In Fact
Creative nonfiction is no oxymoron. Shorthand for an exciting genre that encompasses the hard-hitting honesty of journalism and the dramatic techniques that make fiction so compelling, creative nonfiction is just that: gripping stories that just happen to be true. As Brian Doyle defines it in this volume, creative nonfiction is “true stories about people and the world… small true odd interesting unusual voice-laden funny poignant detailed musical sweet sad stories.” Good, old-fashioned reporting plus insight, story, reflection… and wisdom. That’s creative nonfiction.
In Fact offers much more than twenty-five of these stories: it offers twenty-five of the best. Culled from the 300 pieces published in the journal Creative Nonfiction over the past ten years, themselves chosen from over 10,000 manuscripts, the stories reprinted in In Fact showcase the magnificent possibilities of this emergent genre in pieces by the famous, and those surely destined to be so. Not only that, each author has included a reflection on the process of composing the particular piece included valuable advice for those hoping to find their own writing voice. Annie Dillard’s sassy introduction, “Notes for Young Writers,” sets the tone for the whole volume. Over and over again, she and the other contributors stress the importance of reading good work, as well as writing it, and the aspiring poet, novelist, journalist, essayist, creative nonfiction writer—or simply curious reader who relishes good writing—could do no better than to begin with In Fact.
The questions probed here are questions that touch us all: identity, race, love, memory, truth. Only through this genre can you get so close to what it feels like to be a feminist, 115-pound woman riding a 600-pound motorcycle through Mormon country to rediscover her family and herself, as Jana Richman reveals to us in “Why I Ride.” Richard Rodriguez questions the nature of race and authorial voice. The battered face of 14-year-old Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 for talking slang to a white woman, haunts more than one writer in this volume. Francine Prose explores the immutability—and permeability—of culture, and Diane Ackerman looks at the foundations of language itself.
Part writing-manual, part prose anthology, In Fact is not a book simply to be read, but to be re-read, thumbed over, annotated, dog-eared and lent to friends and family or jealously guarded on one’s bookshelf, right above the writing desk.
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Table of Contents
Three Spheres
A therapist is forced to revisit her past when assigned to treat a woman in an institution where she herself was once a patient.Looking at Emmett Till
Reckoning with the brutal murder that was “an attempt to slay an entire generation”Shunned
The steep price paid for one night on a beach with a boyAn Album Quilt
That August I returned to the town in New Jersey where I had been born 50 years before. It looked much the same. Any town would, after five weeks.There was a great deal of waiting mail—08540, 08540, 08540.Dinner at Uncle Boris’
Always plenty of good food and wine. The four of us at the table take turns uncorking new bottles. We drink out of water glasses the way they do in the old country.Prayer Dogs
Prairie dogs. Prairie gods. Pleistocene mammals standing on their hind legs in the big wide open.What do they see?What do they smell?What do they hear?What they hear is the sound of a truck coming toward their town, the slamming of doors, the voices, the pressure of feet walking toward them.What Is It We Really Harvestin’ Here?
We got a sayin’, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” which is usually meant as a compliment. To my mind, it also refers to the delectable treats we as a people harvested for our owners and for our own selves all these many years, slave or free.The Brown Study
Killing Wolves
The trapper struggles to hold on to something that seems almost as elusive as the wolves they pursue: the chance to make a life out of wildernessBeing Brians
"There are 215 Brian Doyles in the United States..."Language at Play
Finders Keepers: The Story of Joey Coyle
Coming down made Joey Coyle feel desperate and confused. When he was high the drug filled his chest and head with gusts of power so great that he could barely breathe or think fast enough.Adventures in Celestial Navigation
You begin by pretending you know exactly where you are. You begin with a fiction.Leaving Babylon: A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony
Two years after Cyrus, King of Persia, conquered the Babylonian Empire, he allowed the Children of Israel to return to their land. The year was 537 BCE. Two thousand five hundred and thirty-six years later, I walk down his street in Jerusalem, on my way to get divorced at the district rabbinic court.Gray Area: Thinking With a Damaged Brain
A damaged brain corrodes the author’s mind and sense of self, a state akin to “harboring a zombie”Joe Stopped By
When I handed her the phone, Laura looked like I was taking her to the dentist. Her father was in town and threatened to come over. I had met the guy twice.In the Woods
Sa’m Pèdi
A novelist visits Haiti to research its history and finds a country suspended between past and present uprisingsGoing Native
Several years ago at an elementary-school Christmas play in upstate New York, I sat behind three fourth-graders from the most remote and poorest section of the rural school district. In all likelihood the boys had never seen an actual African-American person except on television and on rare trips to Kingston, 40 miles away.Mixed-Blood Stew
It was an old document. Rough parchment, yellowed and withered. I was all of 10, on the threshold of womanhood, digging in my mother’s closet, trying to find clues about why my mother abandoned me when I was an infant, why she returned to claim me when I was 9.Why I Ride
The fear begins to subside as soon as I’m out of town. The speed of the open road should cause greater fear, but the whir of the engine lulls me into a false sense of safety.Delivering Lily
Ever since expectant fathers were admitted into delivery rooms a few decades ago, they have come armed with video cameras and awe. Before I became a father, I often heard men describe seeing the birth of their baby as “transcendental,” the greatest experience in their lives.Notes from a Difficult Case
Almost everyone I know advised me to sue. Their advice was not casual, because almost everyone I know is an attorney. As am I. At 42, I’d been an attorney almost half my life.Chimera
Last Thursday, one of those gray, fall days when the starlings gather up and string between the elms around here, my children’s mother–dead 10 years–walked into a pastry shop where I was buttering a croissant.The Creative Nonfiction Police?
I am giving a reading at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. It is a Thursday evening after a day of classes and questions about essay writing, but now, in the auditorium, the audience is sparse, perhaps sixty or so in a space that seats nearly two hundred and fifty.The Brown Study
Or, as a brown man, I think. But do we really think that color colors thought? Sherlock Holmes occasionally retired to a “brown study”—a kind of moribund funk; I used to imagine a room with brown wallpaper.Notes for Young Writers
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure – to the largest think you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else.Leaving Babylon
A Walk Through the Jewish Divorce Ceremony
Additional information
Weight | 4 lbs |
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Dimensions | 9 × 6 × 1.25 in |