Writers to Read: Robert Vivian

I’m going to tell you to read a book that’s not here yet. But it’s coming. In fact it’s quite close. At first I only sensed it out there somewhere, its wake pushing waves across an ocean and causing seawater to lap at my toes where I once stood on dry land. Now I see this book, a gorgeous ship at full sail, on the horizon. It’s so beautiful I feel impelled to cry out, “Look, it’s here!”

The vessel we await is called Mystery My Country, and it contains a collection of dervish essays written by Robert Vivian, the author of four novels and two collections of meditative essays. It arrives in 2016, published by Anchor & Plume. A dervish essay is a prose poem that takes on the spinning energy of its namesake. But it goes beyond the realm of poem and stakes itself in nonfiction because Vivian molds the form to make it so. Using precious little punctuation he feels his way through, much as a straight essayist would, a notion, an observation, a question, all in service to better understand and appreciate what connects life to himself and his world.

To read the rest of this review, written for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, use this link.

When asked to contribute to the Assay series on “Writers to Read” I seized the opportunity to discuss an intriguing form, the dervish essay, and Vivian’s forthcoming book.

Enjoy!