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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        • Aggie Stewart, "Bringing Dark Events to Light: ​Emotional Pacing in the Trauma Narrative" (9.1)
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      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
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        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
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        • 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)
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        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
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        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
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        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
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        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
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        • 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)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
2.1

Picture

Crystal N. Fodrey
​

Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: 
A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship



The fall 2014 arrival of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies into the limited landscape of creative writing studies journals marks a significant moment in the legitimization of creative nonfiction (CNF) as a distinct area of academic study with its own conventions, epistemologies, and pedagogies. Looking to scholarship on CNF pedagogy published prior to Assay’s debut, it would seem at first glance as though only the discipline of composition studies has had a stake in teaching students to write the genre—although that is obviously not the case. Current NCTE president-elect Douglas Hesse explains the genre’s academic and social origins in “Who Owns Creative Nonfiction,” and he speculates as to why it seemed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to belong to creative writing more so than composition. Initially to answer the question posed in his title he says, “At some level it really doesn’t matter, as long as whoever claims it isn’t selfish” (261). While it may not be a case of selfishness per se, there is an interesting but understandable disconnect between the disciplinary positionality of those who teach the majority of CNF writing courses and the disciplinary positionality of the majority of those who have written about teaching college students to write CNF over the last two and a half decades. 

Since 1989 with the publication of Chris Anderson’s edited collection Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, only a relatively small number of journal articles and chapters in edited collections have appeared discussing college-level CNF writing pedagogy specifically.[1] Despite the ever-growing number of undergraduate and graduate-level courses in CNF that exist within creative writing programs across the United States and other English-speaking nations,[2] almost everyone who has published on the topic of CNF writing pedagogy (not craft, about which much more has been published) is a scholar with a background in more than one English studies’ discipline—usually but not always creative writing and composition studies. This means that the intended audience for most CNF pedagogical scholarship in the past has been mostly teachers of first-year composition, advanced composition, and other composition-studies-situated personal writing courses who might decide to bring CNF craft into their classes (for example, through teaching a unit on literacy narrative or memoir or immersion journalism), not necessarily creative writing teachers teaching full semester courses in CNF. This makes sense. CNF is still quite new to the academy—that is, when it is understood as CNF and not just some iteration of the personal essay as it has been taught in first-year composition classes on and off since the late 1960s. More importantly, however, is this: In a creative writing disciplinary climate where creative publications are valued far over scholarly ones both in terms of tenure and personal preference, theory and practice-centric scholarship by creative writers has been few and far between before the recent influx of creative writing studies scholarship. This has, unfortunately, perpetuated a cycle of creative writing teachers teaching without much guidance.[3] However, as Stephanie Vanderslice notes in the foreword to the 2011 Dispatches from the Classroom: Graduate Students on Creative Writing Pedagogy, publications like Dispatches should be seen as “a forecast of the ‘better days’ in store for our growing discipline, where those who would scorn their own teaching really are a dying breed” (xiii).  The publication of Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley’s edited collection Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century published in May 2015 is the latest harbinger of better days for the teaching of all creative writing, just as Assay is for nonfiction specifically.

Prior to the fall of 2014, perhaps the best and most recent example of newfound theorized practice acceptance regarding creative writing-situated CNF practitioners in particular comes from Phillip Lopate’s spring 2011 Creative Nonfiction column “The Essay: Exploration or Argument” in which he laments that CNF lacks a unifying theory. He notes that those who teach and write CNF “are flying by the seat of our pants, in almost complete ignorance of oratorical and rhetorical terminology that goes all the way back to classical Greece and Rome” and that we need to “trace our strategies back to their sources and steep ourselves in rhetorical knowledge as well as Montaignian insouciance” (59). While I do not find it particularly prudent to trace CNF strategies all the way back to antiquity at a time when we do not fully understand the strategies within a contemporary context, Lopate’s statement did prompt me to ask: in what ways are CNF pedagogical practices already theorized, and how might this differ based on the disciplinary background of the instructor?

My aim, then, in this bibliographic essay—as the first part of a bigger qualitative project on the teaching of CNF—is to look back so we can move forward with conversations regarding what and how we can and should teach college students at various levels about CNF writing in the future. I cover key texts on the teaching of CNF mostly found in well-known publications with high circulations—namely College English, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and Creative Nonfiction—and/or are written by major figures who champion CNF from a composition studies or creative writing standpoint. I place CNF pedagogical scholarship within a historical context and synthesize the rationales each published author explores in relation to why they teach CNF and/or what they emphasize with their students about the genre, exposing gaps and opening up spaces for innovation that contributors to Assay and elsewhere can continue to fill. I am guided by the notion that there is much we can learn from studying the various rationales for teaching CNF writing across creative writing and composition studies, the subject positions these CNF teachers assume in relation to their writing and teaching, and the teaching methodologies that these CNF teachers utilize. 


