ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 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)
  • 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)
      • 1.2 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)
        • Bruce 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)
        • Anthony 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)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
5.1

Picture

Jen Soriano

​
Multiplicity from the Margins:
The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form



                                                                             What do you use shoes for?
My mouth clamps shut.
                                                                                                                                                           Hands wringing in lap.
     Willing-my-legs-to-not-swing.

I sit in the principal’s office, a dim but cozy place with soft chairs, and stare at him in silence. He stares back at me with expectation. His black-brown beard with stray grey hairs. His kindly wrinkled eyes. Silence like a third person between us. I am afraid that if I speak, one orphaned answer will spring from my mouth and all by itself that one answer will have to be wrong.

    Because there are so many answers.
                                                                         What do you use shoes for?
    for rain
    for color
    to keep from stubbing my toe
                                               to scrape on the ground to stop my bike with its broken brakes
to keep from getting that worm Mom says gets under your skin in bare feet
                                                                                                         to dress up like my mom when she wears

    heels
                                                           to show I’m a girl
                                                                    and have my own shoes
                                                                                                                   (even when I have to wear
                                                                                             my brother’s hand-me-down clothes)
                                                                             to show that I’m a tomboy on days
                                                                                                                                                     I don’t feel like being a girl
                                                                                  to show that we are lucky enough to buy nice shoes

but I’m ashamed of this too,
                                                                        because we live in America     
  
​       (not like some relatives in the Philippines.)



Surely this would be too much to say
                                                              ​                                   too much space to take up
     in such a small dim room, with the once-smiling principal looking at me now in confusion.


Not an Introduction but a Crossroads

Faced with the question “what do you use shoes for?” my five-year-old self wrestled with many answers. The struggle was not among the answers themselves, but between them and the external expectation of a single answer. What did the principal want me to say? Should I have answered as a girl? A tomboy? A youngest child? A daughter of striver-class immigrants? Or just as someone who didn’t want to get her feet wet? What if I said all of my answers, and the principal rejected me as dim-witted and indecisive?

This clash of internal multiplicity and external expectations of a single truth yielded one definitive result: my silence.

For too many writers, conventional expectations—and how they are institutionalized—can cause similar silences in life and on the page. Readers might expect a writer to identify as one thing: a person of color, a woman, a trans person or a domestic worker, for example. Editors might expect a work to be clearly “about” one thing with a disciplined point of view, a clear narrative arc, an opening, exposition, and authoritative conclusion. Publishers might expect an author to write in one distinct genre. These singular expectations may be useful and comfortable for those interested in maintaining the status quo. But for those of us in the margins of rule-making, singular expectations—and the way they are institutionalized—can perpetuate long histories of silencing and erasure.   

I have written like this before: just in the form of conventional nonfiction; just as an Asian person; just as a woman; just as a disembodied objective white-sounding voice. With clarity and a takeaway message. This work of mine has been praised; yet this work has often left me empty; it has left me, to echo Audre Lorde, feeling mute as a bottle and no less afraid. And then I began to study literary nonfiction by authors from long-silenced communities, work by authors like Kazim Ali, Lily Hoang, Lauret Savoy, Robin Kimmerer and Bhanu Kapil. All of these writers resist oppressive forces of silencing and erasure to write what they feel must be told. And what must be told is complicated and uncomfortable and full of fragments, layers and gaps. This multiplicity of what must be told necessitates a distinct type of form; I call it “intersectional form.”

Intersectional form is characterized by writing in which authors write their intersectional identities, experiences and perspectives onto the page. What results is writing that breaks away from the confines of traditional narrative arc and instead moves through fragments and strands and strips, conveying multiple viewpoints to reject homogenous truth in favor of a more complex reality. In doing so, intersectional form necessitates the use of multiple genres such that the lines between nonfiction, fiction and poetry become blurred. Ultimately, by bucking expectations of singular topic, narrative arc, and conclusive truth, intersectional form resists convention not just for the sake of experimentation, but for the sake of conveying and even modeling new ways of being in the world.

