Miranda K. Pennington

Contributor Spotlight - Miranda K. Pennington

​Miranda K. Pennington’s office at American University is located behind the Bender Sports Arena. I didn’t know this - and the several other people I spoke to didn’t know, either. The building, which appears as “SCAN” on the AU Map, is home to many of AU’s professors that teach in the College Writing program. I took a winding path around an eagle statue and a set of greening steps before I managed to find it, but find it I did. The building reminds me of the “portable” classrooms we used to have in elementary school, just, perhaps, bigger. White walls, tile floors. It seems a bleak, sterile place to put the offices of writers. Especially a writer as vibrant as Miranda.

This piece is the first Miranda has published since her book A Girl Walks Into A Book: What the Bronte’s Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work came out in May 2017. Miranda connected with Melissa Scholes Young on Twitter, and saw this as an opportunity to begin publishing essays again. One of the first stories she wrote while attending Columbia University’s MFA program, the essay, according to the author, is totally true. It was different than the work she had been producing up to that point. Miranda noted to me in an e-mail that “I went in writing a lot of lighter, comedic essays, and this was one of my first attempts to dig deeper and tell a story that only I could tell, rather than a relationship essay or pop culture commentary, which a lot of people do so well.”

---

Miranda’s essay in Grace in Darkness certainly epitomizes both “grace” and “darkness.” “Puncture” is haunting and quietly shocking.  It was hard to believe her, at first, that the essay was true, for the it reads like the best realism, and left me feeling so raw that I almost hoped the essay was fiction. But indeed, Miranda worked at this unnamed “make a stuffed animal-store” when she was 19 years old. She described it to me as a slightly cult-like atmosphere, but enjoyed it because working there required a certain amount of presence and human interaction, as detailed in the essay, but after the shift was over, she could turn that side off.  The prose is tight and exact without losing its heart. Even though it is a short piece, still felt for the protagonist deeply. She is relatable and perhaps slightly awkward, and this allows for the narration to be lightly humorous. It is short, too, and required the most precise of pacing. This was something Miranda was well aware of:,“This [essay] was also one where I knew I had a Moment I wanted the audience to experience, and had to trust my pacing instincts rather than listen to suggestions like cut the lighter opening or get to the "gasp" quicker.”

The mourning of a dead child is a prominent theme in this piece. When we met to discuss this essay, Miranda and I commented on the various ways that women throughout history have mourned the premature deaths of their children. Though the characters in this essay chose an unusual method, it is perhaps not any more jarring than Victorian post-mortem photography, in which the families of the deceased would often pose with the corpses, or social media-era Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, an organization that provides, according to their website, “beautiful heirloom portraits to families facing the untimely death of an infant.” The enclosing of ashes inside of a Build-A-Bear is similar to these practices, but somehow more heartbreaking. The essay that “Puncture” tells is one of secrecy, perhaps. Certainly there is love, there is gentleness, but the hiding of the ashes is certainly its own kind of shame.

Love and gentleness in the face of a challenging situation is one of the reasons why “Puncture” has a place in this anthology. But I was still curious as to why Miranda decided to submit this piece in particular. In her own words:  “After I read the description of this issue's theme, that mix of light and dark, I looked over my work and this piece just fit the best thematically--it has the most contrast of any essay I've written, and it stands alone. I was only 19 when the essay's events took place, and it was one of the first times I was ever actually required to show grace in the midst of an unsettling or unexpected experience.”

This is the first piece Miranda has published since her book was released last May. In the best light, publishing your work can be seen as the birth of something new and wonderful; in the bleakest it could be compared to the loss of something very dear to you. Publishing is at least a little bit scary for all writers, and it probably changes the way you write from that point forward. I asked her if publishing a book has changed her outlook on writing. Miranda wrote to me: “Publishing forced me to get more comfortable with letting go…Once it leaves my hands it really doesn't belong to me in the same way, which is an adjustment! You can't follow people around and explain what you meant, you just have to sit with what you wrote, and who you were when you wrote it. Writing the book taught me so much about structure and thinking on a large scale--when I work on essays now, I have to make a conscious effort to scale my ideas down, to reacquaint myself with the constraints of the genre.”
​
I am so appreciative that Miranda has trusted Grace in Darkness with her beautiful piece. It may no longer be in her hands, but it is now in ours, and I trust that the readers of the Grace and Gravity series will handle it with all the care of a newly stuffed teddy bear.