CREATIVE NONFICTION: PERSONAL ESSAYS, MEMOIR, ANDFIRST-PERSON JOURNALISM

DANIEL NESTER, INSTRUCTOR

WHAT IS CREATIVE NONFICTION?

WHAT IS CREATIVE NONFICTION?

WHAT ISCREATIVE NONFICTION?SOME ATTEMPTS AT DEFINITIONS.

One common question you will encounter, or perhapshave already encountered, as a result of registering for our class is:

What is creative nonfiction?

One answer comes from Lee Gutkind, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction and the so-called “godfather” of the genre. He didn’t coin the term, but he did teach one of the first creative nonfiction classes around 1970.

Gutkind defined creative nonfiction as:

“Nonfiction that employs techniques like scene, dialogue, description, while allowing personal point of view and voice (reflection) rather than maintaining the sham of objectivity.”

Where did the term come from?

Where did the term come from?

No one really knows.

It’s safe to say that creative nonfiction was written before the name was termed — in other words, it’s a largely academic term to rope off whole wings of prose writing, as opposed to fiction and poetry.

I don’t mind the academic term personally; it’s my hiring slot here at the College, after all.

But I think it’s important you get some background on the name itself.

First there’s nonfiction. On the surface, that term seems fairly self- explanatory: that which is not, or the opposite of fiction.

Something that’s true.

But, seriously, what is true,what is truth?

One person’s truth is another person’s myth.

One person’s bad childhood is a mother’s joyful time with a son or daughter.

There are some things we can see as facts— dates, times, names— but there are others that are more prone to taste and judgment and that most subjective of terms, memory.

The invasion of Iraq, for example. Some don’t even callit an invasion. Some call it a liberation, others an awfulquagmire.

Debates like this continue and will always be that way. But thepoint is when people write about real-life subjects,whichever the viewpoint, be it an article or book, it will betaken as “nonfiction,” not a story, poem or play.

Then there’s creative. This, again, is an academic buzzword. We’ve all probably heard of “creative writing.”

Many people aren’t happy with the term creative nonfiction, and it begins with this word, creative.

Phillip Lopate calls the term as “slightly bogus.” “It’s like patting yourself on the back and saying, ‘My nonfiction is creative.’ Let the reader be the judge of that.”

Fair enough. But we should keep in mind that the naming and classification impulse, the necessity to graft the word creative onto nonfiction, comes not only from academic and education circles, but also from human nature, an impulse to organize.

It may not help in describing the aesthetic and artistic impulses that go into writing creative nonfiction, but it does have a necessary function with everything from course and lesson plans to grants for writers.

Other descriptors that have been used and are still used in place of creative nonfiction:

new journalism literary nonfictionfirst-person nonfiction personal narrativeprose nonfiction

Creative, however, has some meanings that are directlyantithetical to nonfiction— that is, the truth.

To create means not only to portray — that is, to re-create— but to make something up, to make something out ofnothing.

Creative nonfiction could be interpreted as one of those great oxymorons, the stuff of a cheesy Jay Leno monologue punchlines:

“jumbo shrimp,” “diet ice cream,” “business ethics,” or “military intelligence.”

The idea of “creative” does draw attention to the idea of creation and also what Gutkind refers to, rather datedly, as the “sham ofobjectivity.”

Can any story be told, or object or person portrayed, completely truthfully and objectively?

Does it matter who tells us the story?

Does it matter when a story is told?

Or who is reading the story?

Does it matter from which vantage point at story is told?

Of course it does.

Should a story keep in mind its audience, the background of the subjects as well as the teller?

If there is drama involved, or if the story or person portrayed has some kind of inner life that the writer can only guess or speculate is happening, does the writer merely report the exteriors (“just the facts, ma’am”) and leave it at that?

No. We don’t.

Joe “Just the Facts, Ma’am” Friday

We humans, in our real lives, are capable of guessing, empathy, intuition, dreaming, poetry, and drama.

We research. We ask questions. We create.

We speak our truth.

Though only recently identified and taught as a distinct and separate literary genre, the roots of creative nonfiction run deeply into literary tradition and history.

“Cogito ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am.”

— René Descartes

For centuries, writers have asked questions and havewritten stories drawn from real life. Usually, writers start with — who else?— themselves.

Saint Augustine’s Confessions, for example.

“I give thanks tothee, O Lord of heaven and earth, giving praise to thee for that first being and my infancyof which I have no memory. For thou hast granted to man that he should come to self-

knowledge through theknowledge of others, and that heshould believe many thingsabout himself on the authority ofthe womenfolk. Now, clearly, Ihad life and being; and, as my infancy closed, I was already learning signs by which my feelings could be communicated to others.”

