Preface

Contents

Alternative Contents by Topic

Alternative Contents by Subgenre

Alternative Contents by Techniques and Strategies

Part One: Meanings

Chapter 1: Defining Creative Nonfiction

A Visit to the Bookstore

What Creative Nonfiction is Probably Not

Chapter 2: Kinds of Creative Nonfiction

A Brief History

Memoir

The Essay

Critiques, Rants, and Reviews

Lyric and Reflective Essays

Place Writing

The City Essay

Literary Journalism

Part Two: Craft

Chapter 3: Form

Elements of Form

General Principles

Beginnings

Middles

Endings

Formal Options

Chapter 4: Description

Description of a Place

Description of an Ordinary Thing or Activity

Description of a Person

Description That Moves the Action

Description for Its Own Sake

Chapter 5: Dialogue

Dialogue Tags

Creating Mood Through Dialogue

Chapter 6: Style

Varieties of Style

Punctuation

Rhythm and Style

Repetition

Point of View

Chapter 7: Revision

Figuring Out What it Needs

Revision Challenges Confronted by All Writers

Revising After a Piece is Accepted

Two Examples of Revised Work

Part Three: Research

Chapter 8: Written Sources

Types of Sources

Incorporating Sources

When do Writers Research?

Chapter 9: Interviewing

Whom to Interview

Composing the Questions

Face to Face or Far Away?

Scrawls and Transcriptions

Literary Journalism and the Interview

Interviewing People You Know

Putting it All Together

Chapter 10: Ideas for Writing

In Class or On Your Own

Classroom Ideas for Writing

Part Four: Anthology

Steve Almond, from Candyfreak

"I hoped to seek out other purebred candyfreaks, men and women who still made bars the old way, in small factories, and who did so not primarily for profit but out of an authentic passion for candy bars."

Interview with Steve Almond

Margaret Atwood, "A Path Taken, with All the Certainty of Youth"

"If I had suspected anything about the role I would be expected to fulfill, not just as a writer, but as a female writer—how irrevocably doomed!--I would have flung my leaky blue blob-making ballpoint pen across the room…"

Tara Bahrampour, "Persia on the Pacific"

"Los Angeles and Iran lie at opposite ends of the world, but for the past twenty-five years – ever since the first Iranians fleeing the revolution established an exile outpost in L.A. – the two places have been closely linked."

Interview with Tara Bahrampour

Kim Barnes, "The Ashes of August"

"Born and raised with in a fifty-mile radius of where I now live, I have memories of late summer that are infused with fire."

Inteview with Kim Barnes

Gabrielle Bell, from Lucky [graphic memoir]\

"In order to sustain us through mind-numbing jobs, it is necessary to tell ourselves lies, and mine is that if only I was surrounded by France, I would no longer feel perpetually ill at ease."

Interview with Gabrielle Bell

Sven Birkerts, "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man ; or, Why I Can't in Good Conscience Write about Noam Chomsky"

"I faced the difficult fact: I will do nothing overt to further causes I believe in – I will do nothing political."

Chester Brown, from Louis Riel [graphic biography]

"Why have I been brought here? I’m not crazy! I’m a prophet! I must free my people!"

Wanda Coleman, "The Evil Eye"

"He’s blinded by the sight of a mixed couple and huffs around us in a hostile orbit."

Interview with Wanda Coleman

Frank Conroy, "A Yo-Yo Going Down, A Mad Squirrel Coming Up"

"I was, in the language of jazz, ‘up tight’ with my yo-yo, and finally free, in one small area at least, of the paralyzing sloppiness of life in general."

Dennis Covington, from Salvation on Sand Mountain

"Red hair flying, speaking in tongues, she had lifted up the pile of snakes to eye level and shouted at them until her face turned crimson, and then she had dropped them back onto the pulpit …."

Guy Delisle, from Pyongyang [graphic memoir]

"Buried 90 meters underground, the Pyongyang subway can double as a bomb shelter in case of nuclear attack. What better way to cultivate a constant sense of threat?"

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse"

"Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun want away."

Debbie Drechsler, "The Dead of Winter" [graphic memoir]

"Yeah, well. Also, someone has to go with me. To the clinic. For the abortion. You know. Just in case."

"Yeah, sure. Listen, I gotta go."

Interview with Debbie Drechsler

David James Duncan, "What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation"

"The majority of challenges to the printed word in American schools, libraries, and bookstores are made by people who call themselves ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘evangelical’ Christians."

Interview with David James Duncan

Gerald Early, "’I Only Like It Better When the Pain Comes’: More Notes Toward a Cultural Definition of Prizefighting"

"It should come as a surprise to no one, knowing modern prizefighting’s national and racial origins, that the sport extols most simply and directly the values that the Anglo-Saxon male has historically cherished most: the indomitable will of the individual, aggressive conquest, and contempt for humiliation and submission."

Interview with Gerald Early

Dave Eggers, from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

"It is an unsaid mission of mine, the source of which is sometimes clear and sometimes not, to keep things moving, to entertain the boy, to keep him on his toes…. It’s an effort, I’m guessing, to let him know, if it weren’t already obvious, that as much as I want to carry on our parents’ legacy, he and I will also be doing some experimenting."

Miriam Engelberg, from Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person [graphic memoir]

"But if I expect pessimism to work, then I’m being optimistic. Which is bad. Isn’t it?"

Louise Erdrich, "Rock Paintings"

"Of course, the rock paintings are not just pointer signs. They hold far more significance. They refer to a spiritual geography, and are meant to provide teaching and dream guides to generations of Anishinaabeg."

Elizabeth Gilbert, from Eat, Pray, Love

"…Catherine. She’s my one and only sibling…. We were just beginning to hammer out the new terms of our relationship when my marriage went into a skid."

Laurence Gonzales, "Marion Prison"

"The administration of Marion, as well as the Bureau of Prisons, maintains that the population of USP-Marion, being radically different from all other prison populations, merits such radical conditions as total lockdown and justifies the forty thousand dollars per year per man that it costs to maintain those conditions."

Emily Hiestand, "Maps"

"Our town was then a kind of modern frontier village, insular and close, full of purpose and people pulling together, like immigrants to a new land."

Edward Hoagland, "Circus Music"

"In a circus you didn’t have to – weren’t supposed to – avert your eyes, and that may have been its ultimate kick."

Denis Johnson, "Run, Rudolph, Run"

"Eric Robert Rudolph will be formally charged in October for the Northside clinic bombing. Some Bible-based Christians believe that any business offering to stop the human organism’s growth in the womb deals in murder, and that whoever kills a man or woman working there saves lives."

Interview with Denis Johnson

Jennifer Kahn, "Notes from a Parallel Universe"

"Judging from the reams of odd theories sent daily to science journals, universities, and researchers, science cranks are more prolific than ever."

Interview with Jennifer Kahn

Barbara Kingsolver, "Household Words"

"…Homelessness as a significant problem occurs in countries stricken by war, famine, plague, and natural disaster. And here, in the USA. Why are we not carrying on with ourselves, our neighbors, and the people who represent us the conversation that begins with the question, What on earth is wrong with us?"

Maxine Hong Kingston, "A Sea Worry"

"As they watched for the next wave, the boys turned toward the ocean…. When a good wave arrived, they turned, faced shore, and came shooting in, some taking the wave to the right and some to the left, their bodies fishlike, one arm out in front, the hand and fingers pointed before them, like a swordfish’s beak."

Interview With Maxine Hong Kingston

Amitava Kumar, from "Traveling Light"

"Our freedom as a later generation of Indians has also meant a freedom from Gandhi worship."

Interview with Amitava Kumar

Li-Young Lee, from The Winged Seed

"And I see now his faith is his God was learning to winter-out those Pennsylvania winters and those hard communions. But if those communions were difficult, were they empty?... Was my father wasting his time? Was he wasting his life?"

Maya Lin, "Between Art and Architecture"

"…I did not want to civilize war by glorifying it or by forgetting the sacrifices involved."

Paul Lisicky, "New World"

"Things are happening inside my head. One minute I work on a new song, which I’m planning to send to the producers of The Partridge Family, the next I think about the street names in Cambridge Park, a development under construction near our house in Cherry Hill. Everyone who knows me knows that I want to be a builder, a famous builder, like Bill Levitt, when I’m older."

Interview with Paul Lisicky

Norman Mailer, "The Faith of Graffiti"

"There was always art in a criminal act—no crime could ever be as automatic as a production process—but graffiti writers were opposite to criminals, since they were living through the stages of the crime in order to commit an artistic act…."

Demetria Martinez, "Inherit the Earth"

"With a patience that rivals Job’s, the migrant gathers information, plans, packs, says good-bye to her family, then strikes out. It is not Disneyland she hopes for, but dignity."

"The Things They Carried"

"…empty plastic water jugs, a backpack, a baby bottle, soap, Colgate toothpaste, a hairbrush, a sardine can, a sock, and used AeroMéxico tickets."

