Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character
Barrie Jean Borich
What was missing in my early understanding of nonfiction portrait has to do with the ways actuality shadows the creative nonfiction page. Character may be the area where nonfiction prose is the most unlike fiction, because the nonfiction writers, due to the nonfictional nature of the genre, will never be able to fully speak from a deep character point-of-view separate from our own, and because, in as many cases as not, our character referents are not only actual but actually living, potentially wounded by any words we publish about them, leaving the nonfiction writer a relatively limited ethical field within which to work. This means that characters in most nonfiction works play a much different role than they do in most fiction, functioning as portraits and foils for a more deeply developed narrator, rather than as longing and obstacle-battling narrative engines, advancing plot. Click here to continue reading.
As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay
Tim Bascom
Art can play a significant role in writing, as with ekphrastic poems that explore visual subjects—for instance, Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" or Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter." And there are craft lessons to be learned too, especially for essayists, since they, like most visual artists, have had to work under the sign of the real. When Magritte painted his iconic pipe, he was reacting to millennia of viewing assumptions, such as the inclination to view a marble bust or a still-life as a factual replica. The nonfiction writer deals with that same tendency to confuse the essay with its purported subject. Fiction writers are given leeway to imagine, and poets get a dispensation unless writing confessional poems, but essayists must write against the grain of popular thinking, breaking the "equal sign" that readers tend to place between each essay and what it supposedly portrays. Because they are often seen as factual recorders, their perceptive and imaginative abilities are underappreciated. Click here to continue reading.
Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir
Adrian Koesters
When I find myself falling into a memoir—falling in to it, responding to the summons to "come on in"—it is because I am learning a language I didn't know before, and it is not the language of simply subjective experience, or passion, or titillation, nor is it the language of either sincerity or cleverness. I come back to both of these essays and others like them so often because the authority of the piece does not rest in the fact that I have accepted that the author (the I) is saying what is being said, but because I have perceived that the author has created a particular, necessary language created for the piece and for my understanding of and presence within it. Click here to continue reading.
Interview with Simmons Buntin
The American Desert Southwest is at the front line of ecological instability and environmental change. It's also produced great writing, both poetry and prose, and Simmons Buntin, who founded the online journal Terrain.org helps us understand our place and as well as understand how we create place. Beyond his work with Terrain.org, Buntin is a noted urban and regional planner, whose recent book Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (coauthored with Ken Pirie) is a collection of sustainable community case studies. He is also an accomplished poet, whose two collections Riverfall and Bloom, are published by Salmon Poetry. He lives near Tucson, Arizona. Click here to continue reading.
Narrative Disruption in Memoir
Mike Puican
If narrative is the straight-ahead engine of the story, digression is its indirect, yet insistent, emotional heart. Digression interjects points of focus and intensity at unexpected junctures. It reminds us of how thoughts and emotions insert themselves into our own everyday lives. In this way, it creates an intimacy with the reader. I'd like to suggest four key characteristics of narrative disruption that help explain its effectiveness. Click here to continue reading.
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