Naming Nonfiction (A Polyptych)Author(s): Robert L. Root, Jr.Source: College English, Vol. 65, No. 3, Special Issue: Creative Nonfiction (Jan., 2003), pp. 242-256Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594256Accessed: 26/09/2010 16:59

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242

Naming Nonfiction (a Polyptych)

Robert L. Root, Jr.

The word is late, but the thing is auncient. Sir Francis Bacon, Essaies, 1612

Reporter: What would you call that hairstyle you're wearing? George Harrison: Arthur.

A Hard Day's Night

ur problem at the outset is simply naming nonfiction as a class of written works. Opening dictionaries in hopes of hints or clarifying clues, I mostly glean insight into the problems of definition. Take, for instance, one of the most comprehensive examples, a definition in the Random House Webster'

Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition:

non fic tion n. 1. The branch of literature comprising works of narrative prose deal- ing with or offering opinions or conjectures upon facts and reality, including biogra- phy, history, and the essay (opposed tofiction and distinguished frompoetry and drama). 2. Works of this class: She had read all of his novels but none of his nonfiction. 3. (esp. in cataloguing books, as in a library or bookstore) all writing or books not fiction, po- etry, or drama, including nonfictive narrative prose and reference works; the broadest category of written works. (NON- + FICTION) non fic tion al, adj. non fic tion al ly, adv.

Confusion at the outset: why is the adj. "nonfictional" and not "nonfictive," the adj. used in the definition?

Robe r t Root's books include nonfiction studies (E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist and Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing), a composition textbook (Wordsmithery), two coedited an-

thologies (Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching and The Fourth Genre), and a memoir

(Recovering Ruth: A Biographer' Tale). He teaches at Central Michigan University.

College English, Volume 65, Number 3, January 2003

Naming Nonfiction 243

Most dictionaries claim that "non-fiction" is simply everything that is not a more specific and circumscribed form of writing (not fiction) but none explain why all the other things it's not (for example, also not drama and also not poetry) aren't included in the term (for example, "non-fiction/poetry/drama"). The Random House

Dictionary's third definition tries to compensate for its exclusiveness with inclusive-

ness, at least in regard to bookstores and libraries-"including nonfictive narrative

prose and reference works"-but it still makes non-fiction a rather compendious category. The first definition tries to narrow the field somewhat, but every qualifier is problematic: "narrative prose" (as opposed to forms that are "non-narrative" or

"non-prose"); "opinions or conjectures" (as opposed to incidents and accidents and

experiences and events); "including biography, history, and the essay" (but not lim- ited to those three? and excluding all others?). Don't even get me started on "facts and reality," a great bugbear in theorizing about creative nonfiction. Definitions, almost by definition, are never definitive.

At least this dictionary tries to pin the subject down. Other dictionaries fudge altogether. An early edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has no definition-it is

lumped with all the other words prefixed by "non," all of which are presumed to be

negations of another word; the reader must see the "positive definition" and assume that whatever it is the "non" version is merely not. And indeed other dictionaries say as much: Webster' Third International Dictionary (1965)-"literary works other than novels or stories"; the Oxford English Dictionary (1989)-"Prose writings other than fiction (see FICTION 4)"; the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000)-"Prose works other than fiction." All these dictionaries emphasize the "non- ness" of the form. Yet "nonfiction" has long had reference to specific qualities or characteristics of certain kinds of writing; we can't define it by breaking down its

etymology. Unlike "nonsense," for example, or "nonchalant" or "nondescript," "non- fiction" has yet to reach that same level of near invisibility, that moment when some- one is startled by recognizing a lost original meaning rising to the surface and realizes that nonfiction is not just not-fiction anymore-that it's something positive and self-

defining in its own right, an entity rather than a non-entity. How useless the existing definitions of nonfiction are, particularly in light of

the current popularity and prominence of certain of its forms. Given the breadth of achievement a term like "non-fiction" (meaning really "non-everything-other-than- whatever-it-is") is assumed to cover, we will either have to write a new definition that names what nonfiction is now or find an appropriate modifier to add to "non- fiction" (unhyphenated), such as "literary" or "creative," to distinguish it from "non-

literary" or "non-creative" forms, whatever they might be. We may even have to invent a new term in order to avoid the complications of the old term. (This is a job we lately have left to the French, but since they long ago provided "essay" and "mem-

