Execute the Office: Essays with Presidents

With one essay for every president in American history, Colin Rafferty's Execute the Office uses lyric prose and formal invention to explore the humanity, or lack thereof, that thrived in each of these powerful individuals. Whether celebrated for infamous deeds and heroism, or forgotten as placeholders in the annals of America, too often presidents are commemorated by the sterility of simple fact. However, non-fiction contains life, and Execute the Office seeks to balance both halves of the creative nonfiction genre by writing essays that are invested as much in lyrical writing and experimental forms as they are with factual accuracy. To balance these factions, Execute the Office uses constraint, metaphor, allusion, and epiphany to explore not just the facts and artifacts of history, but describe the connections between the facts and human nature in thought-provoking and inventive ways. These essays discuss the modes in which we remember through death songs, footnotes, infinite rooms, evacuation routes, and nomenclatures. While diverse in scope, each essay stimulates thought and engagement and will resonate in everyone, from the student of history to the individuals attempting to do and to be better, whether they have failed, have succeeded, been corrupted by, or currently strive in the pursuit of those attempts. Execute the Office contains histories in unusual objects. While unfamiliar at first, they soon become distinct, unforgettable, profound.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Colin Rafferty grew up on the Kansas side (which makes a difference). In third grade, he unhesitatingly told an autograph dealer that the label on a Lincoln autograph was wrong―he was the sixteenth president, not the seventeenth. Later, Rafferty attended land grant universities (Kansas State, Iowa State) and eventually got an MFA from the University of Alabama. He writes about monuments and memorials (Hallow This Ground, Break Away Books, published in 2016), presidents (Execute the Office), and more generally public and private histories. In doing research for Execute the Office, he visited the graves of 28 presidents, toured the homes of another 16, and, for reasons still unbeknownst to him, was allowed to handle a four-page letter written by George Washington. Rafferty has taught nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington since 2008, developing classes on nonfiction of place, the lyric essay, and writing for multimedia. Since 2012, he has lived in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their dog in the same neighborhood where Patrick Henry gave the “give me liberty or give me death” speech in the presence of two future presidents. He is surrounded by history.