Just to Be Silly
April 26, 2012 § 6 Comments
The Brevity blog has been exceedingly serious lately, with all of the truth-in-nonfiction debate and angst over genre boundaries, so here we go. Nothing but silly below.
Earnest discussion welcomed.
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Every other month or so, my mother randomly inserts a question in the midst of an e-mail message detailing what she cooked for my dad’s office staff, who she ran into the other day, or what package she’s sending and when it will arrive. That question, “What is creative nonfiction?”
I never have the energy to answer. After all, she told me years ago I needed to stop writing about “personal stuff.”
My mother is proud! Unless I write about her…
we discussed this very topic at lunch today! another CNF writer said her mother asked her skeptically, ‘how many memoirs can a middle-aged woman WRITE?’
Isn’t every mother’s opinion of their child creative non-fiction?
With mom, isn’t it more like “Pride and Prejudice”?
No one ever told my mother they had seen any of my 40+ articles in professional journals. Then Ann Landers mentioned my name. After that, in Mom’s eyes, I was a success.