Brian Doyle's 'Leap'

For my first night of assigned readings for my Creative Nonfiction class this quarter I got one of the authors mixed up on the syllabus and read the wrong reading.  This wouldn't have been that bad if I hadn't chosen that 'wrong' reading for my first response journal.  Come to find out that author's not even included in the syllabus - - 'Why yes, I am in my second year of grad school, preparing to graduate in June, why do you ask?'

Anyway, I didn't turn it in that day and make a fool of myself (although I really don't think our professor would've minded...she probably would've read it and given me a grade, but I chose not to give her the first impression of me as someone who can't even read the name off a syllabus correctly).  I digress...

I wanted to share the reading because I thought it was quite powerful, and well I have this useless response journal.  You can read the (very) short essay here and then I've posted my response below.  The essay is called "Leap" by Brian Doyle (the 'correct' author was Doty and they're right next to each other in the anthology, so see I wasn't too far off...okay well maybe I have no excuse).  We're using the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction edited by Williford and Martone.

Leap - excerpts from an essay by Brian Doyle (Acrylic, gouache, graphite on Tyvek)
by Kathleen Borkowski
Source: Kathleen Borkowski website

Brian Doyle’s “Leap” touched me in a way I could have never thought possible from a page and a half piece of writing. As a member of the ‘9/11 generation’ it took me only moments to realize what event he was discussing in his piece. Within seconds I was taken back to my eighth grade Home Economics classroom and the visions on the television of smoke and fire coming from the Twin Towers; we all sat mesmerized, horrified, watching the cameras pan from one image to the next. Our teacher had never experienced our silence before, and she wouldn’t again. In that moment, I felt ‘American’ in a way I’d never felt before and have never felt since. Doyle’s brief, but stunning piece took me back to that moment. It also conjured up a more recent image of the photograph in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer depicting a man jumping from the tower.

Perhaps Doyle's influence and power in conjuring up these powerful images is what makes it such a great piece of writing. It takes us back and connects us to those moments, what we thought, how we felt, what we tried to tell ourselves to find some sense of comfort. In a brief page and a half he captures the moment, the people who witnessed the powerful image of the couple holding hands, and the connection to verses in the Bible.

His weaving of Scripture was perhaps what touched me the most; he tries to give words and meaning to the positive image witnessed amid the turmoil and tragedy. Even in the way he incorporates those Scriptures – “wrote John the Apostle” or “says the Book of Wisdom” – he makes it seem less like he’s pulling them from a holy text, and more like he’s quoting wise friends who provide wisdom in a time of need.

His inclusion of people’s names – the people who had watched as they leapt from the towers – seemed odd to me at first. As I read their names silently, I wondered why he had chosen this kind of ‘reportage’ style, quoting them as one would in a newspaper. But after reading through the entire piece, I understand that what Doyle might be doing is providing real witnesses, people who could, in a sense, ‘give voice’ to the circumstance, and in turn, share those images with us, as readers.

Though this piece, and its subject matter, has the danger of sounding ‘sentimental’ or overly optimistic, his has enough realism and an underlying message that death and tragedy, though inescapable, cannot be explained or understood. Instead, he urges that in those moments when we could easily focus on the “screaming souls of the murderers,” why not remember the “extraordinary ordinary succinct naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love?” (166).

I think what makes this a wonderful example of creative nonfiction is that he tells the story of a true event, while weaving in his own speculations and reflections. He has also tried to make connections to other tragedies, guiding his readers to see that love “is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death” (166). Even in this terrible moment, when it would have been easy to give up on the power of love, Doyle provides an articulate example that whether these two people were “husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell,” they fought against the world’s evil as best they could until their moment of inescapable death. His reflections, along with the inclusion of the witnesses and Scriptures, are what make this a powerful example of creative nonfiction.