Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
We Are Now on Threads and Bluesky
Learn More here
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders here
January 9, 2026
from “Admit the Gravity”
in River Teeth Fall 2025
by Emma Bolden
“Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer.”—THE
I had the honor of writing the “Editor’s Notes” to the fall 2025 edition of River Teeth journal, and for the month of January we will feature four essays from this issue.
I chose as my topic “voice” because the fall issue has such a wide variety of interesting voices. I agree with the poet William Stafford that voice is a gift that cannot be taught: “You already have a voice and don’t need to find one,” he once told a group of writers. But even if it cannot be taught, voice can be silenced, often through self-censorship. In “Admit the Gravity” Emma Bolden reclaims her voice by breaking a rule she learned in a writer’s workshop.
You can learn more about River Teeth journal at the website here. Read the Fall 2025 issue at Project Muse here.
The Paragraph of the Week
I fell to my knees on the kitchen tile. It didn’t seem possible. Nothing seemed possible, in the face of this. Less than an hour later we were standing, me and my aunts and uncles and my father and grandfather and the priest, around the bed in which her body lay, dead, one hand curled and claw-like. The priest blessed her body’s mouth and hands and feet. Last rites. Her final sacrament, received after her death. Later I sat on the front porch while an aunt walked into the front yard, yelled “goddamn” as loudly as she could, and told me I looked beautiful. She kissed me on the cheek. There were so many Honey Baked hams. It was my first real experience of familial grief and what I learned was what a shock it was, how strange it was, an ending, even when you think you know what’s coming.
—Emma Bolden
Commentary
Even though voice cannot be taught, it can, sadly, be damaged, and even destroyed, especially in a young writer. Following the “not-entirely-unspoken rule” of never writing about “dead pets or dead grandmothers,” Emma Bolden was discouraged in workshops from writing about her grandmother. “Instead, I wrote poems that were poor copies of poets who themselves had died – cummings, Eliot, Dickinson, Sexton,” she explains. “It was how you learned, I was told: by listening to the voices that came before, not the voice that came from you.” The lesson sank in as a stultifying rebuke: “And anyway what did I have to say?” Fortunately, she realized over time that the only way to understand the events in her life is to “language them” in her own voice. In “Admit the Gravity” she finally finds her own words for the forbidden subject of her grandmother whose death “ghosts” her and keeps her up at night.
—THE
~ ~ ~
Weekly Reminders from
The Humble Essayist
​
We are now on Bluesky and Threads and will begin posting weekly reminders there. If you are on either of the social media plaforms, please follow us. We are still on Facebook as well. Due to the toxic nature of X we no longer promote our site there.
The best way to keep up with us is to add your name to our growing list of subscribers, and we will send free, brief, weekly reminders of our features with a link to the page directly to your email. Please click on the blue button to subscribe.
Unsubscribe Here.
~ ~ ~
​
Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
​
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
​
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
​
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
​
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
​
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
​​
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
​
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