244 College English

oir," they may be disinclined to make the effort. Still, a foreign word with few En-

glish associations-the Spanish realia, the Italian sagista-might serve.) What we can't do is attach a term like "narrative," as the Random House defi-

nition and a number of definers of "creative nonfiction" have. While it's reasonable for an individual publication like River Teeth, which can determine the boundaries of its own interests, to describe itself as "a journal of nonfiction narrative," such a phrase won't do for the genre as a whole. "Nonfiction narrative," like "nonfiction novel" and similar terms, only describes one subgenre or one subset of the genre of literary nonfiction, as also does "the lyric essay," a form of nonfiction that the Seneca Review is exclusively inclined to publish. Presumably the terms "lyric essay" and "nonfic- tion narrative" would not generally be used to describe the same literary work, even one as complex as, say, Dillard's "Living like Weasels" or Didion's "Slouching to- wards Bethlehem" or McPhee's "In Search of Marvin Gardens."

Instead, we have to accept that narration and exposition and dramatization and

lyricization are all attitudes or strategies or shapes that literature takes in every genre and every form-as prose, poetry, or drama; as a short story, a poem, a play, or an

essay. As Robert Scholes and Carl Klaus, differentiating among representative forms in Elements of the Essay, observed, "[W]ithin each of the four literary forms [essay, fiction, play, poem] all four possibilities exist again as emphases or strategies. Each form can use the techniques of the other forms" (4). A writer who has a story to tell, a narrative at the center of his thinking, can tell that story not only as fiction but also as poetry or drama or nonfiction, and writers in the other literary genres have simi- lar options.

We want in a definition something not only accurate and current but also pointed and precise, something not compendious or cumbersome but still encompassing and inclusive. We want the definition to exclude what doesn't belong but not what

does; we want a match between term and artifact. The problem with "nonfiction" is that it is a one-size-fits-all garment draped over artifacts requiring something tai- lored. Definitions of nonfiction are on the one end so staggeringly encompassing as to give a potential practitioner no sense of practical proportion and on the other end so idiosyncratically circumscribed as to give only a limited group of practitioners the

possibility of generating its texts. Whether a new definition or a new term, we need

something that refers to what we really think the form to be.

Hesitant Admission: Because my students ask me what nonfiction is (they never ask about

fiction or poetry), I have created the following definition: Nonfiction is the expression of, re-

flection upon, and/or interpretation of observed, perceived, or recollected experience. The defi- nition has this advantage: I can catalog every work I think of as nonfiction in the parameters of the definition. Another advantage is that, while some would claim that it could also apply to

fiction, poetry, and drama, in order to distinguish those forms from nonfiction they would have to add qualifiers to the nonfiction definition (for example, "through the means of in- vented characters, situations, and events" in the case offiction). This is of course my point: that

Naming Nonfiction 245

the other three are not necessarily about "observed, perceived, or recollected experience," al-

though they may well be, and when they are they present experience in ways that alter or

camouflage or transform actuality. It has this disadvantage: the term it's defining isn't separate enough from the familiar

blanket term "non-fiction "for someone who doesn't think of the same works I think of to be able to apply it. "How does this definition apply to a VCR manual?" I hear someone ask. "To a biologicalfield survey? To a dictionary?" My term needs a qualifier or, alternatively, needs to be replaced by a word that will only call to mind my definition and no competing definitions. I search for that qualifier, that alternate term, every time I talk about nonfiction, but I never have any difficulty knowing what I'm naming when I use the term "nonfiction."

***

... the terminology itself is still under construction. Once generic distinctions start to leak, people bring in anything that might conceivably hold water. "Literary nonfiction," "creative nonfiction," and "lyric essay" are some of the makeshift semantic hybrids in current use ...

Arthur Saltzman, "Preface"

The boundaries of nonfiction will always be fluid as water.

