Editor's Note

Announcements are in the air, for nothing alive stands still, and Fourth Genre is alive and changing in ways to note.

I'd like to begin by thanking Mimi Schwartz, who after 11 years is departing Fourth Genre to pursue other projects and new endeavors. Since its founding, she has shaped the journal as editor of our Reader-to-Reader reviews, matching worthy books to worthy reviewers, editing the results, and thus tilling the field of creative nonfiction.

As one editor departs, another arrives. I'm pleased to announce that Ryan Van Meter will join our editorial group. Readers may remember "The Goldfish History," his remarkable contribution to the Spring 2010 issue. His work has also appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and River Teeth, among other venues, and reappeared in The Best American Essays 2009 and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. His collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now, which includes "The Goldfish History," is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2011. Ryan will judge this year's Michael Steinberg Essay Prize.

In this issue appears the winner of last year's Steinberg Prize, "Circling My Father," by Sandell Morse. The formal and emotional strength of this essay develops through a performance of "the form's circling bent, its way of looking again and again at itself from all angles in order to see itself most fully."* Also in this issue is the runner-up in last year's contest, Andrew Hood's "Genesis."

We continue to publish roundtables on topics of interest, in this issue "Aftershocks of Memoir," which originated as a panel discussion at the Associated Writing Programs Annual Conference in 2009. It is a wide-ranging encounter with the consequences of telling real-life stories in creative nonfiction, involving family, friends, and community. How, for example, does the writer respect the privacy of the characters in nonfiction? Our participants suggest that there is no formula to follow, for each case brings its own demands. Bob Cowser, Jr. considers whether the names of those who appear in a memoir should be changed. What are the consequences of such alteration, and can we know them? The question turns out to be more complex than it first appears. For some writers, the real name textures the authenticity of the real person they seek to portray. Having changed the name of a boy in his small-town memoir Scorekeeping, Bob says: "When I read it now, his altered name, it rings hollow."

Also here is the third installment in the relatively new Writer as Reader series, "In the Syntax" by Eula Biss, which revisits her experience of studying Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That." Biss once wrote out Didion's much-admired essay as a way to absorb her style, much like a painter copying an old master. Coming to know the essay almost by heart, Biss discovered that the syntax at the heart of Didion's art is immutably Didion's. As the modernist poet Marianne Moore said, "Rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality."