1: Introduction

Why we tell stories:

Stories build cultures. True stories build entire civilizations, belief structures, and communities. Since humans could communicate, stories have been shared. Some of the earliest cave drawings discovered from 30,000 years ago tell tales of the challenges and victories of living at that time. Indigenous people across the globe pass stories through generations. Moral structures are built from stories. Centuries-old texts full of narratives are used to convey truths, to warn, to inspire, and to instruct in faith communities of all kinds. Storytelling is entertainment, it’s instruction, and it’s foundational to our humanity. It's kind of a big deal.

On a smaller scale, stories help us connect with others every day. They help us empathize and find commonalities. At the end of each day when I connect with my son, who is a high school student, I ask him for stories. When I want to encourage or warn or correct him, I offer stories of my own mistakes and triumphs. When I meet someone for the first time or teach a class full of new students, I ask for stories and share my own in order to know them better.

My college-age daughter is living in Brazil. She interacts with people from all around South America, the U.S., and Africa. When meeting someone from a place she hasn’t been, she has learned to ask for stories. “What is your hometown known for?” she asks. The true stories they share are sometimes more fantastic than fiction.

She recently met a new friend from Honduras, who shared that her hometown is known for lluvia de peces, translated as “rain of fish.” At least once a year, this region experiences a unique meteorological phenomenon in which fish literally fall from the sky. They explain the phenomenon through—guess what? A story about a local clergyman who prayed for his community to receive food during a time of famine, which resulted in the first fish storm. Is the story true? It sure feels true at least once a year when the skies get dark and everyone runs inside to avoid getting pelted by plummeting seafood.

Vikki Moran of HerLife Magazine sums it up beautifully:

Listening to a good storyteller can transport your spirit. With a skilled storyteller, you can experience changes in seasons, smell aromas and ultimately seed your open mind. “Spinning a good yarn” can shape culture, impart values and pay respect to the subject matter. We listen and interpret the meaning in stories we hear. It is very human, and it is essential to history. Storytelling is vital to language development and can assist in creating racial equality and religious respect.

Defining the genre:

Creative Nonfiction is seen by some as a new genre, sometimes referred to as “The Fourth Genre” (the other three being fiction, drama, and poetry). Frankly, that’s weird and a little insulting. Creative nonfiction is probably the original genre, the first way knowledge was passed between generations. Is the word “Creative” the part that makes it new? Regardless, humans have designed beautiful or scary or funny or otherwise enhanced ways to convey truths since humans began to be human. Ancient Greeks and Romans saw themselves as conveyors of truth through narrative. Michel de Montaigne, who wrote hordes of personal compositions in the mid-sixteenth century, is known as the “father of the essay.” Literary scholar William M. Hamlin speculates that Montaigne’s essays influenced playwright William Shakespeare as he penned The Tempest. Shakespeare was sixteen years old when Montaigne’s first book of essays was published, and the influence (concepts as well as diction) of Montaigne’s essay entitled “Cannibals” on Gonzalo’s musings in Act 2 of The Tempest are obvious (Hamlin, Go). Learning to convey truths about human nature was crucial to Shakespeare’s mission as a dramatist, as he noted through Hamlet’s observations:

“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” — Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

Nonfiction, then, has been intertwined with fiction and drama in myriad ways, including powerful inspiration, in some of the most seminal works of western culture set on paper. At some point between the Elizabethan era and the late twentieth century, the perception arose that nonfiction needed to be reportage and exposition only: encyclopedias, newspapers, just the facts.

In the 1960s, a few landmark publications opened the gates to writing nonfiction in a literary way, and those gates remain ajar today. In 1966, writer Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, an unprecedented literary retelling of a grisly multi-murder in rural Kansas. Two years later, Joan Didion published her collection of essays entitled, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. American author Tom Wolfe called Didion’s nonfiction writing style “New Journalism,” a phrase picked up from his colleagues. Other writers, including Gay Talese and Normal Mailer, were also expanding their nonfiction voices using literary conventions.

Next, in 1969, Maya Angelou published the first of a series of “autobiographical novels” entitled, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou was a poet, and she wasn’t looking to tell her story until a fateful dinner party the year after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Having shared some stories of her childhood at the social gathering, Angelou was soon contacted by Robert Loomis of Random House publishers and offered a book deal. Her reply? “Absolutely not.” Her priorities were poetry and drama, not autobiography. Dinitia Smith recounts the story in her 2007 New York Times article, “A Career in Letters, 50 Years and Counting.”

Mr. Loomis tried another ploy, phoning Ms. Angelou and saying, “It’s just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible,’” she recounted.

That did it. “I said, ‘I will try,’” Ms. Angelou remembered, in her majestically deep voice. Out of their phone conversation came “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and about 20 other books written by Ms. Angelou for Random House.

Perhaps coincidentally (and probably not), the same year Angelou’s first memoir installment was published, the term “Creative Nonfiction” was first used by literary scholar David Madden in his book, Survey of Contemporary Literature, noting that the sound of truth had again transcended basic reportage or exposition. It was time for a new name (Moore).

Nonfiction is a weird word, beginning with a negative, implying that it is lacking something. If fiction is not true, nonfiction is NOT not true…right? Writer Philip Gerard argues that defining a genre by what it is not, as with nonfiction, is “…like defining classical music as nonjazz. Or sculpture as nonpainting.”

Is it only English that undoes or negates this genre in such a unique way? In Portuguese, it keeps its ”non” status: ficção vs. não ficção criativa. In Polish, fiction is fikcja while nonfiction is literatura faktu. Make it creative, and it’s twórcza literatura faktu. I think I like the Polish name best. Literature of fact.

In English, as best we can tell, the term “Creative Nonfiction” originated as a term in the late twentieth century when writers wanted to differentiate this literary genre in which expository writing, journalism, sometimes research, are all hanging out together, but they invite the sexy celebrities of fiction to the party: vivid sensory imagery, figurative language, maybe some alliteration or assonance or their various cousins…the genre remains true, but it becomes more stunningly true. Is it the same as Montaigne’s mental meanderings? I’ll leave that up to you, if you can stay awake while trying to read through an entire essay of his.

In summary, we have given ourselves permission (again) to write truth in beautiful ways, and we have named it, perhaps by accident or by default, Creative Nonfiction.

Now, let’s get to work.