​Teaching Creative Nonfiction Informed 

by Composition Studies Theories and Principles 

As of July 2015, Literary Nonfiction from 1989 remains the lone book-length work that has been published explicitly on CNF theorized writing/teaching practices from the disciplines of either composition or creative writing.[4] The contributors to the pedagogy section of that book, all from composition studies, typically either equate “literary nonfiction” with the Montaigne-inspired exploratory personal essay when discussing how they teach it in “freshman composition” or dedicate their chapter to how they use specific works of literary nonfiction to teach various forms of textual analysis in composition classes. Indeed, in Leta McGaffey Sharp’s 2009 dissertation “Creative Nonfiction Illuminated: Cross Disciplinary Spotlights,” she notes that historically compositionists have had a limited view of CNF as being synonymous with the personal essay, rarely taking into account any other subgenres (21). One who fits into that category, Jim W. Corder, in his “Hoping for Essays,” does include what I view to be an early theorization of the process of writing CNF, a practice he engaged in along with his students (although, of course, he didn’t call it CNF at the time). In this chapter Corder explains what he has learned from a lifetime of being a “self-ordained essayist,” one who made a conscious choice to be personal in his scholarly work and in other, more “imaginative” nonfiction prose that he writes as well (301-02). He includes a lettered list of “propositions for writers” that are meant to address the “problems and practices in invention,” noting the great importance of invention to the type of exploratory writing that happens in an essay (and, I’d add, to all CNF). Three of the propositions resonate most with me: “e. Since you are a person, you might as well show what you are like and how you think,” “j. Don’t hide your motives or yourself” and “k. You are always standing somewhere when you speak—try to know where it is” (312). By explaining his own thinking, his motives, his place to stand, he enacts his theories in his (scholarly/creative, public/private, transactional/expressivist) prose. I find that the best published (and student-written!) CNF does the same. 

The 1990s were quite barren of CNF/literary nonfiction pedagogical texts (aside from one Lynn Z. Bloom article I discuss later), likely due to the related facts that only composition studies scholars tended to publish about teaching students to write CNF, and composition studies as a discipline had so thoroughly bought into anti-expressivist social-constructionist theories—as espoused by scholars James Berlin, Lester Faigley, and others—that the teaching of personal writing was rendered temporarily taboo and borderline unethical.[5] To counter this, Sherrie L. Gradin published a groundbreaking work combining theories of expressivism and social constructionism in her 1995 Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing—which could be viewed in part as a book on CNF pedagogy even though CNF as a genre is never named. There she defines what is arguably the most important theoretical concept to the study of CNF: social expressivism (which is now more commonly referred to as critical expressivism).[6] For Gradin, social expressivism is a stance that “stresses the need for teachers to focus on writing for discovery, writing to discover self and voice, and development of power and authority of one’s own writing” while “also focus[ing] on . . . positioning the self within the world and writing for change” (xv). This subject position is a transactional, rhetorical subject position that the genre of CNF makes possible, a position that can simultaneously uphold the agency of the individual writer and the power of public, action-oriented prose—communicative acts that Wendy Bishop refers to as “enduring” (Teaching Lives 320). It is this expansive, potential-filled critical expressivist pedagogical space, in fact, that my research shows a majority of CNF teachers across English studies teaching within, and this is certainly the case for published scholarship available on CNF since the beginning of the twenty-first century that I cover in this section.[7] Critical expressivist pedagogy and the CNF teachers who knowingly or unknowingly utilize it in their classes stand in direct opposition to the potentially solipsistic individualist subject position claiming art for art’s sake that has been historically connected to creative writing workshop lore regardless of the genre being taught.

Since the turn of the century, the most substantial coverage of CNF teaching practices and the theoretical concerns underpinning those practices within university settings can be found either in one 2003 special issue of College English or in the pages of Pedagogy—publications that may not be on the radar or in the reading rotation of most university-situated creative writers. I will focus first on the College English special issue before briefly covering other key works from a composition studies perspective as that issue offers the most influential collection of writer-teacher-scholars from composition studies with a history of publishing (about) CNF: Douglas Hesse, Wendy Bishop, Robert L. Root, and Lynn Z. Bloom, among others. In the introductory article, Hesse, the guest editor, characterizes CNF as difficult to place both within English studies and elsewhere, using the example of the seemingly arbitrary call letters used by the Library of Congress to categorize various works of CNF. Some CNF books are deemed representative of a literary form belonging in the P section while others are shelved based on their content instead, thus aligning those works more with the social sciences. He then draws a parallel between the confounding effects of these categorizations and the divisive effects of CNF’s literariness within composition studies at a time marked by the embrace of social-constructionism (i.e., the 1990s, as I mentioned above), saying “[composition studies scholars’] arguments about the nature of civic discourse not only questioned the political work that creative nonfiction could do but also critiqued the authorial subjectivity constructed through those genres” (“The Place of Creative Nonfiction” 237-39). 

Despite this pronounced push away from the literary and subjective by a vocal majority within the discipline, CNF still managed to become “Suddenly Sexy” in composition studies around the turn of the twenty-first century, according to Bishop at least who characterizes it as such in her important article of that title in which she argues for greater cooperation between composition studies and creative writing. She believes that CNF has the potential to “improve our thinking about composition” (259) since composition does work in nonfiction genres—a point she illustrates by enacting CNF genre conventions (much like Corder does in “Hoping for Essays”) throughout her article about CNF. Quickly shifting her focus just to the personal essay, she opposes the idea of it being merely literary and, therefore, incapable of doing anything (which she explains is a common argument among literary theorists); this way of thinking arises, she says, “because the creative writer’s version of creative nonfiction is undertheorized, borrowing pedagogy from the fiction and poetry workshop, eschewing the taint of required composition pedagogy (and, therefore, unfortunately, the possibilities of rhetoric)” (272). Critiquing this “fissure” between composition and creative writing, she gives an example of two essay-based classes being taught concurrently at Florida State University, one in creative writing and one in composition studies, dismayed that graduate students had to choose between them: “my experiences suggest that English departments continue to divide and complicate the curriculum without undertaking necessary and possibly enriching discussions.” This division, she hypothesizes, may have something to do with the longstanding divide of the modes: exposition and argument go to composition and narrative and description go to creative writing (263). 

After lamenting the lack of craft/style talk in composition studies and the lack of emphasis on creative writing pedagogy in scholarly journals as well, Bishop continues in “Suddenly Sexy” to shed light on the absence of theoretical depth in CNF textbooks. (In my 2013 article “Voice, Transformed: The Potentialities of Style Pedagogy in the Teaching of Creative Nonfiction,” I, too, critique this continued lack of theoretical depth in CNF textbooks especially in terms of the dearth of sentence-level style instruction, and I offer an approach to teaching rhetorically theorized style as “craft” in the CNF classroom.) In response to these deficiencies, Bishop calls for “a pooling of knowledges, a comparison of terms, a development of strategies . . . in textbooks, in classrooms, in departments, across the writing area subsections of our broad discipline of English Studies” (267). She urges those in English studies to move away from elitist ideology that says if students aren’t producing high literature when they write essays, then they shouldn’t be writing essays—a democratic understanding of CNF commonly invoked from a composition studies perspective.[8] Bishop draws her significant critique of CNF’s position in the academy to a close with a call to action that creative writing studies scholars are poised to answer: “We need to get serious about creating new, fused pedagogies, ones that include rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and literature as partners in instruction” (273). 

College instructors who embrace fused pedagogies and/or have backgrounds in more than one discipline within English studies like Hesse, Bishop, Root, Bloom, and many others who teach and write CNF certainly eschew an extreme individualist art for art’s sake subject position when they teach, which is perhaps an inevitable effect of the both/and thinking required to make sense of the oftentimes disparate disciplinary ideologies of creative writing, composition studies, and/or literature. While Root does not discuss pedagogical practices at much length in “Naming Nonfiction (a Polyptych),” also from the College English special issue, he does speak from a both/and subject position making a claim that potentially places him as a critical expressivist in relation to his understanding of CNF (which he refers to as “literary nonfiction” here):
Students who write personal essays in composition class are writing literary nonfiction, particularly if they push their pieces away from the mere recording of personal experience or the mere expression of egocentrism into some territory that connects with readers. . . . But that same kind of passion and engagement is also found in the best transactional examples we give our students. . . . Students who write transactional essays in composition class are writing literary nonfiction, particularly if they push their pieces away from the mere recording of researched authority or the mere regurgitation of someone else’s understanding and information. (254, emphasis added)
This passage illustrates Root’s critical expressivist leanings because he acknowledges the transactional potential of personal writing and the poetic potential of transactional writing; regardless of the aims of the writing course within English studies, students can and do put the conventions of CNF to use. In fact, when Root explains part three of his four-part “nonfiction” definition in “Variations on a Theme of Putting Nonfiction in Its Place”—“the expressive, transactional, and poetic prose texts generated by students in college composition courses”—he points to James Britton and the London School Project’s explanation in 1975 of those functions of discourse as discussed in The Development of Writing Abilities (11–18).[9] “Expressive, transactional, poetic—these terms cover very nicely the range of writing students do in my courses,” Root says (290). 

A continued explanation of Root’s belief in the centrality of CNF comes into more focus in “Variations” when he claims that what is commonly referred to as “literary nonfiction” connects to each of the disciplines typically associated with English studies. He says that nonfiction in its broadest sense “is a significant part of literature in every region and period; a lively and vital form of creative writing; a rich source of language study; an essential element of English education . . . [and nonfiction] is what composition is when it’s at home and also when it wants to get dressed and go out into the world” (293). The problem from a pedagogical perspective in both articles is that Root provides only brief anecdotal examples of courses he has taught to illustrate CNF as central to both student writing and to the overall curricula within English departments, as his concern is more about what CNF is than how it is taught. We still do not get a clear answer to the question of how myriad CNF teachers teach CNF, which is somewhat necessary in order for his claim to stick.[10]  

While the deftly written critical-autobiographical prose in Bloom’s 2003 College English article sticks to ethical concerns regarding the “true” telling of factual stories and family secrets—an important and relatively well-theorized topic related to the relationship between CNF writers and readers that has gotten the lion’s share of coverage in recent discourse surrounding CNF [11]—she does attend directly to pedagogical concerns in her 1991 “Creative Nonfiction—Is There Any Other Kind?” There she advocates for the teaching of CNF in/as advanced composition: [12]
Although the techniques of creative nonfiction are not off-limits to beginning writers, advanced composition courses are better suited to the development of more sophisticated writing, which involves setting scenes, presenting carefully contrived and perhaps diverse authorial personae and voices, experimenting with alternative and sometimes dramatic organizational structures, creating or recreating characters and scenes, and employing dialogue and figurative language. (97)
She then goes on to explain the aims, procedures, and subject matter for her upper-division undergraduate and graduate CNF-centric courses. She wants each of her students “to write very well, in a diversity of nonfiction modes, for a real audience (or audiences) of the student’s choosing, and to attain clarity, grace, and an individual style in the process; to develop some measure of ease and efficiency in their writing process(es); and to publish” (97). In order to meet these personal, transactional goals, she asks her students to be risk takers “willing to experiment with subject, form, and style” and write about people, places, science, controversy, etc., for audiences outside of the immediate one provided in the classroom—a practice she describes as “the best incentive I know for encouraging students to use the techniques of creative nonfiction” (98).  Notice that for Bloom (as for Hesse, Bishop, and Root) being personal has nothing to do with engaging in solipsism; in fact, she goes as far as to insinuate that ethos in CNF is both socially and personally constructed, as she uses the phrase “carefully contrived . . . personae” to describe the way a writer chooses to present herself in a given text for a given rhetorical effect. 

The 2004 CNF special section of “From the Classroom” in Pedagogy, where Root’s “Variations” was published and where Bloom also appears again offering an approach to teaching stylistic compression, brings together a collection of (occasionally theory-grounded but rarely theory-articulated) CNF pedagogical practices. One of the bigger problems tackled in those pages is that of promoting resistance to the push toward “juicy” confessional subject matter in the CNF classroom, a problem fueled by the publication of popular, controversial works like Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary around the turn of the twenty-first century. Jenny Spinner, another composition studies/creative writing scholar, covers the topic of giving CNF students the freedom to write about what may seem like trivial subject matter in “When ‘Macaroni and Cheese Is Good’ Enough: Revelation in Creative Nonfiction.” There she makes an argument for teaching CNF as rhetorically situated discourse, saying that “[o]ur goal as creative nonfiction instructors is to offer our students various tools for digging and to help them translate their discoveries for their readers. What we seek is not so much the profound or the packaged as the genuine (and genuinely appealing)” (316, emphasis added). 

Finally, in Rochelle Harris’s theory-rich and often-cited Pedagogy article (also from 2004 but from a different issue than the one covered above) titled “Encouraging Emergent Moments: The Personal, Critical, and Rhetorical in the Writing Classroom,” she explains the goals of CNF in terms of how writing in the genre can empower students through “a reflexive understanding of the self, the word, and the world” (408). She then goes on in her article to illustrate how composing CNF can give students the opportunity to “become active participants in critiquing and transforming unjust social institutions . . . at the intersections of the personal-critical- rhetorical” (402). Harris refers to such intersections when they occur within student CNF texts as “emergent moments” where “the student can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and reflexively” (403). In elaborating upon the vast potential these emergent moments, she adds a much-needed element to the CNF pedagogical conversation through her discussion of how these student-produced works of CNF can function:
Students’ texts can be heteroglossic counternarratives to combat hegemony; they can be ways to develop students’ critical consciousness, tools for the study of language, articulations of self and situatedness, and attempts at naming and transforming the world. The uses and purposes of student texts are more critical—more apt to be empowering and lead to genuine social critique and action—when they emerge from (personal) writing on topics students choose to pursue. (416)
This critical expressivist articulation empowers CNF writer-teachers with greater agency as well, as Harris provides the language to articulate the genre as a public practice that pushes back against accusations of CNF being little more than merely self-indulgent group therapy sanctioned by university English departments in order to recruit more students to the major. As recently as the spring 2015 issue of Assay, Jessica McCaughey writes of how she uses Harris’s emergent moment theory as a lens through which to analyze the results of the narrative writing assignment in her CNF-themed first-year writing course. McCaughey illustrates how this theory provides language and a framework not only for articulating the outcomes of a CNF course but also, more generally, for understanding how student writing can function at the critical expressivist intersection of personal and cultural narrative. 

