A Very Normal Prize in Fiction and Nonfiction

Fiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication
Nonfiction Prize: $1,000 & Publication

Deadline Feb 12, 2010

Final Judges

Margot Livesey: Fiction
David Shields: Nonfiction

GUIDELINES

1. All submissions must be no more than 10,087 words double-spaced, 12 pt. font, with numbered pages and NO IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON MANUSCRIPT.
2. Entry fee: $20 per submission. Please make checks out to “The Normal School.”
3. All submissions must include 2 Cover Sheets:
   1. 1^st Cover Sheet must include: a) Title b) Genre c) Name of Author d) 50 word biographical statement e) mailing address f) email address
   2. 2^nd Cover Sheet must include: a) Title of Work b) Genre *NO OTHER IDENTIFYING INFORMATION CAN APPEAR ON THIS COVER SHEET.
4. All submissions must be previously unpublished in any form (print or electronic media).
5. Simultaneous submissions ARE allowed as long you notify editors of The Normal School should your piece be accepted elsewhere. Multiple submissions ARE allowed, but each submission must be accompanied by the entry fee.
6. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please do not send your only copy. If you want verification that we have received your manuscript, send a self-addressed, stamped postcard.
7. Please address all submissions to:

The Normal School

Normal Prize Contest – “Genre”
5245 N. Backer Ave.
M/S PB 98
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740

All submissions must be postmarked between 12/1/2009 and 2/12/2010.
Please be sure to SPECIFY GENRE on envelope and cover sheet.
All entrants will receive a complimentary issue of The Normal School.

Winners will be announced before the Fall 2010 issue via email.
All entries will be considered for publication.

Creative Nonfiction Defined: Yes You Can

Oftentimes, at the end of a long day of manuscript sorting high up in the Brevity corporate towers, we will push back our chairs, throw some Miles Davis onto the big speakers, pour small offerings of Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon, and wonder at people who have trouble defining creative nonfiction. “Really,” we might say to one another. “It’s not a mystery.  What we do is pretty straightforward.  Can you pass the Blanton’s, Mr. Jeeves?”

So we were pleased when running across poet/memoirist/blog-provocateur Steve Fellner’s discussion of definitions on his blog Pansy Poetics. Here’s a bit, but the entire post is worth reading as well.

I tell (my students) they need to break up the word. Creative. Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction=The Real=Autobiographical Experience and/or Texts and/or History=”The Content” of the Piece

For the “Creative” aspect of the definition, they need to ask the question, “Where would the author locate his artistry in the piece?”, “What special formal strategies does she employ?” (ie point-of-view, diction, organization, etc.”)

“That’s why,” I say, “Journalism and diary writing cannot be creative non-fiction. There’s nothing inherently special about its formal strategies. It’s simply meant to convey. To an audience. Or to oneself. It’s not meant to convey in a way that is special or artistic.”

Of course, there are an infinite number of ways to deconstruct this definition. (Even though I think it’s pretty good.)

The endless battles about this definition as a result of that can go on and on.

But it offers a starting point rather than simply raising your hands in the air, and offering nothing except to claim no one can pin it down, that it transgresses boundaries and refuses to be defined. Of course, it refuses to be defined; that’s why we’ve become writers, to fumble our way towards a useless, necessary naming.

How About that Best American?

In our effort to seem young and jazzy, the Brevity editorial team hangs out on Facebook way too much.  Along the way though, we noticed that former Mid-American Review nonfiction editor Karen Babine had posted a thoughtful, personal reaction to the latest Best  American Essays volume, edited by Mary Oliver.  We like her enthusiasm (as a reader and a teacher) toward the BAE series, so we asked Karen if we could post her Facebook review to Brevity as a bonus between-issues book review, and we did, and we hope to spark some discussion here.  If you want to comment, go ahead and comment here, or if you have your own review of BAE 2009, send it to us for the blog.

Here’s an excerpt from Karen’s full review:

When my 2009 Best American Essays arrived and it was only half the thickness of my Best American Travel Writing, I frowned at it. What is this? Where’s the rest of my book? But I sat down on the couch with it and my highlighter and did what I always do: I flip to the back and check out the Notables, because this is where I think the neat stuff is happening. I highlight people I know or magazines I really like. My highlight was back in 2003, when my brother-in-all-but-blood Matt had an essay in the Notables. This time around, there were quite a few names I recognized and that thrills me as much as anything else about my BAE.

Here’s my overall impression of this collection: well done. I’ve got a fairly specific aesthetic, one that likes to see essays not only work through an idea, but I want to be able to see the author’s brain on the page working through the idea. But there has to be more than that. I want the author’s work to illuminate some other area that I didn’t expect, something that’s at stake for me as the reader.  And I want language. Too many of the essays I’ve seen in past years have completely neglected the language.

Karen goes on to discuss specific BAE essays by Brian Doyle, Sue Allison, Richard Rodriguez, Jill McCorkle, Gregory Orr, and Janna Malamud Smith.  We really think the full review is worth reading, with Best American Essays 2009 at your side.

On Awkwardly Nosing About Another Culture

Oronte Churm offers a fascinating, thoughtful interview with Ninth Letter fiction editor Philip Graham over at his Inside Higher Ed blog today.  Graham talks about the pitfalls inherent in writing about other cultures, the false assumption that a year abroad will inevitably be idyllic, and the flawed assumption that living overseas is always “enriching” for one’s children. He says a good bit that is wise about the process of writing as well.

An excerpt:

“We’re all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what’s the alternative except deepening isolation?

“The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall  …  In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.”

Social Justice and Equity Nonfiction Book Award

Benu Press is accepting completed manuscripts for the Social Justice and Equity Award in Creative Nonfiction.

“Benu Press is a small, independent press committed to publishing creative non-fiction, poetry and fiction. We believe in the transformative power of literature. To that end, we seek to publish inspiring and thought-provoking books about the practical dimensions of social justice and equity.”

Deadline in November, so act soon if interested:
http://www.benupress.com/submissions.html

Winning entry will be published by Benu Press and the author will be awarded $1,000 in addition to 17% royalties. The initial run will be 1,000 copies. The winner will also receive 20 copies of the book.

Any Nonfiction Scholars Out There?

The College English Association invites papers and creative works-in-progress on the theme of voices in Creative Nonfiction Writing for the Annual Conference, San Antonio, Texas , March 25-27, 2010.

We quote from the CFP:

“Remember the Alamo!” cried Texans who’d joined arms with General Sam Houston after the Alamo fell. They were defending their home, but we ask now, Whose home was it? At the Alamo itself, voices called from opposing sides of the wall, representing two distinct cultures, ideologies, and ways of being. Truth is about territory. In the interest of hearing an array of voices, we call out for your creative nonfiction on voices. Under the many subgenres of creative nonfiction, a voice may take many forms. Here are a few:

The Personal Essay:
As soon as essayists utter the word voice, the voice is divided. “One person, of course, can have 20,000 different voices,” said Marie Howe. Rarely does the voice exist in a box or adhere to a consistent thread. Michel de Montaigne, considered the father of the essay, is known for chasing down the vicissitudes of his thoughts on life’s basics: “Of liars,” “Of sleep,” “Of the punishment of cowardice,” “Of the resemblance of children to their fathers,” to name a few. These essays are full of voices and personae that inform, sharpen, soften, exalt, and demote one another.

Literary or “New” Journalism:
A blend of journalism and personal slant, literary journalism does not purport to tell the objective truth, but accepts that how one shapes a well-researched story is influenced by personal sensibility. Two early examples from the 1960s are Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” on the marriage industry in Las Vegas the night before one could lower his draft status and Tom Wolfe’s “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!)…” on hotrod culture in California. More recently, literary journalism has represented other counter cultures. Michael Pollan’s An Omnivore’s Dilemma, for example, in which the author researches the United States’ industrial food system and presents an alternative.

Oral histories and ethnographic essays as well as essays that experiment with form through double and polyphonous voices are also welcome. The aforementioned categories are not meant to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive. The theme of voices, like the not-so-easily-defined genre of creative nonfiction, is infinitely flexible. Submit individual proposals that fall under one of the categories above. If you would like to organize a panel under a different subject relating to passage, please follow the instructions for submitting a panel.

Electronic submissions opened August 21 and will close on November 1, 2009.

Ah, sweet ignorance!

Rebecca Frost discusses the genesis of her brief essay “In Case of Emergency,” in the new Brevity issue:

I’m studying rhetoric and technical communication, so a creative non-fiction class was something out of the ordinary.  It was offered in Fall 2008, taught by Matt Seigel, and I thought it would be a fun (and relatively easy) class to balance out my course load.  I’d  taken two creative writing classes in college and basically expected this to be an extension of those.  Ah, sweet ignorance.

On the first day of class Matt told us we’d be picking a single topic and working on it for the whole semester, fourteen weeks’ worth.  We would share two rough drafts for workshops, and then have a final reading.  The topic that kept coming to mind was my ex-fiance and the breakup, since I’d just passed the one year anniversary of the cursed event.  But I didn’t want to spend the next fourteen weeks dwelling on him, not when I’d spent the past twelve months getting over him!

I tried writing about my cats and writing about my writing, but everything kept circling back to the ex.  It was all very cause and effect: he did what he did, so then afterwards I reacted by doing this other thing.  When I complained about this to Matt, he pointed out that I should write about my ex, since I couldn’t get away from it.  I made a face, but I wrote.

I went through twenty-four distinct drafts over the next fourteen weeks.  My classmates got to see three of them.  The first was a choose-your-own adventure story that manipulated you into making all the decisions I made (false advertising, I know).  The second was composed entirely of sentence fragments and had the word “FaceBook” in there at least a dozen times more than they wanted to see.  And the third one is the draft that ended up in Brevity.

By the time the semester was drawing to a close I was sick to death of my subject.  On top of it all I’d started dating one of the guys in the class, so that old “never mention your ex to your new boyfriend” was thrown out the window.  I wanted to get away from the essay and get away from that stage of my life, so I didn’t even edit my essay before submitting it.  That was the final step needed to get a grade in the class: submit your essay somewhere, and show Matt that you did actually send it in.

I had to laugh the other day when I saw the email saying that Brevity only publishes previously published authors.  When I got my acceptance notice on April 3 (I remember the date so exactly because, earlier in the evening, I’d found out that my mom had breast cancer – we were all grateful to the timing of Dinty’s email so that we could end the night with something positive to think about) I was completely taken by surprise.  I’ve had my share of rejection letters and was expecting another one, but here was an acceptance letter – and I’d clearly stated in my bio that this would be my first publication.

Yes, the email was dated 2007, but I just wanted to make this clear: Brevity publishes unpublished authors.  My resume was blank as far as publication credits were concerned, and now I’ve got something to put there, all because Matt forced me to write about something I wanted to avoid, and then forced me to send it in.

Hey, They Stole Our Concept?

But still, it is nice for those whose work doesn’t quite fit into Brevity to have more options, so we share with you:

Beginning September 10, 2009 until November 15, 2009 the Yalobusha Review will begin accepting works of literary non-fiction of lengths no more than 750 words. We are looking for stand alone topics that vividly capture exact moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. Though we are not looking for a particular aesthetic, writing that takes chances, pushes the boundaries of language and does not rely on either narrative or sympathy posseses the greatest chance of publication in the 2010 issue.   Include a cover letter with the title of your piece. Include SASE with submission for notification of results. We retain first North American rights.  Payment is a contributor’s copy.

Please send submissions to:

Yalobusha Review
Travis Morris, Non-fiction Editor
Department of English
University of Mississippi
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677-1848

Essays, Peanuts and Cracker Jacks

The Southern Review is currently accepting submissions for a special feature about baseball to be published in the Spring 2010 issue. Please send your previously unpublished poems, stories, and essays by November 1:
The Southern Review Baseball Feature
Attn. Andrew Ervin
Old President’s House
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

http://www.lsu.edu/tsr/News_Baseball.html

Of Nonfiction Blogging: Calling All 21st Century Montaignes

Creative Nonfiction magazine has been republishing blog postings in the annual W. W. Norton Best Creative Nonfiction anthologies, and will soon do the same in the magazine itself.  Nominations (even self-nominations) cheerfully accepted.

Here’s some official language:  “Please note, blog nominations will be accepted only through our online submission manager and only during specific reading periods. We are currently accepting blog nominations until August 31, 2009. We’re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone, 2000 words max, from 2009.”

For more information, or to nominate a blog, click here.

The Contaminated Essay

From Dislocate, the journal:

Contaminate’s root is the Latin word tangere, “to touch,” and contamination usually refers to “touch that makes bad.” But there are ways that elements become stronger as a result of corruption: steel gets stronger when tempered in extreme heat, and chemotherapy purifies the body by nearly destroying it. In literature, stories are retold and recontextualized in an endless and productive series of contaminations. Perhaps, even, the limit toward which we speed is for every sphere of life to be contaminated by every other sphere. The question looms: How do people survive, and even thrive, within this contamination? You need not answer this question directly. But let the question contaminate your work.

Your essay may be contaminated in form…

What happens to the essay when we contaminate it with heterogeneous elements? You might add photographs or screenshots from a PowerPoint presentation. You might mix up formal conventions, and make the piece extremely short, or especially lyric. You might transcend generic boundaries and integrate elements of fiction or poetry.

You may contaminate your process…

Write under the influence of giardia, or in traffic jams, or in the presence of small, demanding children, and find ways to incorporate those impositions into your text.

Guidelines:

Length: Up to 3,000 words.

Deadline: December 1, 2009

Contest Fee: $15 (includes at 1-year subscription to dislocate)

1st Prize: $400, publication in dislocate #6, and 4 contributor copies

GO HERE FOR COMPLETE DETAILS

..

“What do you need more words for?”

Christina Olson, author of Duck, North Carolina in Brevity 30,  writes about her brief essay, and brevity, briefly:

“Duck, North Carolina” started as little vignettes—small impressions that I had jotted down. I was trying to arrange them in a framework, figure out what connected them all, establish a linear narrative. And as I was doing so, my boyfriend walked into the room, took a look at the table, and said simply, “What do you need more words for?”

When it was published, I sent the URL to my brother, who wrote back three lines: Surely you know there are no mountains off the coast of Carolina. What’s with the picture? But then: Like this essay. High praise, stated as succinctly as possible, from a mechanical engineer.

Sometimes fewer, not more, words are what you need.

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Are We Getting Panked?

PANK Magazine is pleased to announce its first writing competition, 1,001 Awesome Words. And we think it suits the PANK ethos to leave it at that.

Not enough, you say? Need key words, you say? Explode. Excite. Intrigue. Surprise. Blow. Our. Pea. Sized. Brains. Any form or formlessness, 1,001 words or less. You know who you are. Now go to it.

Prizes and Fees

Yes! Prizes!

1st Place: $750* and publication in PANK 4.
2nd Place: $500* and publication in PANK 4.
3rd Place: $250* and publication in PANK 4.

Yes. An entry fee, too.

$15 for one entry; $25 for two entries. Each entrant will receive a copy of PANK No. 4, out in January 2010.

FURTHER PANKISH GUIDELINES HERE

Second Annual Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose

Named in honor of Gulf Coast’s founder, the Donald Barthelme Prize awards $500 and publication in the upcoming issue of Gulf Coast for one prose poem, micro-essay, or piece of flash fiction.

The 2009 prize-winning entry will be selected by Mary Robison, author of Why Did I Ever? and One D.O.A, One on the Way.

Postmark deadline: August 31, 2009.

Full Barthelme Contest Guidelines

Call for Submissions: End of Life Stories

Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays that explore death, dying, and end of life care, for a collection to be published by Southern Methodist University Press. We’re looking for stories that transcend the “I” and find universal meaning in personal experiences. We hope to include stories representing a wide variety of perspectives—from physicians, nurses,hospice workers, social workers, counselors, clergy, funeral directors,family members, and others. We want narratives that capture, illustrate and/or explain the best way to approach the end of life, as well as stories that highlight current features, flaws, and advances in the healthcare system and their impact on professionals, patients, and families.

Essays must be vivid and dramatic; they should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information. We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice.

Creative Nonfiction editors will award one $1500 prize for Best Essay, and two $500 prizes for runners-up.

Guidelines: Essays must be: unpublished, 5,000 words or less, postmarked by December 31, 2009, and clearly marked “End of Life” on both the essay and the outside of the envelope. There is a $20 reading fee (or send a reading fee of $25 to include a 4-issue CNF subscription); multiple entries are welcome ($20/essay) as are entries from outside the U.S. (though subscription shipping costs do apply).

