Having gone on record against the narrative-killing malevolence of PowerPoint (“Unsure? Tell a story . . .”), I was pleased to see that the most popular story in The New York Times this week documents military commanders’ disgust with the fancy slide show. But we haters have little impact: recently someone asked me if I could give a presentation in PowerPoint on a magazine article I wrote. No and no! The Times‘ April 26 story by Elisabeth Bumiller refers to …
“nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers. “creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir. “memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges. “novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir. “short story: An essay written to conceal the …
Gary heard Jack was making his last trip to the veterinarian, so he stopped last Friday to say goodbye and to comfort me. “The only thing I can say is what my vet told me when he put our dog to sleep,” Gary said. “He told me, ‘You’re sad, but I’m not. Because I know this dog was loved. People bring me dogs all the time to put down because they just don’t want them any more.’ ”
As he spoke we looked across the lawn. Jack had lain down facing us in the grass, under the shade of a massive ginkgo tree. Everything has flowered at once this glorious spring—even the dogwoods and the redbuds together—and the breeze was perfumed with the mingled scent of lilac and crabapple blossoms. An acquaintance had just told me, “I’m from New England and we lived in Hawaii. There’s nothing like Ohio in Spring. You have to pay attention, because once it’s gone, that’s it.”
We buried Jack the next afternoon in the backyard between two aged crabapple trees, their limbs a bower of airy white blossoms. He was an old dog, at thirteen, but he was a little dog and we thought we’d get more years.
I like thick, type-packed, and otherwise densely off-putting literary journals as much as anyone—especially when they include something I wrote. But when the newly redesigned Creative Nonfiction arrived in my mailbox, I thought Hallelujah! I’ll be posting soon about their interesting interview in the new issue with Dave Eggers. Meantime, Creative Nonfiction is currently seeking narrative blog posts to reprint in its next issue (#39: Summer Reading). They’re looking for “vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell.” Posts must be able to stand alone, …
John D’Agata’s new book About a Mountain portrays Congress deciding to make Yucca mountain a nuclear dump, and, as if in response, a sixteen-year-old boy makes a suicide leap off the balcony of a skeevy Las Vegas hotel. In an otherwise rave review last February in The New York Times Book Review, Charles Bock took D’Agata to task for changing the date of the boy’s death to better serve his narrative (D’Agata gave the correct date in a footnote). D’Agata …
Vivian Gornick’s view of literary memoir as a return to storytelling in her influential treatise The Situation and the Story. After reading David Shields’s anti-narrative yawp Reality Hunger, I happened to be rereading Vivian Gornick’s influential treatise on nonfiction, The Situation and the Story, and saw that she holds a far different view of the reason for the memoir explosion of our time—and she holds as well a different prescription: not more voice, the talking heads Shields loves, but more of …
The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning or shaping of events. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable. The memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the “facts” and “truth.” —David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto A year ago I aired David Shields’s original …