ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
    • 11.2 Articles >
      • Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)
      • Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Conversations >
      • Thomas Larson, "The Reader's Mental Ear" (Assay 11.2)
      • Patrick Madden, "An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle" (Assay 11.2)
      • Rhonda Waterhouse, "Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry” (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Pedagogy >
      • Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler, "Avoiding Empathy Fatigue: What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist" (Assay 11.2)
      • Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger, "Essayism in the Age of AI" (Assay 11.2)
      • Marco Wilkinson, "Exquisite Copse" (Assay 11.2)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • Subject Index
    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 1.1 Articles >
        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
        • Andy Harper, "The Joke's On Me: The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative" (1.1)
        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
        • Brian Nerney, "John McCarten’s ‘Irish Sketches’: ​The New Yorker’s ‘Other Ireland’ in the Early Years of the Troubles, 1968-1974" (1.1)
        • Wendy Fontaine, "Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir" (1.1)
        • Scott Russell Morris, "The Idle Hours of Charles Doss, or ​The Essay As Freedom and Leisure" (1.1)
      • 1.1 Conversations >
        • Donald Morrill, "An Industrious Enchantment" (1.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Amazon Constellations" (1.1)
        • Derek Hinckley, "Fun Home: Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir" (1.1)
        • Interview with Melanie Hoffert
        • Interview with Kelly Daniels
      • 1.1 Pedagogy >
        • Robert Brooke, "Teaching: 'Rhetoric: The Essay'" (1.1)
        • Richard Louth, "In Brief: Autobiography and Life Writing" (1.1)
    • 1.2 (Spring 2015) >
      • 1.2 Articles >
        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
        • Diana Wilson, "Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay" (1.2)
        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Why the Worst Trips are the Best: The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff & Jonathan Franzen" (1.2)
        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
        • Catherine K. Buni, "Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Conversations >
        • Doug Carlson, "Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic" (1.2)
        • Patrick Madden, "Aliased Essayists" (1.2)
        • Beth Slattery, "Hello to All That" (1.2)
        • Interview with Michael Martone (1.2)
      • Spotlight >
        • Richard Louth, "The New Orleans Writing Marathon and the Writing World" (1.2)
        • Kelly Lock-McMillen, "Journey to the Center of a Writer's Block" (1.2)
        • Jeff Grinvalds, "Bringing It Back Home: The NOWM in My Classroom" (1.2)
        • Susan Martens, "Finding My Nonfiction Pedagogy Muse at the NOWM" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Steven Church, "The Blue Guide Project: Fresno" (1.2)
        • Stephanie Vanderslice, "From Wordstar to the Blogosphere and Beyond: ​A Digital Literacy and Teaching Narrative (Epiphany Included)" (1.2)
        • Jessica McCaughey, "That Snow Simply Didn’t Fall: How (and Why) to Frame the Personal Essay as a Critical Inquiry into Memory in the First-Year Writing Classroom" (1.2)
    • 2.1 (Fall 2015) >
      • Editor's Note2.1
      • 2.1 Articles >
        • Daniel Nester, "Straddling the Working Class Memoir" (2.1)
        • Sarah M. Wells, "The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: ​Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth" (2.1)
        • Chris Harding Thornton, "Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose" (2.1)
        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
        • Megan Culhane Galbraith, "Animals as Aperture: How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Conversations >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character" (2.1)
        • Tim Bascom, "As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay" (2.1)
        • Adrian Koesters, "Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir" (2.1)
        • Interview with Simmons Buntin (2.1)
        • Mike Puican, "Narrative Disruption in Memoir" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Pedagogy >
        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
        • Crystal N. Fodrey, "Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship" (2.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
        • Christian Exoo & Sydney Fallon, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to ​First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (2.1)
    • Special Conference Issue
    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
4.2

Picture

Corinna Cook

Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire




The Mountain

Recently, I streamed a sixteen-minute piece of digital nonfiction, an animated documentary, from the National Film Board of Canada website. In it I recognized the Carcross Mountain drawn in rough, shifting pencil. I leapt at this sense of recognition, and recalled the last time I drove through Carcross, Yukon: the gas station was closed that summer. Awkward, because the Carcross pump is the only one on the 110 miles of road between Whitehorse, Yukon and Skagway, Alaska. Also awkward because the hand-written note taped to the inside of the gas station window suggested no fuel alternatives, no rescue plans. I called out to the kids circling on their too-big bikes. They shrugged. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one expecting to fuel up in Carcross, forced instead to shoot for the Canada-Alaska border mostly in neutral, coasting as much as possible down the pass to Skagway.

The Carcross Mountain is remote by outside standards, but it’s a familiar feature in my part of the North. Yet while Yukoners and Southeast Alaskans may recognize the mountain depicted in Daniel Janke’s animated documentary, How People Got Fire, most other viewers won’t. Prior to the film’s credits, the place is only referred to as “the village,” and the tribe isn’t explicitly identified, either (only their relatives and neighbors are named, and even then it’s as “coast people,” with tribe and language group unnamed). Finally, the elder character is simply called Grandma Kay. But to viewers who recognize that mountain, it is clear that the village depicted is Carcross, and so the people are probably mostly inland Tlingit. And those familiar with the region’s oral histories and oral historians will understand that Grandma Kay likely represents Kittie Smith, one of the three individuals to whom we owe virtually our whole written record of the region’s oral tradition. In other words, Janke’s nonfiction film, How People Got Fire, is set in a specific place and features a specific person. But the film broadcasts the names of neither. And since the film is animated, viewers might assume its visual elements are fictional constructions, or composites at most. Why is this film so silent on the subject of place names and historic figures while retaining strict visual loyalty to the Carcross Mountain? In other words, why set the film in a specific, existing place—one eminently recognizable to insiders—without situating outsiders?
​

A simple answer: How People Got Fire refuses to be held accountable to mainstream viewing expectations. It carves out a space in which to make meaning on its own terms. ​


​Animated Nonfiction

From the perspective of nonfiction studies, Janke’s decisions nevertheless remain intriguing. By reflecting on How People Got Fire, I am working to broaden understandings of the role played by imagination and abstraction in the expression of truth and reality. Might this film reveal some of the ways in which documentation and its associated nonfictionality can gain, rather than suffer, from departures and complications of “factual reporting”? And might nonfiction’s most essential form, the essay, provide insight in the discussion? Since the first radio entertainment broadcast in the mid-twentieth centry to early video essays of the 1980s, the twenty-first century in particular has seen a flourishing of digitized nonfiction. This includes not only an expansion of audio and video essays, but also hyperlink essays and social media essays, as well as digitally interactive essays and cinematic essays. John Bresland points out the common thread here is not medium at all, but the particularities of the essay as a form that makes an inquiry, pushes toward an insight, yet tends to ask more questions than it answers. In his comments on video essays, Bresland thus argues “that asking—whether inscribed in ancient mud, printed on paper, or streamed thirty frames per second—is central to the essay, is the essay” (2010). Reading Janke’s film as an essay, and investigating its blend of abstraction with realism as one of its essayistic elements, thus means paying attention to the question(s) the film is asking.

The film, in calling itself a documentary, invokes definitional considerations within the field of cinema studies as well, for the concept of “documentary” is in flux. Film critic Sybil DelGaudio maps the poles of documentary discourse as follows: “whether one defines documentary as John Grierson’s ‘creative treatment of actuality’, or accepts Trinh T. Minh-ha’s position that ‘there is no such thing as a documentary’, the term, always dynamic, has undergone continual scrutiny and re-consideration throughout film history” (189). Standing at the more open and all-inclusive end, the Film Studies Dictionary submits as documentary “any film practice that has as its subject persons, events, or situations that exist outside the film in the real world” (Steve Blandford, Berry Kieth Grant, and Jim Hillier 73). But as Jane Gaines points out, “the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ describes fiction as well as nonfiction film” (84). Imagination is intimately bound to both fiction and nonfiction, in other words—though (we hope) on different terms.
​

The debate is familiar to readers and writers of the nonfiction essay, as definitions of truth in the art of nonfiction draw much of the field’s discursive attention. Here is the angle I propose for now: when a viewer’s particular sensitivity to “actuality” and “the real world” is activated, then that viewer might arguably be reading a film for its documentary potential. The realism of the southern Yukon landscape and the specificity of Carcross Mountain suggest this film’s relationship to the real world is crucial; in order to register the film’s meaning, its argument, or its thesis, it’s also crucial we understand it as true. But the film represents at least two real worlds: a nonfiction distant-time and a nonfiction present-time. As a documentary film, what is the production documenting about each? Or as a digital essay, what is the film asking about each? How do distant-time and present-time relate? How do the mixed approaches of abstraction and realism knit these two worlds together without defining one as more true than the other?


​The Film

The premise of the film’s present-time frame narrative entails immediately accessible political insinuations: after the credits, the film begins by juxtaposing a lumbering yellow school bus with an elder’s teaching by storytelling: “Hey, you kids,” Grandma Kay calls from her doorway. “Come here. I’m gonna tell you a story. More than you learn in that school.” She makes the kids a snack. And she tells them how people got fire—it involves Chickenhawk and Crow (though “coast people call him Raven”). The frame narrative thus expresses explicit skepticism about institutionalized western education, and functions not only as a present-time story and a frame for the distant-time narrative, but also as a critical intervention in education discourse, the present status of which is deeply marred by Canada’s vicious legacy of boarding schools.

However, Janke’s film also transcends its political and anthropological ramifications, and it does so beginning with its opening sequence of un-narrated, animated charcoal-drawings of Crow swooping through the air in a boreal forest and mountainscape to the tune of Janke’s spare, contemporary classical composition. At the outset, the soundscape is modern while the mountains are ancient; also, the soundscape makes explicit auditory reference to classical training, while the animation style is simple black and white sketching, mixing a musically formal aesthetic with a visually rustic one. It’s in this opening pastiche that the Carcross Mountain first figures in to the film, morphing from charcoal-drawn to colored-in, and thus works as the visual transition from the distant-time of Crow to the present-time of Tish, Grandma Kay, and the village. So within the film’s first minute, the Carcross Mountain is already a two-sided coin, the voice of liminality: it suggests the hybridity of totemic time and human time, embodies the fluidity of an ancient past and a contemporary present, and distills, to my mind, the film’s unstated thesis: the past is here, present; just overhead, just underfoot. And, just as a mountain, the past is structurally integral, the world’s very foundation.