Please send manuscript, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information, SASE and payment to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: End of Life Stories
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

More info at:
http://creativenonfiction.org/
information@creativenonfiction.org

Tweet Tweet Nonfiction

Many people are confused by Brevity’s relationship with Creative Nonfiction the print magazine.  Well, let us put it this way: we read submissions separately, have offices in different states, have separate production teams, and we are better looking.  CNF allows us to piggyback for free on their server space (thanks), and in return, they steal all of our good ideas, like the whole idea of brevity.  Thus, the new CNF twitter challenge:

Forget 6-word memoirs. Can you tell a true story in 130 characters or less? Prove it. Trend topic #cnftweet, and we’ll RT our fave everyday!

We don’t tweet here at Brevity, because you have to draw the line somewhere, but if you want to follow CNF on Twitter, here’s where you can go: http://twitter.com/cnfonline

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Blogging William Stafford

Rick Robbins writes about the genesis of his Brevity 30 essay, Driving William Stafford:

A friend of mine suggested I write short essays dealing with the drives I make to and from the Minneapolis airport in connection with my hosting the Good Thunder Reading Series. The Stafford piece was the first of these I tried. The fact is, I forget most of the conversations I have with visiting writers on that 80-mile journey, even though I remember much of the talk as animated and interesting.

The Stafford drive was unforgettable, though, for its harrowing aspects and for Stafford’s stubborn restriction of subject matter.

I think he was trying to keep us both alive.

.. a petri dish for innovation

A brief interview with Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore, here:

No Titles

“…  the short form, when done well, offers a compression of experience, a distillation of the moment, that is more like the haiku or poem than it is like the longer, thoughtful memoir or essay.  I think certain experiments, with language, point-of-view, structure, work better in the short form.  Very brief essays are like a petri dish for innovation.”

In Search of a Name: The Splor?

Here in nonfiction we have the short form and the long form, the essay and the memoir. The essay essays—it attempts—and the memoir remembers.

But then again, our essays often remember too, and our memories are often essayed into their eventual meaning. Some memoirs are boiled down to only a few pages, and essays often swell to book-length sprawls in the tradition of Montaigne’s “On a Few Verses of Virgil.” Even more complicating, certain online journals claim to be interested only in very short shorts of, say, 750 words or less, turning a blind eye to what such pieces might’ve been in a longer span: essays or memoirs or somethings-else. And then you have books like Scott Russell Sanders’ Hunting for Hope, in which a whole group of essays, any of which could stand alone, combine in a way that magnifies each. Add to that the interviews, reviews, profiles, radio essays, graphic memoirs, hybrids, experimentals, prose poems, grocery lists, and Facebook statuses that might also jostle for space in the genre, and, well, you get the idea.

I’m not really worried about small, sub-genre distinctions between essay and memoir and all their cousins, though. But I can’t get past the fact that I inevitably seem to come back to length: If you say “essay,” I think “short”; and if you say “memoir,” I think “long.”

My friend is finishing up her dissertation and it’s 90 pages long—too short to be a book, too long to be an essay. Discussing it recently in a workshop, we had trouble calling it anything except “the dissertation.” Somebody threw out the word novella, but somebody else rejected it on the grounds that the term novella was reserved for fiction. The word monograph was tried, but it rang of academia. Chapbook was similarly ill-fitting. “That-stuff-that-Essay-Press-is-publishing,” I tried: too long.

Another colleague thought a neologism was in order and suggested the portmanteau splor, a combination splurge and exploration. As in, “This started as an essay, and there’s too little here to make it into a whole book, so I’m hoping to expand it into a splor of sorts.” There were half-hearted assents and some nervous laughter, but no one championed the cause (Sorry, Dave).

So what do we call it? What term can we use for our middle-form nonfiction? “Novella-length essay”? “Short memoir”? “Book-length essay”? Splor? Messay? Brevimoir?

This isn’t really that important except for this: if they have a name, they might find more of a space. It seems to me that many excellent pieces are in publishing limbo because they are too long for the journals and too short for the houses. Often they get bowdlerized or wait around for the author to get a book deal so they can sneak in with shorter works. I’m thinking of “Tense, Present,” David Foster Wallace’s massive splor that filled 20 pages of Harper’s but 61 pages of Consider the Lobster. Or his “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub” that fills 11 scant pages at rollingstone.com, 89 pages of Consider the Lobster, and 144 pages as its own book, McCain’s Promise.¹ I just finished de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” which only makes it to Penguin-edition glory by being packaged with two other of de Q’s works. And I can’t help but remember a piece by my mentor that sat on the editor’s desk at The American Scholar for close to a year: they seemed pleased with its quality but were nervous about its girth.

I’m not bemoaning the fact that I have an 80-page manuscript without a home. I don’t. But I wish a had more 80-page jewels on my bookshelf waiting to be read. The splor, like the brief essays we publish here, has a certain allure. It can exhibit a kind of brevity not seen elsewhere. It is the movement of a mind focused on a subject for an afternoon—not an hour, not a week. That mind ups the ante on the essay’s demand for precision and concentration, yet it eschews the sometime pretension or petulance of the full-length memoir.

If essays are episodes of Seinfeld and CSI, and memoirs are Groundhog Day and You’ve Got Mail and, sometimes, all three Lord of the Rings films, then splors are miniseries. They are made-for-TV movies. Telenovellas. Firefly. Freaks and Geeks.²

But they need a name, one we can all agree on (or at least argue about). Personally, I’d like to vote for “the monograph essay.” Sounds classy. Discuss.

~David Grover
Managing Editor

¹ In fact, DFW’s collected essays often have lines like, “Since this will undoubtedly be cut before publication,” giving one the impression that he wasn’t writing with the reader in mind at all but was instead engaging with his editors in some kind of odd game.
² Brevity, I guess, publishes commercials.

David Foster Wallace: Nonfiction’s Special Contract

Our friend Richard Gilbert notes on his blog Narrative some wonderful recently published comments from the late David Foster Wallace about the difference between (and the importance of the difference between) fiction and nonfiction.

Here is one of those comments:

“[W]e all know . . . any embellishment is dangerous, that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances the overall ‘truth’ is exceedingly dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify the Means rationalizations. Some part of nonfiction’s special contract with the reader specifically concerns means, not just ends, and also concerns the writer’s motives . . . and maybe the ultimate honesty that good nonfiction entails, and promises, is the writer’s honesty with herself.”

Caregiving

Kaleidoscope, a journal that explores the experience of disability through literature and the fine arts, plans an issue themed on “Giving and Receiving Care: A Delicate Balance”

“There are many variations of caregiving relationships. We are looking for personal essays, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry which provide insights into this delicate subject from the perspective of caregivers and people who receive care.”

Submission deadline is March 1, 2009. Pays: $10-$125, plus two copies. Click here for more information.

A Reverse Kitchen

Jill Kandel wrote about her late Uncle Ray in Brevity 27, and now she weighs in on an unexpected development:

______________

I’m calling it a reverse Kitchen— kind of like a reverse Nelson—in honor of the memorable Judith Kitchen, who pulls story out of photograph. I sat under Judith’s teaching this past summer, spending a week diligently wrestling with and writing around pictures dredged up from childhood.

Then I went home.

And the opposite occurred.

After I’d heard the family folklore my whole life, after I’d written it, and after “There’s Things” was published in Brevity Issue 27, my sister wrote she’d found a picture of Uncle Ray.

It is sepia blotted with age. I gaze at it and see what I did not write:

A dark crop of hair sticks out the top of the bandage.

He’s propped up by a corner of a wall and tilted.

His hard working farmer hands lie white in his lap.

The vulnerability in his earnest face takes my breath away.

He’s wearing slippers.

Finding Ray’s photo struck something inside of me. I knew the accident had really happened, yet holding the picture I kept thinking over and over, “Oh. So it is true.” The picture and the story deepen each other. They add truth upon truth.

I cannot get the look of his face out of my mind. We sit and stare at each other. There’s things I will never know the depths of.

The River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Series

River Teeth’s editors and editorial board conduct a yearly national contest to identify the best book-length manuscript of literary nonfiction. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by The University of Nebraska Press. Manuscripts must be between 150-400 pages long .  Deadline is March 1, 2009.

Past winners have been honored as Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers and School Library Journal Best Adult Books for High School Students, as well as finalists in the Connecticut Book Awards and Sayoran International Prize for Writing.

For more information about River Teeth and the Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, visit http://www.ashland.edu/riverteeth/guidelines.htm

Of Mystery and Regret

From Laura Sewell Matter:

Just a few weeks after I submitted “The Crab in the Stars” to Brevity and a few weeks before I received the editor’s response accepting it for inclusion in Issue 29, I got a call from my mother to tell me that my grandmother, about whom I had written in this essay, was dead.

I made my arrangements to attend the funeral, held in the same church where my grandfather’s had been held almost twenty years earlier. I sat in a pew while my cousin (the one who had been most wracked with hilarity at the minister’s misapplied lipstick, last time around) calmly delivered a eulogy extolling my grandmother’s selflessness and love of family, “practical” gifts (dickeys anyone?) and stocked cookie jars. It started out exactly the way a grandmother’s funeral should be. But when we got to the cemetery and crowded under a small tent over the open grave, while rain fell around us, a veritable plague of mosquitoes laid siege. I think my mother might have landed the first blow on my father’s head to kill one that had lighted upon his temple. Pretty soon we were all slapping them off each other and ourselves, swatting and scratching while the ceremony went on around us, trying to minimize profane utterances in light of the occasion. Not even the minister (a man, this time) could keep from smacking a mosquito on his forehead while intoning the bit about ashes and dust, leaving a smear of blood over his eye.

What struck me as troubling when I was twelve—the fact that life goes on, in all of its absurdity, even when something awful happens that ought to require us take a solemn and reflective pause—now seems like reason for delight.

I suppose there are two reasons why I wrote “The Crab in the Stars” in the first place: 1) A mystery: I was haunted for years by the image of the man in the bike helmet who came to our door, to the extent that I could not think of my grandfather’s death without thinking of this stranger as well, and it was curious to me that he should remain so persistently in my memory, even though I don’t now believe that his presence meant anything at all. 2) A regret: I did not stay with my grandmother to wait for the coroner and other family members (those more capable of consoling her, perhaps) instead of retreating into my own mind after learning of my grandfather’s death. I don’t entirely blame my twelve-year-old self, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother never held it against me either, but I do regret it all the same. Writing a vaguely self-implicating essay seemed like the only way to atone.

I wonder what she would have said if I could have showed her the essay—whether she would have been able to affirm or contradict my recollections of these events, and how she would have felt about it now. In the end, she outlived the habits of gentleness and propriety that had characterized her for most of her life; she spent her final days in nursing homes where she occasionally made inappropriate references to sex and dumped glasses of orange juice on other old ladies. Her memory had been failing for years. Part of me just wants to feel bad about it, but another part of me thinks that being able to see all of this as an interesting (and, frankly, hilarious) story is a better way to get by.

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BREV29: A Warm Winter Stew

BREVITY, the journal of concise nonfiction, launches the 29th issue today, bringing you the Big Bad Wolf, a glass eyeball, Parisian lingerie, a pair of stolen sneakers, an orphaned doe, and, possibly, a visitor from another planet. Maybe it’s just the snow playing tricks on our eyes, but each of these pieces seems to ask the same thing: “Did I see what I think I saw?” Bundle up and get warm by the intense fire of such talents as Lance Larsen, David Bradley, Tim Elhajj, John Bresland, Diane Seuss, Joe Bonomo, Kyle Minor, Laura Sewell Matter, Elizabeth Westmark, and Bryan Fry. Also, new Craft Essays from Brenda Miller and Lisa Knopp, and Book Reviews from Mary Richert, Richard Gilbert, and Stephanie Susnjara.

Read Brevity 29

The Accidental Plagiarist

An interesting take on accidental memory-stealing, offered for those still puzzled by the confounding Neale Donald Walsch “Christ Was Love” scandal, via VQR:

The Accidental Plagiarist

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Crazy Little Thing Called Memory

The New York Times reported recently about yet another scandal, this one with quite a twist. Apparently, the Christmas essay Neale Donald Walsch posted at Beliefnet.com a few weeks ago was plagiarized from an essay Candy Chand published in Clarity ten years ago.

The essay relates the story of the writer’s young son (both Walsch and Chand have sons named Nicholas) participating in a school Christmas pageant. When members of the choir were meant to hold up letters spelling the name of the song “Christmas Love,” the girl with the “m” held hers up upside down, creating the phrase “Christ Was Love.”

Heartwarming, yes. Which is why it has been circulated around the internet for years, where Walsch apparently found it. It’s beginning to look a lot like plagiarism.

But here’s the trick: Walsch is claiming that he actually believed the story was his own. He had told the story so many times since first hearing it that somehow his memory wove it into his own experience. When he meant to remember the words on the page, his mind provided images instead—of his own Nicholas no doubt—and he took it for a real memory.

Sounds plausible, but many are skeptical.

As one whose mother has corrected his memory on more than one occasion, I want to believe Walsch. But does that excuse him? Is it still plagiarism if it’s unconscious plagiarism? And what does it say about the memories we write that aren’t being claimed by someone else? Are they to be trusted? How do we manage our memory?

DG, M.E.

Feel-Good Nonfiction

Our friend The Ethical Exhibitionist comments provocatively and wisely on Lee Gutkind’s response to Herman Rosenblat (see entry below if you missed the set up):

It seems to me that Lee Gutkind absolutely nails it in his observation that these fraudulent memoirs couldn’t be marketed as fiction.  The one thing that James Frey, Margaret Seltzer, and Herman Rosenblat all have in common (aside from the fact that they’re frauds) is that their stories are all “affirming,” in the sense that they tell the reader, “Hey, what you want to believe is true actually IS true.”  Jamey Frey showed us that addicts can overcome their sickness through willpower alone; Margaret Seltzer showed us that even a career gangbanger can escape the streets if she really wants to; Herman Rosenblat– most nauseatingly of all– reassured us that we can find joy even in genocide, if we know where to look.  These writers comfort their readership through, to use Joan Didion’s language, “the imposition of a narrative line” that insists that there’s something reassuringly  noble about humanity, that the types of simplified endings that the world of fiction would dismiss as “contrived” or “trite” actually do happen.

That’s why, I think, defenders of these memwahists like to say “But it doesn’t matter– it’s still a good story.”  For them, “good story” doesn’t indicate aesthetic merit (because, of course, these stories are about as well-written as your typical LIFETIME ORIGINAL MOVIE or any number of Very Special Episodes of MR. BELVEDERE), but, rather, that the story made them feel good by insisting that their own intuitive optimism about complicated issues is somehow “right” in the “real world.”

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Grappling with this muddled confusing wild world …

One of our favorite writers, Brian Doyle, is briefly interviewed on the Paper Cut blog today.

Just finished a lean little novel about a guy who goes looking for his foot, which was blown off in a war a while ago. It was glorious fun to write a novel. I was always terrified of fiction — I mean, I am an essayist, and proud of it, the Ancient Clan of Essayists, we are all descended from Plutarch and Montaigne, and Orwell’s our king, and it’s hard enough to grapple with this muddled confusing wild world — but it was very freeing to commit a novel like a venial sin.

The rest of the interview here. And some of Brian Doyle’s brief grapplings here and here and here.

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Opium: 500 Words

Opium’s 500-Word Memoir Contest–judged by author and Oscar-nominee Tom Perrotta.

The rules? Write a memoir of 500 words or less. The winning memoir, along with a handful of finalists, will appear in Opium8 which will debut on May 1, 2009. For a shining example (and the rules)–a finalist from Opium5–check out Giancarlo DiTrapano’s heartaching memoir here: http://opiummagazine.com/contest.aspx

The Deadline: February 22, 2009
The Reward: $1,000, and publication in Opium8.
The Cost: $10 for a single entry; $17.50 for two (or you can now subscribe and enter for $25!)

How to Submit: Go to Opium’s new submissions system and enter!
The Judge: Tom Perrotta has written six novels, including Election, the New York Times best seller The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children. Election became an acclaimed movie directed by Alexander Payne, and Perrotta received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Little Children. Perrotta has taught at Yale and Harvard, and lives near Boston.

Baffled, We Are

Can’t really understand why Gulf Coast’s Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose includes short fiction, the prose poem, but not brief nonfiction!  Baffled, we are.

