More Good News for Nonfictionists

In our last installment, we celebrated the publication of two new anthologies of interest and value to the readers of Fourth Genre: Blurring the Boundaries, edited by B. J. Hollars, and Metawritings, edited by Jill Talbot. Here, I review two others that fit the same bill. It seems like an embarrassment of riches to have so many like-minded yet unique books published in the span of a little more than a year, and I hope this review will help you discern which of the lot you want to pick up first (before getting all the others, of course).

The other two new books I’m referring to are Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, which is edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, and Understanding the Essay, which is edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter. Whereas Metawritings and Blurring the Boundaries were structured similarly, as volumes of new creative work accompanied by critical commentary by the authors, Understanding the Essay and Bending Genre are not.

Instead, and rather appropriately, Bending Genre is made up of 27 hard-to-categorize essays that seem neither wholly “creative” nor wholly “theoretical.” They are themselves hybrids. One organizing principle driving Bending Genre seems to be the willful dissolution of (or disbelief in) “tidy generic categories,” such that even the book’s sections—“Hybrids,” “Structures,” and “Unconventions”—are barely categories, and the pieces they contain seem as if they would fit in any of the three. This works well to create a book that practices what it preaches. It is a new way of thinking about genre, one I prefer to the dry and rigid taxonomies we see in so much traditional literary criticism.

The essays here never feel like stodgy academic work. They hold their ideas in clear voices and interesting metaphors. Eula Biss’s “It Is What It Is,” for instance, pokes at our assumptions about the adjective organic not only as it pertains to writing but also as it is used in agriculture. Amid direct statements about genre, Biss shuffles in passages from surveys and other pieces of evidence that lead us to rethink the way we define our food. Jenny Boully writes of her encounters with people who wonder at her mixed heritage while lamenting that job interviewers bristle at her unconventional thinking about genre. Michael Martone (who appears twice, as do the editors) repurposes Greek myths and histories, along with his own anecdotes and subversions, to demonstrate the kind of genre-bending he advocates. Mary Cappello proposes a layered, complex argument undermining simplistic approaches to thinking about and writing creative nonfiction, shaking us away from “mere representation” and inviting us to “translate an imperative into an endlessly unfolding version of itself” with examples and other non-traditional prompts for essaying. The book is full of insight like this, from Wayne Koestenbaum, Lia Purpura, Kazim Ali, Barrie Jean Borich, Ander Monson, Lee Martin, Robin Hemley, Dinty Moore, and others. There are pieces considering fragmentation, white space, point-of-view, metaphor, borrowed forms, research, and so much more.

On whole, the book is a varied and always-interesting collection that promotes deep thinking in myriad ways. If you prefer straight talk about issues, then you will find that here. If you prefer examples to develop ideas, then there is that, too. If you like holding on to the edge of bemusement, feeling your brain a bit scrambled, that will definitely happen. If you have trouble committing fully to a particular esthetic, or your rebellious streak drives you to break from formal constraints, if you believe certainty to be an illusion, if you side with the editors, who claim that “there is no such thing as a nonhybrid genre,” then this book is for you.

It is worth mentioning that this between-ness I have noted so fondly is not unique to this book, nor to this time...