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11/11/2005 Archived Entry: "Creative Non-Fiction"

Creative Non-Fiction
Twice this year, I've heard presentations I've given called "creative non-fiction." I have no idea what this actually means; I don't study anything that is called creative non-fiction, and I'm not really sure what the genre entails. I have no connection with any kind of “creative writing.” Is this a bad thing (being creative)? What is it we do that would not be creative? Is the opposite of what I'm doing some kind of stiff prose (and is it our desire to cultivate such stiffness)? Why would "creativity" be the anomaly, and not the norm (like some students tell me from time to time: "I can't do this assignment because I'm not creative"). I guess I got the label because:
1. Lack of objective stance (the distance prose mythologized as "academic writing")
2. Open nature of the "I" composing the writing; the self-reflection; the pauses to wonder and question what I just said or experienced, the open discussion of why I can't negotiate moments where there is no meaning, yet I am experiencing something, etc.
3. Concern with place (Detroit as moment of invention)
4. Reliance on association in place of causality for exposition

This label keeps returning to me in my thoughts. "Am I creative non-fiction?" I don't think so. But I went back to re-read Jim Corder, whose work is often called creative non-fiction as well. Corder's work is quite odd. Laments over the state of pedagogy, asides about cutting his grass, heavy self reflection, emphasis on Texas where he lived and grew up, critique of pedagogical practice that is stiff and out of touch with how rhetoric circulates outside a classroom, critique of the blind continuation of pedagogy that cannot justify itself as rhetorical practice (only as assignments to give). Sirc returns to Corder often. I see the parallels between the two, and knowing how much Sirc influences me, I began to see that a return to Corder was necessary. I felt the same years ago when I went back to Macrorie (who I also hear when I read Sirc), and despite my problems with expressivism, couldn't resist the lure of Uptaught. Macrorie and Corder are these two lost figures to composition - sometimes anthologized, but seldom placed in the kind of conversations we reserve for others. I'll have more to say on Corder soon; I'm waiting for a used copy of Yonder, Life on the Far Side of Change that I found online.

Posted by robert @ 11/16/2005 11:56 AM EST

Well, when you figure it out, let me know, since I get to teach Intro to Creative Nonfiction next semester.

UNH tries to demystify the term by throwing genres at it: nature writing, the profile, the memoir and "the personal essay" (as opposed to the impersonal one, I guess). Whatever it is, it's somewhat of an institution here—approx. 300 students take it every semester.

I've been listening to Lee Gutkind clips at the Creative Nonfiction journal site; he defines CNF as the act of "writing the truth" as a journalist does (teehee) while using literary techniques to "elevate the quality." Sounds to like a concept that's just begging for parody and exaggeration, which might be what my students mostly end up doing.

Posted by Mike @ 11/13/2005 11:45 PM EST

W.Coles's -The Plural I- and Mike Roses's -Lives on the Boundary- may well fit the "creative non-fiction" label, though more folks are drawn to the latter.

Here's Coles on his process of engagement w/ -PI- ten years after:

===

"The successive rewritings of The Plural I involved me at first then only in a very superficial attempt to eliminate what other people had found offensive in it. I worked to purge my pages of the appearance of arrogance and self-aggrandizement while at the same time trying to hang on to my image of myself as outsider, as the lone wolf professional, tough but fair, directing a learning process in which he himself never really participated.

It didn't work of course, the attempt to simply tone that notion down, and that failure is what pushed me, stumbling, into the dialogic, novelistic form of the book. I had to create something to play against the all-consuming voice of my narrator. My students, in other words, had to get a hearing.

And then I found I had to create my teacher as someone could listen to them."

====

Funny to think of Plato returning to his dialogues ten years later and writing an afterword or preface.

How might Plato reflect on his framing of Gorgias and Hippias?

Hmmmmmmmm, I wonder if such an writing/re-reading opportunity would be considered "creative nonfiction" ... ???

Posted by gvcarter @ 11/13/2005 11:31 AM EST

"Creative" or "literary" non-fiction is super hot right now. So I guess this is a compliment. Except for the fact that so much of the stuff is god-awful.

Posted by cbd @ 11/12/2005 07:04 PM EST

1. Lack of objective stance (the distance prose mythologized as "academic writing")

How about deconstruction/destruction of the myth of the objective stance? The "creative" as a deconstructive/demystifying force ...

Or how about aesthetics vs. empiricism, i.e., imaginative observer immersed in material world, reconciling the minds-eye images with lived reality? Virtual and material real swirled together . ..

I myself dislike the term "creative nonfiction." One could often just as easily apply the old label "expository writing."

Posted by comp mafia @ 11/11/2005 02:26 PM EST

Yeah, you know, I've been thinking along these lines, the way that what we teach and do as scholars/rhetoricians is defined against something else called "creative writing," so that it seems you know you're teaching composition if you're teaching something that isn't interesting, that isn't engaged in larger connections with what's going on. Weird. Weird affect that seems to garner a nearly field-wide attachment.

Posted by Donna @ 11/11/2005 11:21 AM EST