Beginning in May, this substack will be a home for fortnightly familiar essays on life, love, writing, reading, the natural world, folklore and fairy tales, and other catastrophes.
I first learned about the notion of the familiar essay from reading Anne Fadiman, most especially her essay collection At large and at small: familiar essays (2007). Only then did I discover I was already a fan of the form, having devoured Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823) and The last essays of Elia (1833)—essays that Lamb described in the preface to Last essays as ‘unlicked, incondite things’.
In an interview, Fadiman offers a description of the familiar essay as a form. First noting that is something of an old-fashioned form, whose heyday was the early nineteenth century, and whose most well-remembered practitioners were Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. She goes on to say:
Familiar essays are called familiar not because the essays themselves are familiar to their readers … "Familiar" refers to the fact that the subjects were often familiar to the reader, or at least familiar to the writer. They weren't about exotic things; they were often about everyday life. But most importantly, the writer talked to the reader as though the reader was his familiar.
Later, in the same interview, Fadiman is asked about the notion that the familiar essay might be ‘a kind of sanctuary from anxiety’, and she responds:
They are sanctuaries, but that doesn't mean that they are divorced from the world … I don't think of essays as a kind of trivial ivory tower, a way for Nero to fiddle while Rome burns. I think that they often provide a useful way of understanding why Rome is burning.
But they're also a way to process and untangle events from one's own life. Your memory is just a dark tangle, and writing an essay like this allows you to shine a spotlight, to tease out strands.
I don’t know, yet, what to expect from this sustained exploration of my familiar world. And so I cannot make a promise to you regarding the focus of these brief exploratory pieces of work. Expect … intuitive logic; expect normalised magic. Expect contemplations of the specific and the local as a way of trying to grasp hold of something larger. Expect ruminations on poetry, art, writing, love, the natural world, queerness, women, children, and other wonders.