Mary Clearman Blew, "The Art of the Memoir"

For a very long time introductory literature courses and creative writing programs have divided literature into three genres-fiction, poetry, and drama. Although non- fiction as a literary form has been around for a very long time, in creative writing communities it has often been seen as a vehicle for the discussion of fiction and

poetry rather than an equivalent artistic outlet. But recently writers' conferences and workshops, creative writing programs, and literary journals have been at pains to establish strands of creative nonfiction. The increased popularity of the memoir in particular and of nonfiction generally-travel books like Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, science books like Dava Sobel's

Longitude, histories like Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, nature

reportage like John Krakauer's In the Wild and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, crime books like John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, memoirs like Frank McCourt's Angela 5Ashes and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club-have all helped raise the visibility of literary forms of nonfiction. Many of the foremost writers in this genre are also those who write equally well in other forms of literature-poets like Patricia Hampl, Mary Karr, Garrett Hongo, and Kim Barnes, novelists like

James Galvin, Ivan Doig, Peter Matthiessen, and Kathryn Harrison. Nonfictionists like Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Dillard have also published novels and poetry. These crossovers have opened up the possibilities of nonfiction as a literary form and gen- erally suggested to the creative writing community that the nonfiction genre offered

246 College English

a great many aesthetic and logistical advantages at least equivalent to those in other

genres. A good many of the creative writers who excel at what is generally termed "cre-

ative nonfiction" have had difficulty with the term. In some cases the writer has

specialized in one particular subgenre and identifies chiefly with that subgenre, as the essayist Scott Russell Sanders does; the term "essay" is sufficiently descriptive for his purposes (Root 123). In other cases the writers find that the term doesn't

really suggest their own particular approaches to their work; for example, Sydney Lea argues that his own essays are really more lyrical and connected to his other work in poetry (330). Essayists and memoirists and, for that matter, cultural critics and literary journalists and writers of travel and history and nature works have a sufficient sense of their own identity, their own mission. Practitioners may not need a different term for what they do, but the distinction between an essayist and a memoirist is not as great as between a novelist and a dramatist-the former are

essentially engaged in different branches of the same genre while the latter are en-

gaged in separate genres-and critics and pedagogues and catalogers may need some blanket term to cover all the variations among them.

All literary genres essentially create representations of reality and require craft and design and discovery and process, but nonfiction is unique in that it alone is

required by virtually unstated definition to apply those strategies and techniques to

something that already exists. It's that preoccupation with factuality, with preexist- ing reality, with a world outside the writer's mind, that he or she has to interpret and

represent, that separates it from the other "three genres." It also helps account for some of the discomfort some creative writers have with a genre that they feel isn't "creative" in the same way that fiction, poetry, and drama are.

Tacking the adjective "creative" in front of the noun "nonfiction" may help link it to other forms of "creative writing" as a literary genre but it also helps to marginalize it in the same way that creative writing is marginalized in most English depart- ments-as something chiefly of interest to an artsy contingent of student and faculty writers rather than to the student and faculty litterateurs, scholars and critics, and readers who make up the majority of the department. From this perspective creative nonfiction is a mere tangent, an obscure and irrelevant side chapel barely visible from the cavernous nave of the cathedral of literature. Either because people in

English departments see creative nonfiction as a new form, rather than as a form that dates back to the epistles of Seneca and the moralia of Plutarch and the essays of

Montaigne and, above all, the periodical nonfiction of Addison, Steele, Lamb, and

Hazlitt, or because those who know any history of English departments connect it to a defunct and discredited tradition of belles lettres, nonfiction has difficulty finding a place in the overcrowded alcove of creative writing. In some creative writing pro- grams, the genres-nonfiction among them-are accepted as different instruments

Naming Nonfiction 247

appropriate to different kinds of music, as different vehicles effective on different terrains. In others, territoriality, determined by alpha poets and fictionists, rules. Decisions about where we place nonfiction are fraught with the baggage of precon- ceptions and misconceptions, even when we name nonfiction among the literary genres.

Confession: The anthology that Michael Steinberg and I developed out of materials with which we taught nonfiction courses in both creative writing and composition programs was titled The Fourth Genre in order to acknowledge nonfiction as a literary genre on a par with the three other literary genres-we saw it partly as an answer to the title of Stephen Minot' classic creative writing textbook, Three Genres, which captures perfectly the sense that the field of literature has three subcategories. To be honest, I at least hoped the title would circumvent the drawbacks of nomenclature and help me avoid the repeated arguments people were willing to have with us about the term "creative nonfiction." I even sometimes fanta- sized that the term 'fourth genre" would catch on and replace the problematic labels with a new and more or less uncomplicated one-a writer could be introduced as "the scientist and

fourthgenrist Chet Raymo " or "the poet andfourthgenristJudith Ortiz Cofer"-but it hasn't

caught on and it likely won't. Moreover, by now I have my own reservations about the term

'fourth genre, " not because of the danger of 'fourth " being considered its permanent ranking but rather because I gradually came to realize that nonfiction is really the first genre, not in terms ofpreeminence but in terms of primacy. You can't decide to make a literary rendition of reality-with rhyme schemes and meter or imaginary characters and situations and dia-

logue-unlessyou have a way to report and record reality in the first place. The literaryform in that 'firstplace" was somethingpositive and real, not a negation ofsomething else. I'll have to find another, catchier, more accurate substitute.