​
Aesthetics do much of the speaking in Janke’s film, which uses animation to blend realism with abstraction throughout the documentary. Two issues drive the critical discourse on animated documentary. One is reflexivity: critics seem to share a general agreement that animation operates as metacommentary on the mediation of reality (DelGaudio 192). Because animation foregrounds the involvement of the artist’s hand, its forms are always already self-reflexively aware of their own interpretive—and not authoritarian/objective—relationship to what they portray. The second issue is embodied indexicality, or proximity of representation to truth, for animation is uniquely positioned to visually capture kinds of truths not available to literal photographic representation.


​Part I: Embodiment in Animated Documentary

Maureen Furniss outlines three arguments for animation’s unique capacity to embody, or render visual, what photography cannot. They are: (a) animation can visually depict, and not just imply, an individual’s internal processes, (b) animation can “film” material things that are unfilmable because of legal or historic (or biochemical/geologic?) absence of cameras, and (c) animation can manipulate character, either to protect someone’s identity or to create a composite character when the film’s documentary emphasis lies elsewhere than with the individual. Andy Glynn, filmmaker and writer, calls this list reasons for which animation and documentary make “a logical pairing” (75).

Most challenging to my reading of How People Got Fire is part (c). Consider Glynn’s comments about the composite characters in his Animated Minds series, a sequence of films addressing specific mental health conditions like bulimia, Asperger’s Syndrome, etc.: “if we’d made these as live-action films,” notes Glynn, “and had seen one person talking, then suddenly the film becomes more about a particular individual rather than a ‘condition.’ …The difference is perhaps subtle, but nonetheless important; animation helped shift focus onto the experiences rather than the individual” (75). Similarly, having recognized the Carcross Mountain in How People Got Fire, I knew that the elder was one of three possible southern Yukon women: Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, or Annie Ned—the three elders so dear to anthropologist and oral historian Julie Cruikshank. But while the credits acknowledge Kitty Smith as the model for the character in the film (no surprise by the time the credits roll, for the elder character’s name in the film is Grandma Kay) there is an important sense in which Janke’s work is not a story about Kitty Smith, her life, or her oral authorship. Using a composite character, or a non-historically specific character, shifts the film’s focus: there is extant ethnography and oral history on Kitty Smith, and while this film acknowledges its debt to her, How People Got Fire works in a different valence. Abstracting the characters prevents the film from being “about” a historically-specific transmitter and an individual receiver, and focuses meaning in the alternative areas of philosophic and cosmological transmission and the content transmitted.

Yet as a counterpoint, the Carcross Mountain in How People Got Fire is unquestioningly identifiable as such. The setting is not a “composite location”; it’s geographically exact. Still, this specificity is subtle: if you don’t know the Carcross Mountain, it won’t announce itself. So while How People Got Fire does use animation to shift the focus away from historic individuals, it is not for all that forced by animation to abstract all of its physical elements—that the artists chose to preserve geographic specificity and not individual human specificity might be construed as one of the film’s ontological theses, which I interpret as follows: landscape is fixed, mythological/elemental characters are fixed, but human individuals are more fleeting, temporary, or interchangeable.

Animism in How People Got Fire might be construed as embodying some kind of internal truth to the extent that animism might be understood as a spiritual phenomenon, and spirituality is often understood as individual and internal. In How People Got Fire, the teacup images move, the flowers on Grandma Kay’s nightie blossom and wilt and grow anew, Tish’s notebook flaps about with a life of its own (which she tries to hide from the other kids), and the members of framed photographs react to the kitchen scene, offering unworded and (to me) often inscrutable commentary. Animism here might be construed as internal because the film’s characters all have individual reactions; Grandma Kay sees nothing out of the ordinary but simply responds to the teacup that calls her hand, whereas Tish has a bit of guilt and embarrassment over her notebook’s movemented agency. The other kids don’t seem to see any of this—I suppose they aren’t attuned the way Tish and Grandma Kay are.
​

Or perhaps animism in How People Got Fire is better understood as a project of filming the materially unfilmable. Maybe notebooks really, cosmologically, are animate, but photography can’t capture this in much the way mirrors can’t see vampires. In this sense, abstraction is a useful tool: through it, the filmmakers access what their cameras cannot. Additionally, distant-time in How People Got Fire also fits quite neatly into the unfilmable category: there were no cameras in distant-time, so animation might be as indexical a representation as we can get of it. It is here that digital nonfiction becomes, as DelGaudio puts it, “both a practical and a philosophic concern, directly challenging [falsehoods], not only about the ‘knowability’ of the world but also about cinema’s capacity to represent it” (193). And it is because animated documentary stretches the cinematic bounds of the filmable that certain critics see animation as inherently self-aware. In other words, animated digital nonfiction may well be understood as a form invested in examining its own boundaries.


