SLICE ME SOME TRUTH
Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction, will be out from Wolsak and Wynn in Toronto. Publication date is set for spring 2011. This book is co-edited with Dr. Luanne Armstrong. It’s been three years in the making. For those of you who keep track of such things, the publisher had to push the date back by one season. Too bad, but Noelle Allen is terrific to work with and has been supportive of this idea from the get-go.
I’ve left the definitions of our category types as a few writers have said they find them helpful and have used them in their teaching.
Our editorial assistant is Nelia Botelho. Nelia’s email is: neliabotelho@yahoo.com
Memoir
The memoir is a piece of an autobiography that highlights a specific time in the narrator’s past, often including a contemplation of the meaning of that event at the time of the writing of the memoir. The memoir may be more emotional and concerned with capturing particular scenes, or a series of events, rather than documenting every fact of a person’s life.
Some characteristics of the memoir form are, that it focuses on a brief period of time or series of related events, it follows narrative structure, including many of the usual elements of storytelling such as setting, plot development, imagery, conflict, characterization, foreshadowing and flashback, and irony and symbolism. It contains the writer’s contemplation of the meaning of these events in retrospective. It has a fictional quality even though the story is true. It is a personal reconstruction of the events and their impact.
Personal essay
A personal essay involves a strong sense of narrative voice on a topic the writer deeply cares about. Such an essay will have the personal and direct presence of a memoir crossed with an idea. The writing keeps going back to that idea, looking at it, seeing if the writer understands it more or from a different angle than before. It takes the reader on voyage of discovery to somewhere, possibly unexpected, at the end.
Literary travel
Pico Iyer says,”Travel writing is essentially a dialogue between a person and a place, and the dialogue is only as rich as what the person brings to it — the extent to which that person brings the weight and intensity of his questions or his hauntedness or his uncertainties. All of us when we’re traveling have remarkable encounters and feelings and experiences, but the reason that we cherish certain writers is that they are bringing something to these places that none of us could ever have expected.”
Travel writing is about both an interior journey as well as an exterior journey. The pieces are vivid enough that a reader from Japan could identify with a story written about BC, or conversely, a reader in BC could delight in and really see the details the writer gives us about Japan. The stories make use of an identifiable narrative voice, someone who lets the reader in close.
Characters are fully formed, closely imagined and multi-dimensional. Travel writing uses techniques of images, metaphor, simile and sensory description. In these stories, it is the narrator who changes from beginning to end so the reader feels there’s truly been a journey. Or as G.K Chesterston wrote, “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
Nature Writing
Canadians have traditionally excelled at nature writing. Good nature writing incorporates clear and well-researched information about the natural world; at the same time, it also delineates deep personal involvement and philosophical premises. Nature writing calls upon its readers to re examine and revalue more-than-human beings, places and histories. More and more, nature writing involves ecologically oriented interests, an examination of ecological identity, of self in nature. The last decade has seen the emergence of an ecocritical perspective where it is equally important to emphasize both language, and the complex unfolding of life on earth. The term nature writing is problematic. But whether we call it nature writing, environmental literature, ecopoetics or something else entirely, the question that such work fundamentally addresses is that of the relationship between humanity and other-than human beings, their places and histories.
The Lyric Essay
The recent burgeoning of creative nonfiction and the personal essay has yielded a fascinating sub-genre that straddles the essay and the lyric poem. These “poetic essays” or “essayistic poems” are about art more than information. They favour poetic meditation over narrative. The lyric essay has the distillation of ideas and musicality of language of a poem, as well as the weight of the factual in an essay. It has the melding of form and content that is found in a prose poem.
The lyric essay often takes shape as a kind of mosaic. “The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme. Such work invites the reader’s participatory interpretation. The lyric essay – with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language – to give us a fresh way to make music of the world.” Deborah Tall, Editor and John D’Agata, Associate Editor for Lyric Essays, Seneca Review
Researched Literary Journalism and Cultural Criticism
An essay by Deborah Campbell on the ‘New New Journalism,” published in TheTyee.ca, quotes Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski: “The traditional trick of literature is to obscure the writer, to express the story through a fabricated narrator describing a fabricated reality. But for me, what I have to say is validated by the fact that I was there, that I witnessed the event.”
Campbell, a magazine writer and book author defines literary journalism as work that enters deeply into subjects’ worlds. She writes: “Literary journalism is more in-depth than most other journalistic forms. It is more intimate. It also tends to take more time, which the press, concerned as it is with daily events and daily deadlines, doesn’t have. Literary journalism is concerned with the everyday. The telling details. The moment. And often with voices ignored by the press. It is interested in everyday people in unusual situations, not just experts. Literary journalism relies on voice. It is not just fact-finding. It is concerned with style, rhetorical flourish, the precise word chosen. Literary journalism can involve an internal voice. It is often highly idiosyncratic.”
Rhetoric
Essentially, rhetoric means the art or skill of persuasion. Thus, although the term rhetoric today is generally taken to mean a persuasive essay, it also accommodates the idea of perceiving how language is really at work in writing. Rhetoric examines the ‘how’ of language, the methods and means of communication, as well as the elements of a good persuasive argument. Good rhetorical writing doesn’t divide the form from meaning; how one says something conveys meaning as much as what one says.