We also need to distinguish between at least two kinds of writing that fit underneath the larger notion of literary nonfiction. [. . . T]he essay is reflective and exploratory and essentially personal. Its purpose is not to convey information, although it may do that as well, but rather to tell the story of the author's thinking and experience. Jour- nalism, or the "New Journalism," is informative rather than reflective; its main pur- pose is to convey information, although it may certainly use autobiography as a per- spective and device for conveying that information. There can certainly be essay writ-

ing or journalism that is not literary, but the kind of writing that concerns us here is

literary in some way, however that is defined.

Chris Anderson

Until recently, discussions of contemporary nonfiction as a literary form have been most focused on "literary journalism." This is the branch of literature-or perhaps the branch of journalism-that the OED is referring to when it defines "non-fiction novel" as "a novel about real situations or characters." The most commonly cited "non-fiction novel" is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and the trend toward treating

248 College English

subjects typical of journalism with techniques typical of literature led to the rise in the late 1960s and early 1970s of what was initially termed "the New Journalism" and later called "literary journalism" (and sometimes "faction" and "realty"). The writers most often cited as exemplars of this form were Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe (who is usually credited with popularizing the term "NewJournalism"), Joan Didion, Michael Herr, and Gay Talese. Essentially, literary journalism is the

application of strategies familiar from fictional narrative-the journalist as a first-

person narrator, the development of character and dialogue, the emphasis on setting and observation, the attention to language-to reportage of current events and pub- lic affairs-political conventions (Miami and the Siege of Chicago), lifestyles (Slouching towards Bethlehem, The Electric Kool-AidAcid Test), foreign wars (Dispatches, Salvador), the space program (The Right Stuff, Ofa Fire on the Moon), celebrity ("Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," "Radical Chic").

The term suggests a distinction between itself and regular or "non-literary" or

simply "journalistic" journalism-the average everyday reporting of local, regional and national events, the emphasis on who, what, where, when, and why, the consis- tent use of one- or two-sentence paragraphs, and the formula of cramming informa- tion into the top of the story so that less important information can be trimmed from the bottom of the story if space limitations demand it. It also suggests a con- tinuum in that globally inclusive term "nonfiction" on which several varieties can be lined up and placed side by side and on which, instead of clear and definitive lines of

demarcation, blurred areas of overlap might occur. Here the implication is that lit- erature and journalism are side by side, and the border area sometimes confusingly allows literary strategies to seep into journalism-theoretically we might be able to create a chain of works from the most purely literary to the most purely journalis- tic-and also permits journalistic strategies sometimes to seep into literature-the

emphasis on factuality, the focus on currency and immediacy, the reportorial dis- tance from the subject. Of course the noun in the term "literary journalism" indi- cates that the slant of the writing is preeminently reportorial, that is, toward news rather than toward aesthetics, although the adjective indicates a counterbalancing bent toward whatever concerns for artistic or creative expression a word like "liter-

ary" is intended to suggest. But the term "literary journalism" is generally seen as too limited in scope to

cover a great deal of nonfiction writing that might be said to be more literary than

journalistic-for example, Walden hardly seems like journalism, nor does Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Angelas Ashes or "Shooting an Elephant" or "Once More to the Lake" or "Beauty When the Other Dancer is the Self." Yet all of these are nonfic- tion as literature. Efforts to develop a term that could encompass both the works of

literary journalism which leaned heavily toward literature and the works of nonfic- tion that were nonjournalistic literature have led to the sometimes interchangeable

Naming Nonfiction 249

expressions "literary nonfiction" and "creative nonfiction." Neither term, unsurprisingly, has been easily accepted.

