Contents
Preface /David Cooper and Michael Steinberg
Introduction / David Cooper and Michael Steinberg
1 /Reading History to My Mother / Robin Hemley
2 / My Father Always Said / Mimi Schwartz
3 / The Stranger at the Window / Rebecca McClanahan
4 / King of the Cats / Kathryn Watterson
5 / Toward Humility / Bret Lott
6 / Ours or the Other Place / Anna Monardo
7 / Why I Played the Blues / Richard Terrill
8 / Red / Carol Guess
9 / Riot / Joelle Fraser
10 / How to Meditate / Brenda Miller
11/ Baked Alaska / Karol Griffin
12/ Fast Food / Alex R. Jones
13/ Fields of Mercy / Ladette Randolph
14/ Within This Landscape, I Find You / Anna Moss
15/ Notebook of an Arctic Explorer / Dan Gerber
16/ A Brief History of Thyme: Cosmology on the Corner Lot / Melissa Haertsch
17/ The Romance Writer / Lisa D. Chavez
18/ Reflection Rag: Uncle Joe, Alberto Clemente, and I / Christine White
19/ Positive / Danielle Ofri
20/ Fire Season / Lee Martin
21/ Family Geometry / Diane Comer
22/ On the Mowing / Leslie Lawrence
23/ Physics and Grief / Patricia Monaghan
24/ We¿re Here Now / Floyd Skloot
25/ Chicago Torch Songs / Amy E. Stewart
Preface
by David Cooper and Michael Steinberg
Looking over nearly eight years of publishing innovative essays, we see contemporary practitioners of the ¿fourth genre¿ forging new routes into subjects that have long defined some of the highest literary aspirations of essayists writing in the past century.
Contemporary literary nonfiction carries on a legacy of the American essay that values introspection and iconoclasm while probing subjects, far from congenial or genteel, that comprise our common, lived humanity. The essays gathered here in this retrospective volume carry on the tradition of the American essay Joyce Carol Oates has described as ¿springing from intense personal experience . . . linked to larger issues.¿ Even those writers who stretch the conventional boundaries of essay technique are only exercising the independence and inquisitiveness that Emerson, the sage of American prose, had in mind when he challenged future generations of freethinking writers to ¿insist on yourself; never imitate.¿
Among the many reasons for the current resurgence of creative nonfiction is the moral populism of the form. Its skillful practitioners remind us that seemingly ordinary, even ephemeral things¿like a train whistle, a mantle photograph, some misplaced keys, a snow fall, the smells of a mother¿s cooking¿often hold the key to unlocking extraordinary insight into family, culture, personal history, place and time. Many¿if not all¿of the writers featured in the pages of this anthology find sharable insight in these unique particulars of their experience, the universe in a grain of sand.
The Uruguayan writer and iconoclast Eduardo Galeano, interviewed in our Fall 2001 issue, spoke of what it means as a writer to be ¿a voice of voices.¿ ¿Deep down¿ Galeano said, ¿we all contain many people even though we don¿t know it.¿
Because it liberates these common voices, the contemporary personal essay is the most democratic among nonfiction subgenres. It is doubtful that writers can forge as close a connection to readers through more expository forms such as the feature story, polemic, commentary, or reportage. The moral populism hard at work in the contemporary personal essay continuously reminds us that every life worth living well is one well worth writing about.
In a Fourth Genre roundtable on the art of the personal essay (Fall 2001) Steven Harvey summed up a basic claim that guides much of our editorial work and consequently much of the work in this volume. ¿Writing becomes art,¿ Harvey said, ¿the moment that we care as much about the way it says what it says as we do about what it says.¿ Many of the writers featured here explore that ¿way.¿ What is particularly useful about their experiments is how they treat technical concepts¿imagery, structure, voice, juxtaposition, dialogue, narrative line, closure, etc.¿as open invitations to aspiring writers ¿to take risks on the page,¿ as Scott Russell Sanders put it in a Fourth Genre interview, ¿to venture out from familiar territory into the blank places on those maps¿ (Spring 1999).
It is in that willingness to ¿venture out¿ that the essays reprinted here engage a variety of subject matters. Some writers strike cheerful poses, wearing their subjects loosely. Others, knowing they are headed into painful territory, are wary, cautious, severe.