A characteristic of the discourse that holds each of these composition studies situated pedagogical writers together—which remains true in McCaughey’s article as well as Robert Brooke’s “Teaching ‘Rhetoric: The Essay’” published in Assay’s first issue—is that they each tend to explain the writing of CNF as a rhetorically situated practice and tend to argue for the teaching of CNF in ways that connect the genre’s functions and conventions with the goals of composition studies. This means that they claim to discuss with their students what it means to write for “real” audiences, both in and beyond the classroom, and give their students a sense of what it means to write for such audiences. The idea of writing as a transaction between reader and writer is present in the published texts explored here insofar as these scholars mention the concept, but none except Root and Harris focus on that idea as what makes CNF different from dominant conceptions of other genres under creative writing’s purview. The importance of the fact that each of the writer-scholars covered in this section relies on the wealth of pre-existing scholarship in composition studies and rhetorical theory cannot be understated. Interestingly, the need for CNF students to understand the threshold concept of rhetorical situation is every bit as prevalent in the small handful of CNF pedagogical texts written by those coming from a creative writing rather than a composition studies standpoint. Those writing from a creative writing disciplinary positionality tend not to rely on previously published scholarship or use standard rhetorical terminology as often to discuss those emphases in their pedagogical approaches. Instead, they tend to rely on practitioner knowledge alone.

Teaching CNF Without Reliance on Composition Studies Theories and Principles 

When the rhetorical situations (i.e. potential audiences, issues, contexts, and purposes) of student writing in a CNF course are not defined or analyzed, this can create problems for writers who then are made to believe that pleasing an instructor to get a good grade is the primary goal of a writing act. Focusing on a similar “juicy subject” problem to Spinner’s mentioned in the previous section, Mary Pope, who teaches CNF from a creative writing disciplinary positionality, shares a narrative of the consequences of disregarding everyday material practices in “The Teacher as Hostess: Celebrating the Ordinary in Creative Nonfiction Workshops,” published in 2005. When workshopping in-progress pieces in an MFA-level CNF course, she recalls her professor often asking “where is the sexual tension?,” something absent from Pope’s essays about place and her experiences working in a bakery in a small town. The only published works they studied and discussed in class were memoirs of “sex, cancer, and depression,” and she was made to feel bad by her professor and classmates for writing about such a mundane topic (105). When she became a CNF teacher herself, she realized that “[p]roviding a class with a reading list that is rich in examples of writing about ordinary experiences gives students confidence in their own subject-rich lives and respect for the subject-rich lives of their fellow students” (106). Here we get an actual sense of a material experience via a description of how a writer teaches CNF writing, and we are asked to see the importance of topical diversity when choosing readings for a full semester CNF course. Ultimately Pope puts most of the blame for the ineffective MFA experience in her past on her teacher who did not celebrate the ordinary or see past what was fashionable in CNF at the time. That party failed, Pope argues, because the hostess failed. I would add, though, that the party also failed because there was not a system in place to educate the hostess on effective pedagogical practices, so that Pope’s former teacher did not look beyond what she personally liked in CNF writing. [13] 

Phillip Lopate is one of only two major figures in CNF that I can find (the other being Lee Gutkind) who have published—albeit a limited amount—on pedagogy from a standpoint that does not include any background in or research from composition studies. This is understandable, as I noted earlier, based on the promotion and tenure requirements for creative writers in the university as well as the relative lack of pedagogical training that creative writers typically receive prior to teaching their first creative writing class. Lopate’s specialty is the personal essay from a literary standpoint; his most famous work in addition to his numerous stellar personal essays is arguably the popular edited collection The Art of the Personal Essay, and in its introduction he breaks down the dominant characteristics regarding an essay’s possible authorial stances, tones, forms, topics, development, narrative and reflection strategies, and writerly tools. In “The Essay: Exploration or Argument”—the same piece I mentioned earlier in which he makes a call for a greater rhetorical understanding of CNF strategies—he confesses that an English department colleague of his once called this introduction “‘charming,’ which [he] took to mean insufficiently theorized and dilettantish” (59). Yet even without drawing on theory, per se, in “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” Lopate reflects with much insight on the possible reasons why his students make the ineffective rhetorical choice to be “resistant to the activity of retrospective thinking on the page” when writing memoir, despite his persistent calls for them to include “those moments where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience” (26). I say “ineffective rhetorical choice” because Lopate connects the reflective, retrospective moves in question to ethos and transactional rhetoric when he says, “The quality of the thinking, the depth of insight, and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as one is humanly capable of arriving at—these are the guarantees to the reader that a particular author’s sensibility is trustworthy and simpatico.” He also admits to being “deeply attracted” to such passages, calling them “the dessert, the reward of the prose” (26-27), an explanation that could be tied the rhetorical concept of identification.[14] When students complain that reflecting will clog up their narratives, he counters with the argument that reflection offers an “ongoing dialectic between their prior and present intelligences” (28, emphasis added). When they claim they want their writing to be vague so as to not “give away the mystery,” he counters saying it is “more important for the reader to develop trust in a worldly, confiding, forcefully elegant narrative voice from the start” (30), an explanation that could be tied to the rhetorical concept of ethos (or, even more specifically, Corder’s theory of generative ethos, which he defines as a narrative voice that that “issues an invitation into a commodious universe” (“Varieties of Ethical Argument” 94)). When students reason that retrospective reflection takes “away from a piece’s ‘vulnerability,’” Lopate counters with his “conviction that emotion and thinking are not mutually exclusive but can coexist: passionately argued thought can have affective warmth, just as feelings can be thoughtfully and delicately parsed” (35), ideas which again could be connected to various aspects of rhetorical theory. I’d argue that one does not necessarily need the language of rhetorical theory when one can convey the functions and rationales for certain discursive moves as eloquently and specifically as Lopate does. But it certainly can help to know how discussions of these moves fit into larger ongoing scholarly conversations connected to theories of rhetoric and writing.

Gutkind, who, similar to Lopate, makes a rhetorically-charged call for those who write CNF to “be aware of their responsibilities as writers and the scope of their potential influence and power to communicate ideas, germinate wisdom, and create change” in his 2009 interview published in The Writer’s Chronicle (Morgan), also shares a narrative of his teaching, though perhaps not with the same level of retrospective reflection as Lopate. In “The ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Creative Nonfiction, But Were Too Naïve or Uninformed to Ask’ Workshop Simulation,” Gutkind informs readers of what he teaches his students about CNF craft elements/genre characteristics via a lighthearted narrative illustrating conversations that might take place on the first day of one of his workshops. Here’s an excerpt from that text covering most of his main ideas:
“OK?” I ask. “Does everybody understand? The building blocks are scenes. The scenes aren’t scenes unless they have a beginning and an end. Something has to happen. Information—the reporting—is embedded in the scenes and between the scenes. That’s the rhythm and that’s the dance, whether it is an essay or book chapter or even the entire book. OK?” I repeat. 

“Yes,” they say. 

“Are you ready to go home?” I ask, even louder. 

“Yes,” they yell. 

“No,” I tell them. “You haven’t learned the ‘F’ words. Creative nonfiction won’t work until you can use the ‘F’ words.” (179)
The “F” words in question here are “framing”—“organising by time and shape” and “focus”— “organising by meaning and content.”  He ends this short work that provides little in terms of pragmatic strategies for the teaching of CNF making the claim that “when you put it all together . . . [y]ou get creative nonfiction: story and information, style and substance, frame and focus. That’s all there is to it” (180). This comes from the one of only two representative chapters on CNF in The Handbook of Creative Writing (the other covering the conventions of memoir), which is unfortunate (1) because he refers to what he’s doing as a “workshop simulation,” which reduces the concept of a CNF workshop to one where the teacher recites rudiments and the students accept them without question (which might be fun to read but is actually hard to believe), and (2) because would-be CNF teachers and writers are left with little but a to-do list of these genre conventions to share and use but no illustrations of how to share or use them beyond what Gutkind himself does throughout the piece—a move that reinforces his argument of “That’s all there is to it.” Make the moves, create art, and attract readers with prose that “captures [readers’] attention and engages their imagination” (174). Easy as pie, right? [15] 

I do not mean to snub Gutkind here; Hesse warns not to do that when he calls uncooperative acts of cross-disciplinary finger pointing “debilitating” (“Who Owns Creative Nonfiction?” 264), and that is not my intention. Gutkind has done so much to popularize CNF both within and beyond the academy. Yet such problematic oversimplified formulas for CNF success appear in many of the craft writings available to students and teachers alike, especially those included in many popular CNF textbooks, as I cover in “Voice, Transformed.” This, I think, is related in part to the problem that Lopate describes about creative writing-situated CNF writer-teachers “flying by the seat of our pants, in almost complete ignorance of oratorical and rhetorical terminology” (“The Essay” 59) and that Bishop connects to an under-theorization of the genre and the tendency for creative writers to disregard composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory. It’s not as if established CNF writers trained in creative writing classes are poor writers of description. It’s not as if they do not know how to thoroughly research any topic of their choosing and write about it in an interesting way that is accessible to a general readership. It’s not as if they don’t love language and strive to be better practitioners of the written word. Yet there does seem to be a disconnect between creative writing-situated CNF writer-teachers and the study of how to specifically articulate and demystify the ways they and others use language (i.e., rhetoric via stylistics).  And there does seem to be a disconnect between that particular group and the understanding of how to contextualize student writing outside of the teacher’s personal taste and subject matter (i.e., rhetorical situation). Even when we bring composition studies scholars back into the mix, the sum total of what had been published on these pedagogical issues ultimately provides too small a sample and, therefore, an unclear picture of how CNF instructors actually teach their classes now in the second decade of the twenty-first century—what they emphasize with their students and what outcomes they expect of their students. And those rare published works mostly from a decade ago do not represent the voices of the newest generation of CNF instructors and researchers.[16]

Moving Forward

In “Who Owns Creative Nonfiction?,” after Hesse expresses his desire for the owner of CNF not be selfish, he problematizes the ownership issue, trying to get to the root of why CNF does not play a bigger role in composition. One reason, he surmises, is that composition privileges academic genres over public genres. Another reason could be that composition does not foreground the subject position of writers as students; instead students are viewed as writers only when in the classroom. Hesse posits that one way to broaden the scope of composition studies and make the discipline more relevant to students would be to teach “writing as craft, as the making of textual artifacts whose maker is important as maker,” and he suggests that “articulating a relationship between creative nonfiction and composition studies would help to inscribe that subject position, not as an exclusive one but certainly as a vital one” (263). In contrast, Paul Dawson writes in Creative Writing and the New Humanities of the need for the creative writing discipline to move toward what he calls a “sociological poetics,” meaning “a poetics which encourages a view of literature [production] as a public intellectual practice, rather than a means for the empowerment of individual identities and subjectivities” (204).[17] He wants creative writers to view language as a tool for action with “the ultimate aim of effecting social change, or at least an alteration of public opinion, beyond the refinement of disciplinary knowledge” (201). Essentially, Hesse urges compositionists to look to CNF for greater awareness of how to teach students to construct powerful texts and be writers who write for the sake of writing, while Dawson urges creative writers to develop greater awareness of the rhetorical situations they enter when they write (although he explains this in terms of literary criticism and not rhetoric, per se). Hesse wants those in composition studies to move closer toward the individualist subject position (i.e., writer as writer), and Dawson wants those in creative writing to move away from it (i.e., writer as public intellectual). 

I believe these two views of the twenty-first century writer in particular can and already do converge in the critical expressivist writing space first defined by Gradin and furthered in various ways by scholars who have connected the personal to the critical and rhetorical functions and attributes of CNF writing over the last two decades, most recently in Assay and in Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto’s 2015 Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice for the Composition Classroom.[18] Yes, most CNF pedagogical scholarship has been about how to bring CNF into the composition classroom, and, therefore, the lens through which most CNF pedagogy has been described and analyzed has been a rhetorical one by default. Even though there are many aspects of the teaching of CNF specific to creative writing, I argue that this trend of reliance on relevant aspects of composition theory and rhetorical theory is one that should continue as we work to locate and articulate fused pedagogies and best teaching practices. There is no need for CNF pedagogical scholarship to start anew when composition studies offers such a strong historical and epistemological foundation from which to build contemporary CNF writing praxes. CNF writing as an area of academic study has benefitted from and, in fact, has been shaped by these scholars whose largely critical expressivist pedagogical approaches I have brought together in this article.

A publication space now exists for conversations that place nonfiction first—not privileging nonfiction as part of creative writing, literary studies, or composition studies but showcasing CNF as a genre that gets taught in different places in different ways with people of different disciplinary backgrounds in different institutional spaces.  So, in light of this, what CNF pedagogical scholarship is needed? More than anything else we need diverse voices from within diverse writing programs (and across diverse cultural backgrounds) about the teaching of CNF at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We need qualitative research conducted in CNF classes to study the rhetorical practices of CNF teaching and writing communities, research that works to better understand the impetus behind and student-learning effects of certain teaching methods, invention/craft activities, assignment types, and workshop approaches. We need to understand how to best assess what can at times be intensely personal writing. As more MFA and PhD programs require creative writing pedagogy courses, we need to understand how to best train graduate students to teach CNF specifically, which means figuring out how to articulate the similarities and differences among the teaching of poetry, fiction, academic discourse, CNF, and other commonly taught genres across English studies. The recent surge in creative writing studies scholarship signals an opportune moment for those deeply invested in the past, present, and future of CNF—regardless of disciplinary affiliation—to frame our goals for its teaching, study, and practice. This is indeed an exciting time to be working in and with the limitless potential of this expansive genre.

End Notes

(1) When I make this statement, I do not count, for example, any publications that cover only the teaching of the personal essay within a composition studies context or memoir within a creative writing context because I am interested in how teachers explore the vastness of the CNF genre with their students for the purposes of this article. 

(2) Check the Association of Writers and Writing Programs “Guide to Writing Programs” database for exact numbers of MA, MFA, and PhD programs with CNF emphasis at any given time.

(3) See Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice’s edited collection Can It Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy for commentary on the effects of this lack of pedagogical theorization across the entire discipline of creative writing. See Suzanne Cope’s 2012 adult education dissertation “Teaching Creative Nonfiction: Influences, Pedagogy, and Attitudes of Teachers of Adults” for evidence regarding how this lack of pedagogical theorization effects CNF writing teachers specifically. 

(4)  While only Literary Nonfiction broadly covers CNF writing and teaching practices, a handful of books published between the mid-1980s and the present work toward historicizing and theorizing aspects of CNF as a literary genre. See Chris Anderson’s Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, John C. Hartsock’s A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form, Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century, Mark Tredinnick’s The Land’s Wild Music, Ross W. Winterowd’s The Rhetoric of the “Other” Literature, and Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History, among other books and numerous articles not mentioned here. Another less scholarly but still quite legitimate place to find CNF literary theorization is in the introductory chapters written by the editors of The Best American Essays anthology each year.  

(5)  See Peter Elbow’s “‘Personal Writing’ and ‘Expressivism’ as Problematic Terms” and Maja Wilson’s “John Watson Is to Introspectionism as James Berlin Is to Expressivism (And Other Analogies You Won't Find on the SAT)” for historical background and commentary on the long-term effects of social-constructionism on the teaching of personal writing in composition studies. 

