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since I began to write and to teach writing 20 years ago, people have been
asking me to explain the genre in which I work -- this form that hasn't
had a name. It was called "the new journalism" by early practitioners like
Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, and more recently Norman Sims of the University
of Massachusetts edited a popular collection entitled The Literary Journalists.
Though the word "journalism" has been eschewed by academics, poets and
novelists, Talese, along with New Yorker writer John McPhee, who says he's
an "old" (meaning traditional) journalist, frequently refer to themselves
as "reporters."
In the 1960s and
1970s, Talese, Wolfe and many others, including novelists Norman Mailer
and Truman Capote, shattered the sacrosant bonds of feature writing by
adapting fictional techniques. They captured subjects in scenes, used
dialogue, embellished with intimate and substantial description, and included
an inner point of view (life through the eyes of the character about whom
you are writing), thus adding the "creative" element to what was once
an impersonal process. McPhee, Talese and other writers are also referred
to as "immersion journalists," intimately involving themselves in the
lives of the characters about whom they are writing for extended periods
(months or even years, if needed).
"Creative nonfiction"
was first popularly used as an umbrella to describe this genre in the
application form for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative
Writing Fellowship, a phrase which seemed to have been employed defensively
to distinguish between traditional journalism, and the personal essay.
(For a while, the NEA foolishly replaced creative nonfiction with something
called "belles lettres.") Ironically, under the NEA's guidelines (five
essays published over the previous five years in respected journals),
writing by Talese, Wolfe, McPhee, et.al., would probably not qualify in
any category.
The problem occurs
in the inflexible way in which the NEA (and many writers, editors and
academics) define creative nonfiction -- not necessarily in its notion
or understanding of what the creative nonfiction genre really is. I believe,
for example, that all of the pieces collected in the first issue of Creative
Nonfiction would upon careful reading fall within the parameters of the
NEA guidelines. They are obviously essays, but also contain strong elements
of reportage, which is the anchor and foundation of the highest quality
of journalism and of creative nonfiction. The word "creative" refers to
the unique and subjective focus, concept, context and point of view in
which the information is presented and defined, which may be partially
obtained through the writers own voice, as in a personal essay.
It is this rich combination
of reportage and style which allows the very different ideas of Mimi Schwartz,
Phillip Garrison, Christopher Buckley, Richard Goodman, Peter Chilson,
Jill Carpenter, Mary Paumier Jones, Natalia Rachel Singer and Carolyn
Kremers to be collected in the first issue, while maintaining a strong
and special individuality, a blend of singularly distinctive voices. John
McPhee expresses this notion in Michael Pearson's profile, describing
the emerging genre of creative nonfiction as "an attempt to recognize...that
a piece of writing can be creative while using factual materials, that
creative work can respect fact."
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