I hope everyone will use this space to extend our class/conference discussions, try out some creative nonfiction, respond to the readings, and reflect on your own progress.  What problems have you encountered as writer in the course?  How are you trying to solve them?  Sometimes I'll blog on a topic we've discussed (or are about to) and offer some prompts for you own writing, if you're interested.  But feel free to write about what you want here (about 300 words per week).  I hope you comment on interesting posts from others as well.

In conference this week, we'll be discussing what we mean by "creative nonfiction," but we'll get at that question indirectly by looking at the debate over truth-telling.  All writing genres are, in a sense, contracts with readers.  We assume some things about what conventions to expect, what are appropriate purposes for that genre, what relationship readers will have with the author, and what relationships the author will have with his or her material.  When we think about nonfiction genres, most of us naturally assume that the word "nonfiction" means writing that is based on true events.  What actually happened.  Anything else would be, well, fiction or poetry.  We give some allowances, of course, for the fallibility of memory. We don't expect an essayist to remember exactly what is mother said that day twenty years ago, and it's possible to get some of the details wrong here and there.  But nonfiction means getting it as right as you can.  Right?

One of the readings we'll discuss in conference this week, "Breaking Clean," is a lovely essay about a woman's decision to leave her Montana ranching family.  It's a so-called "segmented essay," with each section separated by line breaks.  What's relevant to our discussion here, however, is the fact that one moment in the story--the account towards the end of the piece where Blunt writes that her father-in-law smashed her typewriter with a sledge hammer--is made up.  It didn't happen.  Does it matter?  It certainly mattered to the author's father-in-law.  But is this the kind of thing that violates the contract?

The other reading, "What Happened in Vegas," looks at the issue of truth-telling in nonfiction head on, and it raises fundamental questions about why we write creative nonfiction as well as how we're supposed to do it.You might blog before or after conference this week on this issue, or anything else you want to write about.