Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
We Are Now on Threads as well as Facebook
Learn More here
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders here
July 31, 2026
from “Sussex”
in Riverteeth: Spring 2026
by Ana Maria Spagna
“...that slow building is the essence of the whole that surpasses any of its parts”
Ana Maria Spagna is an essayist who lives in the North Cascades. Her essay “Sussex,” which originally appeared in the spring edition of Riverteeth, is from her newest collection Coiled: Essays on Urgency and Kinship due to be published this fall. In our commentary we discuss her masterful weaving of thematic threads to create a subtle and moving whole.
You can can read her essay in Riverteeth here and preorder her book here.​​​
The Paragraph of the Week
​
Once, I had a close friend, a coworker, who had to shoot his own dog. He loved the dog, and the dog was very sick, and the vet was very far away. He did what he had to do, and he did it bravely. He dug the grave himself, by hand, near the tack shed beside the horse pasture, a place with a view of light-shifting on the mountains and plenty of mosquitoes, and he buried her there. In the weeks afterward, my friend loitered near the grave. He found excuses to work right there, day after day, and though none of that work mattered, he couldn't bring himself to leave.
—Ana Maria Spagna
Commentary
​
Sometimes it is hard to pick out a single paragraph in a masterfully written essay because the mastery is in the weaving of the whole, not in any single part. In “Sussex,” the surprising death of Ana Maria Spagna’s brother, Joe, dawns on the reader slowly but inexorably as it did in real life. She begins incongruously it seems with a neighbor who buried a dog but cannot leave the site. Then we are off to the Sussex in New Jersey, a dumpy motel with happy memories of the author and her wife visiting Joe’s family, making a joke about late night revelers they named “the Sussex girls back from the bingo hall.” The second visit she still feels nostalgic for the old Sussex, “just right in its small-scale discomforts,” but while sitting in plastic chairs overlooking the parking lot and swatting mosquitos that are everywhere in this essay, she hears stories about patrons overdosing there. Later we learn that her mother feels imprisoned in a nursing home and her sister is “just out of actual prison,” and Spagna recalls reading a book “about the wrong person dying” and drops another hint: “that’s this story too.” Soon her brother enters a hospital and dies of MRSA a few weeks later. It all seems to sneak up on us as it did on Joe and on her, and that slow building is the essence of the whole that surpasses any of its parts. Going back through the essay a second time, we see what we missed: bears tearing up garbage, her brother celebrating living longer than his dad, Covid and masks worn around necks, the pathetic motel sign pointing the wrong way. And the man with the dead dog?—he dies too. We realize that nothing, in fact, sneaks up on us in this essay. Always there, it waits to take hold.
—THE
This Visible Speaking
​
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
~ ~ ~
Weekly Reminders from
The Humble Essayist
​
We are now on Threads and will begin posting weekly reminders there. If you are on Threads, please follow us there. 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
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.
