Sarah Minor, doctoral student in creative writing
Sarah Minor, Ph.D. candidate in English (nonfiction), has republished her essay, “Handling the Beast,” with Proximity magazine. The essay was originally published by Conjunctions as a traditional text-only piece.
In Proximity, however, “Handling the Beast” takes on a new, tactile element: the essay now appears in trading card format, which readers are able to download, print, shuffle, and reshuffle, thus reading the essay in myriad different orders.
“This is a version that feels truer to the piece, and that I’m much more excited about,” Minor notes. “As with other examples of visual essays, I hope the design of ‘Handling the Beast’ prompts a reader to think about reordering these pages, about hands and about shuffling as a gesture, even if readers don’t actually print, cut, and handle the pages physically,” she adds.
Minor’s essay grows out of her longstanding interest in rendering nonfiction work through various visual media. “This is one of the first visual essays I wrote, and the piece has shifted as I’ve learned more about how to engage a reader using design strategies,” she explains.
Minor is the author of The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). She teaches as an Assistant Professor of Nonfiction at the Cleveland Institute of Art, curates the visual essay series at Essay Daily, and is the video editor at TriQuarterly Review.
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