Narrative Nonfiction

Found in the Vault, a Weekend Writing Prompt: Paint Chip Memoir

Did you know the list is a legit narrative nonfiction form? Yep, and it’s ancient. McSweeney’s did not invent the list. Around the first day of the first month of Noah’s 601st year, as the ground was drying out, a writer in Sumeria (now southern Iraq) carved wedge-shaped letters into stone tablets, composing a work of wisdom scholars consider to be . . .

Wrangling An Elusive Essay Form: Mosaic

1. Collage, fragmented, montage, segmented, lyric, sectioned: a mosaic by any other name was still a thorn in my flesh. The first mosaic I ever tried to write amounted to little more than a clumsy knockoff of a Richard Rodriguez essay assigned in my first MFA nonfiction workshop. 2. Three years later, I tried again.Continue reading “Wrangling An Elusive Essay Form: Mosaic”

Creative Nonfiction, Gumby of Literary Genres

“Creative nonfiction is a gloriously flexible genre. What we don’t know or can’t know doesn’t have to wreck our writing. Instead, what seemed at first to be only an empty space can be an opportunity to shape and expand a narrative, exploring the gaps and writing our way through the myths.” –Jessica Handler, author ofContinue reading “Creative Nonfiction, Gumby of Literary Genres”