​Part II: Reflexivity in Animated Documentary

The act of documenting the “undocumentable” is either incoherent, or it is a radical overturning of whatever entrenched epistemological structure has defined the undocumentable as such. Perhaps eventually we can approach How People Got Fire as a blueprint indicating how, exactly, a film might exert pressure on cinematic bounds of representing the knowable. But for now, who’s in charge of drawing the knowable/unknowable line? Who’s right about where reality ends and imagination begins? Any school of thought that has already rejected the notion of objectivity, registering it as nonsensical at best (and Fascist at worst) is already primed to digest Paola Voci’s ideas about a genre she calls quasi-documentary, which supposes authentic reality is always already subjective, fragmented, and altered by the very impulse to document it (70). Animation, necessarily a departure from observational realism, can aim to bear witness not only to reality but to this element of reality—its fundamentally subjective and mediated nature. It is in this sense that animation can itself be read as an epistemological theory: one emphasizing the role of expressivity in knowledge and perception of the real. Now, if animation theorizes knowledge, what exact theory does How People Got Fire set forth and what kind of knowledge does it theorize? Studies in animation’s reflexivity might lead to an epistemological reading of How People Got Fire, and perhaps create a philosophic and cosmologic platform from which to interpret the film’s realism/abstraction blend.

Indexicality is a key notion undergirding much of documentary criticism. Martin Lefebvre distinguishes between direct (e.g. a fingerprint) and indirect (e.g. a painting) indexical relations; accordingly, indexicality is generally understood to be higher in photographs than in drawings, because photographic indexicality visually implies one-to-one correspondence with reality or “the real world.” But in the so-called digital age, the photographic image is, in the hands of a digital artist, as physically malleable as acrylics and canvas to the painter. Scholars like Nea Ehrlich and Steve Fore agree that in such times, we doubt all images and question all representations. Indexicality, a core concept to documentary studies, is thus as fraught a notion as “authenticity,” and photographic status is not a universalizable stipulation in establishing either an image’s authenticity or indexicality.

Nea Ehrlich writes, “animation’s constructedness and break with naturalistic representation and visual ‘realism’ … makes animation seem suspect and un-objective as a documentary language” (n.p.). Why? Ehrlich explains: animated documentary “evokes an assumed conflict in that documentation involves notions of authenticity and authority to provide reliable evidence. However, animation’s formal language emphasizes its own constructedness…” (n.p.) In other words, because animation makes the visually-explicit statement that it is a mediated, interpretive, artists’ representation, authenticity (in its simplest and most material sense) might appear fatally compromised. But, because animation isn’t involved in “tricking” the viewer, the transparency of its interpretive qualities might actually be understood to increase indexicality (Steve Fore and Paul Wells are among those advancing similar arguments). Animation, then, is visually and aesthetically attuned to reality as constructed; it’s a tacit, yet visible, rejection of Cartesian objectivity. The Carcross Mountain, for example, offers both the authenticity and authority of indexicality not because it is a photographic image (it’s a charcoal drawing) but rather because it is rendered in simplified realism (like certain caricatures, minus the exaggeration) and is immediately recognizable, albeit interpreted by the artist.

Yet there are a variety of approaches to animation and a resulting spectrum along which to interpret the indexicality of an animated work, and How People Got Fire does not use exclusively the visual approach I’ve ascribed to the Carcross Mountain. As critic Karen Beckman points out, it’s hard to assess indexicality in animation, especially when techniques like rotoscoping are involved (261). Indeed, How People Got Fire utilizes rotoscoped characters in the present-time narrative thread: these characters are visually somewhat abstracted, and thus somewhat visually fictionalized, but not so far as outright cartoons. They’re a tracing over of live, photographed bodies. The tracing is mediated by the artist’s hand (or the computer program), but is also anchored to the photographic image. Abstracting the characters into softened representations of the individual actors on whom they’re based blurs the line between historic individual and actor representing historic individual.

I find a complication here when I consider “real-life” actors. An actor is never really the person they portray. As critic Orly Yadin claims, however convincing an actor may be, viewers don’t wholly forget that they are actors standing in (170). This would seem to be to function in much the same epistemological current that Voci has pointed out: real-life actors, because they are always standing in for whomever they represent, might actually be understood to operate like animation does—foregrounding subjective mediation. But Yadin takes this logic and turns our previous understanding of animation inside out. She argues that “perversely, a strange thing happens with the so-called non-realistic medium of animation: once we, the audience, accept that we are entering an animated world, we tend to suspend disbelief and the animation acquires a verisimilitude that drama-documentaries hardly ever achieve” (170). In other words, where Voci finds in animation an explicit statement of reality-as-subjectively-mediated (implying a simultaneous plurality of realities), Yadin find immersive qualities and a kind of contained reality. In contrast, the distant-time narrative deals with the “elemental” characters Chickenhawk and Crow (Bringhurst 69) and renders them in rougher, rustic charcoal or pencil drawings. The rougher penciling here not only denotes distant-time by signaling a deep chronological shift—more importantly, it signals an ontological one. I take it as axiomatic that the distant-time world led to the one in which we live but is not commensurable with it in crucial ways; for example, right roles and relations were not yet set. Rougher penciling, then, is not just about history: it’s about a more malleable reality in which aspects—which are fixed in our present reality—were not yet so.

