the essay a novel

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The essay : a novel

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The Essay: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 257 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Arcade
• Publication date Oct. 8 2012
• Reading age 16 years and up
• File size 931 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Product description

About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B06XQ7ZTBH
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; Reprint edition (Oct. 8 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 931 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 257 pages
• #348 in Coming of Age Fiction for Young Adults
• #683 in Sports Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #895 in Sports Fiction (Books)

About the author

Robin yocum.

Robin Yocum is the Edgar-nominated author known for his fiction set in the Ohio River Valley.

His next novel, The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, will be released in the spring of 2021 by Arcade CrimeWise, an imprint of Arcade Publishing.

He is the author of five additional works of fiction:

A Perfect Shot

A Welcome Murder

A Brilliant Death

Favorite Sons

Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. A Brilliant Death was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar Award and the Silver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.

Yocum joined the Columbus Dispatch in 1980. He worked at the paper for 11 years, including six years as the senior reporter on the investigative desk. He won more than 30 local, state and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.

Prior to joining the Dispatch, Yocum was the associate sports editor of the Martins Ferry, Ohio, Times Leader, and a reporter for the Lancaster, Ohio, Eagle-Gazette.

He is the principle at Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing consulting firm in Galena, Ohio, that he founded in 2001.

Yocum grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant, Ohio, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.

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The Essay: A Novel Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

• ISBN-13 978-1628727173
• Edition Reprint
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Arcade
• Publication date 8 Oct. 2012
• Language English
• File size 931 KB
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Product description

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., skyhorse publishing.

It was never easy being the class dirty neck, the derisive term used for those of us unfortunate enough to have grown up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. I accepted my social status early in life. After all, it doesn't take long for a kid to realize that he's the outcast. A few days in school are all it takes, really. The exclusion is obvious and painful.

My classmates didn't accept my offers to come over and play. Parents ordered their kids inside whenever I showed up in their yard. I was never invited to birthday parties or sleepovers. When party invitations were passed out in class, I pretended not to notice, or care, when the little white envelopes were placed on desks all around mine. Usually, my classmates were considerate enough to at least pretend that I didn't exist. The exception was Margaret Burrell, an invidious little brat with an untamed mane of black hair that hung around her head like a hoop skirt, a pronounced underbite, and a lisp, who in the second grade waved a handful of invitations in front of my face and said, "I'm having a theventh birthday party, Jimmy Lee, and we're gonna have ithe cream, and cake, and gameths, and pony rideths, and you ... ain't ... invited." She shoved her nose in the air, spun on a heel and strode off, confident in her superiority. It was not unusual treatment. When I was paired with someone for a science project or square dancing in gym class, they would shy away, trying to create distance between us, as though the mere touch of my skin might cause the onset of poverty and body odor.

In our society, you can no longer ostracize the black kid, or the fat kid, or the mentally retarded kid, but in Vinton County, it is still perfectly acceptable to ostracize the ones who are poor, white, and dirty. That was me. Like my brothers, who walked out of Red Dog Hollow before me, I quietly accepted my role as class dirty neck with no small amount of anger and frustration.

When you are the outcast — white trash — your mistakes are more pronounced and open to ridicule. Or, worse — laughter. Such was the case with the erection I threw every morning in Miss Singletary's first-period, junior English class.

This cyclical eruption was purely the product of adolescent, hormonal rampages that I was no more able to control than man can control the tides. I would think about dinosaurs or football, envision myself as a tortured prisoner of war, or review multiplication tables in my head. Nothing worked. Every day, precisely at eight forty-five, exploding like a damn party favor in my shorts, I sprouted a pulsating erection that stretched the crotch of my denims and left me mortified.

Across the aisle, Lindsey Morgan would stare at my lap with rapt attention, as though it were the season finale of her favorite television show. If I looked her way, she would avert her eyes and choke back laugher. Occasionally, if my erection was especially pronounced, she would tap the shoulder of Abigail Winsetter, who would pretend to drop a pencil to steal a glance at my crotch before bursting into uncontrollable giggles.

"Something you would like to share with the rest of the class, Miss Winsetter?" Miss Singletary would ask on each such occasion.

"No, ma'am, sorry," she would eke out, her face turning crimson and the vein in her temple pulsing like a freeway warning light as she vainly fought off the laughter.

I failed two six-week periods of junior English primarily because it is impossible for a seventeen-year-old to focus during such eruptions. When the bell rang at nine-thirty, I would get up holding a notebook over the protrusion and make three quick laps up the stairs, through the second-floor corridor, and back down, working off the erection before American history.

I knew, of course, that Lindsey was telling all her friends about my problem and they were having a grand laugh at my expense. It was just one more thing that Lindsey and her clique of uppity friends had to laugh about. Even by the modest standards of Vinton County, Lindsey's family had money. She also had friends and nice clothes, a smooth complexion, and straight teeth. My family had no money, and I had none of the accoutrements. This made me a pariah in her eyes. It wasn't that Lindsey was openly mean to me. It was simply the way she looked at me, as though my presence in her world was merely for her amusement.

Lindsey's father owned the Vinton Timber Company, a sawmill where my dad worked as a chain offbearer. By all accounts, Mr. Morgan was a benevolent man and a good employer. My dad was a perpetually unhappy soul with the disposition of a chained dog, and there wasn't much about life that suited him, particularly his job at the sawmill and Mr. Morgan. During his many drunken tirades at the Double Eagle Bar — a redneck place where the toilets never worked and pool cues were more often used as weapons than instruments of sport — my dad called Mr. Morgan everything but a white man and told anyone who would listen that Mr. Morgan locked the door to his office every afternoon and got head from his secretary, a plump divorcee named Nettie McCoy, who had hair the color of a pumpkin and a mole the size of a dime above one corner of her mouth. I don't know if the story was true or not, but I desperately wanted to repeat it to Lindsey just to see her get hurt, but I never did.

