Nothing Small About Small Things

A few weeks ago, Anne Fadiman read from her new essay collection at a bookstore. The book is called Frog and Other Essays. Its subjects include a dead pet frog, an old printer she refuses to throw away, her struggles with Zoom, and a hand-typed periodical published on Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expeditions at the turn of the twentieth century.

After the reading, an audience member raised her hand. Her question was direct: why write about apparently trivial things when the world has so many difficult problems?

Fadiman answered with the story of The South Polar Times.

In 1902 and again in 1910, Scott’s men wintered in Antarctica through months of total darkness. They were far from home, facing genuine danger, cut off from everything familiar. Scott decided they needed a periodical. One of the explorers hand-typed it once a month. It circulated among the men like a sacred text — officers and ordinary sailors reading the same pages, laughing at the same jokes, pausing over the same small beauties drawn from memory of a world they might not see again.

“We need beauty, wit, and attention to small things,” Fadiman told the Harvard Gazette in April 2026, “even more when we have to face large, painful things.”

Fadiman is a literary essayist, journalist, and professor at Yale. She graduated from Harvard in 1975. Her 1998 book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader became a classic of the essay form. She has been teaching nonfiction writing at Yale for twenty-one years. She knows the difference between trivial and small. They are not the same thing.

E.B. White spent the last decades of his life on a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine. He wrote about his geese. His dog. A spider in his barn. A child’s swing. A trip back to a lake he had visited as a boy with his own father, and now revisited with his son.

That last essay — “Once More to the Lake,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941 — is considered one of the finest pieces of American prose ever written. It begins with a man and his son fishing in Maine. It ends with the man watching his son pull on a cold, wet bathing suit and feeling, in his own groin, the chill of mortality.

White got there from a lake. From a small thing, observed with complete attention.

He wrote Charlotte’s Web because a spider in his barn interested him. He watched her. He paid attention. He wrote: “A writer’s job is to notice things other people don’t notice.” The spider became a book about friendship, loss, and the way love continues past death. Generations of children have read it and understood something true about the world — not because White set out to teach them, but because he looked at a small thing long enough and honestly enough to find what was large inside it.

The audience member at Fadiman’s bookstore reading was asking the wrong question. It is not: why write about small things when large things exist? It is: how do you write about large things without starting small?

Scott’s men in Antarctica did not need a newspaper. They had no use for headlines from London. What kept them sane through months of polar darkness was a hand-typed magazine about the small, funny, beautiful things they carried inside them from the world they loved.

The Power of Authors teaches that purpose is not the same as scale. A writer’s purpose is to bear witness — to see clearly, to tell the truth, to reach the reader who needs exactly what only this piece of writing can provide. Nothing about purpose requires a large subject. Everything about purpose requires genuine attention.

Fadiman starts her essays in the smallest place she can find, then lets them open. The dead frog opens into a meditation on grief. The obsolete printer opens into a meditation on aging. The South Polar Times opens into a meditation on what human beings need when they are afraid.

White started with a spider and arrived at death and love.

You may be sitting with a story you have dismissed because it seems too small — too ordinary, too personal, too close to your own life to matter to anyone else. That dismissal is the thing standing between you and the book only you can write.

Small things, observed with complete honesty, hold large truths. They always have. The writer’s job is to notice. The rest follows.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

 

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