Roundtable: Research in Nonfiction

Most people consider nonfiction to be a literary form emphasizing actual events and grounded in careful observation, conscientious recall, and/or documented evidence. In general, literary nonfiction doesn't restrict itself to drawing on only one of those resources, but some measure of the range of possibility in nonfiction can be charted by the relative proportions authors allot to observation, recall, or evidence in their work. In reportage and cultural criticism, for example, writers are more likely to draw on primary or secondary research than they are in the lyrical essay or the personal memoir. Although it's true that academic discourse and journalistic discourse both insist on documentation more emphatically than nonfiction (creative or literary nonfiction, that is) does, increasingly in recent years writers of what might be termed "literary reportage," "personal cultural criticism," or "experimental critical writing," have blurred the boundaries of genre by giving freer rein to their literary instincts at the same time that they incorporate scrupulous documentation into their texts.

This roundtable discussion of research and documentation in nonfiction brings together three writers who have each drawn on considerable research to compose books grounded in personal commitment to their subjects. John Calderazzo, who had a background in writing for newspapers and magazines before becoming an award-winning writing teacher at Colorado State University, is the author of articles and essays in such magazines and journals as Audubon, Orion, The Georgia Review, and Witness; he has also written a book on writing, Writing from Scratch: Freelancing; a children's science book, 101 Questions about Volcanoes; and a book of creative nonfiction, Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives. Kristen Iversen not only was a travel writer and an editor but also taught in the MFA Program at Naropa University and at San Jose University before becoming a writing teacher at the University of Memphis. She is the editor of a text anthology, Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, as well as editor-in-chief of the literary journal, The Pinch, previously River City. Her book Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth won the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction and was the basis of an A&E program on Molly Brown. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, Full Body Burden: Living and Dying in the Shadow of America's Nuclear Nightmare. Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College. He is the author of two books of literary criticism, The English Novel at Mid-Century and After Empire: Scott, Naipul, Rushdie, and for his work as a reviewer has received the Nona Balakian Citation of the National Book Critics Circle. His most recent book is The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany, a work that combines travel narrative with historical and critical approaches to travel writing. Moderator Robert Root has written essays emphasizing what he refers to as "intersecting histories"—natural, cultural, personal—and his memoir, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale, is built around such histories, as are his works-in-progress on the Hudson and Rhine Rivers and the Front Range of Colorado. His critical study, E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist, has inspired several essays of place juxtaposing White's response to locale with his own, and he is editor of and contributor to the anthology Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place.

Root: This roundtable focuses on a research-based cultural-critical-as-well-as-literary form of nonfiction. Perhaps we should start out by letting each of you succinctly say something about how you'd define the book you wrote and what elements of the book lead you to make that kind of definition.

Calderazzo: Let's start with Rising Fire's subtitle. Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives suggests those times and places where the natural world bursts right through rocks, soil, and clouds, and floods the human imagination and sometimes profoundly affects culture. This happens more than you may think since about 500 million people, worldwide, live in the shadows of volcanoes...