Rather than softening present-time photographed people through rotoscoping, the distant-time portion of the film roughens totemic figures we’ve grown accustomed to seeing portrayed in polished, streamlined, and highly stylized traditional Native and First Nations visual arts. I find an aesthetically-hinted-at philosophic middle ground, here. Visually softened present-time characters (when we might expect photographic indexicality) combined with visually roughened distant-time characters (when we might expect traditionally-etched symbolic representation) might be read as an overall narrowing of the ontological chasm between present- and distant-time.

DelGaudio argues the result of animation’s self-reflexivity is that “animation prompts the viewer to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text’s problematic relation to that which is represents” (189). In the case of How People Got Fire, the present-time visuals represent contemporary culture, portraying a sort of “how it is here,” emphasizing what the narrator, Tish, makes explicit: “us kids play in all the houses.” While there is plenty of artistic precedent when it comes to illustrating the general via the particular, the animation highlights this leap from particular to general. And the rough charcoal-looking drawings of the distant-time narrative emphasize, through their stylized roughness, (a) the sheer impossibility of photographing the figures driving this thread of the story, and (b) the elemental aspect of the characters—the drawing, while highly sophisticated, are understated and appear almost primal, scrawled and scratched out, unfinished, signaling that among the building blocks of reality, it is a few of the most basic that are represented here.

Ehrlich argues that animation sparks the viewer to contemplate truth-claims, factuality, and statement of information (while material presenting itself as factual, and not as argument, operates covertly to foster complacency and unexamined acceptance in the viewer). The simultaneous exposure and disguise of animation, however, prompts the viewer into a more mentally sensitive and agile space, one marked by continual uncertainty, reflection, and questioning. “Creating an attentive, questioning and critical viewer is no small by-product,” Ehrlich notes (n.p.). Beckman comes to a similar conclusion. She writes, “our conscious knowledge of the absence of the photo-indexical image and the camera’s role in the production of it results in a far greater awareness of the visual effects of the … camera’s framing and movement” (Beckman 264). For both Ehrlich and Beckman, questioning indexicality is about shifting the viewer’s positioning from passive recipient to active, critical thinker. The practical question now is, what does How People Got Fire want its viewership to think about?

Something I did not encounter in the reflexive thread of animated documentary discourse, but which might have helped me answer this question, is a discussion of ethical responsibility. When I engage with arguments like those articulated above by Ehrlich and Beckman, I wonder: what is the result of such a shifted viewing position? If animation inherently cultivates critical thinking in its viewership, what does this mean for that viewership? Are they then endowed with a certain form of responsibility toward the audiovisual art that has heightened their thinking? With a certain form of responsibility that transcends their relationship to the film? What is, in other words, the purpose or potential of this critically-attuned viewership and what are the contemporary (or universal) circumstances in which we ought to mold an understanding of that viewer? More specifically, do Ehrlich and Beckman’s claim have an ethical bearing on my reading of How People Got Fire?

Likewise, considering the reflexive qualities of animation sparks sensitivity to the aesthetic variations at play within the double narrative of the film, but even here, when the animated documentary discourse takes a conceptual turn to explore the significance of reflexivity, I lose traction in my reading of Janke’s film. Without a more concrete framework in which to understand the implications of a critically-minded viewership, how am I to interpret what exactly How People Got Fire cultivates among its viewers, and the particular bearing of this film on those who see it?

While studies in animated documentary have left certain among my questions unanswered, sustained attention to the film’s assumed/argued knowability of the world has caused me to notice a structural element of How People Got Fire. In Janke’s film, I find a structure of concentric circles pressing the bounds of the documentable, which introduces a practical angle on cinema’s capacity to represent the knowable. To explain, I’ll linger on the film’s depictions of animist worldviews.

In each case of animism in How People Got Fire, a frame or material (outer circle) ostensibly contains an image (inner circle), but the images are oddly unburdened by the rules we expect such frames to impose. For example, photos on the wall depict animate (whispering and giggling) and not static individuals; they stay within their picture frames, but are oddly unconstrained by the photographic convention of stillness. Furthermore, the chickenhawk on the mug crouches and takes flight, flapping into its ceramic distance. Again, it stays in its world of the mug, but is uncontained—the chickenhawk flies into a depth of distance, growing smaller as it recedes, even though the surface of a mug is plainly two-dimensional; in this sense, the image on the mug refuses the dimensional bounds of its ceramic frame. Additionally, the flowers Grandma Kay wears bloom and wilt, bloom and wilt. And Tish’s notebook gets restless; it flaps about and she has to pounce on it.

