With the arrival of colder weather, we here at Broad Street have been thinking about winter, and by extension, Ander Monson’s delicate lyric essay “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” from his collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, the 2007 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The form of Monson’s essay is defined by a preponderance of ellipsis, criss-crossing the page and separating fragments of text, resembling nothing so much as a whiteout blizzard. Amid this flurry of ellipsis Monson asks,
“Is snow a lack or a mass? The white suggests the lack, but such weight! I used to demand that my brother cover me over with snow until it weighed so much that I could not move. My head would pop out of the patted-down bank like a Whack-a-Mole. My brother would begin to pelt me with snowballs. That weight would feel so good above me. Watch my body lose its heat. Watch this body lose its heat to the weight of nature packed hard above me. He’d pretend to run away and leave me there. When I got cold enough that I could no longer tell the difference between outside and in, I’d blink my eyes three times, which meant unbury me, let me back up into your world…”
While the full text of what Monson calls “designed essay” is not available online, Monson himself created a brooding, fascinatingly textured video essay to accompany the printed one, available on his Youtube page. Go check out the video, and for more reading see Monson’s manifesto on the designed essay as genre.