My name is James Leland Hickam, and I was born with a surname that was synonymous for trouble throughout southeastern Ohio. I hail from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hard-scrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. My ancestors came to this country from Wales in the 1880s and into Ohio from Kentucky just after the turn of the century. I am not privy to why they emigrated from England or migrated from Kentucky, but given the particular pride Hickam males take in their ornery nature, I can only imagine that my kin crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Ohio River just slightly ahead of angry, torch-carrying mobs.

My namesake and grandfather was an expert car thief and career moonshiner who died in prison when I was in elementary school and of whom I have only a faint memory. He had a thicket of gray chest hair that sprouted over the top of his T-shirt, walked on the cuffs of his pants, and smelled of liquor and dirt and testosterone. Years before my birth, he lost an eye in a still explosion and wore a black patch over the empty socket. When my mother wasn't around, he would flip the patch upward and treat me to a peek at the void, which was rank and dark and sunken, rimmed with a yellow, pustulant discharge that both repulsed and intrigued me to where I never passed up the opportunity to look.

I was barely six years old the day the sheriff's deputies and agents from the state department of liquor control led my grandfather away in handcuffs. He had spent the morning at his still, which was tucked into a ravine and hidden deep in the woods behind our home. I was playing in a dirt patch near the porch when I heard the clinking of glass and looked up to see him walking out of the tree line pushing an old wheelbarrow that he had lined with a quilt and loaded full of quart canning jars of moonshine. That's when an armada of sheriff's cars charged up our hillside and liquor-control agents swarmed out of the weeds, materializing like locusts on the wind. The wheelbarrow tipped and quart jars exploded on the craggy hillside as Grandpa Hickam turned and made a futile attempt to escape. He had taken only about four steps before he was tackled and mauled by a half-dozen law officers. As they led him to a waiting cruiser, his pants falling down to mid crotch, Grandpa's eye patch dangled like a necklace and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead, snaked around the open socket and disappeared into a three-day growth of beard. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.

In the years to follow, none of the Hickam males fared much better than my grandpa. My dad was a wiry, banty rooster of a man who never in his life walked away or backed down from a fight. While he delivered plenty of beatings, he earned as many in return, evidenced by a needle nose that pointed off toward Cincinnati and a patchwork of white scars that danced across his jaw. Nick Hickam liked to drink, shoot off his mouth, and attempt to prove his worth as a man by picking fights with men twice his size, usually with predictable results. Every deputy and police officer in Vinton County knew my dad and had laced him upside the head with a blackjack at least once. He had more public intoxication and disorderly conduct arrests than anyone in the county, and Nick Hickam was never one to go peaceably.

My oldest brother Edgel was eleven years my senior and serving a stretch in the Mansfield State Reformatory after being convicted of burglary and arson. The middle boy, Virgil, who was four years younger than Edgel, shared my father's penchant for alcohol and worked for Barker Brothers & Sons Amusements, traveling the South and Midwest setting up and tearing down rides at street festivals and county fairs. My male role models consisted of a moonshiner, a belligerent drunk, a convict, and a carnie. I also had an assortment of ne'er-do-well uncles and cousins occupying prisons and halfway houses around the state. These were the Hickams of Vinton County, Ohio.

Physically, I took after my mother, a squat, thick-chested woman of Dutch descent who worked the breakfast and lunch shifts at Hap's Truck Stop on U.S. 50 near Prattsville and whom everyone knew as Sis, though her real name was Mildred. Mom was no stranger to hard work, having grown up working on her family dirt farm in Scioto County. She had strong forearms and a pair of thick hands that could hold four breakfast platters at once. Two afternoons a week she drove over to the county seat of McArthur and cleaned houses for a couple of elderly women who couldn't get around very well and the wife of a county commissioner who claimed to be allergic to dust, though Mom said the only thing she was allergic to was work. I think Mom knew she made a mistake of titanic proportions when she married in with the Hickams, but she seemed resigned to her fate. Mom had a pretty face, eyes the color of a Carolina sky, and a sweet temperament, and when a trucker who had taken a shining to her asked why she stayed with a man who liked to drink and brawl and occasionally rake the side of her face with a backhand, she shrugged and said, "I'll be the first to admit that being married to Nick Hickam is not all sunshine and kittens, but when he's not in jail he goes to work regular, and that's more than you can say about a lot of the men who live on Red Dog Road."

Red Dog Road followed Salt Lick Creek for a half mile into the hills until it buried itself into the township dump, which was nothing more than a gash of scarred earth left behind by a long-forgotten strip mining company. There was no trash pickup for much of Vinton County and thus there was a constant parade of pickup trucks kicking up dust and heading past our place to dump trash and dead appliances and motor oil and God-only-knows-what-else into a rat-infested pit that reeked on hot days and was surely leaching chemicals into our wells. Before he went off to prison, Edgel took great sport in going out to the dump to shoot rats with Dad's .22-caliber rifle, usually to the great annoyance of Chic McDonald, who scavenged the dump for scrap metal and still-good items that he could drag back to his perpetual yard sale.