Michael Martone, "Manufacturing Place"

"When we speak of place we often speak of our sense of it, its constant though peripheral presence. That is, there is no such thing as a place, only our own inscription of it we carry around in our own nervous systems."

Interview with Michael Martone

Cris Mazza, "A Girl Among Trombonists"

"What teenager doesn’t want to get up on Saturday at four in the morning, get on a bus at six to get to a parade route at eight, spend four or five hours on a hot September day in a decidedly unsexy wool uniform and hat, soaking undergarments with sweat and causing the gnarly-est case of hat-hair ever seen."

Interview with Cris Mazza

Brenda Miller, "Next Year in Jerusalem"

"Though I was a nonreligious Jew, I had still expected to feel something as I crossed into the Promised Land. I expected some twinge of recognition or arrival."

Rick Moody, from The Black Veil

"So the craft is about language, by which I mean that though my father and grandfather might have more completely welcomed me into the patrimonial lineage of Moodys had I become a bona fide salesman, maybe being a writer and being a salesman are not so different…."

Interview with Rick Moody

Susan Orlean, "A Place Called Midland"

"I went to Midland expecting to find an ordinary small city, but nothing about it was ordinary: not its weather or its topography or its history or its economy….It’s a manic-depressive city, spending lavishly and then suffering desperately."

Cynthia Ozick, "What Helen Keller Saw"

"She saw, then, what she wished, or was blessed, to see, and rightly named it imagination. In this she belongs to a wider class than that narrow order of the tragically deaf-blind. Her class, her tribe, hears what no healthy ear can catch, and sees what no eye chart can quantify."

Gary Panter, "Nightmare Studio" [graphic work]

"The dream studio, unlike its waking counterpart, is a vast derelict factory building packed with metal. With people coming and going. A real creepy front door."

Leila Philip, "Green Tea"

"I sat transfixed; in the small room, her tall, graceful figure seemed to float. The iron kettle, resting on its sunken bed of coals, softly hissed. The next hour passed in a series of stylized rites for receiving and drinking the bowls of frothy whipped green tea."

Jonathan Rauch, "Caring for Your Introvert"

"Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in life."

Joe Sacco, from Palestine [graphic journalism]

"Gunshot injuries! Broken bones! Amputees! The intifada I know from appendices in small press books!"

Interview with Joe Sacco

Leslie Marmon Silko, "Uncle Tony’s Goat"

"This goat was big and black and important to my uncle Tony because he’d paid a lot to get him and because he wasn’t an ordinary goat."

Sharon Solwitz, "Abracadabra"

"Once upon a time a woman gave birth to twin sons…. Thirteen years passed, then one got sick. In the year that followed he was sick and better, then very sick, then a little better. He died. His mother, however, remained alive."

Rory Stewart, "The Missionary Dance"

"I sat down and wrote a long letter to my parents, in case I was killed. In the past sixteen months I had bribed, flattered, pried, bullied, begged and wheedled in order to continue my walk. I was more of a tramp than a mystic, but as I wrote I felt at peace."

Sheryl St. Germain, "Nigger: Notes from a New Orleans Daughter"

"I am what I am, for better or worse, as a writer, at least partly because of what I learned from the black culture of New Orleans."

Interview with Sheryl St. Germain

Craig Thompson, from Blankets [graphic novel]

"Everything Raina had ever given me, I burned."

Touré, "What’s Inside You, Brother?"

"The one who makes everyone laugh loudest wins. And as with the dozens, sometimes it hurts, but when it’s done by your own, to strengthen you for the onslaught from without, you know that a beatdown is really a buildup and you just keep on."

C. Tyler, "Sub Zero" [graphic memoir]

"Sit down. Close yer mouth. Put yer feet on the floor. Knees under the desk, please. Leave her alone. Stop talking. Pay attention 1…2…3… bite my … oops!"

Interview with C. Tyler

Luis Alberto Urrea, from Across the Wire

"In the Tijuana dompe, the outcasts were located along the western edge of the settlement in shacks and lean-tos, in an area known as ‘the pig village.’ This was where the untouchables of this society of untouchables slept, among the pigs awaiting slaughter."

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster"

"So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does ‘all right’ even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?"

Interview with David Foster Wallace

S. L. Wisenberg, "Holocaust Girls/Lemon"

"You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. But it helps…What matters most is that you must love suffering."

Interview with S. L. Wisenberg

Karen Tei Yamashita, "June: Circle K Recipes"

"In Japan, rice must be sticky and polished white. One eats the purity of it. It doesn’t matter if its nutrition is negligible."

Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita