Good News for Nonfictionists

I’ll begin by making a few assumptions about you, dear reader, based on your subscription to or at least borrowing of Fourth Genre: you are high-minded. Your taste is excellent. You favor or are at least curious about creative nonfiction. Perhaps, feeling this phrase a bit presumptuous, you prefer a different term, such as “literary nonfiction,” or you reach back to older genres, such as “memoir” or “essay.” You may teach. You certainly learn. You likely write. You lament the degraded cultural moment when safe and formulaic art achieves the widest popularity and rakes in nearly all the money, when art in all its forms is widely seen as impractical, frivolous, unworthy of public backing or even consideration. You support the arts and feel that they are fundamental to your conception of the world. You wish more people shared your perspective because if they did, we would be kinder and more curious, more open to experience, and more willing to live and let live.

I have good news, I think. Although I’m not entirely sure how cultural evolution happens, whether teachers have the power to nudge students toward maturity and improvement or simply to reflect changes already afoot, I’m cheered by a number of new anthologies that suggest a fulfillment of Joseph Epstein’s decades-old prophecy: “It’s a sweet time to be an essayist” (for me, essayist encapsulates or supersedes all other names one might call a “writer of creative nonfiction”). If you’re nonplussed by my extrapolation from essayist to the “hope for the world” reflected in my claims, then perhaps the books I recommend are not for you. But if you see/hope for the connection, then please read on.

Granted, I have not been alive long enough to witness first-hand long patterns of publishing, but I have been paying attention for the past dozen years or so, and I’ve consulted older, wiser friends who’ve been paying attention longer, and I believe that this recent slew of works focused on exploring and teaching the literary side of nonfiction is unprecedented. Although some older anthologies grace my library’s shelves, they were published sparsely across the years, and they tend to be one or the other: collections of creative work or of criticism. However, 2012 and 2013 brought us a windfall of books that are right up our alley, combination creative-critical anthologies that teach and inspire by example and by analysis.

In this review, I focus on Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, edited by Jill Talbot, and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction, edited by B. J. Hollars. In the next issue, I’ll complete my overview, covering Understanding the Essay, edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter, and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker. Other books of this ilk have been reviewed previously or will be reviewed soon in these same pages. It is not in my nature, nor in the nature of a review such as this, to lambaste books, only to recommend them, and I do recommend these, wholeheartedly, but I will also try to set them apart one from another, to characterize them in descriptive ways that can reveal something of their content and guide would-be readers and course-adopters.

Both books follow a similar felicitous format, publishing recent creative work by contemporary luminaries in the field of creative nonfiction paired with commentary by the authors about their process or focus or writing decisions and strategies. In the case of Metawritings, the commentary comes in the form of a brief interview (often with long answers). In Blurring the Boundaries, the commentary is a short essay focused on an aspect of craft, such as point of view or research or humor. I’ve rarely seen this kind of self...