The houses that lined Red Dog Road were paint-starved and frail, looking as though a strong wind would splinter them across the hillside. More often than not, the roofs were corrugated steel and turned into sieves during a heavy rain. Wringer washers stood by the front doors, outhouses were not uncommon, and running water came from wells laden with iron oxide that stained sinks and tubs and toilet bowls a bright orange. Children, barefoot and dirty, played with mangy dogs in dusty yards strewn with trash and rusting cars.

Beauty was rarely a part of my youth. The exception was the visits to my grandfather Joachim's farm in Scioto County. Papaw Joachim died when I was in the fourth grade, and when he was breathing, like almost everyone else in Appalachian Ohio, he didn't get along with my father, so my trips to the farm were few. But the beauty remains engrained in my memory. It was a magnificent piece of land that ran from a bluff nearly to the Ohio River, where the morning fog rolled off the shoals and snaked around the tobacco plants on its uphill creep toward the white farmhouse, which stood in stark contrast to the dense green of its surroundings. The Silver Queen corn he raised was so nourished by the unctuous soil that it towered along his lane and created a cavern of green that by the end of July could only be penetrated by the noonday sun. The stone outcroppings in the pasture above his home stretched into a plateau lush with trees and full of deer and rabbits. It was like much of southern Ohio in its beauty. There was, of course, the exception to this natural splendor, such as the godforsaken stretch of Vinton County land on which we lived.

Our house was built into a steep, rutted slope on the tallest hill lining Red Dog Road on land so rocky and thin with soil that honey locust trees and foxtails struggled for footing, and copperheads sunned themselves on the exposed stone. The hills were once like those in Scioto County, lush with dense groves of oak, shagbark hickory, buckeye, eastern cottonwood, black walnut, and beech trees. But in the 1920s, the hills along Red Dog Road were timbered out, the tree trunks cut to ground level. The erosion that followed swept away the topsoil and left precipitous, moonscape slopes of rock and clay. The sun baked the surface and created dust as fine as talcum powder that swirled in the slightest breeze, often creating mini twisters that skittered over the rocks and covered your teeth and nostrils with a fine, brown film.

A quarter mile beneath our house stretched the abandoned Hudson Mining Company's No. 2 mine. It had been more than three decades since the mine closed, yet its spider web of shafts continued to collapse upon themselves with such force that our windows and water pipes rattled with each implosion. The natural resources above and below the ground had been stripped away, and it was unsuitable for farming. It was worthless, and thus the only property my family could afford. In 1961, my dad paid twenty-three hundred dollars for the dilapidated mining company house — a two-story, brown, asphalt-shingled home with a metal roof and a slight list to the west. The window trim and porch were painted an industrial gray, which blistered and shed with each passing summer until it had the parched feel of driftwood. The wooden gutters were full of dirt and maple saplings sprouted from them each spring, sometimes growing nearly a foot high before performing a death bow when the gutter could no long support the roots.

The only access to our house was a dirt drive gouged by years of runoffs that made a treacherous descent from below our front porch to Red Dog Road. The rusting corpses of every two hundred dollar car my dad had bought in the previous fourteen years lined the drive; saplings and thistles pushed up through engine blocks, and vacated trunks provided refuge for families of raccoons and possums. Each year, the junkyard grew and the drive became steeper and more dangerous as the spring rains washed away another layer of clay, pushing stones and mud flows across Red Dog Road and into the Salt Lick Creek.

Across Red Dog Road from our house was the man-made mountain of red dog — a "gob pile," in miner parlance — from which our road got its name. For dozens of years, before going out of business in the early sixties, the Hudson Mining Company dumped its red dog on the marshy plains that served as the headwaters of Salt Lick Creek. Long before I was born, Salt Lick Creek was a cool, clear-running stream that made a shaded trek through a canopy of poplars, oaks, and weeping willows. Trout and crawfish and freshwater clams thrived in waters that traversed eastern Vinton and Athens counties, emptying into the Hocking River two miles north of its confluence with the Ohio. The gob piles were full of sulfuric acid and eroded iron. As rain water seeped through the red dog, it collected its contents and carried them to the Salt Lick Creek, turning the pristine stream into an ecological nightmare. The runoff from the mountain of red dog caused the stream's waters to run orange, killing off the fish and plants. The massive roots of the willows drank in the poison and slumped into the waters. The mud flats and stones and tree trunks near the waters all became stained in dirty, muted orange. As a young boy, I watched dump trucks haul loads of smoldering ash up the hill. When they dumped the still-hot loads, plumes of white smoke seeped out of the hill, giving it the ominous look of a volcano primed to erupt. Even so, local boys still took sheets of cardboard or food trays and slid down its slopes of red dog like volcanic bobsledders, sucking red dust into their lungs and leaving their teeth covered with a powdery, red scum.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07M6RSYJP
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; Reprint edition (8 Oct. 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 931 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 257 pages
• 1,098 in Sports Fiction (Kindle Store)
• 1,641 in Sports Fiction (Books)
• 1,717 in Psychological Literary Fiction

About the author

Robin yocum.

Robin Yocum is the Edgar-nominated author known for his fiction set in the Ohio River Valley.

His next novel, The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, will be released in the spring of 2021 by Arcade CrimeWise, an imprint of Arcade Publishing.

He is the author of five additional works of fiction:

A Perfect Shot

A Welcome Murder

A Brilliant Death

Favorite Sons

Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. A Brilliant Death was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar Award and the Silver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.