But we are fans of Gulf Coast, and of Mr. Barthelme, and of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, so we happily pass along the details:

The Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose This year’s judge: Beckian Fritz Goldberg Guidelines: Submit up to 3 previously unpublished prose poems or short stories, each no more than 500 words in length. Your name and address should appear on the cover letter only. All entries will be eligible for publication, though only one will receive our $500 prize. Manuscripts will not be returned. Include an SASE for results. Your $15 reading fee, payable to “Gulf Coast,” will include a one-year subscription. Send Entries to: Barthelme Prize, Gulf Coast English Dept, Univ. of Houston Houston, TX 77204-3013 Deadline: December 20, 2008 Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts

On Narrators, Memoir, and the “Pretty Shabby Stuff” Inside

Author Gary Presley is an occasional contributor to both Brevity and the Brevity Blog, and author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, new from the University of Iowa Press.  We recommend his memoir, and recommend his thoughts on sypathetic and unsympathetic narrators:

I help lead a group that discusses creative nonfiction. There’s about thirty of us exchanging emails, and we all profit in dissecting an essay or a book chapter every week. In fact, I’ve hit up (Brevity editor) Dinty W. Moore regarding his editing experiences, particularly about publishing a piece with an unattractive or unsympathetic narrator.

I always knew I could be a jerk, although I don’t think it really came through in my writing when I stuck to essays. What I did learn when I set out to write in a longer form, though, is interesting. It may be a tough gig to be a jerk in real life, it’s even tougher as being a jerk who wants to write a memoir.

I’m what’s referred to as a “polio quad,” most likely the result of what is now called a “vaccine accident.” That happened long ago and far away. As you might expect, it made me angry, bitter, and oftentimes frustrated with my lot. But that’s something I hide from most people most of the time, even when I wrote op/eds about disability issues.

One day, though, I was inspired to write a wry and ironic essay about one of the practicalities of using a wheelchair — the essay was entitled “A Pot to Pee in.”

Why? I think because I was in the mood to be honest, perhaps even to be honest with myself, which is a trait I urge on others but often avoid on my own. Something good came of it, though. I discovered readers like honesty. In fact, several in my critique group said, “This is good. You need to write a memoir.”

And so I did. It’s called Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio.

In writing the book, I did go beyond polio, down toward a place where I learned something about my life, about the person I had become, about living “boob-high to the world,” as my wife describes it.

What interested me, though, is more than one reader seemed puzzled over the anger and frustration and bitterness within the memoir. “That’s not the Gary I know.”

Sure enough. I was right. I am a jerk, at least sometimes, and thankfully mostly in private. I always knew there was wisdom in the novelist Peter DeVries’ observation, “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

But in writing the book, I also learned I am an observer, a person honest enough to recognize that element of jerkiness, forgive himself for it, and understand that by offering something “so bitingly honest that … readers sometimes cringe before turning the page … ” that I have been able to illustrate disability is a normal aspect with the human condition and to change a few minds about what it means to live with a disability, to recognize the need for equal access, and to think hard thoughts about institutional care and end-of-life issues.

–
Gary Presley www.garypresley.com
SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life beyond Polio
Fall 2008 University of Iowa Press

Third Coast Looking For Your Finest CNF

Third Coast — a consistently high quality literary magazine, nationally distributed and edited entirely by graduate students at Western Michigan University — is looking for submissions, particularly nonfiction.

Third Coast publishes excellent (often award-winning) fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and drama. In the past year, two stories and one poem published in Third Coast were chosen to appear in the O Henry Award Series, the Pushcart Prize Series, and Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri.

The editors tell us, “We are especially interested in seeing more submissions in creative nonfiction at the moment.”

Submissions are accepted electonically through a submissions manager.

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Lee Gutkind on Immersion

My friend* Eric Parker interviews my friend* Lee Gutkind over at the website Fresno Famous.

As well as founding and editing the magazine Creative Nonfiction, Lee is a major practitioner and proponent of the branch of creative nonfiction called “immersion journalism,” with roots in Capote and links to Kidder and McPhee and Susan Orlean.  Lee knows more about “immersion” perhaps than anyone else teaching right now, and has some excellent guidance and observation in the full interview.

A quote:  “… that’s why immersions are so wonderful in that you walk into an immersion having an idea, idea A, but by the time you’ve spent three months or six months, you have a new idea, or a different formulation of your idea. Then, if you spend another year or two, your idea sophisticates and focuses even more. So, it’s a constant balancing challenge to make sure that you are giving the subject the proper attention.”

—

*(As a side note, it is continually fascinating how small the literary world seems when you’ve been knocking around in it for twenty years or so.  I met Lee many years ago as a student in Pittsburgh; and came to know Eric just this past summer in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  The six degrees of separation game in the writing world sometimes seems too easy — it should be one or two degrees of separation.)

Harper’s Hails Hohn and Our “Journal of Little Essays”

Harper’s Magazine’s Weekend Read Blog gives Brevity a nice shout out for the recent, wonderful mini-essay from Donovan Hohn, Snail Picking.

Here is what Harper’s had to say:

Donovan Hohn, an erstwhile editor at this magazine (and current contributing editor), has been writing terrific essays for Harper’s and others for a number of years. He has a lyrical way with line and a rigorous way with theme. He is attentive to the appearances of things, to the natural and its perversion by man. A little essay of Hohn’s that appeared in the journal of little essays, Brevity, begins:

I was, at age nine, a god of snails. On the quiet San Francisco cul-de-sac where my family lived, Helix aspera, the brown garden snail, was by far the most plentiful and least evasive wildlife around. Snails plied the long green fins of our neighbor’s agapanthus like barges transiting green canals. I’d unglue them from their shiny trails, hold them in mid-air, and poke their sensitive horns. They’d ripple and recoil.

It’s nice to be noticed.

Hey Y’All: Notice for a Southern Review Resident Scholar

The Southern Review announces an opening for a Postdoctoral Researcher (The Southern Review Resident Scholar). This is a two-year, non-renewable twelve-month appointment and carries a salary of $32,000 and benefits (pending final administrative approval). Preferred start date is August 1, 2009. Founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, The Southern Review is published four times a year on the campus of Louisiana State University. For more information, please check The Southern Review website at http://www.lsu.edu/tsr/.

Required Qualifications: M.F.A., Ph.D. or equivalent; one year editorial experience on the staff of an established literary journal; ability to demonstrate the following: editorial expertise with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; a broad knowledge of literature, especially contemporary; basic computer skills; a solid understanding of the publishing, especially small presses and literary magazines. Responsibilities: commits 20 hours per week to editorial duties at The Southern Review; teaches one class per regular semester in the English Department (courses assigned by departmental need and/or Fellow’s expertise).

An offer of employment is contingent on a satisfactory pre-employment background check. Application deadline is December 1, 2008 or until a candidate is selected. Applications should include a letter of application, CV (including e-mail address), one-page statement of editorial philosophy, a creative writing sample (5000 words of fiction or creative nonfiction or 10 pages of poetry), and three letters of recommendation, at least one of which should address the candidate’s abilities as a teacher. Applications should be sent to the following address:

The Southern Review Resident Scholar Search Committee
The Old President’s House
Louisiana State University
Ref: #029816
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

LSU IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/EQUAL ACCESS EMPLOYER

Welcome to Our New Poll

Brevity Editor Dinty W. Moore Workshopping in Mexico, Summer 2009

Details below, from the folks at the University of New Orleans Low-Residency Program:

Announcing the second annual Writing Workshops in San Miguel

Join us this summer in lovely San Miguel de Allende for an unforgettable month of writing and community. We’re very excited about our newest program and plan to make this year even better than last! Faculty and Guests will include:

Joseph and Amanda Boyden, Andrei Codrescu, Alex Espinoza, Dinty W. Moore, Steven Church, Bill Lavender, Jim Grimsley, Hank Lazer, Michael Winter, and many more

San Miguel is located in the mountains north of Mexico City. The high elevation keeps the summer months cool. It is close enough to Mexico City for weekend visits, and even closer to such historic locations as Dolores Hidalgo, Querétero, and historic Guanajuato, famous for its mummies, silver mines, and as the birthplace of Diego Rivera.   The program will provide excursions to nearby historic sites, and participants are also welcome to travel on their own on weekends.

Application for The Writing Workshops in San Miguel de Allende is now open.  The priority deadline to sign up is January 15, 2009. Some new courses we are offering, or hope to offer, this summer include: A Literary Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop in Fiction, Playwriting, and Screenwriting; A Food & Literature Class, which will feature many exciting readings, and food related excursions;A Chicano Literature Course; A Documentary Production Course; TWO CREATIVE NON-FICTION workshops, with Dinty W. Moore and Steven Church

For more details see www.lowres.uno.edu

And for scholarship opportunities:   http://www.lowres.uno.edu/contest.cfm

Questions?  CONTACT :

Jennifer Stewart

Coordinator

Study Abroad Programs in Writing

Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing

University of New Orleans

New Orleans, LA 70148

jennifer.stewart@uno.edu

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Searching Through the Blog Fog

Creative Nonfiction is seeking narrative blog posts to reprint in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3, edited by Lee Gutkind, forthcoming in August 2009 from W. W. Norton.

We’re looking for: Vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell. Narrative, narrative, narrative. Posts that can stand alone, 2000 words max, from 2008. Something from your own blog, from a friend’s blog, from a stranger’s blog.

The small print: We will contact individual bloggers before publication; we pay a flat $50 fee for one-time reprint rights. Deadline: October 31, 2008.

Click Here: To Nominate a Blog

Capturing the Galaxy as it Forms

From Kathrine Leone Wright, author of “Why” in Brevity 28:

Sometimes thoughts don’t take linear form. Sometimes words are an explosion.  They come to me in a rush of color, busting with their own force.

So an assignment to  decipher the why in “why I write” from my thesis advisor couldn’t be completed in linear fashion.

The reason I write can’t be summoned in narrative form. The reason I write crosses genres. And because words amaze me, the density of poetry excites me. Calculating cost per word, tossing out cheap articles and overused flowers. That’s what I’m talking about.

And because I’m not all that great with authority, even though I did strive to be a good student. And I wasn’t a traditional student, having taken on graduate school at 39 as a “decade crises” in which I assessed what I meant to do versus what I had DONE. I thought I had already examined the linear why.

And plenty of writers have already gone there, said it best. Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, by Will Blythe comprises a wonderful set of essays on the topic.

And because the best possible answer for why I write – have to – wouldn’t meet the guidelines for the assignment. And because writing is a joyous, laborious, insane process that slips away when you reach for it.

That day, I wanted to capture the explosion.

From John Griswold: Writing and Wabi-Sabi

From John Griswold, author of “Three Graces” in Brevity 28

I’ve long been interested in the concept sabi from Asian art. The meaning has shifted over time, and it’s now usually joined with wabi:

“Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.” (Andrew Juniper, Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, Tuttle, 2003)

The poet and translator John Balaban once described sabi as the feeling you’d get watching a very old man dressed like a young hip hop artist while waiting together on a train platform—you might want to laugh and cry at the same time. As I think of it sabi doesn’t contain the anger of black comedy but rather leads to empathy and even compassion. This viewpoint doesn’t seem all that common in Western literature, but Chekhov is a master. My piece in Brevity is an attempt to see with that view.

My father was 89 and in good health until two months before he died. He and his wife had the curious, engaged, witty minds that I have often wished for in acquaintances my own age. But he left us when I was six or seven months old, and I knew him only because I had tracked him down and only ever as a friend and only for ten years. It was strange and beautiful and frightening being at his bedside in hospice. All I could do was run little errands, be calm, and tell him more about his grandsons. Being there was important, not because I could share much more in my father’s life, but because I wanted to show him I loved him enough to witness his dying.

There weren’t many left to bear witness. Most of his friends and colleagues from various universities and from his time in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had been dead for years. A few more lived far away. I was a little afraid for him, with his failing breath, and his wife, who couldn’t hear well, and it had something to do with loneliness. Maybe that’s silly, since the dying often begin to distance themselves long before they die, but I was thankful when the others came.

First there were neighbors from their retirement community then the waitresses came from a Greek restaurant where my dad and his wife had breakfast every morning. Life and time had made the waitresses a little hard and tired in a way you don’t recover from, and it was easy enough to imagine the rest of their unchanging lives. But they were comical as well, full of gossip, cussing and the need for more drinks. And it was they who had the strength and vitality to flirt and kiss my father’s hands goodbye as a kind of last rites. I was so moved and found them so beautiful that I saw them instantly as sabi figures, the three saving graces.

User Error: On Memory and Nonfiction

From Brian Oliu, author of  “Virus 1″ in Brevity 28:

This essay came as a result of an “end-user error” on my part; I had originally written an essay reflecting on my birth and what I had ascertained to be the truth around the medical complexity of the situation.  Upon hearing a reading of the piece, my mother explained that this is not how it happened at all; there was no C-section.  I felt terrible about getting the story wrong all of these years, and especially relaying something that is considered to be non-fiction whereas it turned out I had gotten perhaps the most important fact incorrect.  As a result of this, I began to question all of these “made-up” memories about my childhood that had been passed down to me.

Naturally, I don’t remember being born or getting injured as a small child, but through stories and recounted information it is as if I created that memory, and therefore it was as valid as the experience itself.  I equated this idea to the computer virus; how these viruses fill in gaps left by human error in order to create new things and make programs do specific actions or simply overload the file with too much information.  These installed concepts “infect” us, causing our ideas to become more erratic, finally spitting out an amalgamation of truth, ideal, and excess coding.

Leslie F. Miller: Writing is a Piece of Cake

Leslie F. Miller author of the upcoming Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt writes about writing her essay “Three Bites” in Brevity 28

What do you do?  If you’re a plumber or a life insurance salesman or a retail sales clerk, sometimes folks will ask where you work and if you like it, depending on whether they care to get to know you or are just making small talk.  If you answer that you’re a writer, though, you seem to be scrutinized.  “A writer, eh?  Well, what have you written?”

It’s not glamorous enough to write newsletters and ad copy.  “Oh, that kind of writer.”  And just watch their noses turn up, as if accosted by a foul odor, when you tell them you’re a poet.  And if you write essays for literary magazines, forget about it.  Brevity?  You might as well be speaking dog.  A writer can sometimes gain respect claiming to have written for local papers and glossies, but even then, people want to know the subject, whether they’ve read something you’ve written.  Are writers more fascinating?  Or do we have more to prove?

Until last year, that was my experience.  Now I’ve written a book!  So when people ask, I say, “I just finished a book about cake for Simon & Schuster that will be out April 14th.  It’s already on Amazon.com!”  With sound effects, you’d hear a bowling ball striking all ten pins with ferocity, the pins falling loudly and slowly.

Now, in their eyes, I’m even better than a writer.  I’m a writer who bakes cake.  I’m not going to challenge anyone’s political leanings, nor will I bore them with historical meanderings.  I will simply make their mouths water.  And in the months that follow, those people will send me emails asking me to recommend a bakery or if I have a recipe for something.   I can.  I do.  And they will often ask me to bake—for their husband’s birthday, their parents’ anniversary.  A literary acquaintance who knows me as a poet invited me to be a featured reader in her series.  The theme is: writers whose day jobs conflict with their writing lives.  When she asked me, later, if I would bake a cake for the final reading of the series, I realized she must think that I’m a baker.  But I’m a writer.  That is my day job.

All of the people I have told about the cake book—every one of them—must be under the impression that a nonfiction book about cake is a recipe book.  What else could it possibly be?  And when I turn down their offer of money to bake their fortieth birthday cakes because I kind of suck at baking for other people (my cakes taste good, but they are ugly), I see an awakening.  “Well, if it’s not about baking cake,” they say slowly, thinking, thinking.  “Then what is it about?”

My book, Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt, is about eating cake.

Slowly, their lips turn upward, as if a whole new and delightful world has opened up to them.  The best reaction of all came from an exchange in Desmond’s, an Irish pub on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

“About cake?” a London native with a cockney accent asked me, his head tilted like a dog who recognized “dinner.”

Yes, cake.

“C-A-K-E cake?”

Yes.  C-A-K-E cake.

“About making it?”

No, about eating it.

There was a brief pause while this new fact underwent rumination.  “Well, all right then!” he said, even more pleased, and he bought me a Smithwick’s.  (I like beer just a tad better than cake.)

My book began with a long essay.  Its potential grew and took on many disparate layers, but eventually, with filling and frosting, it held together.

My Brevity essay is a couple of small slices, reshaped and whipped into a petit four, a taste of what’s to come.

Notes on Writing “Accident” by John Calderazzo

John Calderazzo shares some thoughts about his essay “Accident” in Brevity 28:

A funny thing happened to me a few years ago as I sat in the back row of a beginning creative writing class taught by a Colorado State University graduate student of mine. He’d invited me to observe him so that I could write a letter of recommendation that spoke to his teaching skills. So I sat in the back, in silence, taking notes and doing whatever he asked the class to do. Which on this afternoon was to write a poem that grew out of some very good sound exercises he had just run us through.

Once, in my twenties, I considered myself a poet, and I’d even published a chapbook from those intense and confused young man days. Then I decided that prose was my bag, the natural register of my writing voice. First it was fiction and then, overwhelmingly, nonfiction, and I had been writing magazine pieces, essays, and books ever since. “Ever since” meant a good twenty-five years.

So I have to say that I was shocked to see, and then feel, the poem that I dutifully started morph line by line and image by image into something that I could feel with my entire body. It was like watching a muscular stallion clop tranquilly by, then climbing on and taking off with him over the countryside, leaping ditches and flying towards the horizon, even though I barely knew how to ride. Scribbling very fast, I wrote right past the bottom of my legal pad and onto the desk top—well, maybe I put another sheet of paper down first (I’m writing nonfiction here, after all). But it sure felt like I’d flown off the page.

The next morning I was up before 5, writing more poetry. Same thing the next morning and the next . . . and now, a couple of years later, I have a poetry manuscript, culled from about 200 new poems, that I’m about to send out. I am still shocked by this.

But I’m not shocked that, along the way, a few of my poems came out sounding like narrative nonfiction. I mean especially some of the ones in which the “I” is “really” me and the facts are all verifiably true. This was almost the case with “Accident.” Based on an incident that occurred about two weeks before I sat down to write, I conceived it as poem. All the facts were true except one: the overturned, gasoline-smelling car never burst into flames. In my poem I made it do that because that was exactly what I thought might happen at the time. So if I wanted that car to burn, it would burn.

But when I decided to see what the piece looked like in paragraphs and then decided to make it nonfiction, I had to douse those poetic flames, so to speak. Thus the phrase, “In my mind’s eye . . .”

And thus this nonfiction short-short for Brevity.

From Terese Svoboda, on Writing “How Catholic”

For the next week or so, we’ll be featuring blog entries from authors found in our newest issue, Brevity 28.  The first comes from Terese Svoboda, author of How Catholic:

For maybe twenty years I have been trying to write a short story about the effect of finding two moons of green eye shadow on a towel in my youth. I have also written three poems twisting the memory around, alluding to its larger context. But what was that larger context? Was it only a “family story,” an anecdote worth repeating only once to another relative just to make sure I didn’t imagine it?

I feared nonfiction telling: that would be me. I went into poetry originally to throw the velvet cloak around that persona, or to flaunt the “I” voice in peekaboo. Publishing my memoir last year–Black Glasses Like Clark Kent–where I could skulk around as a detective and refer to myself in relation to my relatives—wasn’t too bad. But only under the duress of my uncle’s suicide and the horrific revelations of his tapes would I have attempted its writing. Yet something about the form felt familiar. Cannibal, my first novel, was called a roman a clef by Vogue.  According to Wikipedia, that’s the opportunity to portray personal, autobiographical experiences without having to expose the author as the subject. Think “thinly disguised.” The entry suggests that any material based on personal experience is a roman a clef, and used Heart of Darkness as an example. Huh?

What I do know is that all material needs the fuzziness of time until what’s important remains. Time completed How Catholic, enough to gain perspective on what those two green moons meant, and to find a voice to say what I understood about them in a larger context. To find a formal solution for this narrative in creative nonfiction worked. I’m happy.

Maybe I’ve always been happy.

Could He Be Any More Sexist, or Misinformed?

dumber

Thanks to Bill Milligan for passing this one along, a doozy of a misinformed discussion of Creative Nonfiction by Will Fitzhugh on EDNews.org.  Here are some mind-boggling excerpts:

“There is a new genre of teenage writing in town: Creative Nonfiction. It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in “essay contests” by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as “How do I look?” and “What should I wear to school?” …

“Of course teen girls should write about anything they want in their diaries, that is what diaries are for, after all, but it is a crime and a shame to try to confine their academic writing experiences in such a small, and poorly-gilded, cage of expectations…

“Of course high school girls like to think and write about themselves and their friends, just as many boys still like to play Grand Theft Auto–San Andreas, but why should that lead to the practice of limiting their academic writing to personal matters, whether that writing has been re-branded as “Creative Nonfiction” or not.”

Creative. Nonfiction. Nothing New.

From Gary Presley, author of the new memoir Seven Wheelchairs:

__

I’m surprised no one in my writing discussion group has quoted Oscar Wilde to me. “I may have said the same thing before…but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.”

Too often when we discuss the art of creative nonfiction, I say that people can roll on the ground, kick their heels, and scream “No!” but creative nonfiction was a real thing long before Gay Talese wrote the inimitable “Mr. Sinatra Has a Cold” or Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Take George Orwell’s “A Hanging.” Or better, read Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow.”

Creative. Non. Fiction.

Both are as nuanced as Talese’s “Mr. Sinatra.” Talese doesn’t tell the reader that Sinatra is unstable, insecure, sometimes overbearing man with enormous talent, but a sophisticated reader sees all that, and more.

Ernie Pyle’s “Captain Waskow” provides art with the same layered dept, art that opens another window on the human condition, art offering up by the heart of a man worn down by war, a man telling us how hard it is sometimes to be a thinking-feeling creature on this earth.

Oh, there are differences, but those revolve more around subject than style. Talese’s essay on the Chairman of the Board pretends an intimacy that masks it’s ironic distance. Pyle’s lament for Waskow is about Waskow, but the good captain is also symbolic. Pyle substitutes empathy and compassion and stark reality for irony, but there is another deeper, more existentialist layer that allows the reader a glimpse in the mirror of mortality, a place where we each can glimpse our deaths smiling from behind the dark curtain of consciousness.

Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

‘You Need to Take My Son to Jail’

Those of you who read Ann Bauer’s powerful Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past Sunday may also want to read Ann Bauer’s Brevity essay “The Nowhere Place.”

This is the second time in recent months that a Brevity veteran has landed in the Modern Love column, and that makes us smile.  If you missed Lori Jakiela’s essay on sex chairs (among other things) you missed a good one.

Both Jakiela and Bauer are veterans of the same issue — Brevity 11.  A fine vintage, it seems.

Michael Martone on “the fabrication business”

From Dinty W. Moore, BREVITY EDITOR:

I am a staunch fan of Michael Martone — love his writing, love the way that he pushes the envelope for all of us.  At the same time, I still think that genre — is this fiction or nonfiction — does matter, and I sink dejectedly into my seat every time Martone (pictured on the right, at a recent AWP Conference) suggests it does not.  So he makes me uncomfortable, which, since we are in the business of making art, is actually a decidedly good thing.

So to keep the discomfort going, here’s an excerpt from a fascinating interview with Martone, wherein he makes some strong points suggesting that genre-conservatives like myself are all wrong-headed about this insistence on the ‘truth’ distinction:

“I want to think of what I do as writing and let the speciation to others. Many artists draw, use watercolor, paint in oils, sculpt, construct, assemble, paste. They mix their media but it is all seen as art, and issues of its fact or fiction seem beside the point to me. Well at least beside the point when the thing is in the making. I am in the fabrication business and there are different gradients on that scale of fiction and non-, I suppose, but none I worry about as I am doing them. I have a fiction in the voice of Dan Quayle who is writing an essay; a book about Michael Martone written by Michael Martone in the voice and form of his, Michael Martone’s, biographer; I have an essay in the voice of Michael Martone on the fictional creation of a character named Bobby Knight. To me the differences are in the details at a microscopic scale, not at the much larger one of genre.”

Read the rest of the interesting interview over at THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION.

there’s the navel and then there’s the way the writer gazes at it

I’m never sure how well comments are read on this blog, so I’ll put a pointer here to the item just below, on Navel Gazing, introduced by Gary Presley.  The comments have been fast and furious, thoughtful and provocative, and are well worth reading.

Look up from your navel a moment and check it out:  http://brevity.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/from-gary-presley-navel-gazing-in-creative-nonfiction/

From Gary Presley: Navel Gazing in Creative Nonfiction

presley

A group of accomplished writers I pal around with in the virtual world recently discussed a long’ish essay about … well, about growing up under tough circumstances, which seems to be one of the primary themes within the genre. (Augusten Burroughs and A Wolfe at the Table, anyone?)

My reaction? I jumped into the fray waving the flag of anti-narcissism. So the author had a crappy childhood? As Mr Tolstoy said, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That she has made literature of it is good. That she has taught me to care, I’m not sure; or at least, I don’t care any more than I might about any other child growing up in similar circumstances. That she can write elegantly about the issue – granting that she may feel more deeply, feel more pain than a person less intelligent or sophisticated – surely provides some reconciliation unavailable to the less intelligent or talented.

Each time I stumble across creative nonfiction in a similar vein – and there’s millions of little pieces of that I had it tougher than you literature out there – I wonder “Is too much of our genre too centered on navel-gazing? And, the corollary question: “Is navel-gazing the antithesis of an intellectual pursuit?”

Or to put it another way, “Does the genre rely too much on memoir to be intellectually-influential in the way society perceives useful intellectualism?”

Or to put it a third way, “Are we memorists and navel-gazers getting a free ride on the coat-tails of John McPhee, Barry Lopez, Lewis Thomas, Edward Abbey, Edward Hoagland, Richard Selzer, Paul Theroux, et al?

—

Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

Brevity Mid-Summer / Father’s Day Bonus

If you read the excellent Modern Love essay in the New York Times this past weekend (Father’s Day), you know about Tim Elhajj’s life as a father trying to buy a Yankees cap for his 10-year-old son.

Well, Brevity is pleased to present a companion piece — Tim Elhajj writing about his own father, and his name, and many other things.
Here’s the start.  Just click the link at the end to read the entire essay:

I Am
By Tim Elhajj

Until I was well into my thirties, I didn’t realize this simple fact: Elhajj is an Arabic word that means pilgrim.

I blame Dad. He rarely said anything about our name; never talked about his father, or what it means to be an Arab.

In Islam, a pilgrimage is the sacred duty of every Muslim. If you make the trip, you earn the title, Elhajj. When Malcolm X did it, he took the name, El Hajj Malik Shabazz.

When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn’t sure how to present it.

Or maybe I didn’t want to risk the answer.

THE REST OF Tim Elhajj’s ESSAY .

Along those lines…

Curious myself, I typed the phrase, “imaginary nonfiction,” in a search engine and out popped a Japan Times article on the unsung heroes of literature: translators. (Making its point with the question, How many translators can you name?) In a nutshell, the article celebrates Japan’s tradition of celebrating its translators. http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080518rp.html

Now, what do Japanese translators have to do with imaginary nonfiction? Not much, in terms of our discussion here. But this might be useful; the article takes a stab at defining the genre as one “in which the author takes a real down-to-earth occurrence and flies with it.” The example they give? A “story” by contemporary Japanese writer, Motoyuki Shibata, called, “Ghosts All Over.”

(Wouldn’t the label “story,” however, indicate that it’s fiction? Is imaginary nonfiction called a story, or an essay? Right; it’s probably both. Memoir, then.)

In it, “Shibata and his wife go to America and rent a house, even though they have been told that it is haunted. [. . .] Ghosts do appear; and, as it turns out, they are ghosts of themselves. Everywhere he looks he sees his wife: on the sofa, then at the dining table…”

Lately I’ve been writing about the daydreams I entertained when I was a child. They’re not “memory,” exactly, because technically, they’re not of the stuff we call experience. They’re experiences of another kind (like Shibata’s ghosts), staked in “real” desires and anxieties that I was certainly experiencing and working through in this medium of the imagination. Do these written-daydreams constitute imaginary nonfiction, then? Is this what I’ve been writing all along? Why am I still struggling to understand, exactly, what part of the “down-to-earth occurrence” is imaginary, and what part is non-fictive? And why are we continually haunted by this ratio?

Maybe I should take up translation.

–Rachael

Imaginary Nonfictions: Almost an Oxymoron

Daniel Nester is a friend to Brevity, one helluva Queen fan, a nice guy, and Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas at McSweeney’s, so we wanted to pass this along.  First though, we had to ask him “Dude, what’s an imaginary nonfiction?”

Daniel answered, “speculation, ruminations — you know, imaginary.”

Okay. We have no problem with nonfiction writers telling us what they’ve imagined, as long as they tell us it is imagined.

So, here’s the pitch:

The-Out-of Bounds Essay: Bloomsbury Review’s New Bi-Monthly Imaginary Nonfictions Feature
Editors: Reamy Jansen and Daniel Nester

We’re both looking for fresh, off-beat, non-fiction prose. No more than 300 words.
Send two copies of your entry to Reamy Jansen, 16 Homestead Ave., Highland Falls, NY 10928. Include SASE, brief bio, e-mail address, and phone number.

A Writing Workshop, By Any Other Name

And speaking of The Kenyon Review, the KR Blog makes note of yet another “withering attack” on the concept of writing workshops. The attacks just seem to come without end, from people who very often have little idea what they are talking about. Hanif Kureishi is certainly one of them.

But this latest stupid attack did force to me to reflect some on my pedagogy, and it finally hit me, like a soft mallet to the head, that I don’t teach a writing workshop – I’m not sure many of us in the academic creative writing field actually do – I teach an editing workshop.

Here’s what I mean:

A good workshop assists a young writer in seeing how a reader might encounter and experience their manuscript (with the help of some artificial readers – the workshop members.) Then, with the help of a prodding and encouraging teacher, the student is helped to see how to take what she has learned and re-vision what she has already written.

She learns how to take a muddy scene and make it clear. How to take a soggy bit of language and make it crisp. How to take a limp narrative arc and find some spine. How to take an undifferentiated character and create, well, character.

She learns, too, how voice can be altered, and how small changes can make a difference in point-of-view. This is editing that is being taught, and more specifically, self-editing. A student who learns the rigors and wonders of self-editing, before launching her work into the world, has learned quite a bit, and has greatly increased her chances of finding a publisher/audience.

We should call it an editing workshop, then, or a revision workshop, since that’s what we are teaching and modeling. If it were truly a writing workshop, those of us who teach would be standing over our students’ shoulders as they attempted their first drafts, and goodness knows I don’t do that.

So let’s call them poetry editing workshops, or creative nonfiction editing workshops, and do away with the perennial and pointless question: “Can writing be taught?”

- Dinty

To engage in hypotheticals…

I’m going to break a personal rule and respond to my last post, and yes, bother you with my own legal concern. I called The Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) to ask “what the rules are on publishing a private email without getting consent” and after a very brief conversation (“It doesn’t do any good to engage in hypotheticals,” apparently, a big blow to the essayist’s ethos), I was told to contact the Bar Association in both my state and the state where the author of the email lives, for “the law is different in each.”

So I try a few numbers. The first person I reach wants me to describe the content in the email. Does it defame the sender? she wants to know.

It’s complicated, I say. There’s no outright defamation…but it’s not exactly flattering, in the context of my writing.

Now she wants to know what the work is about. When I tell her, she doesn’t seem impressed–she actually sounds annoyed: I don’t see what the big deal is; can’t you just paraphrase the email?

I try another number.

But the Bar Association wants to refer me to a consultation service that charges thirty dollars for a half-hour of legal advice. Now, thirty bucks isn’t much (there was this pair of sandals I really wanted…cute, strappy) to avoid possible financial and emotional damages down the road, but I’d rather try my hand at soliciting some free advice first.

My third attempt: Does anyone know the laws, in any state, for publishing a private email without consent? Bueller? Bueller? I’m going to roll-call until I get an answer.

-Rachael

Of Memory

Oddly enough, I’d bet this guy’s memoir (if he wanted to write one) would be tedious and lacking in the satisfactions we seek in personal reflection. I don’t know what that means — and I certainly don’t know if it would indeed be true — but it strikes me as an interesting counterpoint to our continual questioning of memory’s tendency to shave off the sharp edges and soften the lines:

Man’s rare ability may unlock secret of memory

LA CROSSE, Wisconsin (CNN) — Give Brad Williams a date, and he can usually tell you not only what he was doing but what world events happened that day. He can do this for almost every day of his life.

Williams is one of only three people in the world identified with this off-the-charts autobiographical memory, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who gave the condition its name: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words for excessive (hyper) and remembering (thymesis).

Unlike most people whose memories fade with time, much of Williams’ life is etched indelibly in his mind.

“It’s just there,” said Williams, 51, who reports the news for a family of radio stations in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The researchers are studying Williams and the two others with hyperthymestic syndrome, a man in Ohio and woman in California, hoping to gain new insights into how a superior memory works.

– Dinty

What Else Does Dinty Know?

Hi, Dinty W. Moore here, editor of Brevity, the little magazine that could.

It seems I am doing a lot of blog interviews lately (see the blog entry two below this one), and that either means,

(a) I’m promoting the heck out of my new book, or

(b) I’m not getting nearly enough writing done, or

(c) both.

You decide.

But thanks all the same to Collected Miscellany for featuring me this week.

Here’s an excerpt

Well, the truth of Nixon is pretty spectacular – going back to the Alger Hiss case, and to so many seminal Cold War events of my parent’s generation. And he was the foe of John Kennedy, who became so important after his death. And then Watergate. This man was connected so closely to so much amazing history.

