I’ve been reading braided essays for a long time, only I didn’t know they were called braided essays. Last week I was in a Zoom meeting when a reader casually dropped the name of this creative nonfiction style, and I immediately had to look it up.
Braided essays are those that weave different threads together to create a cohesive (more or less) whole. Zining Mok recommends Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, which I ordered five seconds later. Happily it came in the mail over the weekend, and I’ve had a few minutes Sunday to look over it. I knew I would enjoy it right away (especially since these days I read a lot of children’s books, so I can relate).
“Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.”
What I love most about braided essays is that there’s room to step outside of the linear narrative; essays don’t have to be the forged path of introduction-thesis-body-conclusion. Some of my favorite essays linger and sometimes they even jump off the path completely to explore ideas far from the original topic. I don’t see this as a bad thing, and in fact I’d like to read and write a lot more that way.