Yocum joined the Columbus Dispatch in 1980. He worked at the paper for 11 years, including six years as the senior reporter on the investigative desk. He won more than 30 local, state and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.

Prior to joining the Dispatch, Yocum was the associate sports editor of the Martins Ferry, Ohio, Times Leader, and a reporter for the Lancaster, Ohio, Eagle-Gazette.

He is the principle at Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing consulting firm in Galena, Ohio, that he founded in 2001.

Yocum grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant, Ohio, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.

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Follow the author

The Essay: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 257 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Arcade
• Publication date 8 October 2012
• Reading age 16 years and up
• File size 931 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who read this book also read

Product description

About the author.

Robin Yocum is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Favorite Sons and The Essay. His next novel, A Brilliant Death, is set for release in April 2016. Favorite Sons, published by Arcade, was named the 2011 USA Book News’ Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense, and was a Choose to Read Ohio selection. Robin lives in Westerville, Ohio.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B06XQ7ZTBH
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; Reprint edition (8 October 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 931 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 257 pages
• 478 in Coming of Age Fiction for Young Adults
• 873 in Sports Fiction (Kindle Store)
• 1,063 in Black & African American Literature (Books)

About the author

Robin yocum.

Robin Yocum is the Edgar-nominated author known for his fiction set in the Ohio River Valley.

His next novel, The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, will be released in the spring of 2021 by Arcade CrimeWise, an imprint of Arcade Publishing.

He is the author of five additional works of fiction:

A Perfect Shot

A Welcome Murder

A Brilliant Death

Favorite Sons

Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. A Brilliant Death was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar Award and the Silver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.

Yocum joined the Columbus Dispatch in 1980. He worked at the paper for 11 years, including six years as the senior reporter on the investigative desk. He won more than 30 local, state and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.

Prior to joining the Dispatch, Yocum was the associate sports editor of the Martins Ferry, Ohio, Times Leader, and a reporter for the Lancaster, Ohio, Eagle-Gazette.

He is the principle at Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing consulting firm in Galena, Ohio, that he founded in 2001.

Yocum grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant, Ohio, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.

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The Essay: A Novel

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The essay: a novel (paperback).

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9781628727173

Robin Yocum

08 October 2012

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The Essay: A Novel

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"Like Annie Proulx, Richard Russo, and Richard Ford, Robin Yocum knows how to stake out a claim to a very particular part of America and make it uniquely his own…. A book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."--Howard Frank Mosher Jimmy Lee Hickam, with the help of some and to the consternation of others, fights to create a new destiny and future for himself. Jimmy Lee grew up in the poorest part of Appalachian Ohio with a family history of trouble. His family has been in the same Appalachian hills for generations, and they included moonshiners, drunkards, and thieves. Jimmy Lee is convinced that he will be the same until a coach and a teacher take a chance on him. Jimmy Lee’s ability to play football, and a coach who believed in him, kept him in school his junior year. Jimmy Lee’s English teacher takes a chance on him and saves his eligibility for the upcoming football season. That faith results in a fabulous essay that few believe Jimmy Lee wrote. This is a story of finding a door outside of one’s current situation and a way to transcend the times and judgments of others. It is a celebration of students who surprise themselves and the adults who believe in them.

About the Author

An award-winning former crime reporter with the Columbus Dispatch, Robin Yocum has published two true crime books and five critically acclaimed novels. A Brilliant Death was a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar and the Silver Falchion for best adult mystery. Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. His short story, The Last Hit, was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2020. He grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant and is a graduate of Bowling Green State University, where he received a degree in journalism, which kept him out of the steel mills and prevented an untimely and fiery death. 

Praise for The Essay: A Novel

“A heart-rending tale . . . with deep insights. The writing is plain and unadorned, and completely in tune with the people and place. Highly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review "Like Annie Proulx, Richard Russo, and Richard Ford, Robin Yocum knows how to stake out a claim to a very particular part of America and make it uniquely his own. In Yocum's poignant and hard-hitting new novel, THE ESSAY, he explores, with great insight and craftsmanship, the coal mines and out-of-the-way farms and rivers and Friday night football games of southeastern Ohio. Jimmy Lee Hickam may come from a family of outlaws, but he's my latest literary hero. THE ESSAY is a book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."--Howard Frank Mosher “After reading The Essay, a tough but compassionate story about a poor teenager in southern Ohio who struggles to make good despite his harsh upbringing, I am convinced that Robin Yocum is one of the most talented and graceful writers working in America today. And I mean it when I say that I love this book.” --Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff In The Essay, Robin Yocum explores just how far we can pull at the ties that tether us to our lives. Can we ever overcome circumstance and family history to chart our own destiny? Inspiring, compelling, and filled with characters I came to care deeply about, this is one story I couldn't put down. -- Carla Buckley, award-nominated author of The Things That Keep Us HereIn The Essay, Robin Yocum explores just how far we can pull at the ties that tether us to our lives. Can we ever overcome circumstance and family history to chart our own destiny? Inspiring, compelling, and filled with characters I came to care deeply about, this is one story I couldn't put down. -- Carla Buckley, author of The Things That Keep Us Here “Yocum writes like the reporter he used to be. He’s observant and still has his eye for detail and nuance.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch “A heart-rending tale . . . with deep insights. The writing is plain and unadorned, and completely in tune with the people and place. Highly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review "Like Annie Proulx, Richard Russo, and Richard Ford, Robin Yocum knows how to stake out a claim to a very particular part of America and make it uniquely his own. In Yocum's poignant and hard-hitting new novel, THE ESSAY, he explores, with great insight and craftsmanship, the coal mines and out-of-the-way farms and rivers and Friday night football games of southeastern Ohio. Jimmy Lee Hickam may come from a family of outlaws, but he's my latest literary hero. THE ESSAY is a book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."--Howard Frank Mosher “After reading The Essay, a tough but compassionate story about a poor teenager in southern Ohio who struggles to make good despite his harsh upbringing, I am convinced that Robin Yocum is one of the most talented and graceful writers working in America today. And I mean it when I say that I love this book.” --Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff In The Essay, Robin Yocum explores just how far we can pull at the ties that tether us to our lives. Can we ever overcome circumstance and family history to chart our own destiny? Inspiring, compelling, and filled with characters I came to care deeply about, this is one story I couldn't put down. -- Carla Buckley, award-nominated author of The Things That Keep Us HereIn The Essay, Robin Yocum explores just how far we can pull at the ties that tether us to our lives. Can we ever overcome circumstance and family history to chart our own destiny? Inspiring, compelling, and filled with characters I came to care deeply about, this is one story I couldn't put down. -- Carla Buckley, author of The Things That Keep Us Here “Yocum writes like the reporter he used to be. He’s observant and still has his eye for detail and nuance.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

