Ed Park’s essay, “The Blizzard of ‘77,” pairs the story of a monstrous blizzard in Buffalo with the story of a board game modeled on the same event. Park’s essay shows us how memory is reconstructive—how we can revisit and rebuild the past through events, images, and stories as we try to understand what it means. Let’s see how he does it.

Welcome to Everything Essay! where we read an essay together and study the craft at work. Go ahead and read Ed Park’s essay now—it’s about 2,000 words long and will take about 8 minutes.

What’s It About? (the story on the surface)

The Blizzard of ‘77 is about a disastrous weather event that left 20 people dead and shut down Buffalo, New York for over a week. Ed Park’s essay is also about The Blizzard of ‘77 Travel Game, a board game modeled on the storm and sold thousands of copies.

The Craft at Work

Structure. Park’s essay is segmented, numbered and braided. The segments alternate between Park’s childhood experience of the blizzard, the story of the board game—its creation, how it’s played, and how Park encounters the game later in life.

Most board games have the instructions presented as a list of numbered steps to make the set up and rules of play easy to follow. Park mirrors that structure in his essay. Does that make “The Blizzard of ‘77” a hermit crab essay, where a writer uses another form to tell their story? Not exactly. Park uses a numbered list, but the sections don’t read like instructions. They aren’t written in an implied second-person point of view (e.g., Roll the die.) and they don’t sound instructional.

Still, the segmented and numbered format makes Park’s essay to track as he approaches the blizzard from multiple angles—the blizzard’s story, the child’s story, the game designer’s story, the adult Ed Park’s story.

Then and Now Narrators. The essay spans a 45-year period, from 1977 when the blizzard hits and Park is six years old, to 2022, when he buys the Blizzard game off eBay.

When you write personal essay and memoir, you end up working with the voice and perspective of two narrators: the then narrator and the now narrator. Here, the then narrator is Park as a child living through the storm. The now narrator is Park at 51 looking back on the blizzard through the lens of the board game.

From the child’s perspective, we see the blizzard through a six-year-old’s eyes: a wall of ice and snow piled high against the front door, school canceled for a week, and his dad home too because he declines the offer of a helicopter ride to work. As the adult now narrator, Park explores the blizzard in a more reflective and nuanced way, relying less on his memory and more by using the board game as a comparison, a metaphor, for understanding what happened.

Research and Sources. To fill in the blanks regarding the impact and devastation of the blizzard for the reader, Park quotes and summarizes media sources from the time (segment 1). Park uses copy from the board game box and the game’s instructions to show the reader both how the game works and how the storm is translated into play.

Making Connections. I think the magic in Park’s essay is how he pairs his childhood experience of a blizzard with the a board game that goes viral. That’s original

Park’s description of the game, the parts, the board, and the instructions of how to play, was probably my favorite part of the essay. Lots of detailed descriptions. And the essay pivots here too. Once the board flips to the blizzard side, [t]he world—the game—changes immediately, for everybody. The most clever player has no advantage; there is no strategy for winning. Park taps into something much larger than the game, how life events are often random and uncontrollable.

Imagined Scene. Park brushstrokes in a mini-imagined scene in segment 9.

Think of Charles Marino, seeking shelter after snow swallows his car, realizing that his half-hour trip home is not going to end any time soon. Picture him cloistered in the firehouse, fishing for a dime so he can call Donna and Paul and tell them he’s safe, while knowing that others were not so lucky. Though the play can feel interminable, at least in the game, no one ever dies.

Through his research, Park knows that the game designer, Charles Marino, abandoned his car during the blizzard and sheltered in the local firehouse, safe and warm, for a few days before he could return home. Park wasn’t there. He didn’t know Marino. But he “imagines” what Marino might have been thinking and feeling. He creates a mini-imagined scene and invites the reader in with active verbs: Think. Picture.

Then Park moves on his own interior thought about Marino’s predicament and contrasts that to the game: In real life, the storm was deadly, in the game, no one dies.

Imagined scenes can help you recreate moments that you weren’t present for or don’t remember. But these scenes work best when they’re grounded in fact, when the writer has some knowledge, research, or resource, to support what’s imagined. Essays are creative nonfiction, so there’s room for some imagination, but you typically want to stay as close to the facts, the reality, as possible.

Metaphor and Book Ending. Young Park shares his first image of the blizzard up front (segment 2):

I remember opening our heavy wooden front door out of curiosity and being confronted with a wall of white.

A metaphor! The child Park is confronting the unknown.

Park returns to the front door at the essay’s close (segment 9):

…unchanged since day one, and I looked one last time at the thick wooden door I had opened that January morning so long ago, like a polar portal to Antarctica. Outside the grass was green.

Time has past. Park brings the reader full circle from the blizzard of is childhood to a final visit to his family home decades later.

Look for opportunities to return to images and language, as Park does here, that can make a connection, deepen meaning, and bookend your essays—providing a sense of closure.

There is so much great craft at work in Park’s essay I could keep going. What craft do you notice? What lights up for you?

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The Aboutness?

In my last newsletter I defined the aboutness as what the essay is about on a deeper level, what percolates below the surface, what’s submerged and bubbling up from underneath and within the story—and there for the reader to uncover.

Park plants a seed for that deeper meaning at the end of segment 2.

That door of snow, pounded flat against the glass, loomed like a giant piece of paper—blank, untouched. Now I see it as a page from the future, on which I would inscribe my memories of home.

Here, Park hints hard that his essay is about memory and home.

And at the essay’s close, the adult Park writes:

I remember as a kid I once wrote my name in tiny letters, on patches of stucco along the staircase. It was my secret, binding me to the house. I looked for the signatures, but they were nowhere to be found, as though the white stucco had swallowed them up, like so many drifts of snow erasing every human trace.

The blank page from his childhood returns transformed to a wall of white stucco. Now the image speaks to loss from the blizzard and to the loss of Park’s childhood home. The missing signatures point to fading memory and identity, and maybe even to the way we all will be erased over time.

Take a minute to think about what Park’s essay is about on a deeper level—the aboutness—and let me know what you think.

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The Outlet

The essay was published by Graywolf Lab, which they describe as “an online platform for interdisciplinary conversations and new writing from Graywolf Press.” (I’m a big fan of Graywolf Pres and ave many books that they’ve published.) In 2024, the Lab published conversations, poems , essays and fiction on the theme of Time. In 2025, the them was Games. I don’t see a theme announced for 2026 yet. I spoke to a Graywolf editor at AWP a couple weeks ago and she said check back to the website for new calls for submissions.

Ed Park’s Latest

If you liked Park’s voice and writing style, check out his recently released short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis. Park has a great imagination and wit, and he can be quite funny. My favorite stories were: The Wife on Ambien, An Accurate Account (clever, an epistle), Seven Women, and Thought and Memory.

An Opportunity

If you are interested in turning your own writing life into publishable essays, I’m teaching a 90-minute class, Write About Writing—And Get Published on March 30. Learn more and register here. Questions? Message Me.