The problem in both cases is the adjective. When literary journals call for manu-

scripts of literary essays, they are generally calling not for essays that are themselves works of literature but rather essays that are about literary works of (usually) fiction or poetry or drama. When literary journals do not see themselves as chiefly publish- ers of works of and about fiction and poetry, they are strictly journals of literary criticism. A writer usually has to be familiar with the specific journal to know whether to submit an essay about someone else's literary endeavors or an essay that is a liter-

ary work in itself. This gets back to the difficulty surrounding the word "nonfic- tion." If you say an author writes "fiction" or "poetry" or "drama" you know your listener will identify the author as a literary writer; if you say an author writes "non- fiction" in most cases your listener will not automatically think the author is an

essayist or memoirist or reporter or cultural critic. The addition of the term "liter-

ary" to "nonfiction" is an attempt to narrow down the field, to make certain your listener or reader picks up on the literary nature of the work you're talking about.

"Creative nonfiction" has the same problem. Many people, not only literary critics and teachers but writers of creative nonfiction themselves, object to a term like "creative" because it seems to imply that other writers of nonfiction are not creative. (I should say, however, that I like the term "noncreative nonfiction" as a

descriptor for "nonliterary journalists" and literary critics [critics of literature] and academic writers in general.) But these same people have little objection to a term like "creative writing" as the subject of classes and workshops taught by "creative writers" like novelists and poets. For some reason "creative writing" is descriptive and nonjudgmental-and helps pigeonhole the specialty of certain department mem- bers-while "creative nonfiction" seems to these same people as value-laden and exclusive.

Although "literary nonfiction" and "creative nonfiction" may be efforts to label the same set of works, "creative nonfiction" seems to be the phrase that has won the most adherents. But, because the approach to creative nonfiction has been essen-

tially from two directions-from practitioners of literary journalism and from the creative writing community-that is, from journalism and from English-the mean-

ing of "creative nonfiction" varies depending upon the orientation of the speaker. Clearly, my inclination is to use creative nonfiction as an umbrella term to cover the widest range of nonfiction literary production. It seems to me that, while literary journalism shares space with a large portion of creative nonfiction, it doesn't occupy exactly the same space. It is possible to identify a work as both literary journalism and creative nonfiction simultaneously-perhaps Joan Didion's Salvador or Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air-and it is also possible to identify a work as creative nonfic- tion that is not simultaneously a work of literary journalism-perhaps Frank

250 College English

McCourt's Angela 's Ashes or Patricia Hampl's A Romantic Education.

The quarrel over the correct emphasis in creative nonfiction-whether it is

reportorial or literary, whether it is narrative or lyric, whether it is personal or im-

personal-has implications for where we place nonfiction in the English depart- ment. If creative nonfiction is only literary journalism, then I can only repeat Gilda Radner's exit line as Emily Latela-"Never mind." If it's simply journalism, we ought to teach it as part of journalism courses and journalism programs. But there is a form of nonfiction literature which is not principally journalistic and which, confusingly, is presently also called creative nonfiction. That's the one which surely ought to have a place in English departments and which often does have a place in creative

writing programs. But the problems in the ways we name nonfiction too often make it seem like tangential literature or tangential journalism or a tangential hybrid ex-

isting in a disciplinary no person's land. I believe it's more central than that.

Personal Disclosure: When I began teaching composition I also taught a one-time-only special topics course called "Contemporary Prose Style." We read and analyzed and imitated and parodied George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and a couple of oth- ers, mostly "New Journalists." Later, studying "composing processes ofprofessional expository writers" (as I termed it in my sabbaticalproposal), I interviewed and analyzed manuscripts of columnists and critics, including Tom Wicker, Richard Reeves, Walter Kerr, and David Denby, people who wrote short on deadline. I thought I'd written a pretty good composition study, one that rose from the solid scaffolding constructed by Janet Emig, Sondra Perl, Sharon Pianko, Nancy Sommers, and others. But when the book came out I was surprised to learn that either the publisher or the Library of Congress or both had classified it not under "English Lan-

guage-Rhetoric-Study and Teaching" but under "Journalism-Authorship" and similar

headings. I'd already written a book about the rhetorics ofpopular culture that was cataloged among books of history andAmerican culture and now I apparently had written a pretty good book on journalism. I couldn't get into the composition/rhetoric call numbers. Call it either

falling through the cracks or straddling boundaries, I seemed to have found my niche. In

retrospect it seems inevitable that it would be a non-niche.

