Joy! an essay in factorial

An experimental braided essay, plus a lesson on braided essays w/ prompts!

May 21, 2025

Please enjoy this experimental, braided essay. If you read to the end, I included a note on braided essays and several prompts to inspire your own braided essay if you’d like to give it a try. Please share your essays with me if you write one in response to the prompt—that always makes my day!

Joy! an essay in factorial

5!

5 My teacher explains the concept. It’s called a factorial, she says, writing an exclamation point after the number five on the whiteboard. So five factorial, she says, is five times four times three times two times one. We all write it down, chubby hands moving yellow pencils across lined paper, figuring the factorial. Five times four is twenty. And twenty times three is sixty. And sixty times two is one hundred twenty. It’s so much more than we expected. One hundred and twenty, we gasp. From such tiny, insignificant numbers as five, four, three, and two? It feels like magic. But it’s just math. All week, I add exclamation points after everything. I make everything a factorial. More! More!

4 My best friend and I lie face-down on parallel black leather tattoo chairs, arms propped on twin rolling tables, wrists turned towards the fluorescent lights above. Our spare hands dangle between the chairs, clasped as the needles descend upon the paper thin flesh of our wrists, thrumming ink wildflowers into bloom. My friend squeezes my hand. I squeeze back. She is turning twenty-eight. We have been friends for seven years. This is our third matching tattoo. But numbers can’t quantify our friendship, varied and fierce and infinite as wildflowers, stretching alongside a highway for miles.

3 My fiance dumps a box onto the counter, sending a scatter of squares over the stained formica counter. The magnet squares are white with black type. Garden. Whisper. Sea. Symphony. Dream. Mother. We pinch each word between our fingers and stick them to the fridge until its scratched silver is covered in a cloud of hundreds of magnet words.

2 The spokes on ten bicycle wheels spin into silver blurs as my family and I spiral down languid bends in the road towards a small village in France. The town is fed by mountain aqueducts so, as we bike, there is a steady thrum of water gushing through stone channels beside us, rushing ahead to the small inn where, dusty and hungry, we plant our kickstands in the dry earth, and dismount.

1 Now, I stand between two bodies of water, at the point where the Northern Atlantic slaps into the Cape Fear River, sending great leaping sprays of white water towards the royal terns that swoop through the sky above. It’s called the Frying Pan Shoals off the tip of North Carolina’s Bald Head Island. I’m here for the weekend for a writing retreat. There are so many birds I can’t count. Such an abundance of wings, feathers, and curving claws sharp as nails.

4!

4 The needles retract. Medicated wipes swipe over my best friend and I’s fresh tattoos, wicking blood and ink away before clear bandages are stuck to our shaved skin. We emerge from the dim shadows of the tattoo shop into the clear California sunshine. Arm-in-arm, we stroll down the street, letting our heads fall back in unison, eyes closed against the brightness. We search for a bar. And we find one. We always do. We order drinks one after another, letting the empty glasses multiply on the table between us.

3 Contacts still foggy with sleep, I shuffle to the refrigerator for water, blinking the world into focus. My fiance has already left for work, but the sweet, earthy smell of his morning coffee fills the kitchen. I close the fridge. Several of the magnets we placed on its silver surface have coalesced into a poem at the center of the word cloud. Drunk on life / I whisper to the girl / my sea of love. I wrote it for you, my fiance texts me, while my coffee brewed.

2 A man and a woman emerge from the inn in France. The woman dusts her hands on a checkered apron tied her at her waist. The man says something in french. My dad calls back in English. Lunch, he mimes. Do you have lunch? Termine, the man replies. C’est fini, the woman clarifies. We know enough French to understand. It’s 3pm and the French have very strict rules on when lunch can and cannot reasonably be consumed. My little sister, only nine at the time, bursts into tears. Her tiny legs have been keeping pace with our much-longer ones for over twenty miles.

1 Now, I wade into the ocean, the dueling waves of opposing waters tugging at my calves. My toes crest in and out of the soft sand. The sun slants over my shoulders. One writer friend walks to my right, long tousled hair gusting back and forth across her back. Another writer friend walks to my left, arms painted with tattoos. A mermaid. A skull. A lily. A snake. I never thought I would have this. A writing retreat. Multiple writing friends. A whole community around me here in the ocean.

3!

3 Every morning my fiance leaves me a new poem. It’s the first thing I check when I wake, even before my phone. On Monday: Crush the TV / go out to our garden / live in time. Later that week: A thousand dreams / like a symphony of / cool gorgeous things. The next week: languid summer/ swim beneath shadows / together. And on and on. It’s been months, and the poems haven’t ended. We’re getting married in October. Maybe they never will. The limit does not exist.

2 The woman at the inn does not understand English, but she understands a nine-year-old’s tears, and she dashes into the inn, finger raised behind her, shouting, “Attend! Attend!” We wait. She emerges a few minutes later, with a basket in her arms. In halting English she says, Only we have left dessert. My sister’s glassy eyes light up.

1 Now, we follow our professor from the Frying Pan Shoals, one after the other, like a line of ducklings, into the mottled shade of a tropical forest. This is the northernmost tropical forest, he tells us. A bird titters in the trees and he echoes its call. Seedeater, seedeater, seedeater, seed. That’s a Carolina Wren, he says. The bird calls again. And he’s right. It sounds like it’s saying seedeater. A small miracle, learning something so new about something I’ve heard so many times.

2!

2 Outside the inn, my family and I empty the basket of desserts. We remove four chocolate tartines, three creme brulees, two profiteroles, and a large golden rectangle of millefeuille. We thank the man and woman profusely, and they sit with us as we eat, their own children romping out of the inn and watching intently as we tear into the desserts like we haven’t eaten in days. From a closed door, came a couple, came a basket, came desserts. It is still the best lunch I have ever eaten in my life.

1 Now, our duckling line of writers settles amongst the trees to write. Perched in elbows of trees, computers on crooks of knees, we type, trying to conjure something out of the everything around us. Ten students type with twenty hands and one hundred fingers, thousands of words blinking into black on white pages as tiny bugs alight from our arms and legs, buzzing in chorus with our brains.

1!

1 And all these small beauties, viewed like this, multiplied one against the other against the other make so much more than you’d expect. A life. The light shafts drift through the trees in shuddering golden swags, moving with the wind in the branches like curtains over an open window. I close my computer and walk home. To a coffee mug of wine and maybe some chocolate, to joy!

A note on braided essays:

A braided essay is an essay in which two or more stories are woven together, usually in an alternating pattern as you read in my essay above. When the stories are braided together, each individual story is amplified in meaning. Since we’re on a bit of a math kick today, a successful braided essay is more than the sum of its parts. Each story should illuminate the others in a way that causes you to more deeply understand all of them. For example, in the essay above, each individual braid related a relatively small moment of joy, but, taken together, I hoped that the many small stories might amplify each other to communicate a larger message around how the little joys are what make a truly joyful life.

There are many ways to write a braided essay. Sometimes it looks like braiding multiple personal stories together as I’ve done in the essay above. Other times it’s braiding your story with research as I did in On Mermaids and Men Making Shit Up. Sometimes it’s braiding your story with another well-known story, like Snow White, as I did in Confessions of a Reformed Influencer. The more braids there are, the more difficult it becomes to pull off the essay, but I often find that introducing just one other braid (so weaving together two stories) actually makes essay writing easier, rather than harder. Sometimes adding research or referring to another story gives your essay a clear structure that can be hard to establish when trying to write about your own experiences that might have no clearly defined beginning or end. I really encourage you to experiment with braided essays and see how you like it! You can get started with one or both of the braided essay prompts below:

Prompt 1: Pick a well-known story—like Snow White, Medusa, The Godfather—and think of a theme or concept from that story that relates to a personal experience you’ve had. For example, I’m working on a braided essay now about Sleeping Beauty, and I’m going to relate it to my own struggles with insomnia. Then, take your personal experience and the well-known story and weave them together to create a more layered and compelling essay! (see an example here).

Prompt 2: Pick an emotion—like joy, fear, jealousy—and identify several stories from your own life in which you experienced this emotion. Braid those stories together so that, when read as one essay, they communicate a larger point about your chosen emotion, as I did in the above essay.

*Bonus Prompt: If you don’t feel comfortable writing a braided essay, another fun way to experiment with your essays is to play with length. Last week I challenged myself to write an entire essay in 500 words or less. See if you can do it! And check out my super-short essay below if you need an example: