Issue 01 / 1994
1 / Premiere issue
Where it all began
This—the very first issue of Creative Nonfiction—serves as a keystone to introduce readers to the scope of the publication and the genre.
The issue features CNF editor and founder, Lee Gutkind, defining for the first time the meaning of the “Creative Nonfiction” name. This debut issue includes essays about the violent dramas of the West African roadways, the phenomenon of the meander, life in the tundra, and more, as well as a profile of New Yorker writer John McPhee.
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FROM THE EDITOR: What’s in this Name – And What’s Not?
Ever since I began to write and to teach writing 20 years ago, people have been asking me to explain the genre in which I work—this form that hasn't had a name.Meander
A Nova show about the forms of nature prompts me to look up meander. Having always used the word to refer to walking, I am surprised to learn that it comes from water.Bush Taxi Commandos
It had been a game to the driver, the madman at the wheel of the pickup truck, slaloming between potholes on a narrow, tortuous mudtrack at, I estimate, close to 50 miles an hour.If and When
What happened to my grandmother would not happen to me, I vowed at twenty-seven. She was eighty-nine and at home when her heart failed and a nurse s aide resuscitated her with adrenalin and CPR.Sea Urchins
In the eight months I spent in the Mediterranean town of Sanary, France, working with and getting to know fishermen, I never met a fishwife. I never met a woman who sold fish who was contentious, strident, or foul-mouthed.Consanguinity
When I was young, I met a coarse ruddy man named Blood who wore bib overalls. His rattly car was red with iron rust. I thought Blood an awful name. As bad as Guts.How Tununak Came to Me
“This is your last chance to back out,” Phil said to me over the crackling phone.Several days of clear, calm weather had lured many men in Tununak out into their boats to hunt seals.Time and Again
I.What makes us go against our instincts, our best learned interests? Though time and again my mother impressed upon me gentleness and a respect for life, though I knew in the back of my mind and in the humming cargo of my own blood that she was right, there I was at nine years old, living across the street from the foothills, armed to the teeth.ThePilgrims
Sometimes a bit of travel turns out to have been a pilgrimage. It all depends on whether our destination surpasses our expectations. As soon as we set out, airports and highways start to seal into us everything that we’re going to think about where we’re headed.Nonfiction in First Person, Without Apology
In his introduction to the 1989 The Best American Essays, Geoffrey Wolff tells a story about how, in writing an essay on King Lear as a young boarding school boy, he could not help but narrate some of his own misunderstandings with his Duke of Deception father to illustrate his sympathy with Cordelia.PROFILE Twenty Questions: A Conversation with John McPhee
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.Profile: Susan Feldman
Susan Feldman faces a chronic, life-threatening illness every day of her life. And that, for better or for worse, is what inspired her to become a writer.Interview with Carolyn Kremers
Toward the end of “How Tununak Came to Me,” the story of Carolyn Kre-mers’s move from her comfortable life in the Colorado foothills to the frozen, foreign Alaskan outback becomes a kind of letter to the author’s former partner, Michael, whom she left behind in Boulder. The transition from first-person narration to apostrophe-second-person address of a person not present-is striking and daring.Interview with Natalia Rachel Singer
Natalia Rachel Singer always wanted to write memoir but, she says, “I didn’t really understand it was available to me as a nonfamous person. As a living, female, nonfamous person, I didn’t think it was something I could do.”Interview with Mary Paumier Jones
The last paragraph of Mary Paumier Jones’s “Meander” leaves readers with a striking picture of the human brain as an illustration of the word the essay explores. “The shape is unmistakable,” she writes, “like a close-packed river shot from above, meandering within.”