’t the same; we are suddenly in much deeper water. My students don’t write smiley faces in the margins here. In fact, very few write anything, but they recognize that a “raft of social workers” is not in the same register of delight as what has come before. They do not have vocabulary for it, but they recognize what they see.

Another white space turn, a breath, then a paragraph: “A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protesters is a dream. A group of special education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace.” 15 We are not in the same emotional territory as a tapestry of grandmothers. We are fully in the realm of collectives who face pain daily, those who carry it home with them. We are standing with deeply vulnerable groups, the ones who risk their lives, their hearts, on a daily basis, the ones who live on the knife edge of joy and hurt. For the first time, the turns have led us somewhere we’re not sure we want to be. 

White space, then a single line: “Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.” 16 This is the turn where my students’ shocked eyes connect with mine and I nod tightly at them before they return to the page. We have moved from the exhilaration of the first half into much deeper water. We also have a timing shift, from previously into the now. 

“A target of concert-goers,” Fish writes. 

Next line: “A target of movie-goers.” 

Next line: “A target of dancers.” 

Then, white space before the final turn, a grammatical inversion, the volta that changes everything: “A group of schoolchildren is a target.” 17 

The turns we find in “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” is an inversion itself on collective nouns of animals, in which the torque that spins the piece is largely grammatical and spatial. When we go back and mark on the line where our feelings start to change, where we start to lose our smiles at Fish’s cleverness, we can start to see the turns at work. 

The next day, my students walk into class to a YouTube video of a murmuration of starlings. We watch the birds move on the screen, what seems to be inexplicable beauty, we look at long exposure photographs that charts the incredible patterns they make in the sky. It’s not magic. It’s science, the dance of lift and drag and thrust and lift on bone and feather and wing. Jordan K. Thomas’s segmented essay, “The Murder of Crows,” starts out in the same place Fish’s did, with the expectation that readers will react in a specific way to the collective noun of the title. We may conjure the meme of the “attempted murder” of crows as we catalog our expectations before we begin. The photograph is only amusing if we know that the collective noun is “murder.” 

Our consideration of how Thomas creates large scale turns in “A Murder of Crows” starts by mapping the individual sections of this segmented essay, which looks something like this: personal observation → ornithology → religion/mythology → music/Africa/ religion/eagles → Jim Crow laws/history/ possible etymology from crowbar, to jimmy a lock → crows are the only animals using hooked tools → Disney’s Dumbo/music/ antebellum Black stereotypes → Zora Neale Hurston/Crow Dance/American folklore of birds → 1920s–1930s blackface performers → newspaper: Blue Eagle and Jim Crow → disproportionate incarceration of Black men → legal crow hunting/nuisance birds → murder of Black men and boys for being nuisances → Blackness = danger (but for whom) → lynching: historical/ present/bodies left in public as a warning → ineffective scarecrows/using the dead bodies of crows to scare off live ones → Michael Brown shot and his body left in the street (as a warning?) → injustice for Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Victor White III → crows are dying → the author envying crows their flight → the author’s memories of abuse/a group of crows in a field, gathering around a fallen crow, “wings shattered, neck broken, in a crumpled heap.” 18 By the simple labeling of each section with its subject matter, we work towards mapping for ourselves how we get from one section to the next, where the avalanche starts to accumulate meaning. On their own, the sections are inert. Only in combination with other sections, only when they start to move, do they start to accumulate meaning. 

On the micro-level, when we start to label the essay with McClanahan’s gear shift moves, we can see how we get to the end of Thomas’s essay and the world has shifted so completely that we don’t recognize our own horizon. On the first page, the first three sections, Thomas sets up these segments into an essay so tightly torqued that it could not exist any other way. In “What the Spaces Say,” Robert Root writes, “[segmented essays] announce very early on to the reader that progress through them will not be linear, although it may be sequential, and that the force of the segments will come from their juxtaposition with one another and the effect of their accumulation by the end.” 19 In the first section alone, Thomas shifts from narration to interruption (side step?) into the grammatical turn into complication with “despite my fear of them, they are what I miss most.” 20 Then a section broken with a horizontal line. 

