I wrote an editorial statement, put out a call for manuscripts and waited for the essays to pour in. Twenty years later, I started the journal Creative Nonfiction to provide a literary outlet for those journalists who aspired to experiment with combining fact and narrative. Otherwise, I don’t want to be bothered.” Luckily, most of my colleagues didn’t want to be bothered fighting the school newspaper, so the course was approved-and I became one of the first people, if not the first, to teach creative nonfiction at the university level, anywhere. One colleague, aghast at the prospect of this “new thing” (creative nonfiction), carried a dozen of his favorite books to the meeting- poetry, fiction and nonfiction-gave a belabored mini-review of each and then, pointing a finger at the editor of the paper and pounding a fist, stated: “After you read all these books and understand what they mean, I will consider voting for a course called creative nonfiction. As the chairman of our department put it one day in a faculty meeting while we were debating the legitimacy of the course: “After all, gentlemen”-the fact that many of his colleagues were women often slipped his mind-“we’re interested in literature here, not writing.” That remark and the subsequent debate had been precipitated by a contingent of students from the school newspaper who marched on the chairman’s office and politely requested more nonfiction writing courses “of the creative kind.” My colleagues snickered when I proposed teaching a “creative” nonfiction course, while the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences proclaimed that nonfiction writing in general-forget the use of the word creative-was, at best, a craft, not too different from plumbing. When I started teaching in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s, the concept of an “artful” or “new” nonfiction was considered, to say the least, unlikely. Newspapers are publishing an increasing amount of creative nonfiction, not only as features but in the news and Op-Ed pages, as well. Every year, more universities offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in creative nonfiction. Many of our best magazines-The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Esquire-publish more creative nonfiction than fiction and poetry combined. Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion of creative nonfiction in the publishing and academic worlds. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self discovery, flexibility and freedom. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but also encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. Creative nonfiction writers write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary techniques in their prose-from scene to dialogue to description to point of view-and be cinematic at the same time. In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. This is perhaps creative nonfiction’s greatest asset: It offers flexibility and freedom while adhering to the basic tenets of nonfiction writing and/or reporting. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage, although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through a mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotation and the adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.” Ernest Hemingway’s paean to bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” falls under the creative nonfiction umbrella as does Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.”įor a time, this kind of writing gained popularity as “New Journalism” due in large part to Wolfe, who published a book of that title in 1973 which declared that this style of writing “would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.” Gay Talese described New Journalism in the introduction to his landmark collection, “Fame and Obscurity”: “Though often reading like fiction, it is not fiction. George Orwell’s famous essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” is textbook creative nonfiction, combining personal experience with high-quality literary-writing techniques. I have been using it for a long time, though, as have others, and although the term came into vogue relatively recently (about the time I started this journal, 13 years ago), the kind of writing it describes has a long history. This may come as a surprise, but I don’t know who actually coined the term creative nonfiction. Creative Nonfiction: A Movement, Not a Moment
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