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The Essay: A Novel

“Yocum writes like the reporter he used to be. He’s observant and still has his eye for detail and nuance.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary. There aren’t many options if your last name is Hickam.    An inspiring coach and Jimmy Lee's ability to play football are the only things motivating him to return for his junior year of high school—until his visionary English teacher cuts him a break and preserves his eligibility for the coming football season. To thank her, Jimmy Lee writes a winning essay in the high school writing contest. When irate parents and the baffled administration claim he has cheated, his teacher is inspired to take his writing talent as far as it can go, showing him the path out of the hills of Appalachia.             Terrific characterizations, surprising revelations, gut-wrenching past betrayals, and an unforgettable cast of characters born of the dusty, worn-out landscape of southeastern Ohio make The Essay a powerful, evocative, and incredibly moving novel.  

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The Difference between an Essay and a Novel

It's highly unlikely that you'll ever pen a best-selling essay, but you may certainly be the next best-selling author of a novel. Whether your essays and your novels will be at all similar to one another depends only on which type of essay and which type of novels you choose to write.

The purpose of an essay is to inform readers. Writing an essay means researching relevant information in order to understand the topic and be able to form an opinion or offer thoughts about it. Essays also require that you organize your thoughts, usually through some sort of written outline, and state the point of your essay in a thesis statement.

The purpose of a novel is to entertain readers through story-telling, although some very entertaining novels are also informative. Authors of novels use some of the same techniques that can be used for an essay, such as descriptive writing and using personal narratives to make a point. However, a writer penning a novel also has to consider elements like character and plot development, which makes writing a novel quite different from writing an essay.

The average essay is five to seven paragraphs long, which includes an introductory paragraph, three or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Each paragraph should relate back to the thesis statement in the introduction by having topic sentences that expand on the writer's main idea. Essays are very focused pieces of writing that do not stray from the original main point into other subjects.

Novels vary widely in length. Some graphic novels are only 50 pages long, while Madison Cooper's Sironia, Texas is over a million words, or around 1,731 pages long. While novels generally focus on an overarching story theme, writers can explore many different ideas and topics within one novel.

There are four basic types of essay: persuasive (arguing a point and trying to convince readers to agree), descriptive (describing an object or scene by painting a picture with words), expository (recounting facts in an organized way), and narrative (telling a story that makes a point). Like writing a novel, a narrative essay is story-telling, although the story will be much shorter and more focused in a narrative essay.

Novels come in many different types, such as fiction, non-fiction, romance, and history. Novels can be epic, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or just for fun, like Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.

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Guest Essay

I Reread a Book That Changed My Life, but I’d Changed, Too

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

On the day of the eclipse back in April, walking through Boston Common on a fine spring afternoon as every expectant face turned upward, I thought again of Annie Dillard’s wondrously dislocating essay “ Total Eclipse ,” which I have reread more times than I can count. “My hands were silver,” she wrote. “All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal that the wind laid down.”

Then I read “ This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature ,” the forthcoming book by the Nashville naturalist Joanna Brichetto, which begins with an epigraph from “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” the book that won Ms. Dillard a Pulitzer Prize when she was 29 years old: “Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

And then, as if I were a dullard the universe can’t trust to take a hint, the writer Jennifer Justice mentioned in her wonderful Substack newsletter that 2024 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a book that changed me when I was 18 as thoroughly as the eclipse changed Annie Dillard.

On the same day, if you can believe it, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver singled out “Tinker Creek” in an Earth Day recollection for The Washington Post : “Her writing helped me see nature not as a collection of things to know or possess, but a world of conjoined lives, holy and complete, with or without me.”

Clearly it was time to read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” again. I first read it in 1980, gobbling up the full book after a section of it appeared in my composition textbook. I’ve been afraid to reread it ever since. When you emerge from a book entirely changed, there’s almost no chance the same transfiguration will happen again.

To reread a beloved book after a long time away is always a great risk. If it falls flat on second reading, a feeling of grief descends, as though you’d lost a beloved human and not simply a specific arrangement of words that once mattered to you for some reason you may no longer remember. To lose a book in this way feels of a kind with losing a friend.