(6)  See Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto’s 2015 Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice for the Composition Classroom.

(7)   I am currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Teaching Creative Nonfiction Writing to Undergraduates: A Critical Expressivist Enterprise in which I hope to share more about this.

(8)  See Cristina Kirklighter’s Traversing the Democratic Borders of the Essay and Paul Heilker’s The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form. 


(9)  From their data set of writing composed by eleven to eighteen-year-olds, Britton and the New London School developed a continuum of student writer subject positions that has at one end the “participant” role of writer who produces transactional writing—that is, “[l]anguage to get things done . . . concerned with an end outside itself. It informs, persuades, and instructs”; the “spectator” role of writer at the other end representing one who produces poetic writing—that is, “[a] verbal construct, patterned verbalization of the writer’s feelings and ideas . . .  [and] would include . . . a shaped autobiographical episode”; and the “expressive” mode located between the two primary roles, which is “[l]anguage close to the self, revealing the speaker, verbalizing his consciousness, displaying his close relationship to the reader” (227).

(10)  For perhaps the best, most comprehensive CNF craft book on the market—informed by Root’s CNF pedagogical practices described here—see The Nonfictionist’s Guide. This is my go-to craft book to assign when I teach CNF workshops.

(11)   Since 2008 some noteworthy examples of works that engage the truth in nonfiction discussion include David Shields’ Reality Hunger, John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact (and the numerous published responses to that work), and David Lazar’s edited collection Truth in Nonfiction: Essays. While ever an important issue in CNF circles, conversation and publication about the topic surged in response to Lauren Slater’s “metaphorical memoir” Lying and in response to James Frey’s flagrant lying about details of his life in A Million Little Pieces. The importance here is that the conversations do tend to focus on responsibility to readers, a topic that does not appear as often in discussions of fiction or poetry—highlighting the importance of rhetorical situation in relation to the writing and teaching of CNF.

(12)   This piece was published prior to the proliferation of creative writing situated CNF courses and programs in the mid 1990s. Despite this fact, CNF is still being taught in advanced composition and in a variety of upper-division courses taught as part of Writing and Rhetoric undergraduate majors across the United States, with Syracuse University and the University of Colorado, Denver, having noteworthy composition studies-situated teaching of CNF. For a more recent discussion of CNF as an upper-division composition course, see Celest Martin’s “Not Just Another Pretty Classroom Genre: The Uses of Creative Nonfiction in the Writing Major” in which she makes the argument that the craft skills acquired in a CNF course (1) build awareness of rhetorical choices, (2) can be applied to literary and nonliterary types of writing, (3) teach students coming from other specialized fields to write accessible prose for nonspecialists, and (4) prepare students for jobs as freelance magazine writers. She shares a critical expressivist explanation of the genre’s potential as well, saying “[w]hat creative nonfiction offers students is a way to craft the personal if they choose to make the personal public, a way to reach the universal” (231). 

(13)   See Kelly Ritter’s “Professional Writers/Writing Professionals: Revamping Teacher Training in Creative Writing Ph. D. Programs” for more information on this issue.

(14)   See Brooke L. Quigley’s “‘Identification’ as a Key Term in Kenneth Burke's Rhetorical Theory” for a brief explanation of this concept. 

(15)   In Gutkind’s defense, he does go into more detail about these six CNF genre conventions (as well as many other characteristics that he does not cover in this short piece) in his CNF guidebook, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. He does not, however, say much else about CNF pedagogy there or elsewhere. 

(16)  A number of dissertations written since 2000 deal with the subject of CNF pedagogy to varying degrees (see Bourelle; Cope; Degen; Ellis; Fodrey; Goldthwaite; Grayson; Harris; Sharp).

(17)   While Dawson does take into account the teaching of creative writing in America, it is important to note that he writes from an Australian higher education perspective and is, therefore, responding to a markedly different pedagogical context. Additionally, Dawson does not cover the teaching of CNF as a creative writing genre taught in Australia nor does he engage directly with American scholars like Hesse in the book, but this does not make the concept of “sociological poetics” any less compelling to the teaching of CNF.

(18)   With chapters on the teaching of memoir and personal essay as genres that have the potential to help students connect personal experiences with bigger social, cultural, historical, political, environmental, etc. concerns, I argue that Critical Expressivism (which advances arguments made in Romancing Rhetorics) is certainly relevant to CNF teachers even if the book is written for an audience of composition studies teachers and the term “creative nonfiction” is only mentioned three times in 316 pages. Other tangentially relevant texts: Barbara Kamler’s 2001 Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy and Danita Berg and Lori May’s 2015 edited collection Creative Composition: Inspiration and Techniques for Writing Instruction.


Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

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Crystal N. Fodrey is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where she teaches courses in rhetorical theory, digital writing, professional writing, stylistics, first-year writing, environmental literature, and creative nonfiction. Her scholarship on writing pedagogy has appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and in the edited collection The Centrality of Style. 




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        • 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)
      • 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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