Essays:  Points of Departure

Allan has written several non-fiction, personal essays, as well as more literary criticism than you can shake apart a deconstructionist with (sans vibragun, of course).

Personal Non-Fiction

  • Betwixt and Between:   Allan won the 1997 Langston Hughes Award for Excellence in Prose for "Betwixt and Between," and remains quite proud of that fact some thirty-odd months later.  It's about my desire to have been born left-handed, and left-handedness in lanugage and myth. 
  • The Closer Side of Night:  This essay shares its title with one of my poems, and was written in 1994 and 1995.  It details the deep depression which I survived while attending my undergrad at Penn State (something I'm fortunate to have not reexperienced since then).
  • The Enemy Within
  • How to Walk, One Step at a Time
  • Personal Mythology
  • The Recollection of Memory
  • Shadowings: An Introduction to Migration Patterns:  This essay is what actually got me into non-fiction, personal essay writing in the first place:  I wanted to introduce my thesis without the usual boring thing.  Everything afterward was a downhill slope . . . .

Literary Criticism

I will add some more papers and such here, at some point--probably on various American Renaissance authors first, like Melville ;-0


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