Beyond that, he has an iconic persona as well, as the angry father shaking his finger at his enemies, as the sneaky bastard who (not directly, of course) shot the college kids at Kent State, robbed the Watergate apartment building, lied about bombs in Vietnam. He represents everything we used to distrust about people over 30, and everything we now distrust about our leaders in Washington.

Oprah, vaseline, déjà vu–and writing

I’m just wondering–has it ever happened to you that you’ve been in the throes of writing and something you’re typing that very second pops up on the television screen or in a conversation peripheral to you? Like some kind of writing-deja-vu. (Even though a psychologist-friend recently debunked the idea of deja vu…what a buzz kill.) Recently I was working on an article and happened to turn on the TV for background noise, when suddenly the very thing I was writing reverberated in the voice of (who else, right?) Oprah. Now, maybe this isn’t so coincidental, considering it was Oprah, and on any given day she could be talking about everything from post-Holocaust literature to the wrinkle-fighting wonders of Vaseline. But that day she gave voice almost simultaneously to a thought I was having on the page. And I’ve had other experiences like this–just yesterday, in fact, when a librarian leaned over my shoulder and remarked, “That’s funny, someone else was just in here looking up that old article.” (That old article, in fact, covered a plane crash that happened thirty years ago, killing my grandfather and uncles.) I drilled her with questions: Who was it? A man or woman? Young or middle-aged? She couldn’t tell me much, just that it was recent-enough to feel uncanny–two people in search of the same story. (A story that meant profound horror for my family. What possible meaning did it hold for someone else, three decades later?) “You don’t forget something like that,” she said. And I imagine you don’t, in a small library in a small town. But when I’m writing, everything starts to feel uncanny, which makes me wonder if it really is–or if it’s something else… Some enigmatic aspect of the writing process itself. Joan Connor speaks to this question best in her essay, “On Writing and Telepathy,” which you can read here: http://al.gcsu.edu/connor11.htm.

At any rate, it’s fun to think about, not unlike the pleasure in swapping ghost stories. So, you got any?

- Rachael

What Dinty W. Moore Knows

Oronte Churm over at insidehighered.com has published a wide-ranging interview with Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore on subjects that include panic, desire, writing brief, John and Yoko, and the every-popular truth in memoir equation  An excerpt:

“Simply put, my belief is that a memoir writer, or creative nonfiction writer, has a pact with the reader that goes like this: ‘Memory is faulty, but I’ve done my damnedest. I’ve fact-checked where possible, wracked my brain where appropriate, sat outside my old house on Memory Avenue for a while and tried, tried, tried, to get it right, and this is what resulted. I’m not faking it, ginning it up for book sales, grinding an ax against my parents, or in any other conscious way deceiving the reader—or myself. I’ve worked hard to access my memory and get an honest version here. But yes, I admit some of it may be influenced by memory’s tricks.’  That’s all you can do, that’s all I expect of a writer.”

Best Creative Nonfiction: Redux

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: BEST CNF VOL. 3

–

For publication in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3: Editors of

any publication, print or online, are invited to nominate up to 3

essays or articles from their 2007/2008 issues. Send one hard copy of

each piece to:

–

The Best Creative Nonfiction c/o Creative Nonfiction

5501 Walnut Street, suite 202

Pittsburgh, PA 15232

-

Or by email (pdf or Word attachments only):

bestcreativenonfiction@gmail.com

–

To be considered, work must be slated for publication before the end

of 2008. In the case of work not published by the nomination

deadline, please send page proofs or a Word manuscript.

–

Deadline for submissions is July 15, 2008.

The Bright Forever of Lee Martin

We don’t like to play favorites here at Brevity, but sometimes we do, and Lee Martin is one of our favorites, both for his brilliant novels and searing memoirs, and for the Brevity 17 jewel Dumber Than.

We’d really like to take credit for discovering Lee, but the Pulitzer folks placed him as a finalist a few years back, so we think he was already on the map when we found him.

In any case, he is profiled nicely in the latest Poets & Writers magazine, and he is a great guy, and a stunning writer, and we are happy to have published him.

What We Make of the Experience

Editor Stephen Corey of the Georgia Review has some thoughtful consideration of the growth of creative nonfiction as a genre in the latest Poets & Writers magazine.

And we quote:

“In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least fourfold–except that most of the pieces we receive are not essays anymore, but autobiographical narratives and reminiscences that read more like sentimental journal entries than thoughtful and rigorous considerations of experience.  Everyone has experiences; we as writers must make something of them, in both language and idea.”

You Talking to Me?

BREVITY’S NEW MANAGING EDITOR WEIGHS IN:

Indeed, Frey’s invitation to leave him a message [See previous blog post Give Big Jim a Piece of Your Mind] is a curious move on his part, and one that deserves some consideration. Specifically, I’m interested in how this new “forum” (to speak to Frey directly) differs from, say, an invitation to blog about him. Yes, it has a ring of, “You got something to say, say it to my face” (I think it’s reasonable to acknowledge this tension is present, even to a small degree, no matter how much Frey prostrates before us). But more than that, it’s an interesting rhetorical tactic, garnering more positive reaction than not. (Raising another question: Why does support find its way to Frey’s voice mail, and the criticism, in blogs and classroom conversations? I confess, I don’t have any plans to call Frey up after I’m done typing this… Does my criticism carry any agency, then?)

Once again, Frey has subverted our expectations of the author. It’s maddening, yes. But is it not also a little exciting from a critical perspective? The author is NOT dead–not in popular literature, anyway (no matter how much we’d like to kill him). He is very much alive and taking our calls. All of this is to say, instead of criticizing Frey and, in turn, our culture, I think it’s more interesting (productive?) to critique the meaning of this subversion and, especially, our reactions to it. What better fodder for the essay?

- Rachael

Of Huge Clown Feet and Sex Chairs

We’re happy to throw up a big huzzah for Brevity contributor Lori Jakiela (Brevity 11) who pretty much stole the show in Sunday’s New York Times with her Modern Love essay:

April 13, 2008

The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived

By LORI JAKIELA

THE night we ordered the sex chair, we’d been drinking. Not a lot, but enough to make a sex chair seem like an investment, like junk bonds or an I.R.A.

—–

READ the whole essay here: The Plain, Unmarked Box Arrived

or dig out your Sunday paper before the recycling truck arrives. Wonderful stuff.

..

Who Among Us Has Not Fantasized about the Exotic Life of a Travel Writer?

(CNN) — A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.” The 32-year-old Seattle, Washington, native also claims he accepted free travel, which is a violation of the company’s policy. Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

Liked Brevity, But Found This Excessive

Sort of funny though!

On Truth in Memoir: Remembrance and Amnesia

(Another note from Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay Proselegy and Coda)

Funny things happen on the bumpy road from life to death, and being mauled by a grizzly bear would rank far down on my list of incidents to include in a memoir. But as part of a discussion group focused on creative nonfiction piece, I did read an interesting take on a bloody confrontation with Ursus arctos horribilis.

One member of the group asked, “Why do we read this stuff?” I knew what she meant. When I was a kid, I was a worry wart, and a kindly teacher once told me “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof,” which I learned later she borrowed from the Holy Carpenter.

But the question also made me realize that I believe reading for information and knowledge may be secondary in the human dynamic. I think we crave Story. I think we seek to fill the same need once expressed around campfires thousands of years ago – when we had nothing to protect ourselves from grizzly bears and other things intent on blood and slaughter but a flint-pointed stick.

The thing is, every person has more than one Story, and sometimes, at least for me, I write and rewrite and edit so much that I feel as I’m drifting away from those memories that comprise who I am. By that I mean the the internal narrative I relate to myself, the film strip that unwinds in memory as I subjectively reconstruct what happened.

I begin to think, “Is it a true internal narrative, at least in the sense that readers will understand as true.”

Hold on now — I’m not going to go all Peggy Seltzer on you.

The quality I am attempting to describe is more akin to remembrance. We humans are prone to back-construct a narrative, one often more dramatic than what actually occurred – primarily because we need a memory with which we can live without huddling in a corner crying.

I’m a forgiving sort, and so understanding all the foibles which plague our fragile psyches, I think most internal narratives may consist of both remembrance and amnesia, missing perhaps some things so deeply painful or guilt-inspiring or less-than-heroic that we cannot face, explain, or even understand.

Obviously then, if there is an internal narrative, there is a narrative constructed from outside perceptions.

There are people I know who look through the window into the zoo enclosure where this creature named Gary Presley lives, and they glimpse a beast far different from the one shining in its internal narrative. There are windows for my wife, for my brother, for his wife, for my one-time boss — for every person who knew me “when” and those who knew me “then.”

Like every other human being, I am a prism. No single person (call that person a “biographer,” or classify that person as yourself with the memoirist label) will ever be able to construct a complete and unbiased and entirely truthful narrative of a human life.

I suppose – no, let’s say “I have faith” – that there is be One Mystic Ultimate Truth, but there are many truths. The best we can do is to find the truest part of our own when we want to set down our world on paper.

–
Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

So, What Exactly Are They Smoking in Eugene, Oregon?

Or, Why You Should Never, Ever Send Your Children to School in Oregon.

FROM AN EXCELLENT OPINION PIECE IN THE EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD:

While commentators elsewhere in the country were condemning [Peggy] Seltzer [and her fraudulent memoir, Love and Consequences,] for deceit and betrayal, the intellectuals of Eugene have been circling their academic wagons around her. So far, a professor of English and one of philosophy at the University of Oregon have put their prestige on the line with spirited public defenses of Seltzer’s moral right to lie. A teacher of memoir writing at Lane Community College has also been very sympathetic.

Linda S. Clare, the LCC memoir teacher, admits in a March 13 guest viewpoint that she herself advises her students to “embroider” their dull life stories with untruths.

Seltzer, she says, simply went too far. (Perhaps it should be noted here that Seltzer, who is white and was raised in middle class comfort, somehow passed herself off as a half-Native American, who was brought up by black foster parents in South Central Los Angeles where she ran drugs for the Bloods.)

“In my mind,” says Clare, “that doesn’t make the writing any less complex or beautiful. What I don’t know is what to call it.” While commentators elsewhere had no trouble in knowing what to call Seltzer’s book, Clare reluctantly concludes only that: “ ‘Love and Consequences’ probably can’t be a memoir.”

But Gordon Sayre, a professor of English at the UO, has no such ambivalence. Seltzer’s book, in his estimation, is a fine example of a memoir in the great American tradition.

“Since the early days of American literature,” writes Sayre in a March 9 guest viewpoint, “the boundaries between novel and autobiography have been indistinct, and readers have eagerly confounded them.”

Sayre’s point is that readers like to be duped by fantastic true life tales, and so what if they do? Who’s hurt by it, anyway?

Certainly not Sayre, whose Native American literature students at UO included Seltzer. The professor feels no resentment that his prized student fooled him with her memoir and snookered him with a class paper in which she fabricated a childhood on an Indian reservation.

 

What’s Up, Doc?

Call for Submissions: Becoming a Doctor

For a collection to be published by W. W. Norton, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays written by physicians and therapists. The essays should depict experiences of “becoming a doctor” and could explore periods of growth and enlightenment, moments of transition, or realizations that one’s maturation as a doctor had been achieved. Essays might also explore periods of doubt and struggle for clarity, or incidents of deep disappointment and disillusionment.

The objective is to capture the frustrations and triumphs of the healing art by encouraging doctors to recall and recreate the most salient and significant moments of their professional lives.

Essays must be vivid and dramatic; they should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information. We’re looking for well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice.

Submissions should be approximately 3,000 – 4,000 words. Please send submissions, accompanied by a cover letter with complete contact information, to:

Creative Nonfiction
Attn: Becoming a Doctor
5501 Walnut Street, Suite 202
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Postmark deadline May 31, 2008.

Please email questions to information@creativenonfiction.org

Sweet!

There’s a new kid on the block, full of gooey goodness, or at least sugary promises:

SWEET: A Literary Confection
From the about page:

In 2002 Katherine Riegel and Ira Sukrungruang got married in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at one of the oldest temples in the country. (You should have seen them; they were beautiful). The marriage of Katie and Ira was also a marriage of cultures, a marriage of landscapes, a marriage of genres: poetry and creative nonfiction. So began an ongoing conservation about the two genres, where they intersect, diverge, and mix to create a frothy blend. We, at Sweet, want to include others in this conversation.

We like poetry like we like chocolate. We like creative nonfiction like we like marshmallows and graham crackers. Both are great separately and together. Sweet wants to cater to the chocolate aficionados and those who like their s’mores good and gooey.

More Nonsense Memoir

Woman’s Gang Memoir Is Fake, Recalled

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) — A memoir by a white woman who claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a gang in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood has turned out to be pure fiction, a newspaper report says.

In ”Love and Consequences,” published last week by Penguin Group USA imprint Riverhead Books, author Margaret B. Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home.

Jones also writes of carrying illegal guns and selling drugs for the Bloods gang.

Jones’s story came apart after her older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw an article in The New York Times about the author and contacted Riverhead, the Times says. Hoffman questioned the publisher’s fact-checking and said the fabrication should and could have been prevented, the Times reported on its Web site Monday.

Thoughts on Finding a Memoir’s Narrative Arc

From Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay Proselegy and Coda

I’ve been banging my head against a memoir for two or three years – a book that’s only now crossed the copy-editing stage at the University of Iowa Press on the track to Fall 2008 publication (Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio). As with most things written, the book went through more drafts than I wanted to make – from connected, related essays into a chronological narrative.

During the last state, I told a writer friend, unless you’re famous and can sell a gaggle of essays, a memoir writer may not think he is living a life with a rational, non-repetitive narrative arc, but he best find one if he wants to be published.

She replied with a question, “How would you explain narrative arc?”

She asked me that because I’ve never studied creative writing. I doubt I’ll ever be as famous as Grandma Moses – the famous folk artist painter – but I use her technique, which might be called primitive.

With that in mind, I told her I think a chronological narrative would have a “time arc.” When I wrote 100,000 words as a “memoir in essays,” I would pick a subject about disability, look at it from every direction, and write about it. I had essays about the disease; its treatment; the hospital environment; the rehabilitation environment; isolation upon my return home; about education and employment; and some discussing the nitty-gritty of disability.

The editor first said “Masterful essays, but there’s too much repetition. Try a chronological narrative arc.” I tried, but I felt too close to the material. Then the editor said “It’s lost some of its passion. Make the chapters more like the essays.”

There was the rub. It took me a long time to understand that if anger and frustration occurred when I was in the iron lung at age 17 that I did not need to re-state the origins of that anger and frustration when I brought up an anecdote later.

If I could put the effort in the Wayback Machine, I would outline anecdotes on index cards. Then before I began to write, and I would shuffle the cards around and play with their order – both in theme and in time.

Within the terminology of “narrative arc,” I think, is the idea that we build our lives around themes. My theme was living as a person with a disability in 20th USA, but the sub-themes are anger, and duality (the idea that a virus killed then-17-year-old-Gary and created crip-Gary, who is an entirely different bag of tricks) and a prosaic existentialism.

How that might translate in another writer’s life I cannot say, but I know this: we are different people to each individual we know, both because of their perceptions and because of the way we reveal ourselves to them. With that, there are an infinite number of stories to weave into any narrative arc.
___

Further discussion can be found through Google with the search words “creative nonfiction” and “narrative arc” alone or together, including A Conversation with Rebecca McClanahan in the Kenyon Review and a nidus Roundtable Discussion — The Age of Creative Nonfiction.

 

Still Time to Register for Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Workshops

The registrations deadline for the pre-conference workshops at the

Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference has been extended

through Tuesday, February 19. The workshops will focus on the art, craft,

and business of writing. Established writers looking to expand their range

as well as those just beginning to think about a career in writing will

find that these workshops provide concrete tips strengthening and

marketing their writing. Topics include structuring creative nonfiction,

writing in scenes, book proposals and query letters, writing about food,

beginning a memoir, and profiling places and people. Two manuscript

workshops are also being offered. Workshops can be attended separately or

in conjunction with the conference.

To register or for more information, please visit

www.creativenonfiction.org, or call (412) 688-0304.

Here Comes the Sun, Little Darlin’

The Sun Increases Payments for Writing and Photography

The Sun is pleased to announce an increase in our payments for writing and photography. We now pay up to $3,000 for essays and interviews, up to $2,000 for fiction, up to $500 for poetry, and up to $500 for photographs.

See our submission guidelines for details.

Modern Love, Walks Beside Me

From the hippie culture to the AIDS epidemic to the Internet revolution, love has gone from “free” to fraught to Facebook. What is love now, in this age of 24/7 communication, blurred gender roles and new attitudes about sex and dating?