We also believe that a literary form ought to live, as Diane Ackerman said of the natural world, ¿as variously as possible.¿ Some of our writers, for example, probe the human infatuation for things nonhuman, for the flora and fauna that make our world whole and complete. Their essays often remind us of the dual nature of insight: a simultaneous perception of the inner, sometimes hidden nature of a subject or a thing that poses as the subject of an essay and a discernment of the writer¿s own consciousness and moral complexity. We are left wondering whether the literary nonfiction essay has a special capacity, perhaps even a calling, to merge these inner and outer worlds.
One of our own teachers, mentors, and special friends¿James Laughlin, the late founder and publisher of New Directions¿once reminded us that ¿literature, a whole culture in fact, goes dead when there is no experiment, no reaching out, no counter-attack on accepted values.¿ It should come as no surprise then to see writers experimenting in the following pages. Still, we realize that you cannot get so precious over counter-attacking accepted literary values that you dismiss what traditional and established essayists (Montaigne, Emerson, E. B. White, and personal favorites like Jane Addams and Susan Sontag) have to teach us about how to make an essay. While Laughlin was actively publishing radical new poets like Charles Olson and writers like Gertrude Stein who would eventually form the modernist literary movement, he always reminded us that he was busy reading the Troubadours and ancient Chinese poets so he could have some plumb line as a publisher of poetry that broke from traditional forms. That¿s why {anthology title} includes essays that are conventionally drawn (although hardly conventional) and solidly grounded narratives.
The work we publish in Fourth Genre is sometimes graceful and dignified, sometimes flip and playful, sometimes factual, sometimes truth-seeking. The best of these essays reside somewhere in the gray spaces. The contemporary essay looks to us more tentative and complex, still evolving, and, as such, hard to pin down and explain. We tend to view the fourth genre as exploring the ground between truth and imagination rather than as defying or assaulting the traditional boundaries of factuality. One thing we know for certain: there¿s an entire landscape between hard gravel and soft marshes, and there are many, many good writers occupying that ground, using new techniques, redeploying traditional ones, making discoveries, and revisiting old places. The vast array of writers and subjects represented here, therefore, are perfectly at home in what has long been considered the freest of literary forms.
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Introduction
by David Cooper and Michael Steinberg
The personal essay has been a viable form since Montaigne¿s early efforts in the fifteenth century. And the memoir¿s legacy dates even further back, to St. Augustine¿s Confessions. Yet it is only during the last five or ten years that the genre now widely known as creative nonfiction began to gain widespread recognition as a literary form.
We have published more than 350 personal essays and memoirs since Fourth Genre¿s inaugural issue appeared in 1999. As a result, the journal has been at the forefront of a vital, evolving conversation about creative nonfiction¿s place in the literary spectrum.
Partly to document Fourth Genre¿s evolution, and partly to chart the rapid and remarkable growth of contemporary literary nonfiction, we have decided to now offer a representative sampling from the journal¿s first ten issues.
Fourth Genre¿s subtitle, Explorations in Nonfiction, epitomizes our belief that creative nonfiction¿s roots as a literary form are more closely connected to the spirit of Montaigne¿s work than to matters of subject, reportage, and scholarly research. Consequently, many of the pieces that Editor Martha Bates has chosen for Five Years of ¿Fourth Genre¿ are exploratory, intimate, and personal. As such, they reflect the autobiographical and ¿literary¿ impulses (discovery, exploration, reflection) that characterize the kind of writing we call the ¿fourth genre.¿
Reflecting another aspect of what we mean by the term fourth genre, the authors represented here are writing not simply to confess or tell their personal stories. Rather, they use their personal experiences as a way of connecting themselves (and readers) to larger human subjects, issues, and ideas. As essayist/critic Marianna Torgovnich reminds us, ¿All writing about self and culture is personal in that writers and critics find some of their richest material in experience.¿¿Often,¿she adds,¿our search for personal meaning is precisely what generates our passion and curiosity for the subjects we research and write about.¿
Memoirist Mary Clearman Blew writes that ¿the boundaries of creative nonfiction will always be as fluid as water.¿ Since Fourth Genre¿s inception, we have made it a point to highlight the work of writers who, in their search for meaning and understanding, are not afraid to push at boundaries. Therefore, as you read through these twenty-five selections, you will find that a good many writers have borrowed techniques and strategies freely from other literary genres as well as from other writers. Some pieces, for example, combine narrative with fictional and poetic techniques, while others weave self-portraiture and reflection with reportage and critical analysis.
