Sydney Tammarine: DUALITY IN NONFICTION • Cleaver Magazine

A Conversation with Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Sydney Tammarine
DUALITY IN NONFICTION

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

What does duality in creative nonfiction mean to you? Do you have any favorite essays or memoirs that explore duality?

When I think about duality, I think about the tension that is inherent in all life, and therefore, in all good literature. I often tell my students that one definition of essay is a verb that means to try: the essay is an attempt to understand—to reconcile—those parts of life that feel most contradictory.

One of my favorite short essays about duality—one I got to read with students in a recent visit to Davis & Elkins College—is Anika Fajardo’s “What Didn’t Happen.” Fajardo examines the life she didn’t live—the self she didn’t become—because her family left Colombia to live in the United States. The essay asks those most universal questions: Who am I? What makes me who I am? As she describes this other self, the imagined self, her present life lives like a ghost on the page: defined and measured in comparison to—which is to say, always in tension with—the imagined self in Colombia, the self she carries with her in the United States.

To me, there’s not an essay that doesn’t explore duality in some way. Almost by definition, the essay explores dualities of narrative and philosophy, language and limitation, memory and imagination, self and society: who we are and who we want to be.

I can’t wait to see what our readers come up with.

Submissions to Cleaver’s 2024 Short Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Clifford Thompson, are due April 20.

Sydney Tammarine ‘s work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. Her essay “Blue Hour” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. She is the translator of two collections of poetry by Christian Formoso: The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile / El cementerio más hermoso de Chile and Pavilion of the Names / Pabellón de los nombres (Cuadernos de Casa Bermeja in Argentina and MAGO Editores in Chile). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico Military Institute. You can find her at www.sydneytammarine.com. Visit her bio page here.