- Abby Rabinowitz, Editor
- Leeore Schnairsohn, Managing Editor
- Rylee La Testa, Megan Maxfield, and Hazel Walrod, Junior Editors
Welcome to New York University and our community of writers. As Editor-in-Chief, it’s my pleasure to introduce this edition of Mercer Street, alongside Managing Editor Dr. Leeore Schnairsohn and Junior Editors Hazel Walrod, Rylee La Testa, and Megan Maxfield. This summer, all of us were thinking a great deal about these collected essays not as rubric-busting objects of perfection, but as an evolving creative process that begins with the writer and grows into, as the Junior Editors write below, a “collaborative act.”
You may not immediately see these essays as part of a process and collaborative act given how they’re presented here, proofread and polished, under one writer’s name. Collaboration is not all these essays artfully hide: each started off as an assignment crafted to meet requirements, but each became a motivated, singular, amazing intellectual innovation. How does that happen? How do you write an essay for Mercer Street?
Here, I invite you into the Mercer Street kitchen, or artist’s studio, or biomedical lab, or any metaphorical space you like where things are made. Take Tandon Professor Giuseppe Loianno’s basement robotics lab where, as a graduate student, Dr. Guanrui Li got aerial robots to fly in tandem carrying shared loads for future use in search-and-rescue missions too hazardous for humans. Creating a team of flying robots captures some of what’s involved in writing essays: solving problems, reading, communicating, testing, failing, learning, struggling, succeeding, seeking help, and taking time—lots of time.
Reading the student writers’ reflections, I was struck by these themes of time and struggle—the struggle to understand evidence and to think your way to a complicated new idea. In that struggle, you may find yourself “deleting pages and pages,” as Alexander Palmieri writes: “I forced myself slow down and do something I should really consider more often: reading.” (For more on slowing down and reading, see Dr. Schnairsohn’s letter; for more on how exercises and drafts support revision, see Shawn Harris’s revision portfolio.) Reflecting on her struggles with a source that fed her essay’s problem, Iris O’Connor assures us that “even if you feel like you’re walking in the dark . . . eventually you’ll start to notice what it is that makes that little bulb above your cranium begin to light up.” This creative process is perhaps opposite of a finished robot or essay: it’s messy, imperfect, and lamentably inefficient. But maybe it needs to be that way.
Because in the course of this struggle, essay writers find themselves talking—even complaining—to anyone who will listen. They talk with their professors, fellow students, and sometimes pets. They talk with their sources, getting to know them: Jingshan Wu describes learning that his analytical insights “should not lead me to admire or despise the author but to further the dialogue…” Writers talk with their friends, like O’Connor and Bobby Zabin, who writes his essay “only exists because of my friends who listened to my nightly brainstorms in the library, my professor who guided my revisions, and the thoughtful works and sweeping ideas Landeros and other Latin people in the United States have challenged and remade.” Finally, writers talk with their readers; Zahara Slovenski reflects, “As I have discovered, building my relationship with the reader (you!) is just as important as the essay itself.” This conversation is the collaboration at the heart of an essay.
This conversation continues in the Mercer Street editorial process, where we help each essay selected in our faculty curation process meet the standards of an academic publication and teaching text. This summer, led by Prof. Schnairsohn, the junior editors fact-checked each essay draft, tracking each quotation and paraphrase to be sure it accurately represented the source cited and, in some cases, recommended sources for claims with missing evidence. Over three rounds, Prof. Schnairsohn and I line-edited each draft’s paragraphs and sentences to be sure the essay’s structure and words most clearly conveyed what we understood to be the writer’s arguments and ideas. The junior editors copy-edited every sentence for consistency with our house style. Then, we sent this edited draft back to the student writer for their review, along with with an editorial letter explaining our revisions, to be sure we got it right. Sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t. This summer half the writers approved the draft and half met with me for an editorial meeting that led to further rounds of revision.
How many hours went into editing these essays varied, but I’d say at least eight hours per essay at absolute minimum, not counting faculty reading time and editorial meetings. How much time for the students to write them? This time is perhaps the hardest to track, because these essays are temporal tips of the iceberg, their visible glimmer concealing a hidden mass, much of it unmappable in the dark. Because essays are innovations of the mind, and a great essay is made of what made you. Or it might help you make yourself:
Reflecting on his video essay that concerns male friendship, Connor Elmore writes of trying to get his conclusion right when it felt wrong: “I knew I had to return to my personal life, to personal action. So, I began recording on my laptop and called a dear friend from my hometown. Through a pause, I told him I loved him, something I had never done before. Sure, this meant a solid ending for my essay, but even further, it outlined a path of action, a step towards change within my own life.” Reflecting on their essay that concerns bodily autonomy, Ace Harvest writes: “I had no conclusive argument when I began this writing process—I only had questions, and asking them only gave way to more questions. There came a point where I simply had to choose an answer, rather than find one. I had to create my own truth, and declare it: in spite of everything, my body is mine.”
To be sure, not every essay can or needs to do such work. But I hope that this year you can write just one essay like an aerial robot—an essay that communicates—an essay that flies—an essay that just might help rescue someone. And when you’re done, please accept Prof. Schnairsohn’s challenge, and submit your essay to us at Mercer Street. We’ll want to read it.
Sincerely,
Abby Rabinowitz
Clinical Professor, Expository Writing Program
Editor, Mercer Street
If you look back through the Mercer Street archive, you may notice that this year’s publication is smaller than recent editions—about half as big as we’d expected. There are nine essays and three video essays, whereas we usually publish around twenty essays and (maybe) one video essay. I have a few ideas about why this is so.
One is that reading is just getting harder. Reading, responding, writing about what you’ve read—all of this needs attention and care. It requires patience. Our culture values patience less and less. I can feel it in my body as I write this note: my eyes keep going to my phone. Another possible explanation is that essaying, already a difficult process, is getting more difficult to learn, and perhaps more difficult to teach, as the culture NYU shares with most American universities demands more and more that students (and professors, and administrators) speak in declarations rather than claims. Do you know the difference between a declaration and a claim? If not, ask your writing professor.
It is important that you speak, and that your voice be heard. But how do you come by what you have to say? Where do claims come from? How do you know whether you’re proposing a claim or declaring an opinion? How do claims become ideas? How does a piece of writing become an invitation into conversation, rather than simply a declaration of position? Ask your professors these questions—not just your writing professor.
I want Mercer Street to publish twenty essays again next year. We will need your help. If you practice patience, if you allow yourself not to know something even as you pursue it, if you push yourself past factitious wisdom and tweetable quotes into a place where you don’t yet know how to say what you feel you want to say, so that you need to look again at a text to illuminate one more part of your idea, and then do it again—in short, if you gamble on your own ability to see deeply into something you haven’t yet figured out, and on your own creative powers to make a new and true idea out of a respectful and prolonged inquiry into difficult evidence—we may get some more essays in here next time.
Good luck!
Leeore Schnairsohn
Clinical Professor, Expository Writing Program
Managing Editor, Mercer Street
The final essays included in the 2024 Mercer Street collection reflect the evolution inherent in the writing process: countless drafts, comments, conversations, and re-reads have gone into the essays you read. Whether carefully annotating for a class assignment or casually browsing, we hope you appreciate the dynamic nature of these pieces individually and of writing and thinking more widely. There may be such a thing as a “final draft,” where, after much consideration, that long and windy process of revision ends, but there is no such thing as a “finished” piece of writing; the thinking that any essay produces is also a continuation of the work.
The essays featured in this collection show striking similarities both in their thematic focuses and in their theoretical approaches. Although the topics varied, we noticed many students chose to tackle issues of gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, particularly how these themes are represented in mass media. Mikah Mazza asked ‘What does a fair representation of queerness look like for fans?’ while Connor Elmore considered how ambiguous representation can challenge assumptions of queerness in male friendship. Camryn Loor spoke about the ways in which one artist used her body as a tool of expression and communion with nature, while Ace Harvest grappled with the work of an artist whose body was perhaps a site of appropriation. Bobby Zabin represented photography that rewrote the narrative around Latinx presence in the U.S., while Alexander Palmieri cautioned us of the unseen power that conflict photography can wield to paradoxically hinder us from acting on injustices. Within each essay and across the collection, there is a striking presence of tension. The same questions continued to jump off the page: how should we represent the human experience and what are the dangers of representation?
Mercer Street is partially designed to be an aid to students and professors in writing instruction. However, we believe this collection also fills another purpose: as a standalone literary magazine whose contents provide a window into the minds of NYU writers. Representing disparate academic disciplines and backgrounds, these student writers highlight some of the most pressing dilemmas we must contend with today. At first glance, some of these problems seem easily boiled down to simple conclusions: of course women on screen should be more than an object to ogle; of course we should have more meaningful queer representation on television. But these essays take simple conclusions and do the more challenging work of asking what’s next? They favor exploration over a single argument—they ask how we ought to rethink and reconceptualize these dilemmas in a more nuanced way. They weave together various arguments, opinions, and claims into a cohesive representation of a societal problem, a style indicative of the evolution from high school to college. Many essays do not feature a foregone conclusion, but they value precision, attempting to clarify ideas and nestle them into a growing theoretical web of other thinkers’ ideas.
In his reflection, Connor Elmore wrote: “My professor began the semester with this idea: the word ‘essay’ is derived from the French infinitive ‘essayer,’ meaning ‘to try.’” Many of us were given this definition upon entering NYU. What it reveals, beyond the absurdity of perfectionism, is that writing through your thinking will always lead to evolution; towards the end of the editing process, after participating ourselves in this evolution, we went back and read earlier drafts and materials given to us by student writers and traced the threads of thinking throughout the many different iterations of the essay—the result was that we could watch deepening in action and see how students continuously asked and then answered their questions. Each attempt at capturing a thought or developing an idea becomes part of an increasingly nuanced conversation among writers—even if not written with the others in mind, ideas easily float between the essays and inform one another. You, the reader, then join the conversation and can weave the many threads together.
Ultimately, it is you who makes the meaning in the end. Thus, in both the literal and figurative sense, writing is a collaborative act: we are truly honored to have taken part in the evolution of these pieces, from first to final draft, and hope you will help us continue the work prompted by the twelve writers in this edition.
Sincerely,
Hazel Walrod, Rylee La Testa, and Megan Maxfield, Junior Editors