I'm currently reading a book that is touted as a "collection of essays".
It's a book I had to put down and come back to, because I bought it thinking it was one kind of book, but it turned out to be a different kind of book, and I had to wait until I was ready for it. You have to be in the right headspace for books, or they just don't work at all.
When I bought the book I was working off a brief description and the title, brief author bio and the description of the contents as "essays" made me think it was going to be the kind of non-fiction book where you learn information about a topic. Perhaps one of those books university lecturers put out that are assigned to students in courses to make sure someone buys them, although they're really just a researcher's love letter to their field of research.
Once the book was in my hands, though, I realised the real clue to its nature was in some of the blurbs on the back cover that didn't make it to the website I found it on, and the description of the genre above the barcode: Creative non-fiction, which tends to get appended to the more autobiographical side of non-fiction.
The book (Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, by Linda LeGarde Grover) is a collection of memoirs that touch on wider (but very personal) themes. It reads like a collection of "slice-of-life" columns from a "smart" magazine or "literate" newspaper - you know the kind, the ones that are written for people who might also read the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. I noticed one of the "essays" actually referred to itself as "this column", and I've since learned she does write columns for the Duluth News Tribune, so perhaps quite a few of them started their lives as "columns".
I'm not complaining - I love columns. They're usually my favourite part of a magazine or newspaper. Heck, sometimes they're the main reason I buy that magazine. And the "creative non-fiction" books I most enjoy reading are the ones where most of the chapters started their lives as columns. This book was accidentally right up my alley (I'm also really enjoying it) - it just wasn't what I was expecting when I bought it, so I had to wait until I was in the mood for the book it actually was.
But it has me thinking about the way we use the word "essays".
As an academic librarian who teaches into workshops on how to write essays for university, my first thought when it comes to "essays" certainly isn't magazine columns. Nor is it short stories (that happen to be non-fiction), or feature articles, or memoirs - but all of these things are described as "essays" once they get into a book that's for sale to the general public.
The word "essay" contains multitudes (as you can see if you look it up in Wikipedia), and I know that both Stephen Jay Gould and David Sedaris have their works classified as "essays", even though they are very different genres... except that they aren't. Both Gould and Sedaris were columnists, and many of their collections started out as columns (Gould in Natural History magazine, Sedaris in The New Yorker).
The genre I teach people to write is an "essay" - but it has absolutely no resemblance to the genre I read when I pick up a book of "essays". The latter is mostly things I would think of as feature articles and columns.
But while I would have been a little closer to the mark in my assumptions about Grover's book if it had been described as a collection of "columns", the words "feature article" and "column" contain multitudes as well. They can be wildly and widely different from each other.
All of which makes it hard to see the word "essay" or "column" and know what you're going to get.
I feel like we need better words to describe non-fiction of this kind. More subgenre terminology out in the world. I used "slice-of-life" above, but that's just my personal way of describing a piece in which the columnist tells me about their own lives.
You know the publishers of magazines and newspapers must have terminology for this, as it's their bread and butter (and when you go looking specifically for "types of columns", there are plenty of options). They'd know exactly what the tone and genre and audience is for X as opposed to Y. But when those articles find their way into a collected book, what does the book-buying public get to see? "Essays".
