Editor's Notes

We like to think that Fourth Genre is a learning community, a place where writers and readers can meet and engage in conversations, ask questions, experiment, test boundaries, offer advice, and share insights into literary nonfiction. The editors and the editorial interns at Fourth Genre are learning all the time. We hope our contributors, readers, and the writers who submit work for review feel that they too are part of our learning community.

Sometimes the learning practices in these pages are direct and didactic. Sometimes they are subtle, even unintentional. On the didactic side, the writer Sam Pickering, interviewed in this issue by Jenny Spinner, talks about the difficulties his writing students experience when struggling to transform ordinary experience into sharable prose. "The hardest thing to teach," he acknowledges, "is that [their] stories have to be shaped for the page. Life is outside of all margins of the page, but the pages do have margins." Pickering himself is a (reluctant) celebrity teacher, the prototype for Professor John Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society, one of the very few popular movies in the last 15 years to take teaching, writing, and learning seriously.

Other voices in this number of Fourth Genre read more like students sharing with us the freshness, tentativeness, and urgency of their subjects and experiences. It may be telling to note that very few of the writers in our Essays and Memoirs section adopt the teacher's persona in their relationship with readers. For example, Leslie Lawrence ("On the Mowing") sorts meticulously—studiously—through the grammar of a familiar place and comes to know it as if for the first time. Elsewhere, young writers like Elizabeth Weld and Sarah Dickerson find power and some authenticity in the absence of perspective that otherwise comes only with age. "You should know that there will be no arc and no catharsis," Elizabeth Weld informs us at the beginning of her piece. "There will be no revelation." The posture of these writers is to look sideways, not back. Striking another learning pose, many of this issue's writers prefer questions over answers. "Border Maps," Kimi Eisele's portrait of Colonia Solidaridad, a community on the outskirts of the Mexican border city of Nogales, is charged with the kinds of questions that, like Leslie Lawrence's, challenge her to "revision" a familiar place, to understand anew what the line of the geographic border between Mexico and the United States really separates.

Fourth Genre's view of creative nonfiction as an evolving form requires—indeed demands—that we keep learning, that we question past assumptions, avoid a hardening of categories, scrutinize established practices, and, most important, cultivate self-criticism (and maybe even make a few mistakes). Exactly what it takes, we believe, to keep a writing community—and a real classroom—honest, vigorous, and alive. One of our own teachers, mentors, and special friends—James Laughlin, the late founder and publisher of New Directions—once reminded us that "literature, a whole culture in fact, goes dead when there is no experiment, no reaching out, no counter-attack on accepted values." It should come as no surprise then to see writers experimenting in these pages. Cheryl Merrill offers not one or a half-dozen but "13 Ways of Looking at an Elephant," an exercise in narration that reveals "a way of seeing," she assures us, "where the eye can be like a mouth, swallowing color, taking in the entire world with one choking gulp." Meanwhile, Steven Church's "Next Stop, Meteor Crater" is half-memoir, half-dialogue between narrative elements like tag-lines and footnotes, half-commentary on the strange world of national park tourism, and half-geography lesson. Somehow, Church makes it all add up to a whole work of creative nonfiction that closes our Essays and Memoirs section.

Still, we realize that youcannot get so precious over counter-attacking accepted literary values that you dismiss what traditional and established essayists (Montaigne, Emerson, E. B. White, and personal favorites...