Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (2 page)

Since my coeditor, Michael Martone, and I had already decided to use a sophisticated democratic online survey of teaching writers for the second edition of
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
, we thought that another survey like it might also be an excellent opportunity to poll teaching writers about the most compelling contemporary nonfiction they’ve read and taught in their creative writing workshops and their composition and literature classes. Thus began the long, arduous process of publishing the first edition of the
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction.

Not long after September 11, 2001, Simon & Schuster’s David Rosenthal described to Edward Wyatt of the
New York Times
what he saw as a recent trend in the reading public away from fiction to nonfiction: “If there’s any theme, it’s that people only want to read the truth.” Following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Rosenthal continued, “readers flocked to nonfiction works.”
¹
Since the James Frey scandal that began the public debate about the ethical boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between memory and imagination, this trend, if anything, seems to be accelerating.

Speculation about the causes of this rise in nonfiction’s popularity has been wide and varied. In
Many Mountains Moving
, one of the many small literary magazines now regularly publishing creative nonfiction, writer and editor Naomi Horii tells interviewer Andrea Dupree, “Good creative nonfiction has always been important in literature — take Thoreau or Laura Ingalls Wilder.” As journalist Deanna Larson of the
Nashville City Paper
speculates in an interview with creative nonfiction guru Lee Gutkind, “Only 50 years ago, Americans didn’t talk much about their personal experiences or impressions…. But that culture has changed. Readers crave compelling stories about real events that tell them why they should care.”

While the rise in the reading of nonfiction by the general public is understandable at such a volatile point in history — the end of a millennium during radical global change — it mirrors a similar increase in the number of creative writing programs now teaching the writing of the so-called fourth genre, literary and/or creative nonfiction.

As our survey and anthology bear out, many poets and fiction writers are transforming traditional nonfiction through lyric, scenic, and structural innovations into something altogether new, raising complex questions about “the truth” in its relationship to literary perception and point of view, blurring the lines between “faulty” memory and the vividly rendered details of the imagination that fill in those gaps.

It is an interesting, important time to be reading nonfiction.

Whatever the reasons for its rising popularity, according to the
Associated Writing Programs Official Guide to Writing Programs
, creative nonfiction is now widely taught alongside courses in poetry, fiction, drama, and screenwriting in the more than three hundred writing programs across the United States and Canada, and the number of creative writing programs advertising for new nonfiction teaching positions has risen significantly over the last decade. Furthermore, as the selections in this anthology suggest, many of the country’s most gifted poets and fiction writers are also writing remarkable, compelling nonfiction.

Perhaps because of the increased interest by the reading public and the growing number of students reading and writing nonfiction, literary journals such as Gutkind’s
Creative Nonfiction
and Michael Steinberg and David Cooper’s
Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
have proliferated. Despite the rise in books on the writing of nonfiction, however, there are still surprisingly few affordable nonfiction anthologies for professors and students to use in their nonfiction classes and workshops.

For this reason and others, the original premise of
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
— to create the highest-quality, most affordable anthology from a democratic selection of teaching writers in universities across the United States and Canada — seemed a perfect starting point for a new anthology of nonfiction, especially when, along with the stunning rise in the costs of a college education over the last decade, the costs of anthologies have almost doubled, some anthologies selling for well over $50 in college bookstores.

Assembling a low-cost, democratically selected anthology like the
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
can do much, we hope, to help make the costs of an education more within reach for students and still bring to a wider audience the most compelling contemporary nonfiction written over the last thirty years.

The Online Surveys

For the month of July 2006, we conducted two separate online surveys of freelance and teaching writers for the second edition of
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
and the new
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
. After a long, arduous search using many sources including Google, the
Poets & Writers Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers
, and many university and writers’ websites, we obtained the names and email addresses of more than two thousand poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and journalists, those with well-established reputations as well as those at the beginning of, we hope, distinguished careers.
²

From this pool of writers, we received survey responses from just under a hundred, many of them distinguished nonfiction writers, fiction writers, and poets, who nominated a total of more than five hundred essays based on the following two questions:

•What short essays published since 1970 would you most like to see in an anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction? (In other words, what essays do you most often photocopy and bring to discuss in your creative nonfiction classes?)

•Why do you read or teach these essays? What specific technical or thematic concerns do they best illustrate?

At the end of July, we collated the survey’s complex results and ranked the essays. Then after several months and no small difficulty in locating the nominated essays, I emailed the same writers who had nominated them to find out where they had found them. Within a matter of days, I’d received stacks of essays via email, snail mail, and fax. It was a remarkably generous response, and we’re grateful to all who saved us countless hours looking for essays in small literary magazines and other difficult-to-find publications.

“You’ve got to read this,” everyone told us, and we did.

The nominated essays we’ve included in this anthology are ranked in this order: Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” (seven nominations); Thomas Lynch’s “The Undertaking” (four); Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels,” Phillip Lopate’s “Portrait of My Body,” Tony Earley’s “Somehow Form a Family,” and Sue William Silverman’s “The Pat Boone Fan Club (three each); and Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place,” Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life,” and Michael W. Cox’s “Visitor” (two each).
³

Choosing among the remaining essays that received a single nomination was incredibly difficult, but the result is, we hope, an anthology that includes a remarkable range of voices unlike any nonfiction anthology we’ve ever seen.

We live in a time a time of big lies and little lies — one president under fire for lying about sex, another for lying about war — and people are hungry for “the truth.” Ask any journalist, essayist, fiction writer, or poet, and he or she might say that striving after truth, the journey itself, is at least as important as the arrival, if not more so, and more often than not it simply raises more questions. Strive as we might for “the truth” — for some certainty
about
it — there are at least as many truths as there are those who believe what they want to believe.

And the rest of us? What can we do? Read everything we can and try to decide the truth in it.

Whether we like it or not, we’ll always be stuck with the “factual” truth of observation, faulty memory, and its imaginative interpretation — the fact that, even in physics, just the observation of a quantum event can change it — but the best nonfiction writers take all this as a given. Impatient with lies, especially the lies they tell
themselves
, they give intelligent, critical readers greater freedom by asking questions about the emotional and psychological truths that matter. They try to tell their stories as truthfully as possible, and then they say:

This may not be exactly what happened, but it’s exactly how it felt.

— Lex Williford

^1.
www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/07/business/booksales.php

^2.
We tried as much as possible to respect the privacy of writers, often solitary and protective of their time, and gave all the writers we surveyed the option of having their names removed from our email list, and we did so, if they wished, immediately. We also asked authors to nominate
only
essays by
other
writers, and when a few of them couldn’t resist the temptation to nominate their own, we eliminated those nominations. Even so, because some of those we surveyed are also some of our most well-respected nonfiction writers in the United States, we had no trouble publishing their essays based on no other criteria but others’ nominations and the high standards of craftsmanship their work represents.

^3.
We also chose several other highly ranked essays, essays we really wanted to include, but we simply couldn’t afford their high permissions costs.

Scott Russell Sanders

There is a kind of writing that begins from the impulse to make things up, to invent a situation and see how it unfolds, to create characters and see what they do. Since around 1600, such writing has been called fiction, from a Latin root meaning “to feign” or “to counterfeit.” In making fiction, the writer freely goes wherever imagination leads. The only requirement is that the counterfeit be sufficiently compelling to engage the reader’s attention from the first line to the last.

Writing may also begin from a contrary impulse, not to make things up, but to record and examine something the writer has actually witnessed, lived through, learned about, or pondered. Such writing can range from history and philosophy to manifestos and memoirs, from the formality of footnoted tomes to the pizzazz of slangy blogs. What all such writing has in common is faithfulness to some reality that the writer did not invent — to a shared history, to real people, to actual events, to places one can visit, to facts one can check. For better or worse, this wildly diverse range of writing has come to be called, by contrast with the freely invented kind,
non
fiction.

Dividing the realm of prose literature into fiction and nonfiction is clumsy at best, rather like dividing the realm of animals into birds and nonbirds. It might be technically correct to describe giraffes and june bugs as nonbirds, but it would not tell us anything about giraffes or june bugs, or birds. Nor is it useful to lump together a four-volume saga of the Crusades and a four-page celebration of croissants under the single label of nonfiction. Judging from the earliest citations of the word in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the label was imposed by nineteenth-century librarians, who began dividing their books into the twin categories of fiction and nonfiction (originally with a hyphen). I suspect they did so, at least in America, to emphasize the portion of a library’s holdings that were solid, sober, useful, uplifting, and, above all,
true
, such as encyclopedias and repair manuals and religious tracts, as opposed to the romances, poetry, mysteries, fantasies, westerns, pirate adventures, thrillers, dime novels, and other frivolous books that wasted readers’ time and corrupted youth and made no mill wheels turn.

Whatever the origins of the nonfiction label, the publishers soon picked it up, and then so did bookstores, critics, and teachers, and now, clumsy though it may be, we are stuck with it. One virtue of the term is that the sly little prefix
non
-implies a promise — that such literature is neither feigned nor counterfeit; it is answerable not merely to the writer’s imagination but to a world beyond the page, a world that precedes and surrounds and outlasts the act of writing.

Of course, these two contrary impulses — to freely invent a world or to report on the actual world — rarely exist in pure form. Fiction must draw on the familiar world if it is to be comprehensible, and nonfiction must draw on the writer’s imagination if it is to come alive. Ask a roomful of writers how far a work may be shaped by imagination before it no longer deserves to be called nonfiction, and you’ll receive a roomful of answers. Most likely all will agree on the necessity of choosing, from the myriad of possible details, those that are essential to the story and leaving out the rest; many writers will accept the filling-in of memory’s blank spaces with vivid details; some will permit the merging of incidents or characters to streamline the account; and a few will claim the right to add, drop, change, or invent anything that enlivens the work.

While we may debate where the line should be drawn, at some point along that spectrum, nonfiction gives way to fiction. When a writer crosses over the line and still claims to be offering nonfiction, it’s usually for the sake of selling more books. Why does it sell more books? Because, in a culture awash with phoniness, we hunger for authenticity. We’re so weary of hucksters, talk-show ranters, ideological hacks, inane celebrities, sleazy moralists, and posturing politicians that we long to hear voices speaking from the heart rather than from a script. Amid so much fakery, hypocrisy, and outright fraud, we long for the genuine. Knowing this, television producers manufacture “reality” shows, film-makers promote movies as “based on a true story,” and some authors, with the connivance of their publishers, fabricate a sensational tale and call it a memoir. In a culture besotted by marketing, we shouldn’t be surprised by such deceit.