In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 219.
It took two weeks for it to happen: A student appeared in the doorway of my campus office, took a seat in front of my desk, and told me she had nothing meaningful to write about for her first creative nonfiction assignment.
“Nothing interesting,” she said, “has happened to me.”
It’s the opposite of the story we often hear, the one where young adults are TikTok influencers or YouTube vloggers, camera-yielding free agents filming their daily lives under a false but pervasive sense of utter self-importance. Those young people exist, I’m certain, but the students I’ve met, by contrast, are humble, hardworking, earnest, and the problem they seem to face most often—at least on the page, though I suspect the same is true of their exterior lives—is a diminishing of the self.
And yet the root of any meaningful work of nonfiction is a sense of self-assurance: You arrive at the page in this genre because you have something meaningful to say. Urgency has brought you here, and it is your work to convey that urgency unto a reader. Without it, the work is insular, siloed, existing in a vacuum. We write nonfiction as a means to connect: to abolish the gap between our lives and our work and the larger gap that we believe exists between ourselves and another person.
“I don’t know,” my student tried again. “I could write about my cat?”
I worried—as most would—about fifteen pages on a cat. But I also trusted my student’s connection to the wider world, whether around her cat or through it. After all, I had been her once, certain my life did not yet contain stories of value or experiences worthy of the page. But the more I wrote and reflected on my life, the more I began to see the significance of my stories as footholds into a wider world. Many other footholds can—and certainly do—exist, but I had to trust that mine were relevant. There’s a larger conversation here, of course, about ethical considerations and identifying voices that need to be the loudest, but at this early stage, I’m most interested in imparting to my students the value of finding and trusting these connections.
It’s something I’ve become well-versed in, particularly over the past decade of my writing life. The first New York Times op-ed I ever published—and the one, by far, to have made the largest impact—began as a rant in the Notes app on my iPhone written from bed late in the night, when anger kept me up. Earlier that day, my closest friend at the nearby college had been awarded tenure, and as I scrolled for profession-specific emojis that might captivate my sense of admiration for her accomplishment, I found a grave discrepancy in gender representation: Male-presenting emojis held jobs as policemen, as doctors, were the default gender for all digitalized athletics, while female-presenting emojis simply got their hair cut, or got massaged, or were one of two Playboy-style bunnies in matching leotards. My anger, though I couldn’t place it in that moment, had less to do with emojis outright than it did with the larger cultural attitudes and positions of privilege that had enabled this misrepresentation in the first place; there was a cultural erasure of women and women’s dexterity and accomplishments, and it was amplified by the digital erasure of authentically representative women on our phones.
The next day, on a hunch that the intensity of my frustration mattered, I reworked my late-night rant into a short op-ed calling for a broader understanding of gender in our emoji lexicon, and within the week, my work was published as a feature essay in the New York Times and printed in newspapers across the country. A few months later, Google techs developed thirteen new “female empowered” emojis, citing my article as their inspiration, and a few months after that, those proposed emojis were officially accepted by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee—a real entity—and installed as part of new iOS software globally. More inclusive emojis, of course, are a small victory in the larger context of global sexism, but representation matters, and those thirteen working women—the rockstar and the chemist, the plumber and the doctor, and, yes, the writing professor—were the first of many thoughtful, inclusive sweeps aimed at enhancing our emoji vocabulary. Racial diversity, ability-inclusive, and sexually-diverse emojis followed soon thereafter.
The trick to begin writing deeply impactful, meaningful nonfiction is to stop telling yourself your story doesn’t matter—that your connection to the wider world is too distant and abstract to be relevant. Trust that urgency and write it well, and you can make that care contagious.
In my office, listening to my student, I remembered that younger me: the one furiously tapping a rant in honor of her friend and history colleague, so certain that our lives—as women—meant nothing to a broader world. How quick I was to diminish myself, and how quickly the New York Times—indeed, the world—reminded me what can happen when we don’t.
“Everyone has a story,” I reminded my student. I pressed on her to identify her cat’s foothold in a larger, more topical conversation. His name was Genghis, after all, and I needed her to think about her own potential.
It didn’t take her very long. Genghis, she informed me, had just completed the first of two required sessions to become a certified therapy cat—a thing I didn’t even know existed—and she planned to soon make him a cornerstone at a nearby hospice facility, owing in no small part to her own grandfather, who—in his final months of living—was often seen stroking the toy cat his nursing home facility had given him.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
At twenty-two years old, in her final year of college, my student was juggling four classes—including my senior writing course, a yearlong advanced workshop in which students develop sixty to eighty pages of cohesive, polished prose—and still she was making time to certify her cat to alleviate the suffering of those receiving end-of-life treatment and care. Genghis brought her joy, and she wanted to bring others that same joy too.
“That’s where we begin,” I said. “That’s your foothold into a larger conversation.”
The resulting essay, naturally, was beautiful, setting into motion—and exquisitely—sixty pages dedicated to improving the lives of our seniors, a radical call for a person so young. But it also started with a cat—a gigantic tortoiseshell and his owner, certain nothing she had yet contributed to the world was worthy even of her own writing.
I balk now at the notion that the young aren’t interesting, or that only age and experience earn one the right to literary reflection. It’s hard work, regardless of age, to see the link between one’s own life and the larger world we live in, but when it happens, that work is meaningful, urgent, a catalyst for change and deep connection. Genghis is but one example, and as I shepherd a longform manuscript on the conversations he’s made possible, I’m here to tell you: There is no greater purrrrsuit.
Amy Butcher is an essayist and the author of two books, including Mothertrucker (Little A, 2021), which explores the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. The book earned critical praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, and excerpts of her new book were recently awarded a 2024 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her essays have also been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series. Additional essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, the New York Times “Modern Love” column, the New York Times Sunday Review, the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She is an associate professor of English at Denison University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska. She splits her time between Columbus, Ohio, and Alaska.
image credit: Jan Kahánek