“Joyas Voladoras” and what I look for as an editor
How Brian Doyle’s essay shaped the way I think about creative nonfiction + an audio experiment
When the doctor checks my heartbeat, I become self-conscious. Skin prickling from the cold, brittle paper dress not quite covering all I’d like it to, I follow their instructions. Lean forward, inhale slow, hold it. Exhale. The cold round metal of the stethescope bites my lower back, my upper back, and, when I sit upright, my left breast. I try not to think about how the stimuli might raise my heart rate, how my anxiety about a raised heart rate might raise my heart rate, how any distortion in my heart could be a sign—of my childhood ailments returning, of a new health concern festering. I inhale. I hold it.
I recently met with my new co-editor at Sundog Lit, and we discussed what we’re looking for in the creative nonfiction submissions we read. Which means I’ve been thinking about Brian Doyle’s essay, “Joyas Voladoras.” Which means I’ve been thinking about hearts.
“Joyas Voladoras” was the first reading assigned in the Lyric Essay class I took in the fall of 2018. Though I majored in fiction and had already finished the requirements for the major, I wanted to take a class with the professor teaching the course. At the time, I was also the editor in chief of the Honors College’s literary magazine, having come up from being the nonfiction editor, though I didn’t write nonfiction myself. It was my last year of undergrad, and it felt like a chance to resolve the dissonance.
There are a few pieces of art and media that have changed the way I think about the genre or form. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Yvette Young playing the electric guitar. Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” The New Yorker’s 2021 story on migrant detention centers in Africa. And, in the fall of 2018, Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras.”
The essay is relatively short, only about 1,000 words, but it embodies and exemplifies a lot of what I’ve come to strive towards in my own writing, along with what I seek out in others’. Keen sensory details, from the visual to the tactile to the auditory. Extraordinary precision, not only in the sharpness of individual words but in the flow of each sentence and phrase.
The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that the best thing a writer can learn is how to listen. Listen to the world around them. Listen to what a story or idea needs. Listen to how each word in a sentence rises or falls, how it delivers the reader to the next syllable or next word or next piece of punctuation. Throughout the essay, Doyle plays with consonance and assonance, with parallel structure, with scale, with the length of phrases and sentences to create an essay that’s rhythmic and, well, lyricial. To quote a single example is to do an injustice to the rest, so I’m going to try something new and include a recording of myself reading the essay. I invite you to listen:
The final paragraph of this essay haunts me. No matter how many times I reread it, no matter how much I think I’ve braced myself for it, it brings me to tears. The essay juxtaposes moments of absurdity and playfulness—the stretching of “waaaaay bigger,” the seemingly endless list of hummingbird species, the provocation to think about the “social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale”—with devastation. The sublimity of the blue whale’s cries, the hummingbirds’ tiny bodies stilled by death, the unrelenting imagery of the final sentence.
Doyle refuses to resolve the tension in the end. If anything, he adds to it, offering us one final contradiction: “the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” “Your father”; “his children.” The warmth and tenderness of your father’s actions are preserved in your memories with cold distance. Why does his voice echo from another room? Who are you if not your father’s child?
It turned out my co-editor is also a fan of Brian Doyle. We talked about our shared preference for essays that experiment with form, that push the bounds of the genre, that draw from other art forms and disciplines. We discovered that we both have a taste for pieces that allow dissonance or tension to remain unresolved by the end. Nonfiction is real, after all, and reality is rarely so neat. I think of it like I think of the first breath after nearly drowning.
In 2015, I went to Puerto Rico on a school show choir and band trip. In one of our many scheduled activities, we hiked into El Yunque, down winding paths until we reached a small waterfall whose basin was surrounded by flat stones. We’d been told to wear our bathing suits beneath our hiking gear, and in the thick, soupy humidity, we stripped and ventured into the water, jumping into the depths or wading into shallower pools. There was a path of rocks that jutted out from the base of the waterfall, and groups of people took turns inching their way out to take photos before jumping in.
My friend wanted a photo of our small friend group like this. The rocks were slick, but she held my hand tight. We shuffled out until we were at the center of the waterfall, water pattering our shoulders and upper backs. A parent chaperone with a camera called for us to smile. And without warning, my hand still in hers, my friend jumped.
The clench of cold hit first. Then came the need to close my mouth against the water rushing in, the realization that my friend had pulled me under, the betrayal of my now-empty hands. The surface was above me, and the waterfall became a downward current, but I was no salmon, no sturgeon, no spotted sea trout, leaping upriver against the odds. I let it push me down until its force weakened, and I grabbed at the water in desperate arcs. My chest ached, desperate to squeeze any last oxygen into my bloodstream and out to my muscles so I could wriggle and kick and pull my way to the surface.
The first breath was euphoric. I gulped air, lung sacs refilling, blood brightening with oxygen, my heart’s contractions rippling through every capillary. I inhaled deep, but my ribs were sore, my abdomen exhausted from the strain of keeping me alive. I inhaled slow. I held it.
Personal updates
As I mentioned in my last post, Sundog Lit is open for submissions! We’re currently looking for creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and illustrations, and our submission window closes May 1. I hope this post has helped elucidate what we’re looking for over at on the creative nonfiction desk, but feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to chat about something you’re considering sending our way.
Also, I recently hit 100 subscribers on Substack! Thanks to everyone who decided to give this blog/newsletter a chance. I’d like to do something to celebrate, but mostly, I’d like to know what you’d like to see more of or any topics you’d be interested in me covering. Recording audio for this post was a lot of fun, and I want to keep experimenting with what this space can be. Until next time <3