The second section changes vocal register into scientific ornithology and research. Instead of continuing with the provocative observation about the author’s fear of crows, he goes in a different direction entirely. Twice, the author changes direction by using “but” as a turn into an opposite mode of thought, before he switches pronouns to direct address: “You call a group of rooks a parliament, a group of jackdaws a clattering. You call a group of crows a murder, a group of ravens an unkindness.” 21 This is not murmuration of starlings territory. The use of second person is deliberate. The reader is implicated. 

In the third section, after another horizontal spacer, Thomas reconstructs stories from religion and mythology with a story about a crow saving Saint Benedict of Mursia, followed by a step to the side to identify how crows function in Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam, then into various mythologies. Then a collision: “Depending on where you ask, the crow is a clever trickster or a wise messenger or a devourer of the dead or a ferryman for lost souls.” 22 Not depending on who you ask, but where you ask. Geographical location is important. 

As the essay ends, the murder of crows takes on yet another meaning, pulling apart the collective nouns and returning to the individual, to the geography of violence that holds the author’s own blood and the memory of a single dead crow in the field, not abandoned by its community. 

A Google search turns up 

a bevy of swans 

a wedge of swans 

a whiteness of swans 

a ballet of swans 

When we break down the craft of turns and focus on the ways torque functions, we are getting to the fine wires of the nonfictionist’s skill. We can extend this discussion into the craft of Mode— the engine that makes them move, whether the piece is in Lyric, Narrative, or Assay Mode23—but the point is that nonfiction must move. Sometimes it dances, sometimes it trips, gravity exerted on potential movement, a wish for wing, and I think about the red-eyed loons of my Minnesota childhood and knowing they can dive beneath the water because their bones are solid. On my screen, I watch Misty Copeland, the first Black principal ballerina for the American Ballet Theatre, whirl in Odette’s fouettés, then torque through Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory and the impact of the highly improbable, but not impossible, Leda and the Swan and the center will not hold, but in nonfiction, the center does hold, and holds fast. Sometimes it dances. Sometimes it is a tornado spiraling just a bit tighter before it lifts a house off its foundation and sets it gently in the next county without a glass broken. 

Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015). She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her nonfiction and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet, Georgia Review, and has been listed as a Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Notes

1.              Rebecca McClanahan, “Rebecca McClanahan’s Selected List of Literary Gear Shift Moves,” Essay Daily, February 15, 2017, http:// www.essaydaily.org/2017/02/ rebecca-mcclanahans-selected-list-of.html. 

2.              Judith Kitchen, “The Art of Digression,” The Rose Metal Press Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty W. Moore (Rose Metal Press, 2012), 118–125. 

3.              Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (New York: Anchor, 1999), 7. 

4.              Kim Addonizio. Voltage Poetry, November 1, 2012. https:// voltagepoetry.com/ 

5.              Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1979), 115–116. 

6.              Michael Theune, Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers Collaborative: 2007), 1–2. 

7.              Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” American Scholar, June 12, 2012. https://theamericanscholar.org/ joyas-volardores/ 

8.              Ibid. 

9.              Ibid. 

10.            Ibid. 

11.            Ibid. 

12.            Heidi Czerwiec, “Success in Circuit: The Lyric Essay as Labyrinth,” in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, ed. Randon Billings Noble (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 218. 

13.            Kathy Fish, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” Jellyfish Review, October 13, 2017. https:// jellyfishreview.wordpress. com/2017/10/13/collective-nouns-for-humans-in-the-wild-by-kathy-fish/ 

14.            Ibid. 

15.            Ibid. 

16.            Ibid. 

17.            Ibid. 

18.            Jordan K. Thomas, “The Murder of Crows,” The Toast, April 16, 2016. https://the-toast.net/2015/04/16/ murder-of-crows/ 

19.            Robert Root, “What the Spaces Say,” accessed June 20, 2023. https:// kucreativewriting.wordpress.com/ recommends/readings/segmenting-this-is-what-the-spaces-say-robert-root. 

20.            20. Jordan K. Thomas, “The Murder of Crows.” 

21.            Ibid. 

22.            Ibid. 

23.            Karen Babine, “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision,” LitHub, August 3, 2020. https://lithub.com/a-taxonomy-of-nonfiction-or-the- 

Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015). She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her nonfiction and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet, Georgia Review, and has been listed as a Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.