Week 2: Research Edition: Eula Biss' "Time and Distance Overcome"
More likely than not, you’re already familiar with the Eula Biss Essay, “Time and Distance Overcome,” which is both available in her book Notes from No Man’s Land, as well as being available online in The Iowa Review. I feel like you’ve probably read this essay if you’ve taken any nonfiction writing course in the past ten years, and for good reason: it starts with a fairly innocuous bit of research about the history of the telephone, but ends in such a larger darker place. We know that there is no direct causation between the spread of telephone networks and the spread of lynching, yet it is now impossible to pull those two things apart. Again, we can go on about this (and please do in responses!), but I want to focus this on the author’s note, where this research comes from. I am legitimately shocked that the essay didn’t start with the idea of lynching, but with telephone poles, with (I’m assuming?) her grandfather’s job and injury. In my own research-based writing, I usually know, l...