Issue 09 / 1998
9 / The Universal Chord
Collective truths
What is the magic touch that turns an incident into a work of literature? As this issue demonstrates, it takes more than a fascinating event in the course of someone’s life to generate a true work of art. The pieces in this issue were chosen because they strike a “universal chord”—a meaning and a feeling that resonates with the larger human experience. These essays epitomize the way the skilled narrative nonfiction author turns the private into the public, the personal and mundane into something universal and meaningful.
Megan Foss illustrates her journey from despondency and heroin addiction, through prison, and eventually to university and graduate school; A. D. Coleman’s “Sea Changes” documents a day on the Staten Island Ferry and how the extraordinary can sometimes lay hidden among the ordinary; Brian Doyle tells of a short but profound moment in his life when his past, future, and destiny seem to blend together in seamless harmony. These narratives show how events in everyday life can slowly build into meaning beyond themselves.
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FROM THE EDITOR: The “Truth and Consequences” of Creative Nonfiction
A few years ago, we received an essay by a talented young writer about her affair with a high school classmate. When I contacted her about publishing the essay in Creative Nonfiction, I learned that she had been out of contact with the woman about whom she had written for many years, but that through mutual friends she had learned that the woman was now married, the mother of two young children.Two on Two
"Once upon a time, a long time ago, I rambled through thickets of brawny power forwards and quicksilver cocksure guards and rooted ancient centers..."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.Love Letters
"The first time my old man went to prison I wrote him letters. I wrote Darryl long rambling letters that went on for 10 or 11 pages."Rural Nobodies
That’s hot? I heard someone ask a literary agent recently. Rural, she said. Nobodies. Rural nobodies. Older people. People capturing ways of life that are disappearing, have disappeared. I think of the popularity of the Delany sisters.Shitdiggers, Mudflats and the Worm Men of Maine
“Hard work,” says Danny Stubbs, and we haven’t even started yet. “Get wet today,” says Ikey Dorr. He pulls his graying beard, squints out over the bay. The blast of an offshore wind (strong enough to blow the boat sideways on its no-lights trailer as we made the drive over) is piling whitecaps, spraying their tops, bowing the trees around us, knocking my hat off my head, giving even the wormers pause.Einstein Didn’t Dream of My Mother
My mother is 82 years old and on alert for drafts, missing socks and the names of relatives who died before my birth. I listen to her carefully, however, as we have not lost one sock in the three months she has lived with me.Scattering Point
In my parents’ living room is a fat paperback book with a white cover and a lot of fold-out maps in it—the “Soil Survey of Livingston County, Illinois,” issued by the U. S. Department of Agriculture in April 1996.You Want Me to Shoot You?
In my last visit to South Dakota, I found Father Dillon to be pretty much the same man I had always known. He was his usual quiet and unexcitable self, given to understatement but slower now in what he did.Musselshell
I learned early to wear only wool and cotton, because wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet, and cotton won’t melt to your skin when it burns. I learned this from Bill Heckman, my boss on the brush crew when I started for the Forest Service in 1979, who hated polyester almost as much as he hated hippies.Sea Changes: Traveling the Staten Island Ferry
We’re all drawn by nature to the source. Rock me on the water, sings one of our voices, got to get back to the sea somehow. No cause for surprise, then, in the discovery by a photographer and a writer that they had in common not only residence in New York City but the sharing of a particular Atlantic voyage.Sa’m Pèdi
A novelist visits Haiti to research its history and finds a country suspended between past and present uprisingsMr. Personalities: A Conversation with Mark Singer
The new, freshly painted offices of The New Yorker magazine are at 20 W. 43rd St., but despite the shimmering white walls, the recessed lighting and the potted plants, there are still the expected clutter and the labyrinthine corridors, as if they were an old dream that can’t be shaken.On Lee Gutkind’s introduction
Your introduction to Issue 9 struck a particular note with me and I thought you might be interested in this. My family comes from a little town called Concrete in Washington state.Interview with Robert Coker Johnson
My original intent was to describe the landscape around Musselshell Work Center in the four seasons. But by and by the essay developed into a bridge between a previous piece on life in the Big Woods and a forthcoming one. I'm very happy with it.Interview with Priscilla Hodgkins
Writer Priscilla Hodgkins chats with CNF about her recent essayInterview with Jeff Gundy
I like the way this piece manages to make something of what most people, and me in many of my moods, would consider almost nothing--what is more boring than a soil map?Interview with Megan Foss
This essay was the final piece in my original Master’s Thesis and what makes me feel best about it is that it articulates not only my love for writing, but my love for language itself.Interview with Brian Doyle
In "Two on Two," Brian Doyle has crafted an economic piece that breaks many writing rules and at the same superbly conveys the personal rules he values: passion, loyalty and devotion.Interview with A. D. Coleman
I conceived this essay as a prose response to a suite of images made by the Cuban-American photographer Julio Mitchel while riding the Staten Island Ferry. Mitchel, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, found in the ferry and its passengers a provocative metaphor and useful proscenium for his exploration of the human condition, and created a powerful tone poem centered around them.Interview with Jill Carpenter
"The essay presents only a small part of my experience with my father, whom I loved very much and miss terribly, and I hope it is clear that there is much more that could be said."Interview with Madison Smartt Bell
"These Haitian pieces began in a fairly tortured way, as an effort to fulfill commercial magazine assignments I had taken on, partly to pay my expenses there, and partly to air some truth about the country, its culture and its current political situation."Interview with Ray Abbott
Ray Abbott is the unusual writer. It’s what he does for a living. No other day job. He just writes. And writes. And writes. “That’s all I do. I have so much stuff that’s unpublished.Interview with Michael Pearson
Ask writer Michael Pearson what he values most in a nonfiction piece of writing and he will answer “I value reporting a great deal. I also value storytelling and careful writing and attention to detail.”Interview with Bill Roorbach
This piece was a hard one to report because the wormers are Downeast Mainers and one of the great points of pride of Downeast Mainers is silence in the face of adversity, silence in the face of poverty, silence in front of outsiders.