Meet our Advanced Essay Instructor, Duncan Murrell

We’re so excited to welcome Duncan Murrell to Redbud! Duncan is an editor at Harper's Magazine, The Oxford American magazine, and The Normal School. He has also written for The Highline @ The Huffington Post, The New Republic, Men's Journal, Our State Magazine, and Southwest Magazine. His work has been recognized in Best American Essays and he holds a master’s in journalism and an MFA in fiction. Duncan will be teaching a class called Advanced Essay for us—this is a must-take if you’re interested in nonfiction. Read on to find out more!

Tell us a bit about your background. How did you come to nonfiction writing? What are some of the highlights of your career so far?

I began as a newspaper reporter, covering crime and government, before moving into book publishing as an editor at Algonquin Books. I worked on a lot of great nonfiction there, and after five years went out on my own as a writer. I began writing for Harper's Magazine and The Oxford American, and am a contributing editor at both magazines.  Somewhere in there I edited three bestselling novels, taught writing at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and got my MFA (in fiction!) from Bennington College. Throughout, I've had the extraordinary opportunity to travel the world digging into subjects that fascinate me, and to come back and write for people who actually want to hear what I have to say. It's been a great gift. 

What is it about the form of the essay that attracts you in particular? What are some of the advantages of this form?

The essay is rubbery, protean. Essays can invent their own shapes, marrying form to idea so closely that it's hard to know what came first. Readers, I think, are willing to grant the essayist a lot of freedom to say what they want to say. We tend to read essays on their own terms. This often means that an essay must teach the reader how to read it, but if the essayist can manage this there's virtually nothing they can't do in the form. I love this freedom, although I know that it comes with an important caveat:  you must have something significant and urgent to say.     

In your class, you're teaching some of the greats: James Baldwin, Zadie Smith. Tell us about a recent essay you've read by someone we might not have heard of yet: what was exciting or challenging about it?

I'm particularly taken with a recent essay by Jody Keisner, in The Normal School, called "Neural Pathways to Love": 

 "... it’s as if the woman participating in the present moment of this nearly ten-year love story isn’t me, not my blood or bones, and I’m no longer having these chemical reactions in my brain."

I'm a sucker for anything about love and anything about the literal and metaphorical possibilities of science, so when the two come together it's a literary event for me. Keisner manages to keep this from being gimmicky. She names the chemical and neural pathways implicated in the various stages of love, but it's not for the novelty of it; it's for the real, desperate purpose of understanding her own love of her husband and child. That love, especially the erotic and romantic love of a marriage, changes inexorably. Keisner expertly describes the terror of this, and also the hope that can come of understanding that it must change. That it always changes. It's a straightforward woven essay, but stepping into science gives it an air of universality and eternality.  

What's your favorite writing activity to do with students in this class? Or your favorite topic to teach, within the larger umbrella of the essay? 

My favorite exercise is to have students spend five minutes peeling an orange in one continuous peel, and then writing about the experience. I also like to take students for walks on which the group chooses 4-5  things they see, which they weave together later into an essay. I like to do exercises that get students to see things differently.

To ask a crass business-side-of-writing question: we see a lot of rhetoric about the rise and subsequent death of the personal essay online. What's the market for essays these days? What are the options for people looking to publish them, or the exciting venues looking for this genre? 

Just now I pulled up two dozen creative essays published in the last three days online. My memory of the last thirty years is faulty, but I seem remember that we'd be lucky if we got that many high-quality essays published in three months, back when we relied on paper. I think the rumor of the essay's online demise is much exaggerated! I'm a fan of all the essays being published on Medium and Longreads, especially in its curated publications such as Gay and Writing the Mother Wound. I love Guernica and have published both fiction and nonfiction there; the editors are great. The Normal School is expanding its publication of essays online, which is good news for all essayists. The Rumpus, LitHub, Agni -- all are doing great work in nonfiction. I think it's an exciting time to be an essayist.

Thank you, Duncan! Find out more about Advanced Essay and sign up here.