“The Cottage Essay,” by Caitlin Horrocks

Fiction faculty member Caitlin Horrocks was recently featured in Essay Daily. Read an excerpt of Horrocks’ essay below:

The Cottage Essay

When I think about Michigan essays, what I find myself thinking about is a subgenre I’d like to call “the cottage essay,” or maybe “the cabin essay.” It’s rarely a “lakehouse” essay, but it could be. I can’t always tell, in these essays, how large or well-appointed or house-like the cottages are. Sometimes my students just write about “my grandparents’ place.”      

In Michigan, it’s not necessarily the richest people who have lakeside property, but the people who have lived here the longest. Wealthy people from Chicago might still simply buy a cottage. But for most of my students, for most of the people I know, your main choices are to rent one by the week or weekend, or to inherit or be hosted in one that was bought in another era, by an earlier generation, when such purchases were in easier reach. I was born in Michigan, but my parents were transplants. My husband is from Seattle. We write and teach. We will probably never have a cottage. But I read a lot of cottage essays.      

Most have one of three shapes: the first is more commonly by a beginning writer, and it is an essay about joy. The joy is cozy and regular, without beginning or end—the writer anticipates the same joy every summer (the cottage essay takes place almost always in summer, though the cabin essay might also take place in autumn deer hunting season, or winter snowmobile season).  The writer’s joy is so perfect and private and steady that it becomes a vague fog to the reader. We talk about this, the “problem” of joy, how odd and unfair it is that it’s so much harder to convey in interesting ways than tragedy. The student’s patience for this conversation tends to correlate to their patience for writing in general.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://caitlinhorrocks.com/