On Tuesday March 11, 2003 PWAC Toronto held its panel on The Art of the Personal Essay. The reasoning behind the panel: as more media outlets make space for readers to write stories that spring from their personal lives and experiences, the personal essay is increasingly becoming a viable writing outlet. 

Panellists included: 

Brian Fawcett has been an urban planner, journalist and even for a short spell, a professional hockey player -- an experience he drew on for his first book, My Career with the Leafs. He has followed this up with eight more books including Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow, and Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversation about Sex and Gender. He is also a former Globe and Mail columnist and a founding editor of www.dooneyscafe.com, an alternative Internet News Service. 

Jane Christmas fell in love with the typewriter when she realized its potential for forging permission notes to get out of gym class. She is the author of countless newspaper and magazine articles about family life, and of first-person stories dealing with social trends and attitudes. Her 15-week series for the National Post, a chronicle of her four-month escape from urban life to Pelee Island, Ont. led to a full memoir about the experience called The Pelee Project: One Woman's Escape from Urban Madness. The book was published in September 2002, by ECW Press, and sold out of its first printing three months later. You can find out more at www.janechristmas.com. 

Leslie C. Smith, an award-winning writer, is known for her humour. While a contributing editor to En Route magazine, she was once approached by its editor to write a feature on fitting in -- in Los Angeles. The resulting piece, L.A. Woman, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Smith says the old adage that dying is hard but comedy is harder certainly holds true, especially when it comes to trying to convince other magazines to give her a shot at writing humorous pieces. Nevertheless, she keeps plugging away at what she hopes are amusing personal essays. You can sample some of her wares at www.smithleslie.com.

Brian Fawcett opened the evening with a short personal essay on the genre: personal essay. In his opinion, every essay is personal. In this age, where the verity of facts and images can no longer be trusted, writers must testify in person to the events they cover.

Fawcett says three main rules govern his writing: 
1. Identify the groups involved 
2. Use no passive voice 
3. Write himself into the story. 

Two main principles govern his story ideas: 
1. Select a difficult subject
2. Let the subject matter define the form the story is going to take.

He added that it is a writer's duty in Canada, where we have free speech, to speak the unspeakable. In personal essay, he said he feels that the writer must write personally without making the subject him or herself. 

Jane Christmas followed up by saying that she is seeing a surge of popularity in memoirs. Something she says Heather Mallick has called 'the new self help.' Memoirs - the writing of them and the appetite for them - have largely sprung from the personal essay genre. 

Christmas feels that with the dominance and concentration of mass media, our identities are being stripped away. Perhaps people are turning to memoirists and personal essayists as the 'rogue observers' of life. In a world that seems increasingly impersonal, personal essays create an intimacy with the reader. 

Newspapers enjoy the 'cult of celebrity' that personal essayists develop with their audience. This is because it is critical for the newspapers themselves to develop a following. 

Also, in this age, many of us don't take risks anymore and with mass media, we tend to live vicariously through other peoples' experiences. Essayists provide this outlet. They also help people vent vicariously about issues of the day. 

To that end, the Globe and Mail has expanded its weekend essay section and the National Post contains a lot of personal journalism - i.e.: items such as the 'Personal Life' column. 

Leslie C. Smith talked about how she started her career as a columnist and after she found people were laughing at her work, she decided to focus on writing humour. Her tips are: 

1. You have to be a good writer to write engaging personal essays. The skill is in taking the most mundane subject and making it sparkle. That takes some talent and lots of confidence. 

2. You have to have a strong point of view. This genre is not for those who are self-effacing. 

3. Once you have a premise, you start by interviewing yourself...digging for answers and providing that twist that turns it from mundane into something that will make your reader laugh out loud. 

The thing about humour pieces is, says Smith, you often cannot land them with queries. You have to write them on spec. So, if you want to enter into this field you have to be prepared to write the whole thing and then have editors slavishly reject you. 

Smith says she things that personal essay is experiencing a resurgence because more and more there is room in the media for not only a factual but an emotional response to the issues of the day. 

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 

Q: To Brian. Don't understand what you mean about how personal essay is about writing in the first person without being personal. Explain this some more. 

BF: I started my books by picking the most difficult subject matter to tackle that I could think of and then started the research. I never ask myself how I feel about a subject, instead the work is personal in the sense that I pick the topics and let them preoccupy me. I write in order to understand things. If you take a close look, all of my books have been about violence. I have never been able to find out why people hit each other. Why does a country hit itself? My material becomes much bigger than myself.