Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: On the Teaching of Creative Nonfiction, Or “Only a Few Have a Natural Talent for Nudity”
A few days ago, Twitter (more precisely: my Twitter pal @MikeScalise) led me to an exchange on memoir and essay, which developed into a conversation about the ways in which creative nonfiction (cnf) tends to be taught (in MFA programs and presumably elsewhere). One of the points that seemed to attract agreement concerned a troubling trend to equate cnf with memoir (particularly, if not exclusively, confessional memoir) instead of inculcating a more expansive understanding of the types of writing that can fall beneath the cnf umbrella.
The discussion reminded me of similar ideas I’d had back when I was an MFA student myself. Remember that I attended a low-residency MFA program, and I was a fiction specialist. I was therefore provided cnf instruction only within the framework of the “gateway” seminars all of us attended, regardless of selected genre.
We were assigned to write brief “response papers” in preparation for each of these seminars. Here’s what I wrote for a creative nonfiction seminar held in January 2002. (I can’t tell you what the faculty/program response was, because I never received back any of my response papers or comments on them. But that’s a topic for another post. Also, in the original, I provided footnotes to document the Jane Kramer and Adam Gopnik pieces that I discuss in the text; in this post, I’ve linked to them on The New Yorker‘s site.)
I realize that in a way, this is an odd moment for me to be reiterating a call for attention to creative nonfiction beyond the memoir. I seem to be publishing a short streak of memoiristic essays these days myself. But it has taken me a long time to arrive at this point, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with it. Plus, I’ve written plenty of non-memoiristic nonfiction along the way: review-essays, opinion pieces, history, etc.
In any case, please keep reading if you are so inclined. And please check out the discussion question at the bottom of the post. (more…)