The NYT invites college students nationwide to submit a personal essay of between 1,500 and 2,000 words that illustrates the current state of love and relationships. The winning author will receive $1,000 and his or her essay will be published in a special “Modern Love” column on May 4, 2008 and on nytimes.com.

Submit to the Fish: The Malahat Review

The Malahat Review, starting with its Summer 2008 issue,will publish at least one work of creative non-fiction in every issue. Submit previously unpublished works of creative nonfiction for the consideration of the Creative Nonfiction Board. No restrictions as to subject matter or approach apply; a submission may be personal essay, memoir, cultural criticism, nature writing, or literary journalism. Seeking highly original submissions that range in length from between 1,000 to 3,500 words.

Lee Smith: Everything is Changing

When first encountering this snippet of Lee Smith’s WSJ Interview, I thought she was being pretty negative, but by the end of the paragraph, I saw what she meant. Anyone who just experienced the AWP Bookfair saw what she means as well. Brevity, I hope, is part of the change.

Do you think it’s more difficult to get published as a new voice today than before?

Ms. Smith: Absolutely. This is the horrible irony that just kills me, as I read this very important and exciting work. Because I think we have more excellent new writers who really have something to say, writing in America than we have ever had before. But the horrible irony is that there are fewer and fewer places for good fiction, literary fiction in particular, and poetry and creative nonfiction to be published. At the same time as the number of excellent new writers is growing, our country is dumbing down. People are not reading. Consequently, publishing is in a state where they are publishing less and less serious fiction, serious poetry. So here you have all these wonderful writers with essentially nowhere to publish. And this is giving rise to small literary outlets and particularly I think too, online magazines and to blogging. So there’s a whole different kind of thinking about writing and where it will be heard and read and seen coming in now. Everything is changing.

Writing the Exotic: Anne Panning on “Vietnam: Four Ways”

Anne Panning discusses the background to her essay, “Vietnam: Four Ways,” in the current issue of Brevity:

It’s hard to write about “exotic” places, and having lived in my fair share of  them—Vietnam, The Philippines, Hawaii—I always go through a period  where I try desperately to use these settings in my fiction.  I’ve found, however, that creative nonfiction—in particular, brief creative nonfiction—may be the best vehicle for me.  Why?  Because it doesn’t allow me to include any “what to pack, where to stay, don’t drink the water” information but it forces me to choose a singular, off-kilter lens from which to view the place and to do it quickly.  When I was writing there were originally “five ways,” but suddenly it seemed it could just as easily be “ten ways” or “twenty ways,” when in fact my goal was to capture the small fragmentary moments that defined the experience of the place for me.  So instead of focusing on large scale noticings (the presence of Communist soldiers everywhere), I looked at the small.

What originally sparked this essay was a street vendor making my son a  bird out of shaved ice one night when the temperature was around 95 degrees. There was so much drama in the simple act of getting the ice bird home without its melting.  I was also deeply affected by the loneliness and severity of the military swimming pool where I swam laps, and knew I had to write about it in some way.

I’m currently finishing a nonfiction book about my experiences in Vietnam with my husband and two young kids called VIET*MOM, and find myself still struggling with the issue of the “exotic.”

Note on Writing “Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops”

Marcia Aldrich discusses the background to her essay, Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops, in the current issue of Brevity:

This lyric essay began in an exercise I did with my undergraduate creative nonfiction students. The assignment focused on two separate objectives. The first asked them to experiment formally with the shape of their essay through segmentation. At a minimum they had to include three different kinds of segments and assemble them in an aesthetically pleasing and unifying way. I gave them suggestions: meditation on a color, targeting different senses, recreating overheard dialogue, memories of other places, a found poem. These suggestions were not intended to limit or prescribe what they might consider including in their essay. I talked about different modes as well—narrative, descriptive, meditative.

The second objective focused on observation and creating a mini-portrait of a nonfiction place. Here we talked about how to define our relationship to this specific place. Since the fountain area was located on campus near frequently used classroom buildings, the students were familiar with the place. We weren’t true outsiders, yet because the place was a public space, none of us lived there and most of us just passed through on our way to somewhere else.

Unfortunately it was the middle of March in Michigan when I did this assignment.  The timing of the assignment came to play an unexpectedly large role in what the essay came to be about.

I tried this assignment with my students as a test drive since I had made it up and I didn’t know what its difficulties might be. Segmentation has not come easily for me; I’ve been working to get the hang of it. This essay was a breakthrough and gave me invaluable experience about the complicated layering and textual intersections that can be accomplished through even a brief segmented essay. The segmented approach drove my discovery of the emotional layers in my experience of this place at this specific point in time and surprised me. 

Anyone Up for an AWP Quickie?

Emerson College’s Redivider journal will be hosting an “AWP Quickie” contest for short-short fiction,  poetry, and yes Virginia, also for short-short nonfiction.  In order to participate, conference attendees just need to stop by Redivider’s table, grab a quickie card, then write a story, poem, or essay on the back and return the card by the end of the bookfair. First prize winners will receive $50.00 and publication in the fall 2008 issue of Redivider. The judges are Brock Clarke for fiction, Ravi Shankar for poetry, and Lee Martin for nonfiction.

The River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Series

This prize series has published a few of my favorite recent books. Become one of them?

River Teeth’s editors and editorial board conduct a yearly national contest to identify the best book-length manuscript of literary nonfiction. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by The University of Nebraska Press. Deadline March 1, 2008

Call for Love

StoryQuarterly

---

Announces the SQ Love Story Contest; open to fiction and nonfiction entries focused on love of all sorts; offering a First Prize of $2,500, a Second Prize of $1,500, a Third Prize of $750, and ten Finalists each will receive $100.

Deadline for entries: March 31, 2008. Guidelines here.

James Frey’s Obituary

Steve Almond, writing a tongue-in cheek-obituary, in the VQR’s Writers on Writers edition. Frey deserves this, and it is hilarious:

In 2028, Frey’s eldest son, Malcolm X Frey, published a searing memoir that detailed his life “as the son of America’s most notorious liar.” The younger Frey portrayed his father as a laxative-popping sexual predator who routinely made his children watch him do squats and who ate entire roasted turkeys in one sitting. Freyed at the Edges was an instant bestseller.

His other children and two of his ex-wives condemned the account. Frey himself filed a defamation suit seeking to halt publication. The case was settled out of court after his son agreed to include a disclaimer in future editions, noting that portions of the book were fictionalized.

Writing in Vanity Fair, journalist Christopher Hitchens accused the entire Frey clan of staging “an elaborate and deeply cynical publicity stunt.” A suit against Hitchens was filed and later dropped.

Read THE WHOLE OBIT

Is the Essay Dead? The Free Range Librarian Responds

K.G. Schneider, one of our favorite librarians and Free Range bloggers, continues the discussion of Christina Nehring’s bleak assessment of the essay:

Quoting Patrick Madden (see below): “As for the Best American Essays 2007, my problem with it is much the opposite of what Nehring seems to be preaching. I find that too many of the pieces in it are overtly and uninterestingly political.”

This was exactly my reaction, the key words being “overtly” and “uninterestingly.” Look at the great political essays of Orwell and yes, even seemingly mild old E.B. White. If there is a better political essay than “The Ring of Time,” march me to it. I will reread BAE 2007 soon (I’ve read all the BAEs, incidentally, most in the past two years; 1987 is sitting on my desk right now) so this statement may change, but I don’t remember a single political piece from BAE 2007 that was truly an essay. Though at least Wallace warned us: “several of this year’s Best Essays are arguably more like causeries or propos than like essays per se…” The only error there being the word “several” instead of “far too many.”

Also missing from Nehring’s argument is a clear explanation for why essays molder in library basements. One big reason having nothing to do with the quality of essays is that library classification schemes toss creative nonfiction into a vast bucket with how-to manuals, math books, and the rest of anything-that-is-not-fiction. Sometimes biography is given a reprieve and filed under “B,” instead of its Dewey number, but the rest is only findable if you are a library nerd given to browsing the 800s (or 600s, 300s, 900s, and 200s… since in many libraries there’s no logical co-location of most creative nonfiction, and a book of essays about baseball will be found next to tips about pitching). It’s all part of the general indignity accorded this genre.

Abigail Thomas judges the 2008 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction

If you don’t know the work of Abigail Thomas, for instance, Three Dog Life, you really should. And after reading the book, you should definitely enter the 2008 Iowa Review Nonfiction contest:

$1000 to the winner / $500 to first runner-up plus publication in The Iowa Review’s December 2008 issue

Submit during January 2008

The rules are posted here: RULES

Is the Essay Dead? Patrick Madden Responds

Patrick Madden, one of our favorite essayists and keeper of the exquisite Quotidiana, responds to our response to Nehring’s thoughts on what is wrong with the essay. [We welcome more responses].

I sympathize with Nehring’s lament, but I, like you, think she’s overstating a lot, which, in my opinion, is an unessayistic move. I don’t think that Montaigne was making grand proclamations; his way was very leisurely and reflexive, and subversive. He did make his way to truths, yes, so maybe that’s the more important point. Emerson, on the other hand, was a Baconian essayist, a guy with Wisdom to impart. He wrote well, had lots of great aphorisms, but he’s not the example I send my students to. My greater problem with what we call “essay” in a lot of contemporary journals jibes with Nehring’s line: “In our own day the essay is an apologetic imitation of the short story.” Writers have been doing autobiographical stories forever. But they’re stories. Essays ought to think more, to essay.

As for the Best American Essays 2007, my problem with it is much the opposite of what Nehring seems to be preaching. I find that too many of the pieces in it are overtly and uninterestingly political. They grab at current issues, state opinions, build arguments with evidence. David Foster Wallace calls them “service essays,” but I call them just articles or opinion pieces. They’re well-written, intelligent, right, etc., but they’re not essaying because their authors set out not to explore and discover but to make a predetermined point. Heck, I largely agree with their points (war is bad, torture is bad, George W. Bush is a knucklehead), but I don’t think we should be calling them essays.

Meanwhile, I think there are plenty of great essays being written, but they’re not widely read, and that IS too bad.

Is the Essay Dead?

I don’t really agree with a lot of what Christina Nehring has to say in her recent anti-essay rant, but I am intrigued by this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.

Well, yes! I actually do agree here.

And the rant is worth a read, even if only to define where and when you think she is over-stating .

– Dinty

Reality Check

A guest post from former Brevity intern Debbie Hagan:

 

“How do I write about my past without coming across like a jerk?” a student in my memoir class asked.

She was a sensitive, intellectual woman, who had made a foolish choice back in the 1960s. She had joined a radical student group that had planned to overthrow the government and stop the Vietnam War. Their criminal acts caused an innocent man to be killed. She had served her prison time, but continued to pay in personal remorse.

The following week, I struggled to find something to tell her. Then I found a quote that for me defined the real purpose of the personal memoir. It was from Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day…. “Does it happen all at once or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You come. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are REAL, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL, you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand.”

I told my student that she had to be real. If she revealed her true self and experience to the world, then she could only be a jerk to those unwilling to understand.

— Debbie Hagan

Can Writing Be Taught (To 19-Year-Olds)?

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is at his most crotchety in his guest blog post, On Seeing Clearly, over at Insidehighered.com.  Really, how does he get off saying stuff like this?

The average twenty-year old, by no fault of his own, doesn’t want the hard truth. He still wants to be reassured. He wants to believe that the answer is simple: if we act well, things turn out well; if we act badly, we are punished. It is only when we get older—most of us, that is—that we’re able to understand with any depth just how arbitrary, unfair, mysterious, odd, and slanted is that thing we call reality.

Oxford Bound, Spring 2008

The Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Conference

February 27 to March 2, 2008

The University of Mississippi

The conference schedule features one-on-one sessions with editors and agents and panel discussions offering concrete tips about the art, craft and business of writing creative nonfiction. Presenters and speakers include Samir Husni (University of Mississippi), Virginia Morell (National Geographic), Rebecca Skloot (The New York Times Magazine, University of Memphis), June Thomas (Slate.com), Michael Rosenwald, (The New Yorker, Esquire), Webster Younce (Houghton Mifflin), Dinty W. Moore (Brevity, Ohio University), Kristen Iversen (The Pinch, University of Memphis), Ted Moncreiff (Conde Nast Traveler), Charlie Conrad (Doubleday/Broadway), Keith Bellows (National Geographic Traveler), John T. Edge (Gourmet, University of Mississippi) and conference director Lee Gutkind, the award-winning editor and founder of Creative Nonfiction.

Intensive writing workshops will also be offered before the official start of the conference. Instructors include Rebecca Skloot, Michael Rosenwald, Dinty W. Moore and Kristen Iversen. Topics include “Structure,” “How to Begin Your Memoir,” “The Art and Craft of Characterization in Memoir,” “Scenes from a Notebook,” and “Writing Book Proposals and Query Letters.”

Yikes Revisited!

Or maybe the Kindle is not so wonderful, after all:

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

Subject: Re: Your Posted “S_ _T” Essay on Brevity

BREVITY never likes to find itself stuck in a rut, and to that end, we were entirely pleased to publish Janis Butler Holm’s provocative, some say “head-scratching,” essay entitled S_ _T. It is experimental, decidedly.

Marissa of Drake University took the time to write the author, on behalf of her class, seeking some insight into the work, and here is that exchange:

Professor Holm,

I am a sophomore undergraduate student at Drake University in Des Moines, IA. For my Reading/Writing Non-fiction class, we read your uniquely structured essay “S_ _T” that was posted on the Brevity site and were impressed. We all loved your essay because of its humor and for its clever lines.

However, the essay positively puzzled us and we are desperate to find out more–so I was assigned to contact you personally and to find out all you would tell us.

We are curious first about the title. What are the middle letters supposed to be? (Our class of 15 girls and a professor guessed slut, spot, shit, etc…) We also would love to hear more about it’s purpose, it’s source, and the reasoning behind the S and T format.

On behalf of the class, I would like to say thank you for writing a piece so mysterious and we would appreciate your time in helping us out.

Thanks Much,

Marissa

–

Marissa,
Thanks again for letting me know that your class enjoyed the essay–always good news to a writer’s ears. Here’s what I can tell you about the piece:

1) It’s part of a collection of nonconversations whose “voices” are named for letters of the alphabet. Other titles on the Web include “C Said, D Said,” “X Plus Y,” and “O, P” (at <http://www.bigbridge.org/poetjholm.htm> and <http://www.locusnovus.com/lnprojects/op/>). Unlike most of the other pieces, “S _ _ T” is nonfiction memoir.

2) I’m interested in what the French theorist Roland Barthes has called the open, or “writerly,” text–writing that invites the reader to play a larger role in meaning-making than do more conventional works.

3) I’m also interested in poststructuralist theories of identity, which suggest that we aren’t the unified egos we pretend to be but collections of contradictions and discontinuities.

4) From my point of view, “S _ _ T” can stand for any or all the words your class has come up with, and even some you haven’t. (Are the blanks necessarily letters? Can they be words? Should “_” be pronounced “Blank”? Etc.)

5) One of my goals is to craft pieces that both engage and call attention to our strong desire to make meaning.

Thanks, Marissa, for taking the time to ask me about “S _ _ T.” It’s always fun to find out how readers respond. Please give my regards to your professor and to your colleagues.

All the best,

Janis Butler Holm

Peak Moments

Lisa Groen Braner wrote the Soundtrack for Brevity 25, and this meditation on brief nonfiction:

The challenge of brief nonfiction seized me first out of necessity, then out of delight.

A few years ago, in a tiny terracotta room, I wrote a book for new mothers. I set my alarm for five-thirty every day and wrote until my children woke up, usually at seven. Just enough time to sketch a 500 word essay, write a draft, or revise one. Fifty-two short essays later, a book small enough to fit in a diaper bag was born.

When your audience (and author) works all day with small children, when overtime and sleeplessness are de rigueur, brevity works. A book daunts. A single essay enchants.

Still, the challenge of brief nonfiction is the compression. Everything extraneous must fall away. Like a poet, the short nonfiction writer must distill an idea, story, or memory to reveal its peak moment. Short nonfiction that succeeds carries an epiphany or emotional punch. Like Debra S. Levy’s piece entitled “Jackpot,” when she reveals in her very last sentence the truth about her mother. Or in John Calderazzo’s “Lost on Colfax Avenue,” when he recounts his own disorientation while watching a blind man struggle to find his way.

In my lyric essay “Soundtrack,” I navigated briefer territory than usual. A lyric essay is a nonfiction subgenre between essay and poetry. It’s mosaic in form and attempts to reveal an emotional truth beyond constructed narrative. No segues or transitions. Just as songs on the radio rouse specific memories, I leap from one shard of my life to another, ending close to where I started—a memory of my father.

