TABLE OF CONTENTS

ANNIE DILLARD • Introduction: Notes for Young Writers
LEE GUTKIND • The Creative Nonfiction Police?
LAUREN SLATER • Three Spheres
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN • Looking at Emmett Till
MEREDITH HALL • Shunned
JOHN MCPHEE • An Album Quilt
CHARLES SIMIC • Dinner at Uncle Boris's
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS • Prayer Dogs
NTZOKE SHANGE • What Is It We Really Harvestin' Here?
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ • The Brown Study
SHERRY SIMPSON • Killing Wolves
BRIAN DOYLE • Being Brians
DIANE ACKERMAN • Language at Play
MARK BOWDEN • Finders Keepers: The Story of Joey Coyle
RUTHANN ROBSON • Notes from a Difficult Case
PHILIP GERARD • Adventures in Celestial Navigation
JUDYTH HAR-EVEN • Leaving Babylon: A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony
FLOYD SKLOOT • Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain
ANDREI CODRESCU • Joe Stopped By
LESLIE RUBINKOWSKI • In the Woods
MADISON SMARTT BELL • Sa'm Pèdi
FRANCINE PROSE • Going Native
GERALD N. CALLAHAN • Chimera
JEWELL PARKER RHODES • Mixed-Blood Stew
JANA RICHMAN • Why I Ride
PHILLIP LOPATE • Delivering Lily

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

Creative nonfiction is no oxymoron. Shorthand for an exciting genre that encompasses the hard-hitting honesty of journalism and the dramatic techniques that make fiction so compelling, creative nonfiction is just that: gripping stories that just happen to be true. As Brian Doyle defines it in this volume, creative nonfiction is "true stories about people and the world... small true odd interesting unusual voice-laden funny poignant detailed musical sweet sad stories." Good, old-fashioned reporting plus insight, story, reflection... and wisdom. That's creative nonfiction.

IN FACT, published by W.W. Norton, offers much more than twenty-five of these stories—it offers twenty-five of the best. Culled from the 300 pieces published in the journal Creative Nonfiction over the past ten years, themselves chosen from over 10,000 manuscripts, the stories now published in IN FACT showcase the magnificent possibilities of this emergent genre in pieces by the famous, and those surely destined to be so. Not only that, each author has included a reflection on the process of composing the particular piece included—valuable advice for those hoping to find their own writing voice. Annie Dillard's sassy introduction, Notes for Young Writers, sets the tone for the whole volume. Over and over again, she and the other contributors stress the importance of reading good work, as well as writing it, and the aspiring poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, creative nonfiction writer—or simply curious reader who relishes good writing—could do no better than to begin with IN FACT.

Editor Lee Gutkind—nicknamed "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair magazine—founded Creative Nonfiction over ten years ago to champion a then-overlooked genre. Yet the genre is as old as American Letters—as old as Walden and as fresh as John McPhee and Madison Smartt Bell. Both McPhee and Bell make contributions to IN FACT; McPhee writes sensitively and acutely about writing and wisdom gained through years of life-experience in the memoir-like "Album Quilt," while Bell chronicles the nightmare-inducing atmosphere of the muggy Haitian political climate during the turnover summer of 1996 in "Sa'm Pèdi."

To great writers, often, genre simply happens to be a particular tone they've chosen for the present. Creative nonfiction leaps genres and seeks to express a larger truth than simple fact-finding and reporting can do alone. It requires both hours of research and rigorous self-reflection. In "Killing Wolves," Sherry Simpson not only presents a factual assessment of wolf-trapping in the Alaskan wilderness, she also uses her own emotions and self-questioning to reveal the larger ambiguities of the ethics of trapping wolves—and what it means to be human.

The questions probed by IN FACT are questions that touch us all: identity, race, love, memory, truth. Only through this genre can you get so close to what it feels like to be a feminist, 115-pound woman riding a 600-pound motorcycle through Mormon country to rediscover her family and herself, as Jana Richman reveals to us in "Why I Ride." Richard Rodriguez questions the nature of race and authorial voice. The battered face of 14-year-old Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 for talking slang to a white woman, haunts more than one writer in this volume. Francine Prose explores the immutability—and permeability—of culture, and Diane Ackerman looks at the foundations of language itself.

Part writing-manual, part prose anthology, IN FACT is not a book simply to be read, but to be re-read, thumbed over, annotated, dog-eared and lent to friends and family or jealously guarded on one's bookshelf, right above the writing desk.