But for a book that is more than merely a favorite, a book that has had a hand in creating you, the risk of loss is even greater. A book that is saying exactly what you desperately need to hear at a time when nothing else in your own plodding life is saying it, a book in which somehow, miraculously, every word is arranged as though to pierce your deepest heart and lodge itself there, living and whole — if you were to lose that book, you would feel that you had lost some necessary part of yourself. Or perhaps you would still have it, but it would become a phantom limb, no longer serving you except as a source of pain.

For most of my life I was an indefatigable rereader. During my decade as a high school teacher, I reread so many poems and so many lines from Shakespeare’s plays that I committed many of them to memory. I spent my summers rereading the novels I had assigned my future students to read before they arrived.

And one of the sweetest parts of parenthood was sharing treasured childhood books with my sons. Reading to them, I remembered the little girl I was, sometimes welling over with feelings too big to express, who would close the door to her room and read the ending of “Charlotte’s Web” again. The tears and the words rushed together to create a comfort I understand now in a way I could not when I was 8. Grief eases just a little when the words match the feelings, and tears are a kind of relief in any case. It is a gift when body, soul and language are of a piece for once.

Part of the pleasure of rereading a dear old book is the chance to remember who I was when I first read it and to take my own measure by standing inside its light once more. But my time for reading is rarely a matter of my own straightforward choice anymore. I read because I need to learn, or because I am eager to support the work of other writers, and I am a slow, slow reader. As the years march on, it feels almost wasteful to reread a favorite when there are so many books that I have not yet read at all. The teetering piles torment me.

The poet Camille T. Dungy reread “Tinker Creek” in 2020, as she was beginning to write “ Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden ,” a book so beautiful and moving that it is arguably Ms. Dungy’s own “Tinker Creek.” Rereading the classic text brought home to her again the sublimity of Ms. Dillard’s language, but it also raised some questions for her about the writer’s separation from the human world, her utter disengagement from the urgent issues of her day.

“Have you read it recently?” Ms. Dungy asks a colleague who declares her own love for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” “You might want to.” The world has turned since 1974.

The second time around, “Tinker Creek” raised some of the same issues for me. Reading it as a 62-year-old, it turns out, is entirely different from reading it as a language-besotted college student just learning that writing like Annie Dillard’s could exist in living time, as indelible as any line by Shakespeare or Keats or Dickinson.

The features of the book that make me cast a sideways glance today — the specific circumstances of privilege, or just the good luck, that make it possible for a young woman to feel confident wandering alone in even a suburb-skirting woodland, for instance — ought to have made me cast a sideways glance in 1980, too, though they did not. I was also a young woman who knew so little of the human world that I still felt safe walking alone in the wild one.

By 1992, Ms. Dillard was dismissing her own early work as “ little, little, little books ,” but they are still magnificent to me. Rereading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” this spring, it was a relief to react to it in much the same way I reacted as a teenager. Reading it again, I am once more intoxicated with language, once more swept away by the violent, intertwined, unaccountable beauty of nature, deeply in love with the whole profligate living world. Reading it again, I am the girl I was then and the woman I am now. Both at once.

Margaret Renkl , a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “ The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, ” “ Graceland, at Last ” and “ Late Migrations .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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Author Joél Leon's New Essay Collection Seeks to Reveal: 'How Similar We All Actually Are' (Exclusive)

In an excerpt from 'Everything and Nothing At Once,' Leon explores what being Black means to him, and why "the totality of that experience is also hard to put into words."

Francisco Cole Cameron; Henry Holt and Company

Author, performer and storyteller Joél Leon wrote his new book for those who are coming up after him, so young Black boys can feel seen.

Structured like an album, the essays in Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future (out June 4 from Henry Holt and Company) stand alone, like songs would. But taken all together, they're a cohesive journey from Leon's childhood in the Bronx, through parenting his own two daughters and into his self-understanding as a son, friend, partner, father and Black man in the world.

By turns lighthearted, touching, contemplative and fun and tackling topics as disparate as Leon's feeling about his growing belly to the challenges of co-parenting, the book contains multitudes, just like its subject matter.

"Growing up in the Bronx, I didn't see anyone who looked like me, was accessible and was willing to share their story," the author explains. "I wrote this book because I wanted young Black boys growing up, from the inner cities to the suburbs, to feel seen. And for the rest of America to see how similar we all actually are, no matter how varying our experiences may be."

Below, read an exclusive excerpt from an essay titled, What Kind of Black Are You .

Henry Holt and Company

I am both greeting and grieving myself. There are endings and beginnings. As a Black father to two Black girls, there is rarely if ever a moment when I am not fully aware of what that means within the context of the world we are  living in today. There is almost always something at stake, something to live for and fight for. And isn’t that what  manhood is supposed to be? If it is not hard or difficult then  it must not be worth it. But I’ve decided for myself, for my girls, for my partner and family and friends and community, I want ease above all else. I want  to make and leave room for a different way of being that doesn’t subscribe to the notion that our pain, suffering and trauma need to play a starring role in the stories of being. The greeting of myself is the reintroduction. 

The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now !

Lauryn Hill talks about having to reintroduce herself to her parents. Because there was a shift, a transformation. And while doing so, there is also a dying. For in the rebirth, there is also a  conclusion, a burying of what needs to die to allow something  new to live. It feels at times that collectively we are at the intersections of both. I’ve found it most helpful to meet the expansiveness  of the moment by expanding right along with it. We are achieving  so much and yet, in parallel, are losing so much in the process. 