I began writing short nonfiction out of necessity. And now, though my children sleep through the night and go to school all day, the flexibility and creativity of the form still delight me.

Sleepless Nights and Disturbing Student Writing

Jennifer Sinor, author of Openings in Brevity 24, offers her thoughts on “disturbing student writing”:

Recently, in my graduate nonfiction class, a student turned in some writing that was, at least initially, fairly disturbing. It contained passages of intense violence (specifically imagined school shootings), expressions of real loneliness, and thoughts of suicide. All in the first person. Yet, it was beautiful, brilliant even, complicated, and smart, oh so very smart. How thin the line grows between art and madness.

In the age of splatter punk and Virginia Tech, it is difficult to know how to react to writing that disturbs. What if I am the one who lets it go? What if this student hurts himself or others? What if his work traumatizes students in the workshop? Or…and this is where my thoughts headed each night that I lay awake wondering just how to respond….what if I am the one who censors my students? What happens in my classroom if some topics are off limits; some honesty just too honest?

Nonfiction writers are especially vulnerable. We ask our students to do the hard work of excavating the truth. The “I” casts no shadow behind which to hide. My surprise should not have been that I received such difficult writing, but that I had escaped for so long.

In the end, we saw no reason for concern. A relief. Turning the student over to the counseling center would have felt in some ways like a betrayal. But I have become aware of my university’s official channels and am working with my department to develop a “first response” committee whose role it is to read potentially disturbing writing. I have also been given a useful set of questions developed by the creative writing faculty at Virginia Tech. I wish I had found this document (PDF Here) earlier. It would have saved me many a sleepless night.

Bottle Caps, Cat’s Eyes, and Literature

The Normal School / A New Literary Magazine / Cal State Fresno

Now Accepting:
Creative Nonfiction. Story. Poem. Critique. Experiential Recipes. Quirky. Boundary-challenging. Energetic. Innovative in both form and focus. We’re the equivalent of the kid who always has bottle caps, cat’s eye marbles, dead animal skulls and other treasures in his pockets. Contributing Editors include Steve Almond, Tom Bissell, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jacqueline Lyons, Duncan Murrell, Laura Pritchett, Steve Yarbrough, and more.

www.thenormalschool.com

Send us your work:

The Normal School
5245 N. Backer Ave.
M/S PB 98
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740-8001

OR as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format only to

submissions@thenormalschool.com

Barrelhouse Invitational, Pop Culture Essay Edition

Barrelhouse is looking for great nonfiction with a pop culture slant (again). The winner will receive $150 and publication in Barrelhouse print issue 6. One runner-up will be published in the online edition. $7 per entry.

http://www.barrelhousemag.com/

Pressure: Air

Pressure. That’s how I found myself pushing, prodding, prevailing over the keyboard to arrive at “Proselegy and Coda,” my publication in Brevity’s Fall 2007 issue.

Since 2005, I’ve been digging up a memoir. That book is tentatively set for Fall 2008 publication through the University of Iowa Press. During the revision stage, the editor said “You’re not showing much emotion when you described the death of your parents, especially considering they occurred so close together.”

That communication arrived before I signed a contract. I understood I was being challenged to show that I can convey scene, character, and emotion with words – to do, in fact, what I thought I could not: evoke the visceral subconscious remembrance of the pain of my parents’ deaths.

I read through the original memoir chapter, that recitation of facts, that grave of memories, reluctant to exhume and reexamine what cannot be changed. Need I know more? Need I grieve more? And let people watch? The questions hissed, lightly, persistently in the background – like the sleep apnea respirator that feeds me air all night.

Air. That catalyst for the fuel we consume to live. Air. That creates words that mean nothing, that are fit only to cheapen the loss upon the death of the woman and the man who made you flesh. Such a thing nearly overwhelms words, causing even the glib to descend into inarticulate gloom, at least for a time, unless you’re Didion. The best that could be had from my psyche two decades post-loss was fragments, thoughts, broken images memory-seared and gathered up from pieces of all that was shattered by death.

Thus, a prose-poem, “Proselegy and Coda,” because I have no coherent thought about love and loss that might transcend all that I think I remember.

– Gary Presley

The Genesis of “What If?”

Every once in a while, a recent or past BREVITY author will weigh in on the origins of their brief essay. Here, Ira Sukrungruang launches this feature with a discussion of his essay “What If?” from Issue 24:

“What If?” started when I received an email from my Polish friend after five years without any communication. Yo, I’m in some shit and the cops are looking for me. I’m coming to stay at your crib for a couple of months. P.S. I love you. He didn’t sign his name, but his email address gave his identity away. I replied quickly—Don’t forget the guns!

In the first draft of the essay, I used my friend’s name. Instead of the direct-address “you,” my friend was a “he.” After I completed the piece, the essay did not sit well with me. I read it out loud over and over—this is part of my process—and at the end of every reading, the essay seemed wrong. In fact, the reading made it worse.

 

The remedy came a couple of days later when I was teaching one of my favorite essays, “Tracks and Ties” by Andre Dubus III, in my beginning creative nonfiction class. I’ve been teaching the essay for years, and an incredibly compelling aspect of the piece is how Dubus addresses his dead friend. This direct address immediately makes the piece more intimate—something students will readily point out—but it also allows a deeper exploration of time and friendship. I asked my class, as I often do, “Why does Dubus use the ‘you’?” And for the first time, a student offered this answer: “Well, if he used “he,” it would sound like a eulogy.”

 

There it was. The reason my essay seemed off—especially when read—was because it sounded like I was delivering a eulogy. I did not want to close the book on my friend, especially because he was alive and still wreaking havoc in Chicago. Although he is part of my past, he is part of the living and breathing past that I carry with me daily, a past that is alive with questions and complexities, a past that makes essay writing challenging and exciting. It was the simplest of fixes, the change of a pronoun, but the “he” presented a finality in the piece that was inauthentic to the relationship of these two Chicago boys, while the “you” seems to represent a continuity.

Do Giraffes Write Creative Nonfiction?

Brevity’s editor is profiled this week on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle.

Apparently, there are animals involved.

Two Grand (Canyon) Job Opportunities

Creative Nonfiction, Assistant Professor, starting August 2008. Duties include graduate and undergraduate teaching in creative nonfiction workshops, directing/reading theses, and advising students. Additional assignments may include teaching poetry writing, advising our literary magazine, Thin Air, and coordinating our creative writing area. 3/2 load. Minimum Qualifications: MFA or Ph.D. in Creative Writing (or English with an emphasis in Creative Writing) at time of appointment, graduate coursework in creative nonfi ction writing, and publications in creative nonfiction. Review of applications will begin on Nov. 1, 2007. Send letter of application, c.v., transcripts, three letters of recommendation, evidence of effective teaching, and copies of books/publications to: Dr. Jane Armstrong Woodman, Chair of Creative Writing/Assistant Professor Search Committee, Department of English, Northern Arizona University, Box 6032, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-6032.

Visiting Writer/Instructor in Creative Writing, Spring 2008. This is a one-semester, nonrenewable instructorship for a visiting writer in creative nonfiction and poetry for spring 2008. Minimum qualifications include an MFA or Ph.D. in Creative Writing, publications in creative nonfiction and poetry, and successful experience teaching creative writing at the college or university level. Non-benefit eligible. Review of applications will begin on Oct. 24, 2007. Send letter of application, c.v., transcripts, three letters of recommendation, evidence of effective teaching, and copies of books/publications to: Dr. Jane Armstrong Woodman, Chair of Visiting Writer/Instructor Search Committee, Department of English, Northern Arizona University, Box 6032, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-6032.

CNF Job, On Another Lake

The English Department at Columbia College Chicago seeks a nonfiction writer, with a strong secondary interest in poetry, for a tenure-track creative writing faculty position, to begin Fall 2008. Successful candidate must have a terminal degree, minimum of one book of nonfiction from press of national standing, and significant poetry publications; deep commitment to teaching writing at all levels; and a desire to participate in, and help shape, an emerging nonfiction program. Successful candidate will teach core courses in the creative writing nonfiction and poetry programs. Interviews at MLA. Review of applications will begin Nov. 1. Please send letter of application and c.v. to:

David Lazar, Chair, Creative Writing Search Committee,
Department of English, Columbia College Chicago,
600 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605-1996 

(Chicago is a nice town, if you like water and can stand some snow — Dinty) 

CNF Job, On the Lake

Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, is accepting applications for a tenure-track position as either Assistant or Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, with a primary specialty in literary nonfiction and a secondary specialty in either fiction or poetry, beginning August, 2008. Review of applications will begin October 8, 2007 and continue until the position is filled.

(Erie is a nice town, if you like water, and can stand some snow — Dinty)

Hunger Mountain Nonfiction Prize

Hunger Mountain, The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters, is pleased to announce the establishment of this new literary prize, judged by Sue William Silverman, author of Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction. Deadline: September 10. One $1,000 prize winner receives publication in the Spring 2008 Issue; two honorable mentions receive $100.00 each. $15 entry fee

Visit http://www.tui.edu/hungermtn/nonfiction.asp for complete guidelines.

Latte Time

A prize of $1,000 & publication is given annually for a personal essay. Submit a manuscript of up to 8,000 words with a $10 entry fee by September 15. Send an SASE or visit the Web site for complete guidelines. Materials to: Literal Latte, Ames Essay Award, 200 East 10th St., Suite 240, New York, NY 10003. (212) 260-5532. http://www.literal-latte.com

SUB-LIT NEEDS DISSIDENT CREATIVE NONFICTION — !

The editors at SUB-LIT — “Sex. Literature, and Rock & Roll” — have let it be known that they are “in desperate need of creative nonfiction submissions. Tell your friends! Please repost!”

Check out the dissidence at www.sublit.com

Graywolf Deadline Upcoming

Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
An advance of $12,000 and publication by Graywolf Press is given annually for a book-length work of creative nonfiction by a writer who has published no more than two books in that genre. Robert Polito will judge. Submit a manuscript of 175 to 400 pages by September 30.

www.graywolfpress.org

Oh, Just Call it a “Book”!

Honestly, we don’t know what to say about this. It seems like everyone — the author, the alleged victims, the publisher, wants to have it both ways — or three to six ways. It’s true. It’s not true. It’s a memoir. It’s a book. It’s a loosely-based fictional memoir.

Don’t words mean anything anymore? Harrumph!

—
‘Running with Scissors’ suit settled

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A family that claimed they were defamed in the best-selling book “Running with Scissors” has settled a lawsuit against the writer and his publisher.

Author Augusten Burroughs and publisher St. Martin’s Press agreed to call the work a “book” instead of “memoirs,” in the author’s note — though it still will be described as a memoir on the cover and elsewhere — and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family’s memories of events he describes “are different than my own.” It will also express regret for “any unintentional harm” to them.

Howard Cooper, a lawyer for the family, said financial terms of the settlement are confidential.

The family’s lawsuit had sought $2 million in damages for defamation, invasion of privacy and emotional distress. It alleged the book is largely fictional and written in a sensational way to increase its market appeal; it also demanded a public retraction and an acknowledgment that “Running With Scissors” is a work of fiction.

Burroughs has said the book is only loosely based on his life, but in a statement released Thursday by St. Martin’s he defended his work as “entirely accurate.”

God Bless You, Sir Mick

We were mildly interested to hear recently that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has begun work on his autobiography, for a cool $7 million. But really, what caught our eye was this line near the bottom of the Associated Press story:

“Sir Mick Jagger has reportedly tried writing his autobiography, but given up, claiming he could not remember anything of interest.”

According to Nan Talese …

.. Oprah has “fiercely bad manners.”

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1648140,00.html

Oh my!

monochrom #26-34: Call For Everything

File this under “odd opportunities.” Monochrom, a Viennese net-artist collective, has sent out this intriguing call for submissions:

Monochrom is looking for articles, essays, graphics, cartoons, cut-up stuff for the next multi-issue of our non-commercial yearbook series “monochrom”. There is no maximum or minimum length for articles or essays. There is no general topic whatsoever. You write about things you find interesting. Or boring. Your text could be about radical constructivism. Or fish and chips. Or hacking your toilet. Or blowing up Mercury. Or HTML. Or Mormon theology and Battlestar Galactica. You’ll find your topic!

A big section of the publication will be dedicated to reviews. And we review everyhing. Want to review a certain medieval war? Or arctic sea protozoans? Laws of nature? Climate zones? Ways to die? Lava streams? Spam headers? Demonstrations? Sumerian gods? Neon feelings? A crisis? The different types of snow in Stephen King novels? Book shelves in porn movies? Kosher hot dogs? Axiology? Sperm? Johann Sebastian Bach? German officers in American movies who shout “Schweinerei”? Russian oil pumps? Calvinistic prayers? Trash cans in Kansas and/or Lithuania? Anal sex? The Northwest as an ontological entity? Perfect! Go on!

Submission details can be found here.

Three More (3) (More) Nonfiction Venues

Have we mentiioned that creative nonfiction, the genre, is gaining steam, still?

Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize  ($1,000)

http://www.tui.edu/hungermtn/nonfiction.asp
Judge: Sue William Silverman

—————————————————

Richard Hugo House Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest

http://www.hugohouse.org/events/wartime

“With this competition we’re asking for creative nonfiction–a personal essay–on your experience with ‘iving with war.” Open to those resident in the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, or Idaho.

—————————————————
Malahat Review Creative Non-Fiction Prize  ($500 plus)

http://www..malahatreview.ca/creative_non-fiction.htm

If You Surfed at Your Wedding, You’ve Got a Perfect Pitch

Casa Grande Press is seeking nonfiction submissions:

Seeking Surfing, Fishing, & Golfing Misadventure Stories
Casagrande Press is seeking golfing, fishing, and surfing stories for three upcoming anthologies. (Golf’s Greatest Misadventures, Fishing’s Greatest Misadventures, and Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures Vol. 2) The press is looking for nonfiction, first-person misadventure stories such as those involving bad judgment calls, pranks, comical/ironic episodes, disaster, animal attacks, misfortune, injury, loss of wit, panic, temper flare-ups, rough weather, critical conditions, trip or game meltdowns, everyday fears, bizarre injuries, etc. The editors are looking for well-written stories that tell a good tale, reflect a culture, and develop character depth while maintaining a tight narrative tension. Open to writers, fishermen, golfers, and surfers of any level. There is no fee to submit a story. Writers paid upon publication. Submit online at www.casagrandepress.com. Deadlines vary.

Seeking Wedding Misadventure Stories
Casagrande Press is seeking wedding day misadventure stories for publication in its forthcoming anthology, Wedding’s Greatest Misadventures. The press is looking for nonfiction, first-person stories about wedding meltdowns, bad judgment calls, Ex-boy/girlfriend crashing the event, cheating during the ceremony, fights, pranks, comical/ironic episodes, animal attacks, bizarre injuries, regretful toasts, temper flare-ups, insane in-laws, natural disaster, misfortune, loss of wit, or day of episodes that surround the wedding event. The editors are looking for stories that tell a good tale, develop the depth of the characters involved, and that have a tight narrative tension. There is no fee to submit a story. Writers paid upon publication. Submit online at www.casagrandepress.com. Deadline not yet set.

_______

Graywolf = Outstanding Small Press

Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize

Judge: Robert Polito

Open to any writer resident in the United States who has published no more than two books of literary nonfiction. Award confers a $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf Press.
http://www.graywolfpress.org

Women’s Work, 1943-1945

Women’s Work, 1943-1945

By Rebecca McClanahan

Everything schnell, schnell, my boots for wooden clogs, and Mother refuses to relieve herself in the open bucket sloshing in the corner. Now to the sauna, schnell, schnell, our names rinsed from our bodies until we are all Ruth, our private places checked for hidden diamonds. They say if you give up your things quietly, they will return to you.

From Brevity’s Current Summer Issue. More Here.

What’s Round on Both Ends and High in the Middle?

Answer one:  My friend Danny.

Answer two: Ohio, where Brevity has recently moved all operations.  More soon on our new corporate offices, new editorial team, and new attitude.

Dinty

MAKING MEMOIR, July, Pittsburgh, Brevity Editor

The inaugural Creative Nonfiction Writing Institute, MAKING MEMOIR, will be held in hilly Pittsburgh from July 13-14, 2007.  MAKING MEMOIR features a day-long Friday course on writing the memoir – emphasizing the basic elements of the classic memoir, such as scene-writing, description, structure, voice and tone, and ethical issues, taught by Lee Gutkind, writer, editor, and founder of Creative Nonfiction.