This last example is particularly pleasing in its complexity: patrons of the literary arts notwithstanding, text is sometimes scoffed at as inert, static, or dead. Since How People Got Fire voiced, through Grandma Kay, a paradigmatic perspective critical of book-learning (“more than you learn in that school”—a perspective that, by extension, is also critical of the hegemonic western institutions that coincide with said book-learning), the life and agency of Tish’s notebook interrupts any didactically postcolonial anti-literate-culture read of the film. Indeed, the book—home of written language and icon of non-oral knowledge systems—is animate, operating on the same metaphysical terms as the photos on the wall, the image on the mug, and the pattern on Grandma Kay’s clothing. It would have been easy to leave the film with the simple thought, the traditional education paradigm is better!, but Tish’s notebook troubles such a neat, indigenous-versus-colonial read on knowledge.
​

Each of these examples might be understood as a microcosm of the film’s overall narrative structure, in which a similar frame-displacement also occurs. How People Got Fire involves a story within a story: inside the smallest center circle is the distant-time story of Crow and Chickenhawk. Outside it is the frame narrative, or present-time story of Grandma Kay and Tish. But formally, the film neither opens nor ends with this frame narrative. There is one more layer, the largest, encircling both the story and the story-within-a-story. The present-time frame itself is bookended by un-narrated, musically-rich distant-time animation of Crow swooping and coasting along in the boreal forest mountainscape characteristic of southern Yukon / northern British Columbia. It’s thus distant-time that is the real frame, the real vessel, the real horizon of the film’s (un)containment. In a sense, How People Got Fire is a documentary nearly exceeding its own bounds, formally pushed to the brink of its own cinematic frame. Is it possible to take this reading just a hair over that edge?


​Part III: Myth ​

The questions of ontology and epistemology belong, for scholar and poet Robert Bringhurst, to the purview of mythology: humans formulate questions about the nature of being and meaning as stories—ones that “think about the nature of the world instead of (like a novel) about the nature of human society or the workings of the human heart and mind” (Bringhurst, Everywhere 168, emphasis in original). Yet while all cultures hatch hypotheses and theses about the nature of the world, Bringhurst emphasizes a major conceptual difference in the approach of literate versus oral cultures. In short, highly literate cultures record their theses about reality in abstract forms like propositions, definitions, and equations (analytic philosophy, mathematics, physics, etc.). But in oral cultures, theses about reality unfold in story form. However, it’s not only a question of theses getting jotted down as equations in literate societies and performed as stories in oral ones. It’s also a question of abstraction and concreteness, for stories deal with living things, and the essential tool of metaphysics in oral cultures is not abstraction but personification (Bringhurst 168). As DelGaudio, Voci, Yadin (and others) find in animation an inherent activation of epistemological and ontological inquiries, I propose we also align with Bringhurst’s ideas which consider mythology in the same light. When we do so, Janke’s film becomes something of a double-whammy, for it deals with the nature of the world in both its form (animation) and its content (an inland Tlingit myth).

What else deals with the nature of the world? In western culture, science. Let us not, Bringhurst argues, misconstrue myth as a kind of misinformation for which science is the cure, because myth is actually “an alternate kind of science. …It aims, like science, at perceiving and expressing ultimate truths” (64). And because it aims at “ultimate truths” and is “so perceptive of reality,” Bringhurst holds the contentious position that myths ring true cross-culturally and outside the bounds of historic specificity (“like any law of nature, in almost any culture at almost any time,” he stresses (64) ). Myths transcend the bounds of cultural specificity because their cultural specificity is only one of the components in play; alongside that specificity is something humanly—and not just culturally—compelling. “As soon as [such stories] are heard,” writes Bringhurst, “they are seen to enrich human experience. That is why they are incessantly retold” (64).

While Bringhurst compares mythology to science, he does so with care. They do not share, for example, basic starting assumptions: science tends to assume that everything it deals with is dead, but again, a myth assumes all existents are alive (64). It is fitting, then, that as scholar Joanna Hearne argues, we should look at animation as a form well-suited to mythic storytelling for in its most literal sense, the form of animation entails an enlivening, vitalizing dimension akin to the assumption myth makes about its existents (92). Perhaps the stakes of animation’s reflexivity might be rooted here.

There might be reason to pursue this thought, for Bringhurst posits morality as exterior to science but core to mythology. He argues not only that the context of a myth is always a world of living entities, but that they are all linked imperfectly, yet powerfully, by moral obligations. A scientific statement, on the other had, usually seems to discuss material objects devoid of moral concerns (65-66). I think here of my own travels: it’s important to me to tip my hat to the Carcross Mountain when I see it, as I would to anyone else when recognition (or surprise, or convention) compels me to give a greeting. But there’s also a weighted sense of how little I really know that mountain, and dismay that what I do know is somehow unearned and is irrevocably a product of my nonNative heritage. How People Got Fire does not, in form or content, let me off this hook. And so Bringhurst’s statement about imperfect yet powerful moral obligations resonates: my relationship to the mountain may be imperfect, but obligation prevents me from freezing in my tracks.
​

Obligation is like a suturing, reconnecting pieces that have been separated. Bringhurst thinks in terms of a continuum of unifying and parsing: mythology and science mark those poles respectively. “Science,” writes Bringhurst, “tends to distinguish much that mythology tends to conflate, and one of the mythteller’s tasks is reassembling things and relationships that analytical study and the practical demands of daily life are prone to parse” (66). Bringhurst’s example is helpful:
a hunter may butcher his prey…then tell a story which symbolically restores the animal… There may be plenty of real science in the hunter’s understanding of animal behavior and in his knowledge of comparative anatomy—but in oral cultures, myths, not scientific theorems, are the customary way of reuniting concepts that experience has severed. (66-67)
If we are to understand truth as something deeply lodged within mythic structures and practices, this may not be a bad place to invoke it. “Symbolic reunification” reestablishes coherence when, as Yeats puts it, the center does not hold (a bewildering kind of pain far from unique to modernism).
​

