The Creative Essay
Logomancer is one of my favorite words: logo meaning word; mancer meaning divination. A logomancer is literally someone who summons magic through words. I revere these word-magicians from Hemingway to Faulkner, Tolstoy and Twain, Austen to Agatha. They flutter their ballpoint wands across paper like a sorcerer in Rowling's masterpiece and abracadabra! A twenty-six character latin script metamorphoses into spellbooks that bewitch readers past midnight.
I'm a writer, and a ritualistic one at that. Every week, I grab my satchel and stow away an obsidian faux-leather pocketbook and lampblack Pilot G2 pens. I take my bike (a once-polished, now-punctured commuter) and cycle to the zenith of the rural Diablo foothills, where I nestle into a bench which I've dubbed "The Weathered Seat." Over the years, I've watched its iron arms turn green from oxidation, and the wood finish on its backrest become sun-faded.
Sitting there, I open my journal's faux cover to the first empty page and absorb everything from birdseye view: downtown's shimmering skyline, sunrays peeping through backlit foliage, the racing specks on Highway-101, and after astral-projecting into my imagination for about an hour, I introduce my pen to the page and vomit every idea, thought, epiphany that finds me. Then, I tear out the page and follow Hemingway's laconic admonition to "cut the scrollwork. Start with the first true, declarative sentence."
It can take two, five, twelve drafts to write something I can call mine. It doesn't matter if I'm submitting an english essay or writing a letter. I write a range: if I'm writing a philosophy paper to PhilPapers, I disfigure the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with my markings for the umpteenth time, and cycle between Thoreau, Aurelius, and Hume depending on what I need; when I type up opinions for The New York Times, I'm drawing on a tree of past experiences and invoking the kind of urgency you'd find only in Woolf's writing: "This perishing world has two edges: one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." It gives me chills. But no matter what genre I'm writing, I write with Aurelius's stoic counsel to do every act of your life as if it were your last.
I'm exhausted when I'm done, but satisfied with my work. Because after, when the ink, the sun, and my energy run out at once, I watch the skyline before cycling from the mountain's zenith, back to suburbia. Only then, hexed by my own incantations, tired from sorcery, I hold proof my pocketbook and with it, proof of one thing: I am a logomancer. A writer.
What this one does
We helped him make the writing carry its own proof. A student who calls himself a writer is judged on the sentences he makes the claim in, so every line here had to show the craft it talks about. By the end nothing needs asserting; the page has already done it.
The essay is the student’s own writing, printed here unchanged.
If you want somebody reading your student’s file with you this year, that is the work we do.