On Saturday, July 14, Gutkind will lead a day-long workshop for advanced writers, memoirist Floyd Skloot will offer a three-hour morning workshop entitled WORKING WITH FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY, and Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore will lead an afternoon workshop on THE ART AND CRAFT OF CHARACTERIZATION IN MEMOIR.

Scads more information right here: MAKING MEMOIR

Margaret Mary’s All Black and White Issue, Featuring Concise Literary Nonfiction

BREVITY

announces a new issue, Summer 2007

with

Abby Frucht , Rebecca McClanahan, Ira Sukrungruang, Barbara Hurd, Bonnie J. Rough, Jennifer Sinor, Carrie Oeding, Suzanne LaFetra, Charles Cantalupo, and Chris Orlet.

Topics this time around include women’s work, Selective Service, cockle shells, mussels, life’s fragility, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Stevie Wonder, animal crackers, baby wipes, beach umbrellas, dusk, and Rural Route 1.

We are also pleased to feature new book reviews, of the late Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers and David Griffith’s A Good War is Hard to Find.

All of it here: Brevity 24
==================

Now for the news:

1. BREVITY, and the entire full-time editorial staff, will be moving to Ohio University next month. Look for us in Ellis Hall. Our e-mail address (brevitymag@gmail.com) remains the same.

2. We’ve suspended reading new submissions for the summer, but look forward to reading your work in September.

3. We’re pleased to note that work from Brevity has been anthologized in Judith Kitchen’s Short Takes anthology, the forthcoming Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and three recent writing textbooks. Additionally, Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays 2006 cites Creative Nonfiction’s Best of Brevity issue as one of the five notable special issues of the year. Thanks to all of our contributors.

Dinty

Creative Nonfiction Meets Fake News

The folks at Brevity will be popping popcorn and crowding onto our office sofa this evening because Lee Gutkind, editor of our sister publication and godfather-in-chief of the Creative Nonfiction Foundation will be Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show tonight — Monday, May 7th — to talk about his new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think. The New York Times recently observed that The Daily Show has become one of the “most reliable venues for promoting weighty books,” which is just amazing to consider. What a world!

Yes, the show will be re-aired Tuesday for those who can’t stay up that late.

Don’t Read this Blog Entry

Boy, I hate to say this, but the NewPages blog is really nifty, and if I wasn’t so fond of this here BREVITY blog, I would say that the NewPages blog was the single best blog resource right now for all matters literary magazine related — poetry, fiction, nonfiction, summer workshops. Of course, I won’t say that, because the NewPages blog is my competition.

Yet, we’re both giving it away for free, so maybe I’d better just chill out.

Dinty

“The Maternal Is Political”

Seal Press is seeking literary essays for an anthology titled “The Maternal Is Political” from women “who are striving to make the world a better place for children and families: both their own and other women’s domestically and globally.”

Deadline: June 1, 2007.

More details at: http://sealpress.com/submissions/index.html

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest Scholarships

Scholarships are available for educators, students, and working journalists.  Check the link for more details.

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest Scholarships
Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism
PO Box 311460
Denton, TX 76203-1460
http://www.mayborninstitute.unt.edu
Deadline: June 15, 2007

Is 750 Words Way Too Many?

Our friends at 400 Words think so.  This is a highly interesting new magazine (both print and web) looking for true stories on a rotating theme.  Right now the theme is work.

There is a word limit.  You can probably guess?

See more on the submission process at 400 Words Submissions.

My Father’s Noose: The Reviews

Grace Talusan’s haunting “My Father’s Noose” from BREVITY 23 has been getting some nice blog reviews lately, including The Writer’s Group Blog, Kelly Spitzer’s Picks of the Week and Un-Made Up.

While the notices are nice, you really should probably spend your browsing time wisely and read Grace’s piece, if you missed it the first time:

My Father’s Noose

When my father was a boy, his mother hung him.

Enter Tondo, a Manila slum, and stand in the kitchen of his childhood home. Look up. The crusty knot is still there, tied around the light fixture.

I imagine my father, Totoy, at ten. He hasn’t graduated yet to long pants and shoes; his shorts and T-shirt are faded and soft from the wear of three older brothers….

Continue here: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev23/talusan_noose.htm

BREVITY 24 Sneak Preview: Abby Frucht

“The shirt reminds me of a certain cigarette, just after I quit. I was walking along on a sidewalk. There the cigarette lay, untouched, where it had slipped from a pack. It was a test I wouldn’t pass. I knew that, the second I laid eyes on it. So I picked it up and hid it in my curled-up fingers and took it to a quiet spot and smoked it, obediently. “

an excerpt from “Blue Shirt,” Coming in the (early) summer issue of BREVITY, on or around May 5th.

The State of the Modern Memoir

Slate is offering a series of interesting articles this week, from the likes of Mary Karr and Alison Bechdel, on the state of the memoir.  We like the part where various writers discuss the difficulty of publishing a book about their lives that also includes friends, families, and others who might not be so thrilled.

Right here:  Slate Memoir Week 

Money, Time, Space, Democracy — We Need Those!

But not so much some of these other topics. Nonetheless, this seems like an interesting project:

The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, an experimental art center, seeks proposals for short essays for a series of slim volumes we call LAB MANUALS, users guides for American life.

We invite proposals for essays on:

*MONEY
*TIME
*SPACE
*WASTE
*TRAFFIC
*ARGUMENT
*DEMOCRACY

We are interested in developing for each of these topics a slim anthology of short essays (5000 words or less) that offer vastly different viewpoints onthe experience and the meaning of each of these elements. We would like to see, for example, work that considers the experience of handling money in a bank or retail setting as well as work that considers the experiences of money unique to the blind, the young, the rich, the poor, the homeless, the lottery winners and the gamblers.

Please send proposals of no more than 500 words by e-mail (attachments OK in

MS Word or RTF) to Jake Adam York, Affiliate Curator for Education, at

Jake.York(at)cudenver.edu (replace (at) with @).
For more information on The Laboratory of Art and Ideas, visit the website

at http://www.belmarlab.org

Emerging, as In Coming Up For Air?

Penn State Altoona. Resident Creative Nonfiction Writer. The Penn State Altoona English Program is taking applications for a one-semester teaching residency in Creative Nonfiction writing. The residence, designed to offer an emerging writer substantial time to write, offers a $4,100 stipend & an additional $4,000 allowance to cover room & board in return for teaching one sophomore-level Creative Nonfiction writing workshop during the Fall 2007 semester (August 27-December 20). The resident writer will also give two readings & work informally with our English majors. Benefits are not included. We are looking for a writer with publications in literary or commercial magazines. Emphasis will be placed on the quality of the work submitted. MA in Creative Writing or English is required. Teaching experience is preferred. The application should consist of a writing sample (one essay or ten pages from a book); a c.v., including publishing history; & one or more letters of recommendation. Send to: Emerging Writer Residency, Dr. Thomas Liszka, Misciagna Family Ctr. for Performing Arts, Pos #: A-24665, Penn State Altoona, 3000 Ivyside Park, Altoona, PA 16601-3760. Review of applications will begin May 14, & continue until position is filled. For additional information, visit <http://www.altoona.psu.edu >.

Cancer Bitch Blog

Brevity contributor and Chicago-based writer, editor, teacher Sandi L. Wisenberg (Furniture, Rental Workers, Houston) is recovering from a masectomy, and blogging — with occasional humor, of course — about her cancer, her thoughts on health and wellness, the often bizarre world of modern medicine, and prestidigitation. We wish Sandi the fastest and easiest recovery possible, and highly recommend the blog:

Cancer Bitch

You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread, and you don’t have to have cancer to read Cancer Bitch

No Lyon

Lyon College 2008 Visiting Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction

Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas, a highly selective four-year liberal arts college, seeks a distinguished writer of creative nonfiction for its 3rd biennial Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing, a six-week residency scheduled during the spring 2008 semester (exact dates negotiable). An honorarium of $5,000 plus campus housing and meals are provided, as well as a travel stipend of up to $350 for round-trip transportation to and from Batesville.

More here

Iowa NonfictioNow 2007 Deadline Extended

If you attended the first NonfictioNow Conference in Fall 2005, you know how enjoyable and stimulating an event the fine folks in Iowa City put on. The most common response was along the lines of, “This is like the AWP, but small enough to feel as if I can talk to people.”

Robin and his merry gang are planning another event, in November 2007, and the panel deadline (just recently extended) is March 31^st. So put something together?

http://english.uiowa.edu/nonfiction/nonfictionow07/index.html

500 Words or Less / Get Paid

The 2nd Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize

Submit your prose-poem, short-short fiction, essay in-brief, etc. of 500 words or fewer. The only criterion (besides length) is that all submissions present an innovative address to the prose form.

Include a title page with your name, address, phone number, and the title of your submission(s). Your name must not appear on the manuscript(s). The reading fee is $15 for three pieces and includes a copy of Vol. 14 (spring 2008). Please make checks payable to Quarter After Eight.

Previously published material is not eligible. Manuscripts will not be returned. The contest deadline is June 15, 2007. Include a SASE for notification of contest winners. Prize money will be awarded upon publication.

first prize:
$200 and publication in volume 14 of QAE
second and third prize:
$50 and possible publication in volume 14 of QAE

Send manuscripts to:

Prose Contest
Quarter After Eight
Ellis Hall
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

Gulf Coast Prize for Nonfiction (And Some Lesser Genres)

I am a big fan of Eula Biss’ dense, clever, experimental essays, so I was pleased to see her listed as a judge here. Be sure to click through for the full guidelines if you are interested:

CONTEST GUIDELINES: Gulf Coast

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/GCContest/gccontest2007.html

2007 Poetry, Short Story, & Nonfiction Prizes

Judges:

Terrance Hayes – Poetry
Sigrid Nunez – Fiction
Eula Biss – Nonfiction

Guidelines: Prize is $1,000 in each genre [Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction] and publication in Gulf Coast.

We Just Lately Started Getting More Reviews

In contrast to Smokelong Quarterly (mentioned just below, though really, we appreciate any and all attention) the generous Emerging Writers Network site chose Kim Dana Kupperman’s intriguing I Just Lately Started Buying Wings (Brevity 21) as the work of the day for January 21st, and actually reviewed it: “It’s a great piece of very short non-fiction by Kupperman, who has seen much success in recent years publishing both fiction and essays … I love how Kupperman uses the various description of the body part – legs – and what they’ve done, where they’ve gone, etc., in order to shed light on her character for the reader. I cannot remember ever reading something like this and think in this case that it works great.”
More here.

Avert Your Eyes Boys

Or so says the Smokelong Quarterly, in a review of Lisa Kahn Schnell’s wonderful Brevity essay Circling. Well, the review seems to have more to do with the review author’s issues with childbirth and the differences between fiction and nonfiction, but it is fun all the same. And we quote:

“Being a chick, I like fiction written by and about chicks. Why? Because I get it—especially the crampy lower parts, the bleeding vaginas, the weepy nipples, the dry heaves. Men, really, have no business here. They know nothing.”

Um, gee, maybe I had better stop there.

Brevity 23: The Special Polar Bear Issue

The Spring 2007 Global Warming issue of BREVITY, the journal of concise literary nonfiction, has poked through the ice.  Brevity 23 features ten outstanding essayists — Robin Behn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sandi Wisenberg, Anne Panning, Patricia O’Hara, Grace Talusan , Christopher Cocca, Joy Beshears Hagy, Mary Akers, and Leslie Stainton — exploring childbirth, urban sprawl, catachresis, candy cigarettes, and beyond.

We are also proud to announce our new Book Review section, including review essays by Lee Martin, Patrick Madden, Kim Dana Kupperman, Porter Shreve and Todd Davis.  Plus an adhesive new Craft Essay by Shane Borrowman.

BREVITY: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

God Bless You, Mr. Buchwald

He was a brave man, a funny man, and way back when I was nine or ten, he was the reason I read the editorial page of my daily newspaper. In odd ways, I suppose he was an influence. In 1977, he bought me a steak in Pittsburgh, and gave me a stub of one of his old cigars.

I, for one, will miss him.

Dinty

Running With (or Without) the Truth

Buzz Bissinger offers a fascinating deconstruction of the lawsuit charging that “memoirist” Augusten Burroughs “falsely portrays” the Turcotte family as an “unhygienic and mentally unstable cult engaged in bizarre, and, at times, criminal activity.” Like the Frey mess, the book and subsequent controversy calls into question whether anybody in the big houses really cares about truth in nonfiction. See the article in the current Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/fame/features/2007/01/burroughs200701?currentPage=1

So, You Like Small Stuff?

This is not nonfiction related, but it does celebrate brevity, so here goes:

Flashquake’s new contest, Less Is More: A Celebration of Micro-Flash.

We’re looking for your best micro-flash fiction (100 words or less), mini-poems called “Fibs,” and “micro” photographs taken with your cell phone or PDA camera. There is no entry fee, and we’re giving out cash prizes. But hurry — the contest opens at 12:01 on January 1, 2007 and closes at 12:00 on January 31.

See the contest guidelines at

http://www.flashquake.org/editorial/contest.html

Memoir (and) … Whatever

The journal is called Memoir (and)

(and) what?

I’m not sure, but the Memoir (and) Prize for Nonfiction offers $500 and publication.

Details here: http://memoirjournal.squarespace.com/contest/

Do not write about the thing that annoyed your brother …

Someone over at The Mumpsimus has posted the best rules for writing I’ve ever seen, pretty much nailing every important part of the grueling process. Check them out:

Do not write about the thing that annoyed your brother the last time you wrote about it, because he’s bigger than you and he’s got a mean streak and there are plenty of other things to write about, like the weather.

Some coaches insist adverbs are stronger than nouns, but an independent panel of statisticians has proved otherwise. Despite appearances, though, statisticians don’t like nouns so much as they adore conjunctions.

And more here: http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2006/11/rules-for-writing.html

Cinderella’s Stepmom Writes Memoir

Literary Mama seeks top-notch writing for a special March 2007 issue: Stepparenting.

More info here: http://www.literarymama.com/interact/blog/

Deadline: December 31, 2006

Our guidelines vary by department. Before submitting, review individual guidelines at: http://www.literarymama.com/submissions/

On Sledding with Citizen Kane

The 4th Biennial X.J. Kennedy award for creative nonfiction. DEADLINE DECEMBER 31, 2006.
GUIDELINES
The author submitting the best piece of original, unpublished nonfiction will be awarded $1,000, publication of the work in Rosebud, and three copies of the contest issue.

Ideal length is 3500 words or less, although longer pieces will be considered.

Entries may be any kind of nonfiction, including essays of all kinds, nature and travel writing, and memoir.

There is a $10 entry fee per piece submitted.

If you send a $15 fee for at least one piece we will mail the prize-winning issue to you as well.

Details here:
http://www.rsbd.net/x__j__kennedy_award.htm

Truth and Lies: 412 PITTSBURGH CREATIVE NONFICTION FESTIVAL

I’m endorsing this event, especially since I’ll be one of the speakers. But really, it tends to be a good time, and if you haven’t heard Kathryn Harrison speak, you’ve missed the boat:

3rd annual 412 PITTSBURGH CREATIVE NONFICTION FESTIVAL, November 6-11.

Focusing on ETHICS IN WRITING, this year’s festival brings together prominent writers,
editors and critics for a serious discussion of the ethical issues writers face when telling their
stories: Is it fair or ethical to reveal intimate details about friends and family in essays,
poems and stories? How can writers avoid exploiting their subjects? Is it legitimate to
recreate conversation from memory? How can you fact-check a memoir? How can writers—
and readers—navigate the gray areas between fact and fiction, accuracy and embellishment?

This year’s featured guests are H.G. “BUZZ” BISSINGER (author of “Friday Night Lights” and
“Three Nights in August”) and KATHRYN HARRISON (author of the controversial memoir “The
Kiss” and “The Seal Wife”).

For a complete schedule of events, and to order tickets, please visit http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/412.2006.htm.

Holy Cow, A New Issue!!

In Brevity 22, Fall 2006, Lisa Kahn Schnell, Jillian Schedneck, Michele Valois, Sheyene Foster Heller, Fleda Brown, Rita Ciresi, Brian Arundel, Rachael Pridgeon, Patrick Rosal, and Rebecca Housel explore circles, confession, heat, sausage, cancer, hot baths, teaching errors, tangos, things that are lost, and the electrodynamics of loving older men.

Just opened to the public today. Please take a dip in our nonfiction waters. Succinct, but never shallow. And we promise there are no sharks.

Dinty

FOURTH GENRE Essay/Memoir Prize $1000

The fine folks at Fourth Genre are running their Fourth Annual Editors’ Prize. The First Prize winner will receive $1,000 and publication in an upcoming issue of Fourth Genre. The Runner-Up essay will be considered for publication.  Peruse the guidelines here:

http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/index.php?Page=prize