I went to find the list I’ve been keeping in my Notes app for this post and right there was something from February 15 of this year when, at 1:08 p.m., I’d tapped in: “The first read is reaction; the second read is reading. From there, when you are so inspired, you can get into a piece deeper to figure out how it works.” I assume already, based on my many spins around the internet, that some folks might think, How pretentious. To which I’ll say, you might not be reading deeply! (Writing with the internet in your head, which I’m doing right now because the stress of our days-long water outage caused me to mindlessly scroll a lot, is always bad.) 

This is what I try to instill in my essay workshops—which are about writing, but are really about reading and re-reading and what we learn from our reactions about the work we want to do and how we can break down a piece through its structure, its tone, its everything. I try to get everyone to go beyond reaction and relatability.

What happens beyond the second read? Something like absorption, maybe. Something like a relationship. In our first meeting of the June sessions of “the food essay,” one participant asked about essays that “feel like friends.” I immediately thought about Rene Ricard’s “The Radiant Child,” which I re-read so often it takes on the rhythm in my mind of an incantation. Here, below the fold, are more of the works I return to constantly to remember how and why to write.