What Is a Braided Essay in Writing
An optional assignment: to interview someone from another subject position whose life had been impacted by the same social issue.
I introduced what would become the research strand via a scholarly source synthesis midterm paper of three peer-reviewed journal articles on their topic that presented successful approaches to ameliorating the social issue.
The memoir begins with this question: “To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like the sudden blood from under the bruised skin’s blister?” (3) This apt question and powerful text ushered students toward beginning to write their essays’ personal narrative strands.
(for example, the concept of surrogacy; physiological responses to systemic oppression; the intersection of religion and self-neglect)
This time, I asked students, a few days after that due date, to post a section from their response on a dedicated discussion board and respond to another student’s post.
“The Babysitter” by Anton DiSclafani: Writing the Braided Essay
How distinct do the threads in a braided essay need to be and how regular does the movement between strands need to remain in order to guide readers through the piece?
Among personal essays, braided essays are a form particularly welcoming to the vast array of ways—our obsessions, expertise, and contexts–that each of us uses to try to explain the personal.
In fact, I think nearly every essay uses a kind of braiding…perhaps,” she continues, “the braided form is most effective when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each other.
“The Mirror Test” was fresh in my mind, and given how much slut-shaming is still relevant to and often weaponized among college students, I decided to include it, as well as Melissa Faliveno’s thematically related braided essay “Switch Hitter,” as first-week readings.
Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay”
DiSclafani begins the essay by describing her current life as a fearful mother, judging the teenagers she interviews to watch her son. As she continues, the sections holding the past and present draw physically closer together on the page. These two stages in her life blur together, and she sees herself differently as a mother employing a babysitter because of her experience as a babysitter. DiSclafani writes, “I try and remember what was required of me. No TV was an unspoken rule. When I babysat there were no smartphones. There were only blocky flip phones, used in case of emergency. It was only me, the child, the clock on the wall” (57). Because she had no distractions while caring for the children of various families in the past, she sets the same standard when she’s hiring someone to watch and care for her own baby. While she used to judge the mothers she worked for, she now sizes up the teen girls before her.
What is a braided essay, and how do you write one
In this essay, DiSclafani weaves between the past and present of a mother in need of a sitter who used to be a babysitter herself. Of her years working as a babysitter, she writes, “As I enter adolescence, and then young adulthood, parents at parks sometimes assume I am a mother, not a babysitter . . . The assumption startles me—can’t they tell that this is not my child?—but I do not correct it” (53-54). She reaches back in time to reflect on her position then and to understand what may be going through the minds of the teenagers she interviews now. In exploring her own experience of caring for other women’s children, DiSclafani is able to relate to the candidates she’s interviewing.
The braided essay is the writers version of “found object” art
“I surprise myself in another way, too: I don’t worry about his safety with a babysitter. I worry about what the babysitter—still nameless, now, still a young woman yet to be invited into our house—will make of us.”
A braided essay is a popular structure for creative nonfiction essays
By the close of section four, the “push” for another strand is almost physical, as a reader. (Can you feel such when you write?) I do think this is the strength of the “braid.” Two of anything is never as interesting as three; three shakes it up.