I have no idea what this term "expository writing" means. Is it possible to do "in-pository writing"? I should think in cases of writer's block one would have to prescribe "sup-pository writing."

Conferee, Warwick Writing Conference

I want my students to know what writers know- [.. .] I want my students to know how to bring their life and their writing together.

Nancy Sommers

In England, where first-year composition is not a universal staple of colleges and

universities, the attempt to establish an undergraduate writing course has been ac-

Naming Nonfiction 251

companied by discussions of what to name it. "Expository writing" has been recom-

mended, a term most American teachers of college English would find unexcep- tional (my department, for one, still has a course called Advanced Expository Writing), but some people object and argue for "practical writing" instead. Nomenclature skirmishes occur everywhere, it seems. More interesting is the British effort to em-

ploy creative writers to teach the course, on the assumption that poets, novelists, memoirists, dramatists, screenwriters, and biographers have an innate and transfer- able knowledge of effective written communication.

An international conference at the University of Warwick in April 2001 brought together creative writers and composition specialists from around the world to dis- cuss "Teaching Writing in Higher Education." It was the kind of gathering unlikely to happen in the United States, where creative writers and rhetoricians and literary scholars, for the most part, all attend their own specialized and exclusive confer- ences. At Warwick the juxtaposition produced some conflict, some choosing of sides, but it also challenged assumptions and presuppositions, ideas that participants took for granted about the divisions and subdivisions of their field that seemed arbitrary to someone not raised in them. I'd come to the conference in the guise of a

compositionist but since I'm also an essayist and memoirist I also identified with the creative writers-after all, the first day ended with a session conducted by the biog- rapher Hilary Spurling and the memoirist Blake Morrison. Admittedly, since I was

among people who were willing to argue about the term "expository writing," I was selective about the moments when I mentioned being in "creative nonfiction" as well. And yet, because part of me felt at home within each of the competing camps of creative writing and composition and another part of me felt like a liaison be- tween them, I began to realize that nonfiction was the bridge I was using to cross back and forth.

What, after all, is "composition"? It is a curious feature of this field of "En-

glish" that, in spite of all our wrangling about theory and practice, our terminology is so vague, imprecise, undefined, and, particularly in the most ethereal reaches of

theory, almost whimsically abstract and conscientiously graceless. Where in life does one write themes or papers or assignments or exercises? As the British might say, what is composition when it's at home? Students enter creative writing and journal- ism classes and programs as novice or apprentice somethings, with the desire or intention of becoming expert or accomplished somethings later on. But in composi- tion classes, even when they assume the guise of cultural studies or critical thinking or espouse other sociopolitical or academic/theoretical agendas, students are treated not as novice specialists but as artificially contextualized language learners engaged in the preparatory imitation of intellectuality. In terms of definition and classifica-

tion, composition seems to be a "non-genre," not only a thing apart from what

happens in creative writing or journalism but something existing in a totally differ-

252 College English

ent universe (if not a totally different department) from the literature study in most

English departments. And this raises some questions: Is this the place where you'd go to be an ap-

prentice nonfictionist, a beginning essayist, memoirist, reviewer, cultural critic? Do we need creative nonfiction courses in creative writing programs because English departments presently do not teach anyone how to write nonfiction? Do students in other disciplines-the sciences, the humanities, the professions-have to hope for an imaginative, enlightened Writing Across the Curriculum program to teach them how to connect in prose with a larger readership than their course instructors and

graduate graders? Should we infuse some strategies for nonfiction into the compo- sition course or should we think of "first-year composition" as "introductory non- fiction"?

In my composition classes I tell students about five essential elements of writ-

ing: a personal commitment or engagement with the work in progress; a need for immersion in context; a habit of assiduous string saving; a willingness to allow dis-

covery through writing; and a flexible understanding of composing processes. I de- rived these elements from studies not only of student writers but also of working nonfiction writers. They are, I believe, the essential elements of all kinds of writing. For example, writer after writer, in interviews and articles and journal entries, testi- fies to the need for personal commitment: "We do not write in order to be under-

stood, we write in order to understand," says C. Day Lewis; "In a very real sense the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself," says Alfred Kazin (both qtd. in Murray 6); "The most difficult work I know is to write about subjects one is not interested in," says John Jerome (95). This is what writers know; this is what motivates their writing outside of classrooms.

