Time and Distance Overcome
Eula Biss
Notes From No Man's Land

1) The voice is very straight forward. Biss comes off as trustworthy because she doesn't flit around the subject. She doesn't pass judgement just states the words as they are and allows the reader to do with them what they may. "A postcard was made from the photo of a burned man hanging from a telephone pole in Texas, his legs were broken off below the knees and his arms curled up and blackened." Biss is descriptive but in a literal rather than flowery sense. The piece ends with a glimpse at Biss's own attitude but even then it is abstract and undemanding-- "Nothing is innocent' my sister reminds me. But nothing I like to think is unrepentant."

3) Biss paints an unnatural beauty to the telephone poles in one of the final paragraphs. The image is striking in comparison to the bleak world she has so far created. "I believed that the arc and swoop of the telephone wires along the the roadways was beautiful. I believed that the telephone poles, with their transformers catching the evening sun, were glorious."

6) Biss often writes in short lists. Paragraphs are full of snippets of related ideas such as different lynching cases. It is written like an investigative journal article and in a couple places newspapers and sources with authority are quoted. The paragraphs are equally short giving the essay an urgency.

7) There are two obvious sections to this piece. The beginning follows the creation of a telephone network focusing on the dissent to it. The second part is about the racial attitudes during the time, the lynching that took place, the bodies that hung from the telephone poles that so much controversy went into raising. I was thrown when the topic went from the chaos in resurrecting telephone poles to race riots. Biss makes the leap smoothly but it is still jarring when a topic you are invested in and feel the writer is invested in telling you about is swapped for another. The two pieces come together at the end when Biss shares her thoughts on the bipartisan nature of the telephone poles themselves.

8) There are two areas of this I would love to emulate. First off I would love to write a piece that winds creativity and story telling with facts. Which, incidentally is what creative non fiction is so I assume I will have ample opportunities to do that. Second, I admired how she to took seemingly unrelated topics and connected them in a way that felt at first unnerving but became natural by the end.

10) When and why did she come to connecting telephones and racial attitudes?
       Why did she chose to only turn to first person in the very conclusion of the essay?