Creative nonfiction writers say yes, it does matter who is telling the story, it does matter who is experiencing what is happening.

Take, for example, the branch of creative nonfiction called “literary journalism” or the “literature of fact.”

These works employ literary techniques and artistic vision usually associated with fiction orpoetry to report on actual persons and events.

The term has since evolved, and includes everything from nature and travel writing, the personal memoir and essay, as well as “new journalism,” “gonzo journalism,” and the “nonfiction novel.”

Gonzo Journalism

New Journalism

New New Journalism,

Nonfiction Novel

All of these terms refer to reporting in which the reader senses a specific person narrating and guiding the story.

An authorial- writerly presence that can be very subtle, as in the New Yorker pieces of the last century.

You might see an old black and whitemovie in which you will see a

newspaperman dictate a story and refer to him or herself as “this reporter.”

Later, starting in, say, the mid- 1950s, journalism started to involve the reporter; he or shebecame part of the story, or is acknowledged as being present during the action described.

One way I can think of teaching this would be those moments when you are watching a TV report of starving kids in Africa, and you say to yourself or shout at the screen,

“Why doesn’t the reporter hand those kids a bowl of food?”

Other times you may read a profile of a movie star in a magazine — Esquire or Vogue, ones that are a step above the trashy gossip magazines — and you will get a sense of the reporter.

A writer will admit to being flustered by really being in front of Brad Pitt.

That’s Brad Pitt up there.

There are so many branches of the creative nonfiction tree.

Coming-of-age memoirs ofFrank Conroy, Mary Karr and Frank McCourt.

Part-of-my-life memoirs.This could be considered an off-shoot of first-person journalism.

These include illness memoirs, road trip emoirs, and immersion memoirs.

Tell-all memoirs

These include from everyone from the recent KarrineSteffans’ Confessions of a Video Vixen

back to Harriette Wilson, a courtesan who became famous for her Memoirs, which is still in print and which make for fascinating, if not historically accurate, reading.

First sentence:

“I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.”

Wilson also had her revenge on her former noblemen lovers who refused to pay her an adequateannuity for not including them in her tell-all. When she approached the Duke of Wellington

To which he uttered the famous line, “Publish and be damned!”

In her lifetime she became, perhaps, the single mostfamous courtesan in London, dressed in her white muslin and courted by leading members of the nobility.

Another branch of creative nonfiction is the personalessay.

Examples of personal essayists: Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, David Sedaris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sloane Crosley, Meghan Daum, Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff.

To name just a few.

Immersion and undercover journalism of A.J. Jacobs, George Plimpton, David Rakoff, Beth Lisick, Barbara Ehrenreich.

Documentariesand film works such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super- Size Me or even the Jackass movies might count as a variety of creative nonfiction.

“Oops” (2000) by Laurel Nakadate

Short, topical essays, which include op-ed newspaperpieces, especially the ones that have a particular point of viewof an author, a personality easily identified with that writer(George Will, Maureen Dowd).

First-person pieces that address a newsworthy topic, one with a news peg (magazines).

Art criticism and aesthetic writing: From the Victorian age (Hazlitt, Arnold, Ruskin) to Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, William Gass, David Hickey.

Personal, first person-aware, often zany, music criticism of such writers as Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis, and Jessica Hooper.

The prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire, up to the dense meditations of Albert Goldbarth, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson.

The so-called lyrical essay, experimental prose forms that draw from fact or autobiography.

Genre-defying prose: experimental essays and nonfiction that uses techniques more akin to post-modern poetry or experimental cinema: Lydia Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum.

Some other terms that are used that would fall under theumbrella term of creative nonfiction:

just plain “nonfiction,” belles- lettres, the fourth genre, first- person journalism, lyrical essay, pillowbook writing, epistolary essay, the diary or journal, and some of the more focused blogs.

This list could go on for pages.

Perhaps because it’s such a catch-all term, so many subdivisional terms, the creative nonfiction genre nomenclature is sometimes considered either the bastard child of the short story, the refuge of navel-

gazing, confessional memoirists, or the Frankenstein construct of academia,

creative nonfiction is often cast as the Rodney Dangerfield of genres that gets “no respect.”

All this may be true, but creative nonfiction is also a genre that produces some of the most exciting and vital writing published today.

Works of creative nonfiction grace the bestseller lists and the front tables of chain bookstores.

Creative nonfiction writers win Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Critics Circle Awards, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many other accolades.

One thing that is exciting about creative nonfiction, at least to this practicing writer, is the freedom that comes from this indefinability.