Dinty W. Moore

A genre by any other name? The story behind the term "creative nonfiction"

Searching for a new narrative on a road trip through small towns in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and central Ohio

My first reaction to Creative Nonfiction’s issue 17 was to wince. The journal had the same front cover design for each issue back then, with only a color change and new number, and I suppose it was inevitable that canary yellow would come along eventually.

I drive all morning, fervent and focused, finally stopping for coffee at The Waffle House near Plain City, Ohio. My car sports a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker that I picked up in Atlanta, and as I lean against the left fender, sipping my cup of mindfulness, a young man spills out of a purple school bus and starts running toward me.

Let me keep this brief. Brevity began in Spring 1998, and I’m pretty sure the first issue had ten readers, counting the five authors and me. Though I imagined, at the time, a run of three or four issues before a gentle exit into digital oblivion, Brevity took on a life of its own.

Now that any poor soul with access to an Internet cafe can post an idea, an article or an entire book to an inexpensive Web site instantaneously accessible to millions of individuals worldwide, now that print on demand places the means of production back in the hands of the beleaguered literary worker, now that blogs break news more effectively than conventional ink-and-paper journalism, forecasts concerning the demise of publishing as we know it are almost too common to track.