This time we’re in feels like a reflection point — an opportunity to  sit with what was and has been, and the potential in what could  be. In that potential, is love. Blackness is love, to me. To be loved is  also very Black. And if we are looking at Blackness through that lens, then that love exists beyond a romantic sense of love and travels deeper into the vortex of humanity as a whole. Because to embody the fullness of Blackness and the spectrums of Black masculinity that exist within that framework, we get to reimagine what Blackness means with a new set of eyes and a new set of  rules to play with. 

Francisco Cole Cameron

I love being Black. Being Black is a birthright privilege, and a rite of passage, like learning how to parallel park or double Dutch. But just as much as I love being Black, I love being able to say I’m Black. The ability to speak, to use words, to use language, that ability to speak to a truth, to our ancestors — I’m in love with that, too. I am in love with language, with the languid  and the lusty. With the length of a page and latitude of a levee breakage. It is this love of words and their use that has moved me to look at Blackness. Being Black is a noun and a verb. I learned  this by looking in mirrors, staring at my reflection, standing naked and seeing Black skin, Black body — my Blackness staring  back at me. I saw a thing, being.

And leaving my family’s two-bedroom apartment on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, going outside showed me what Black was also doing. Doing Blackness as  a person living and breathing — dapping up elders, ducking into bodegas for bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, reciting rap lyrics I learned from Video Music Box and snippets of the cassette  tapes my big brother D would cop near the D train on Fordham  Road in the Bronx. 

Growing up, I learned that being Black is an all-encompassing everything — it is both whirlwind and movement, progress and processed hair; it is fistfights and chicken spots with “Fried Chicken” at the end of each title. It is liquor in barbershops and boyfriends in hair salons; it is long acrylics like Coko from the girl group SWV wore in her falsetto high notes during Showtime at the Apollo. Her stiletto heels set the  benchmark for anything vocals-related in R&B videos during my formative 1990s years.

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These videos and the Blackness in them are what my younger self would watch and stare at, their  Blackness and the volume in them staring right back. I’d be looking at all the caramel Black girls with the door knockers on, clutching their earlobes to the ends of the earth, weave tips reaching their waists. I say caramel because it was also here where I learned that light-skinned was preferable; that colorism was a pseudonym for “acceptable.” These are all constructs, binaries meant to be broken and laid out on the living room carpet for us all to bear witness to, a collective sigh of relief that the baggage of titles and labels can be eschewed for a higher sense of being and self we often aren’t afforded the luxury to  have.

Early on, I learned that masculinity for a Black man is a tapestry of images pulled together from the media portrayals of  what you were “supposed” to have — the exotic, light-skinned, curly-haired girl in haute clothes modeling for cameras; the car with the roof missing, money flying out of the windows, gold chains attached to bodies like tattoos. To be Black, to be a Black man in the era I grew up in, was easily everything and nothing at once. And to exist in that, to have that live both in you and on you, like a tattoo that is at once foreign and also embedded in you with the ink forever drying, is a hard thing to grapple with. 

The totality of that experience is also hard to put into words. Much of my journey and purpose has been in translating my Blackness and my experiences surrounding Blackness, not for white eyes or the white gaze, but for Black folks who have struggled with having the language to describe how they view the world. The words and ways of expression I lacked then now show up in the prosaic language I use to illustrate those times now. This language is now more visual than anything else, and as I’ve gotten older, the language I have learned to use to express my Blackness has shifted. Blackness has shifted.

Excerpted from EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AT ONCE:  A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future by Joél Leon. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Joél Leon. All rights reserved.

Everything and Nothing at Once: A Black Man's Reimagined Soundtrack for the Future is out June 4 from Henry Holt and Company and available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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Book Giveaway For I've Tried Being Nice: Essays

Format: Print book

Availability: 100 copies available, 1318 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Jun 04 - Jun 11, 2024

Countries available: U.S.

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Ann Leary’s people-pleasing days are over

The author’s new book of essays, ‘i’ve tried being nice,’ renegotiates her terms as ‘a lifelong people pleaser.’.

Author Ann Leary is known for the works of fiction that followed her 2005 memoir ”An Innocent, a Broad.” But, for her latest title, “I’ve Tried Being Nice,” she’s turned inward again, chronicling decades of her life as a self-identified people pleaser.

The book of essays, which comes out Tuesday, offers humorous anecdotes about bat infestations, knitting, red carpet events, and tennis. As with her first memoir, the novel provides an intimate glimpse into her life and her marriage to actor and Worcester native Denis Leary, who’s featured heavily throughout the book.

In like fashion, he joined Ann in this interview with the Globe, which took place ahead of the pair’s appearance at Cambridge Public Library on Wednesday. At the event, presented by Harvard Bookstore, the Learys, who reside in New York, will discuss Ann’s collection of essays, with Globe writer Beth Teitell .

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What inspired you to pursue the essays for “I’ve Tried Being Nice” — it’s a departure from your more recent fiction work.

I actually prefer writing novels, but I have written essays for various publications. So after my last book (”The Foundling”), I looked at a few essays that I written and I thought to do a collection.

The title essay, “I’ve Tried Being Nice,” I thought, might be the perfect essay to start with because most of the essays touch on this theme of reaching a certain age and coming to terms with being a lifelong people pleaser and trying to change that a little bit. A few of [the included essays] have been previously published, but most are original to this book.

The essays walk a fine line between divulging personal details while keeping the reader at arm’s length. How do you find that balance?

