Larry Brown was very conscious of language and the relationship of words and sounds. Fascinated with form, he actively experimented with it.

In his first book of creative nonfiction, On Fire: A Personal Account of Life and Death and Choices, Brown chronicles his life as an Oxford, Mississippi fireman. These are short untitled essays and vignettes strung together like pearls. Taken as a whole, they give us insight into the work of being a hero, as well as the work of being human, and throughout, the work of being a writer/witness/vigilant record keeper.

Many of these pieces are a breath away from a prose poem, as in the first essay in this collection, which begins, “I love what I do with my hands and with the hose. I love the knots I know how to tie…” (1). Note the rhythm, assonance. A thoughtful set of sure footfalls begin this piece, as if Brown is pulling on his turn-out pants, his scuffed boots, reaching for his fire helmet.

As he moves into the piece, the pace quickly jacks up; the stakes are named and speed becomes all important. Feel it in this sentence: “… I love the two-and-a-half-inch hoses and the big chrome nozzles that no one man can hold, the red axes and the pry bars and the pike poles that we tear down ceilings with, looking for devious pockets of fire, sneaky little bastards that will smolder and rekindle the house after we’re back at the fire station asleep in our beds, and I love to stand at the pump panel and set the relief valve and hear it open when a line is shut down, and I love to know that I can operate this $200,000 piece of equipment like I’ve been taught so that nobody will get his ass burned up because of me” (2). Brown uses language to replicate adrenalin, courage, trust, a hero’s required arrogance, and the dash of cynicism that keeps him respectful of his enemy. Note the alliteration, the harsh, biting consonants, the teeth in the language. Notice the use of and in the long sentence to create the heft of one action dovetailed with another, one thought working in layers of other thoughts, all focused on the ever-escalating business at hand. The feelings hovering above this piece are abstract, about what the mind can achieve and the body can overcome, but these abstractions and emotions are conveyed in the physical extreme, the tools, the equipment, specific nouns, THE OBJECTS, the action, the training, the specific verbs, THE GESTURES. It doesn’t matter if the reader doesn’t know what a bowline is or what a pike pole is. They have a context to interpret, and maybe an impetus to go learn something they don’t know. Brown never writes down to his reader. He collaborates with his reader, draws him or her into the physical space of his narrative.

Look closely at this essay and make note of what Brown leaves out. That may be the most telling test of all. So often as readers we remember a piece of writing and think emotion and feelings were on the page for us to read, but in fact they were evoked by the very expert use of everything but emotion and feeling. Object and gesture were the method used to wrestle the named gorilla—fire. And they are also the tools Brown uses to wrestle the gorilla of conveying all that emotion and abstraction and energy on the page.

The essays ends with softer, slower sentences as the fire is over and the firemen head back to the firehouse, and later the bar, and then sit out front of the fire station and pass the time until the next crisis. After Brown has given us the details, made us fully aware of the stakes, he gives us the release, the crash after the adrenalin rush, and then states his final message with a concept: brotherhood.

Work cited: Brown, Larry. On Fire: A Personal Account of Life and Death and Choices. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1993. Print.

Exercise: What do you love? How can you use words to convey that energy on the page through object and gesture and word choice? Make a list of what you love, make a list of words you associate with that activity, concentrating mostly on specific nouns and specific verbs. Continue to add to and refine that list, those words. Move out from there.

Scene storm word list (plucked from Brown’s essay discussed above):

lick

hitch

line

tear

pocket

slip

bow

eat

hinge

loop