This is not to say that all writing has to be in the first person singular (though injunctions against it are often arbitrary and arhetorical), but rather to acknowledge, as Thoreau reminds us, "that it is, after all, always the first person that is speak- ing"(3). Proponents of creative nonfiction who lean toward literary journalism as the underlying foundation of the form often worry about the personal interfering with the objective reporting of events, although even in nonliterary journalism the

objective reporting of events is not strictly possible-the reporter mediates the re-

porting in some way; proponents of a strictly academic focus to the composition class make the same argument, as if the personal would keep us from rational con- clusions based on examined evidence and unbiased logic. In either case it is mere

subterfuge to pretend that there isn't an individual intelligence behind the writing, interpreting experience in a singular way. If we recognize that the writer needs to be

present in the writing, whether or not the writer is present on the page, we have the

possibility of avoiding the disengagement and detachment that I believe is really at the bottom of my students' least successful writing. Nancy Sommers once claimed

Naming Nonfiction 253

that, in an academic talk of her own which she was never able to revise into an

article, she recognized "a fictionalized self [...] a distant, imponderable, impersonal voice-inaccessible, humorless, and disguised." In that text, she says, "I speak in an inherited voice; it isn't mine" (27). Sommers bridles at the aloofness and, yes, dis-

honesty of the anonymous researcher persona expected of academic writers. Think then what a disengagement the demand for an anonymous, impersonal, universally interchangeable persona invites in our students. It's tough enough learning to write like ourselves without pretending to write like someone else, especially someone we don't know, someone better educated and thirty years older. Sommers says of her own experience, "I simply wasn't there for my own talk" (27), and that's a good description of what often happens in student writing: they aren't there for the writ-

ing of the works they hand in. Of course, this is as often a problem of student attitude as it is a pedagogical

encouragement of disengagement-students can be disengaged in personal essays, too. It isn't necessarily a question of course content or emphasis. The question isn't

whether, inJames Britton and his colleagues' terms (81), we have to choose between

expressive and transactional functions, between the participant role and the specta- tor role in writing, but whether we can find a way to remain the same writer even when deploying different strategies and even when shifting focus on our relation-

ship to the topic. I think that, when my students encounter difficulty moving from the personal essay to the research paper, it hasn't been because I should have been

teaching one rather than the other, but because I wasn't teaching the expressive and the transactional, the personal and the academic, as if they were compositions by the same author. I was helping to erect barriers to their personal engagement with the

project. If I superimpose a transparency of my map of composition over my map of

nonfiction, I find that the coordinates match. The grids are the same and the chief confusions are the competing place names. For example, the personal commitment or engagement necessary in composition lines up with an essential element of cre- ative nonfiction, personal presence, the distinguishing characteristic that makes "At the Buffalo Bill Museum" by Jane Tompkins more than an academic paper on the contents of a museum or "Where Worlds Collide" by Pico Iyer more than a piece of

journalism on Los Angeles International Airport or "Carnal Acts" by Nancy Mairs more than a medical report about the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis. As in the personal and academic writing I may require of my composition students, per- sonal presence is not measured by the degree of the writer's visibility on the page but

by the guiding sensibility behind the writing. So I have another question: Why don't we see composition as a course in writ-

ing nonfiction? I think that nonfiction is more intimately linked with composition than we usually acknowledge-that composition and nonfiction are often one and

254 College English

the same and that nomenclature shouldn't get in the way of the use of nonfiction in its full range. Like Britton I think the functions of writing are expressive, transac-

tional, and poetic and I insist that these are not mutually exclusive-I take Walden to be all three simultaneously and I also take it that all the attention to nonfiction does is to bring our focus back around to the writer's perspective in the teaching of writ-

ing. Those of us who emphasize expressive writing are nonetheless not simply train-

ing people to write diaries and journals; those of us who emphasize transactional

writing are nonetheless not simply encouraging writers to be detached, disinter-

ested, and disengaged in the composing or the effect on readers; those of us who

emphasize poetic or literary writing (even in nonfiction) are not simply training people to consider issues of craft or aesthetics in a vacuum. The reason it's so diffi- cult to name nonfiction definitively is that the range of artifacts we draw our ex-

amples from is so broad, so diverse, so encompassing, the expressive, poetic, and transactional elements blending in a vast variety of proportions.