Since I usually write fiction, I’ve never had the legal department of a publisher contact me, but Simon & Schuster sent me multiple emails and I had to change a lot of defining details. As a writer, I’ve met people who are convinced that characters I’ve written were based on them. Then people I’ve worried would recognize themselves have no idea, because people don’t see themselves usually the way they are.

A few chapters are about your relationship with your husband. Denis, how do you feel about how you were portrayed?

( Leary ) Ann is a great writer, so in this case, the first time she gave it to me to read, [I spent most of the time] laughing. Even with things that may have been emotionally part of our past, she has the right to create pieces that involve her personal history. I’m glad she shows it to me in advance, but she’s such a great writer. And, in this case, the book was so [expletive] funny.

What life lessons, if any, do you hope readers take away from this anthology?

Publishers want you to write life lessons, but I don’t feel qualified to give lessons in life. I love to read memoir and personal essays and I don’t like to feel that the [writer] is trying to influence me or teach me something. But I will certainly learn something by reading about their experiences.

I do give one bit of advice, and early readers have commented to me that it really helped them. Denis and I hate to check luggage. We can go to Europe for three weeks with carry-ons and we’d do it with children; we’re just too impatient. I include a bulletpoint list of tips on how to not pack too much, and you can carry-on luggage wherever you go.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Ann and Denis Leary will be in conversation with the Globe’s Beth Teitell at the Cambridge Public Library on June 5 from 6-7:30 p.m. Registration for this event is required at eventbrite.com .

Adri Pray can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @adriprayy .

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This is what surprised me about ‘mom friends’ after becoming a parent

When I had my first child in 2010, I began a mommy and baby yoga class on the Upper West Side in New York City. All the women in the class, including me, were skittish and exhausted, and any real attempts at connection were drowned out by the cries of fussing newborns. Still, we tried to form bonds about the terrors and joys of caring for a cuddly newborn baby. If we got a word in without needing to breastfeed or take a crying baby outside during our meet-up at Le Pain Quotidian, it was considered a success. But when my son turned 1, our tight-knit group drifted apart, some moving out of the city, others no longer needing a shoulder to cry on. I never talked to those women again. 

I figured that’s how mom friends would be: You would meet fantastic women at a certain point in time. You’d swap kid hacks, compare notes on sleep schedules or weaning babies off whatever they needed to be weaned from, and when the relationship ran its course, you’d move on. These would be a series of friends centered around convenience, rather than true connection. After all, they were mom friends! A punch line in an SNL skit, women sipping wine and sharing their woes in mom jeans. Women you went to when your kid was potty training or throwing a tantrum. They were not the friends you’d call when you were having a fight with your sister or dealing with a sexist coworker. 

Mom friends didn’t count. Well, not in the way your closest friends from college did. 

Then my son, Harper, started kindergarten, and I found myself in a world of working and stay-at-home moms; no matter how far we’ve come in redefining gender roles, school pickup remains utterly mom-centric. The upside: It made it easy to connect with new moms. Every day at school drop-off and pickup, I chatted with the same several women. We began planning lunch dates. We’d sneak in an exercise class if we were working at home. While trading lunchbox ideas at the playground after school, we’d trade our favorite lip gloss colors or places to get a good pedicure.

Years ticked by. 

In February, my son, Harper, turned 14, and it dawned on me the other day that I’ve stuck with several of these “mom friends” for nearly a decade. In various combinations of women, we’ve celebrated birthdays and planned trips together. We formed a book club, toasted the New Year with our husbands and mingled at cocktail parties. We’ve griped about our partners and sometimes each other, and we shared our frustrations about the unfair burden we saddle in our families.

And yes, we talk about our kids, too. A lot.  

But in our desire to have a stronger bond with our children, we’ve created a stronger bond with each other, too, and that is what has surprised me most. These women I once counted as mom friends are now my closest friends. They are women who happen to be moms and happen to be my friends, not singularly defined by the disparaging term “mom friend.” While shared circumstances might have thrust us together, it is not what keeps us friends today. It is time that binds us like a book. That is what I misunderstood early on about friends I met while chasing after toddlers in the park; they felt less important than childhood friends simply because there was less history between us. Over the years, that history developed naturally, and now there’s glue holding this newish group of friends together, too. 

With my son beginning high school next year, the conversations have changed in my friend group. Talk of high school and college and the dangers of being a teenager with the entire world at your fingertips, thanks to the iPhone . Another conversation is emerging, too: Where will my friends and I be in the next several years? There’s the sense that after many years of close friendship, we may all scatter once more when our kids go away and graduate college. Some of us may stay in our community, some of us may not, and once again, we’ll be trying to figure out who we will stay in touch with.

Recently, four of us sat on my couch after a book club meeting and found ourselves expressing how grateful we were for each other, despite the uncertainty of the future. We decided that we all needed to focus on the here and now; we were still living in the same town, so why focus on things we couldn’t change?

A hush fell over the room. Each one of us registering the weight of friendships lost to life-changing plans. Then someone changed the subject, offering information about a new meditation class in town.

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing about making friends, it would be this: Don’t discount those early mom friends. Yes, you will go through many women before you find the true ones. But when you do find a friend who’s special, hold on. Give the relationship time. Close friendships aren’t made overnight.

Brooke Lea Foster’s latest novel, " All the Summers in Between ," was named a top summer book by Katie Couric.com and First for Women magazine . It’s about two best friends who lose touch at age 20 only to reunite unexpectedly 10 years later, forcing them to face a terrible secret from their past. For a behind-the-scene look at Brooke Lea Foster’s books, subscribe to her newsletter at dearfiction.substack.com .

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