Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario. I was searching for an image of mill tailings. Burtynsky, of course, I thought when I found it. The photograph shows black, barren trees, thin and broken like toothpicks that appear to be…
I’ve never worked on an essay for as long as I worked on “Manufactured Landscapes.” Only in hindsight did I recognize my problem as my being overly interested in the “situation,” as Vivian Gornick calls it in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. I’d read her craft book many times. And yet it was nearly four years before I realized that a deep obsession with the situation of my essay had been holding me back from finding the story—“The thing one has come to say,” in Gornick’s words.
When I first began writing, it felt like I was unraveling a mystery about West Chicago, the town where I spent my early childhood. I read dozens of articles and combed through EPA reports about its status as a Superfund site. Of course, journalists had already done this work, which was why I had so many rabbit holes to explore. Part of me knew this all along—the part that kept bringing in more personal details about my family’s health and the way the essay had felt so pressing to write just after my daughter was born. But the feedback I received from trusted readers always pointed to the way those threads felt tangential to the essay, which I mistook to mean that I should try different personal strands, rather than reconsider the bigger questions my writing was surfacing.
Eventually, I became desperate enough to make the essay work that I decided to add an artwork as a revision strategy, since I came to writing through arts criticism. This method felt forced at first. The town I was writing about wasn’t aesthetic or easily related to pop culture. It was only after thinking back to the early days of my research about the Superfund site that I remembered how I had wanted to know what mill tailings look like—a desire that had brought me to an old favorite photographer, Edward Burtynsky, through a Google image search, which felt more like a passing thought at the time.
Instead, the image search became my way into the “story.” Once I was able to extract myself from the overwhelming amount of information I’d read, it became easier to uncover the ways “the situation” held meaning to me as a writer. As I found a way to re-enter the essay, the excitement I’d felt while creating my early drafts came back—this time as I worked through the art history that I was using in real time as a tool to finally find the thing I had come to say.
ERIN LANGNER writes about art, architecture and identity. She is the author of the essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise. Her personal essays and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, Fourth Genre, The Offing, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Langner is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency and a Jack Straw Writers fellowship. She earned her MA in Museology from the University of Washington and is Manager of Editorial Projects at the Frye Art Museum. She is working on her second collection on the ways art helps us navigate time, space, and change throughout our lives. Find her on Bluesky @erinlangner.bsky.social or Instagram @erins_sweater.
