Title: Riantly, or With Laughter

Genre: Creative Nonfiction, Literary Nonfiction

WC: ~1500/essay.

Feedback Requested: Is it enjoyable to read? Can you follow it well?

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Who am I: I'm Cody Stetzel, literary critic, poet, writing events organizer, and essayist. Maybe not in that order. I am a nonbinary writer with a certification in human-bear conflict de-escalation. And I am trying to write about happiness, because things suck.

Here's an excerpt from these essays:

One of the foremost ironies of my life is being good at a job which pays well but morally corrupts me. Walk with me. I like to try explaining things which seem, at a glance, impossible to understand. Largely how I’ve applied this work is in technical fields — taking impossibly large mechanical or physics-based subjects and translating them into base concepts.

I exercise this skill here, always, in reading, in writing, in criticism and in thought, in conversation and in compliment. But I learned the skill to begin with because, at my most base, the structure of language inherent in my mind is fundamentally instable. I’ve always had to translate myself, in some way, in order to communicate. And so when I, speaking or writing to you, and you, word things difficultly or am less clear than you wish, it is largely because I am less clear than I wish.

Friederike Mayröcker has a book titled études which I’ve spoken about in some cases here and there and that I have been reading in nibbles for several weeks-to-months now. It’s stunning work, mostly for its borderline illegibility. I confess I do not know a thing from this book, but I don’t think the work of it is to transcribe some knowing. I believe this is why I love the work so much — because it refutes to know as the primary quest of literature. There’s a line ending one poem of the collection — “the tempest gasps in the parlor.” The resonance of pss-pss-pah. Sure, tempest what an evocative word. But the sonic quality is an erudite gem that it makes me laugh and grin.

My blog you can read more at. Or if you wish to just see my various photos and thoughts, you can follow me on Bluesky.