This paper analyzes the intersectional form of three book-length essays or collections of essays by authors from marginalized communities:  Lauret Savoy’s Trace, Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon, and Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary. Each of these authors wrestles against silencing to tell what they feel must be told. Lauret Savoy examines the buried histories of her Native American and Black ancestors to trace the ways in which Indian removal, mining and slavery irrevocably shaped the American landscape. Kazim Ali rejects his right to remain silent and instead tells of moving through a world that brands him a criminal, as a queer brown Muslim man choosing to embrace both faith and love. Lily Hoang shatters the cone of silence imposed by the model minority myth to write about the pain, privileges and imperfections of her Vietnamese refugee family racing for survival and belonging in America. Each of these works dismantles once-dominant truths of Manifest Destiny, model minorities, the American Dream, and the purity of religion and sexuality through the content and craft of intersectional form. In naming and examining intersectional form in literary non-fiction, I draw heavily from the Black feminist scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, whose work defined and expanded the concept of intersectionality. I also draw from the literary non-fiction of social theorists from marginalized communities, including W.E.B DuBois, Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldúa and their critical work on double-consciousness, hybridity and la facultad.

Because intersectional form seeks to expand what currently “is,” it is not a break with conventional creative nonfiction, but an evolution of genre. If creative nonfiction is about the transformation of raw reality into literary art (Singer and Walker 2) then intersectional form allows for the transformation of multi-faceted realities into literary art. If essays are a simulation of “the mind working its way through a problem” (Monson), then intersectional form allows for a more authentic simulation of the workings of marginalized minds wrestling with power and “gifted” with the multiple perspectives of the margins (DuBois).

​This wrestling with power is arguably more important now than ever. At a time of rising authoritarianism when political leaders are legislating oppression and coercing dissenters into silence, writers face a crossroads between compliance and resistance. Intersectional form allows for literary resistance that is not just about breaking silence and confronting lies, but about telling truths on one’s own terms and modeling a shift in the balance of power. Intersectional form allows for a strategic engagement with power not by directly locking horns in an arena of authoritative truth and false binaries (the realm of facts vs. alternative facts), but by writing from a third space where there is room for the intersections of contradictory truths, spectrums of identities, clashing and reinforcing values, and interdependent subjects and genres. This space created by intersectional form is not only reactive to oppression, it is also generative of new worldviews, and therein lies the most powerful aspect of intersectional form’s potential for resistance. Instead of positing new singular truths to replace dominant truths, authors writing in intersectional form use the multiple perspectives afforded by marginal identities and vantage points to refract light onto subjects as foundational and varied as race, gender, family, religion, sexual identity and American nationalism.  The result is resistance to stereotypes and dominant narratives that have passed as singular truths, and to the policing of boundaries among identities, competing perspectives, and literary genres. Ultimately we see that the generative power of intersectional form can model a de-centering of dominance, and offer more expansive—and therefore more just—visions of who gets to speak, take up space, and shape the visions and values that govern our world.


Multiple “I”s: Intersectional Identities

Intersectional form begins with the explicit (and often lyric) expression of multiple identities of marginalized authors on the page. As has been explored by writers and scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Gloria Anzaldúa, people from communities that are marginalized by race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation often live in co-existence with many parts of ourselves, including a consciousness of how those with more decision-making power see us. These multiple identities yield conflicting perspectives of ourselves, but they also yield a sort of gift of “double-consciousness,” or “second-sight” (DuBois 2, 3)  and “borderland consciousness” or facultad (Anzaldúa 77, 90) that allows for multiple, expansive perspectives on the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is credited with coining the term intersectionality, writes about the intersection of multiple “categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw 1242). She highlights the ways that racism and sexism “readily intersect in the lives of real people” and specifically in the lives of Black women. This intersectionality affirms that race and gender, as well as class and sexuality, are not mutually exclusive but co-existing, and that experience—and as I argue, writing—must be analyzed at the crossroads where these categories overlap. As Crenshaw writes, to “expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition [is to] relegate the identity of woman of color to a location that resists telling” (1242). Savoy, Ali and Hoang are committed to telling. And so in the face of a dominant society that is largely non-intersectional and silencing, these authors create a new location that allows for such telling. They begin to do so by writing their intersectional identities onto the page.

In her essay collection Trace, Lauret Savoy writes of herself as a descendant of “free and enslaved Africans” as well as “people indigenous to this land” (Savoy 29). But she also writes of her privileged identities, sharing that she is the descendant of “colonists from Europe” and a professional geologist implicated in histories of oppression (64). By laying out these multiple “I”s Savoy also acknowledges that her identities operate on different planes. Intersectional form creates the space to acknowledge differentials in power in privilege, what Patricia Hill Collins describes as the “conceptual space needed for each individual to see that she or he is both a member of multiple dominant groups and a member of multiple subordinate groups” (Collins 234). As an academic geologist, Savoy has the privilege to apply her skills to understanding the storying of place, and to the storying of herself (68). As the descendant of slaves and Native Americans, she also writes from the marginalized place of trying to see what others with more power have buried: “Many of my own ancestors, my mother’s people, lie in forgotten plantation graves; their lives forgotten, too” (94). Savoy also writes that as a geologist, she is implicated in the mining interests that led to the displacement of her own Native ancestors. In this instance Savoy accepts the hybrid identity of both the oppressor and oppressed, as viewed through eyes trained to view the world in geologic time.
​

