By Mikayla Galgerud
“I don’t want immortality; I don’t need to be remembered after I’m gone. When I worry, it is a worry based on life, on a fear of getting it wrong, of coming time to die and not knowing how to do it yet. What I want is to mummify the living, to pause everything until the time comes when all things can be perfected.”
– “Eating the Dead: A Guided Tour” by Angela Pelster (River Teeth 18.1, Fall 2016)
I am a lover of essays of all shapes and sizes. Braided, micros, hermit crabs; you name it. Whether it’s strange content or presented on the page in a new way, I crave it. Naturally, reading Angela Pelster’s “Eating the Dead: A Guided Tour” (River Teeth 18.1) is a treat. Pelster’s essay breaks out of a traditional form, splitting up into many numbered sections; a series of micro essays that welcome us into her own exhibit of contemplation, feeding us bite-sized pieces of death and overall uncomfortable subject matter. Pelster brings us a new form of essay, which I affectionately dub the “gallery essay,” with the individual micros serving as artifacts for the reader to inspect and interpret individually, then coming together to create the larger essay, or the gallery as a whole.
“Eating the Dead” is especially unique because, not only does the essay take on this form of a gallery, it starts off in a physical one. This element of meta-ness elevates what could be argued as a hermit crab essay, putting it into a league of its own. Pelster’s gallery essay is just meta enough to be enjoyable without being too obvious or overworked. Each artifact is its own delectable nugget of scene, research, and contemplation exploring death and life, sex, mummies, and spirituality. Through all of this, she threads separate scenes of her and her daughter, allowing the literal museum to act as a through line. Additionally, it gives space for each micro scene to become its own separate artifact, focusing on something different in each scene set at the gallery.
We see this especially well through the first three artifacts of the essay. These micros are all set in the physical museum, but each is zoomed in on something different. She leads us through: “Before we begin, we watch a short video,” (47). Then, “The first body I come to is tiny, a little mummified boy not quite three years old,” (47). Finally, “My daughter sits on the floor of the exhibit,” (48). Yes, these are all located at the museum, and yes, each scene flows into the next, but they don’t quite belong together. In this first artifact, we know our narrator is not alone, but we don’t know who she’s with. This micro’s focus is set solely on the physical museum. As we venture on, the focus is still on the narrator, but the mention of a mother informs us of upcoming themes, and the narrator starts to bring herself more into view of the essay. Not until the third artifact are we introduced to the narrator’s child and her personal relationship to the aforementioned motherhood. Despite these scenes occurring cohesively, each of these artifacts are remarkably different in their focus: the exhibit, the dead boy, her daughter.
Though the remainder of the essay weaves in and out of the physical museum, each artifact brings something new to the gallery, a new perspective on death, a new contemplation, a new fact. While each section varies in length, the ending closes on a series of short, to-the-point micros, and one grand finale: the largest artifact in the entire gallery. Here, the narrator encounters the body of a woman, deceased on a bench, though she does not know that at the time of approaching her with food. After the realization, she takes the food with her and, although it was not intended for her, she eats it anyway, before driving off in the rain. With this final artifact, Pelster zooms out of the individual piece and we see the gallery—the essay—for what it is in its entirety. We can now leave the exhibition, having seen it in full.
Exercise:
- Determine a subject. It should be something you are familiar with and have personal experiences surrounding, similar to Pelster’s experience with death and the museum.
- List the ways you have experienced this subject, whether it’s a tangible object, a memory, a place you’ve visited, etc.
- Select something from your list and write about it in a full scene. Stretch it out. Inspect it (literally or figuratively).
- Now, break that scene apart. Section it, one moment at a time. Revise each section, and focus on a new idea or theme each time, similarly to how Pelster writes through the museum. Then add more sections, using additional items from the list. Keep writing in these small chunks.
- Take a moment to reflect. Notice how your writing changes meaning when it goes from connected and continuous to short and separated. How does each section act individually, and how does it contribute to the whole gallery you have written?