And what are the constitutive elements of mythic truthtelling? Bringhurst writes, ​
unlike the characters of history, fiction, or legend, the creatures of myth are as a rule elemental. The Raven, for example, is as mutable and complex as plutonium or sulphur, air or blood, but he is fundamental in the same sense. … His status in the mythworlds of the North Pacific Rim is something like the status of an element in chemistry or an axiom in mathematics. He is, within these worlds, a familiar, trusted theorem, not a new hypothesis. Yet the old, accepted elements and theorems are precisely where new revelations come from. (69)
Raven, and other such elemental characters, might be understood as integral building blocks in Victor Masayesva’s “language of intercession” with the spiritworld. What, in How People Got Fire, is symbolically reunified, or placed back into communion with the spirituality of distant-time? I can think of at least three severances the film heals. First, education: How People Got Fire obscures the compartmentalization of school and home by depicting teaching and learning occurring not at school but in a domestic space. Second, fire, heat, and internal energy: in the school bus opening, we see over Tish’s shoulder that she’s been assigned to write an essay on hydrothermal vents. Then Grandma Kay invokes Crow and Chickenhawk to tell, with a completely different grammar, about the very same subject—how the inner fire of the world was brought out and distributed to its residents. Here, the elemental energy of the earth is reunified with the life-energy of those who live here. Third, past and future: Crow, like the Carcross Mountain, is present in the distant-time narrative and the present-time one; it’s not clear the past is gone, at all, for it not only marks the present, but (at least in the case of Crow) hops about with its own agency in both. As Masayesva writes: “the indigenous aesthetic … is the language of intercession through which we are heard by and commune with the Ancients” (n.p.). Aesthetically speaking, then, How People Got Fire implies that this communing is not exclusively the stuff of ritual. It’s going on all over, any time of day.
​

When Ehrlich and Beckman gesture toward animation’s reflexivity, claiming the form itself hones a more critically attuned viewership, I asked, what are the stakes? Cinematically, I still don’t know. But with Bringhurst’s ideas on the table I can say this: How People Got Fire starts out with a landscape many northern outdoor-recreating lover of the backcountry can recognize, and then enters a village—something closed, mostly, to outdoor recreators (frequented instead, and problematically, by government officials and social sciences researchers)—and tells a story about distant-time not in the village, but on the land. Yes, the village is the site of the telling; How People Got Fire doesn’t propose a rosy tribe of all humanity. But the site of the story is the world, so there is no excuse to treat the story as undecipherable. Tentatively, and as a resident of the world, How People Got Fire proposes I adopt—alongside my consciousness as perpetual non-villager—an actively interpretive relationship with the story, treating it as vibrating, animate, relevant, playful, and wise. Not that it is accessible to me in the fullness of its cultural references as it is to Grandma Kay, but that it is fundamentally a story “so perceptive of reality” as to make plenty of meaning both inside or outside the theatre of the village, if we have the agility of mind to pay attention.


​In Conclusion

The Carcross Mountain is not the only thing that marks those of us passing through. There is also the Carcross Desert, and it might have a place here. The Carcross Desert, also called the smallest desert in the world, is a set of sand dunes (about one square mile’s worth) sitting in a rainshadow not far from the village. It is good to pull over next to it, throw off your shoes, forget about bears, and race up the dunes. Pick up what you find there; there’s a good chance that at least once, it will be a small plastic soldier, the kind with a helmet and rifle, feet soldered at a set distance to a piece of plastic earth. Later it is good to resume the drive with sand in your hair, eyes stinging. Get where you are going. Don’t worry, the soldier will make his own way.

But wait: How People Got Fire suggests I ought to place the emphasis elsewhere—nothing wrong with the immediacy of human experience, the idiosyncrasy of a memory, or a puzzling found object, but How People Got Fire says look. Look for the thread of continuity first. And it comes in all shapes: that of a mountain, of a lack (fire) now filled (if you feed it), of the elements, those basic building blocks that are Crow, Chickenhawk, the storyteller, the listener. Look for the thread of continuity first, says Janke’s film, and I think it says this not because continuity is the only way to access the real that is actuality, but because “actuality” was always from the start relational: something existing in contrast to the past and the future, something existing in contrast to the expected, the intended, or the imaginary. Look for the thread of continuity first, because that is the real context of the story’s truth. When it comes to telling you about the Carcross Desert I am not, perhaps, so prepared as I thought: it will take more reflection to find the continuity framing its significance.
​

So the question remains: what kind of documentary is this and what is it documenting? How People Got Fire is documenting a contemporary iteration of an ancient practice, storytelling. It’s documenting an epistemology that percolates up from a particular place. And it’s documenting the active presentness of an ancient past, a presentness that is sometimes goofy, sometimes eerie, but either way, continual. The kind of documentary this is, then, is cosmologic. Tish is well-equipped here, as she is in the film, to have the last word: “there’s only one story. It’s big: now. …Now.”
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Picture
Corinna Cook teaches creative and critical writing at the University of Missouri, where she is pursuing a PhD in English. Her nonfiction appears in journals such as Flyway and the Alaska Quarterly Review. She is presently working on a collection of essays about northern sorrows and friendships.