And because the genre encompasses such a broad range of sensibilities, forms, and approaches, Five Years of ¿Fourth Genre¿ includes writers who are exploring the roots of their identities, others who are chronicling personal discoveries and changes, and still others who are examining personal conflicts and interrogating their thoughts and opinions. All are, in one way or another, attempting to connect themselves to a larger human legacy.
The writers whose works appear in this volume share a common desire to speak in an intimate, singular voice as active participants in their own experience. This impulse often overlaps with the writer¿s need to mediate that experience by serving as a witness/correspondent¿thus creating a synergy that is unique to this literary form.
Another of the genre¿s identifying characteristics is its hybrid nature. Patricia Hampl, one of our finest literary memoirists, has described creative nonfiction as a "mongrel" form. Several writers in this anthology utilize plot, character development, dialogue, and dramatic scenes in some of the same ways that fiction writers and playwrights do. And a number of pieces reveal a heightened sense of language and a use of rhythm, image, and metaphor that for centuries have been the hallmarks of lyric poetry.
In keeping with its hybrid qualities, another of creative nonfiction¿s hallmarks is its flexibility of form. Annie Dillard says, ¿The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do¿everything but fake it. It can also do everything a diary, a journal, a critical article, an editorial, a feature, a report can do.¿
Dillard is suggesting that the genre offers writers license to explore some of the more whimsical twists and turns of their imaginations and psyches.
In their quest for value and order, then, many of the writers in Five Years of ¿Fourth Genre¿ are experimenting with a variety of structures¿ranging from chronological narratives and flashbacks to nonlinear, disjunctive, and associative devices such as montages, mosaics, and collages¿several of which mirror the fragmentation and confusions of our inner¿and outer¿ worlds.
As you can see from the table of contents, we have tried to illustrate both the genre¿s expanding range and the variety of voices it embraces. We have also chosen a representative mix of distinguished and emerging writers who differ widely in their approaches and techniques. Some, for example, blend reportage and straightforward narrative with dramatic scenes and dialogue, while others explore their subjects and ideas in more lyrical, discursive ways. And readers will find that the temperaments and dispositions of the authors vary considerably. A particular piece, for example, might by turns be lyrical, analytical, meditative, expository, self-interrogative, reflective, and/or whimsical.
Still, despite the differences in sensibility, each piece is marked by the discernible authority of the author¿s presence. As essayist Scott Russell Sanders writes, ¿the essay is distinguished from the short story, not by the presence or absence of literary devices, not by the tone or theme or subject, but by the writer¿s stance toward the material.¿
Where, for example, does this narrator stand in relation to the subject or situation he or she is investigating? In other words, who is this person¿or persona¿taking them on this journey? A number of Five Years of ¿Fourth Genre¿ selections demonstrate a variety of ways in which writers establish their personal presence. Some writers are self-interrogative, others reveal more pensive personas, and some deliberately maintain an emotional and psychological distance from their subjects.
And yet, whatever their narrative stance(s) are, we are always aware of the authors¿ presences, partly because they allow us to be privy to their inner struggles¿their thoughts, ruminations, and feelings¿as they wrestle with what Marianna Torgovnich describes as ¿some strongly felt experience, deeply held conviction, long term interest, or problem that has irritated the mind.¿
As the body of work in this anthology demonstrates, the artfully crafted personal essay/memoir is uniquely suited for our times. We say this because today the need to pay attention to the singular, idiosyncratic human voice is perhaps more urgent than ever before. As essayist/editor W. Scott Olson asserts, ¿As the world becomes more problematic, it is in the little excursions and small observations that we can discover ourselves, that we can make an honest connection with others, that we can remind ourselves of what it means to belong to one another.¿ This is precisely the intent and spirit that characterizes all of the writing in this anthology. We hope you¿ll be surprised, enlightened, and enriched by the journey.
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