My interest in creative nonfiction grows out of my interest in learning and

sharing the composing processes that writers of all kinds go through to achieve a

satisfactory or effective or well-crafted text. Students who write personal essays in

composition class are writing literary nonfiction, particularly if they push their pieces away from the mere recording of personal experience or the mere expression of

egocentrism into some territory that connects with readers. "Once More to the

Lake," no matter what else it is, is also a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay with significant modifications and considerably greater reach. But that same kind of

passion and engagement is also found in the best transactional examples we give our students. John McPhee's passion to figure out how things work or what other people know or think underlies everything he writes, even in those pieces where he is not

obviously present. Students who write transactional essays in composition class are

writing literary nonfiction, particularly if they push their pieces away from the mere

recording of researched authority or the mere regurgitation of someone else's un-

derstanding and information. I think this is a theme we flirt with again and again, in recurring calls to teach

the essay, in the anthologies of essays and the textbooks encouraging the writing of nonfiction forms over the years: The New Strategy of Style by Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester, Representing Reality by John Warnock, Fact and Artifact by Lynn Bloom, In Depth by Carl Klaus, Rebecca Faery, and Chris Anderson-at least one of

my bookshelves lines up a thirty-year history of efforts to connect composition and creative nonfiction. Or, more significant, an effort to link the composition course to

contemporary writing. As I was writing this article, I came across a piece by Emily Hiestand in the

Atlantic Monthly about visiting sites in the Boston area infrastructure-a lighthouse, the Central Artery project, a fish plant, a water recycling plant-which works as

Naming Nonfiction 255

both a personal essay and travel reportage; it is followed by a William Zinsser piece which is similarly about his childhood and about a piece of toy history, the Pennant Winner baseball game. Neither of the pieces is far removed, except for expertise in

craft, from the kind of writing my students do in my First-year Composition or Seminar in Writing Nonfiction courses. They exemplify creative nonfiction the way we write it now-I see it all the time not only in specialized journals like Fourth

Genre, River Teeth, and Creative Nonfiction, and in sections of literary journals like the

Georgia Review and Shenandoah, but also in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, and a

wide range of other, more specialized magazines. If this is the kind of writing that's out there, that people write now, why aren't we encouraging our students not simply to read it but to write it-to be apprentice nonfictionists, preparing to join the con- versation? Why can't they be writing in a viable genre instead of training in a "non-

genre" and trying to excel in forms they won't use after college? My quarrel with definitions, it turns out, is my quarrel with categorizing and

compartmentalizing, because of the ways they limit our vision. Maybe the question regarding nonfiction and composition isn't how to infuse nonfiction into the comp course. Maybe the question is whether, when we name composition, we aren't si-

multaneously naming nonfiction.

Draft: As I write this article, through draft after draft, I keep imagining a definition I can live with, or at least imagining that I come up with one. Label this one "Working Draft" or

"Rough Draft" or even "Zero Draft," but ifyou have to tell me what's wrong with it, please try to tell me how to make it better, more useful, more accurate, more, well, definitive.

nonfiction n. 1. the expression of, reflection upon, and/or interpretation of observed, perceived, or recollected experience; 2. a genre of literature that includes such subgenres as the personal essay, the memoir, narrative reportage (a.k.a., literary journalism), and

expressive critical writing (a.k.a., personal academic discourse, personal cultural criti-

cism) and whose borders with other genres andforms (i.e.,journalism, criticism, history, etc.) are fluid and malleable; 3. the expressive, transactional, and poetic prose texts gen- erated by students in college composition courses.

Untilyou do, I think I'm going to use it whenever someone asks me to name nonfiction.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Chris. "Introduction." Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. ix-xxvi.

Blew, Mary Clearman. "The Art of Memoir." Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999. 3-8.

Bloom, Lynn Z. Fact and Artifact: Writing Nonfiction. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1994.

Britton, James, et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: Macmillan, 1975.

Hiestand, Emily. "Real Places," Atlantic Monthly 288:1 (July/Aug. 2001): 130-36.

Jerome, John. The Writing Trade: A Year in the Life. New York: Viking, 1992.

Klaus, Carl H., Rebecca Blevins Faery, and Chris Anderson, eds. In Depth: Essayistsfor Our Time. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

256 College English

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