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        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • August Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Tonee Mae Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
    • 8.2 (Spring 2022) >
      • 8.2 Articles >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Radical Surprise: The Subversive Art of the Uncertain," (8.2)
        • George Estreich, "Feeling Seen: Blind Man’s Bluff, Memoir, and the Sighted Reader" (8.2)
        • Kristina Gaddy, "When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism" (8.2)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "Solitude Narratives: Towards a Future of the Form" (8.2)
        • Margot Kotler, "Susan Sontag, Lorraine Hansberry, and the ​Politics of Queer Biography " (8.2)
      • 8.2 Conversations >
        • Michael W. Cox , "On Two Published Versions of Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” (8.2)
        • Hugh Martin, "No Cheap Realizations: On Kathryn Rhett’s “Confinements” (8.2)
      • 8.2 Pedagogy >
        • Liesel Hamilton, "How I Wish I’d Taught Frederick Douglass: An Examination of the Books and Conversations We Have in Classrooms" (8.2)
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "In the Room Where it Happens: Accessibility, Equity, and the Creative Writing Classroom" (8.2)
        • Daniel Nester, "Joan Didion and Aldous Huxley’s Three Poles" (8.2)
    • 9.1 (Fall 2022) >
      • 9.1 Articles >
        • Mark Houston, "Riding Out of Abstraction: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Re-materialization of ​Social Justice Rhetoric in “The Sacred and the Superfund”" (9.1)
        • Ryan McIlvain, ""You Get to Decide What to Worship but Not What's Good": Rereading 'This Is Water'" (9.1)
        • Quincy Gray McMichael, "Laboring toward Leisure: The Characterization of Work in ​Maine’s Back-to-the-Land Memoirs" (9.1)
        • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
        • Emma Winsor Wood, "A Lovely Woman Tapers Off into a Fish: Monstrosity in Montaigne’s Essais" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Conversations >
        • Philip Newman Lawton, "Rousseau's Wandering Mind" (9.1)
        • Claire Salinda, "Bodily Dissociation as a Female Coping Mechanism in ​The Shapeless Unease, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, and Girlhood" (9.1)
        • Hannah White, "“Which sounds bad and maybe was”: A Study of Narrative in Beth Nguyen’s “Apparent”" (9.1)
      • 9.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jessica Handler, "Your Turn" (9.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Expressing Anger as a Positive Choice" (9.1)
        • Kozbi Simmons, "Literacy as Emancipation" (9.1)
        • Wally Suphap, "Writing and Teaching the Polemic" (9.1)
    • 9.2 (Spring 2023) >
      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Amy Mackin, "A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives: Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jeannine Ouellette, "That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Conversations >
        • Blossom D'Souza, "The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet" (Assay 9.2)
        • Kyra Lisse, "Relentlist Women: On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux" (Assay 9.2)
        • William Kerwin,​ “Life as a Boneyard”: Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello, "The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian" (Assay 9.2)
        • Eamonn Wall, "A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Pedagogy >
        • Khem Aryal, "Beyond Lores: Linking Writers’ Self-Reports to Autoethnography" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: ​Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)
        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Late Night Thoughts on What Street Photography ​Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing" (Assay 9.2)
    • 10.1 (Fall 2023) >
      • 10.1 Articles >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
        • Anne Garwig, "Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the ​Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War" (Assay 10.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out" (Assay 10.1)
        • Kathryn Jones, "Conveying the Grief Experience: Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights" (Assay 10.1)
        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Conversations >
        • Beth Kephart, "On Reading Fast and Reading Slow" (Assay 10.1)
        • Mimi Schwartz, "The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Pedagogy >
        • Angie Chuang, "Dear(ly) Departed: ​Letter-Writing to Engage the Issue of Racialized Police Brutality" (Assay 10.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Where and How We Might Teach Hybrid: A Pedagogical Review of Kazim Ali’s Silver Road" (Assay 10.1)
    • 10.2 (Spring 2024) >
      • 10.2 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
        • Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": ​Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Conversations >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "On Difficulty" (Assay 10.2)
        • Thomas Larson, "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Pedagogy >
        • Amy Bonnaffons, "Writing from the Big Brain: ​An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education" (Assay 10.2)
        • Micah McCrary, "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom" (Assay 10.2)
        • Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
    • 11.1 (Fall 2024) >
      • 11.1 Articles >
        • Anna Nguyen, "A Question on Genre: The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed" (Assay 11.1)
        • Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Conversations >
        • Jehanne Dubrow, "The Essay's Volta" (Assay 11.1)
        • James Allen Hall, "Wholly Fragmented" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Spotlight >
        • Kim Hensley Owens & Yongzhi Miao, "Six Words is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment" (Assay 11.1)
        • Elizabeth Leahy, "Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability: Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center" (Assay 11.1)
        • Jennifer Stewart, "Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection" (Assay 11.1)
        • Katherine Fredlund, "Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Pedagogy >
        • Abby Manzella, "In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: ​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand" (Assay 11.1)
        • Peter Wayne Moe, "Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing" (Assay 11.1)
        • Gwen Niekamp, "The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ​in the CNF Classroom and Canon" (Assay 11.1)
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