Savoy does not seek to resolve these tensions among her identities, and instead likens them to the many layers of intersecting history that lie beneath the surface of the American landscape. Kazim Ali similarly explores multiple identities in Bright Felon, through the metaphor of layered cities. Ali writes that he is a “Muslim” and “an only son,” who is also a poet, a wanderer and a lover of men (Ali 96). Ali not only writes these identities into his work, he unflinchingly explores the tensions among them. And like Savoy, he ultimately refuses to choose between them, even when they are in direct conflict with each other:
You are the only son of your father.
…
Who knows what Hell is.
…
The conflagration in the heart of a son who disappoints his parents.
Scripture or rupture you will never know. (19)
Instead of choosing, Ali resists binaries and embraces the volatility and agency of a hybridity of “I”s: “Neither Isaac nor Ismail, I am the third son, the wolf-tongued son. / So sure of G-D he is willing to walk through the door to the fire” (85). As hybridity theorist Homi Bhabha writes, this third space allows for “liminal and ambivalent positions and in-between forms of identification that may be asymmetrical, disjunctive, and contradictory” (Bhabha 5). By affirming his multiple though dissonant identities, Ali subverts stereotypes of Muslims as patriarchal and heteronormative, and also subverts assumptions about queer men as secular or at least not especially religious.  It could also be said that he resists expectations of only sons of immigrant parents by embracing his identities as wanderer and poet. This multiplicity of identities goes far beyond creating a complex personae on the page (Olding). Rather, by taking up space with its multiplicity, this intersectional personae undermines stereotypes that have served as “universal truths” that restrain marginalized communities both on the page and in society at large.
​

Lily Hoang creates this third space of intersectionality to resist the model minority myth and embrace the many parts of herself that are characterized by imperfection. Hoang writes as a Vietnamese-American immigrant and a refugee, who on the one hand is subjugated to white supremacy, but who on the other hand is privileged compared to the refugees who did not survive, and to other people of color and immigrants in America. She writes as a flawed daughter, failed lover and struggling aunt facing oppressive conditions, and also as a privileged and successful writer and professor. In doing so, she models Patricia Hill Collin’s expansion of intersectionality not just as a personal experience of multiple oppressions, but also a societal positioning of relative power and privileges:
Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. In this system, for example, white women are penalized by their gender but privileged by their race. Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. (Collins 222)
By embracing her multiple identities of relative power and privilege, Hoang complicates the model minority myth and allows herself to become whole through fragments on the page. She shows her own double-consciousness by imagining other identities that would be more acceptable to her refugee parents: “Other Lily doesn’t fail at marriage, and her husband is Vietnamese. He respects her, too” (32) and by embracing the power and privilege she does enjoy despite her minority identities: “In the classroom, I project confidence and strength. People tell me I intimidate them. This is my favorite Lily to wear” (106). Hoang tells all of these identities to give a larger sense of her layered and imperfect self, which resists the myth of the model minority and dominant expectations of Asian assimilation and Asian women’s perfection.

​Savoy, Ali, and Hoang allow their multiple identities to co-exist like strands, layers, and fragments on the page, going beyond what Patricia Collins has described as “the either/or dichotomous thinking of Eurocentric, masculinist thought” (222). The result is that marginalized writers can render themselves more fully human than normally allowed by dominant culture (think of the alternative of Margaret Cho’s character in the 1980s sitcom “All American Girl,” which was about a Korean American family but had no Korean American writers). In the process, they undermine stereotypes meant to box-in marginalized groups and lay the foundation for a third space with room for hybridity, multiple perspectives and expansive truths.


Multiple Eyes: Prismatic Perspectives

While Savoy, Ali and Hoang express multiple identities in their work, the subjects of their essays go far beyond narrow explorations of identity and self-discovery. In fact, identity appears less as a subject in their books and more as a prism through which to look at many different subjects in one work. In this way, intersectional form supports a kaleidoscope of topics as seen from the manifold perspectives of marginalized experiences.

In their craft essay “Ill-Fit the World,” T Clutch Fleischmann writes that a critical departure from conventional essays involves resistance against one “sovereign” and “authoritative” truth as offered through the lens of a singular “I” (Fleischmann 44). Fleischmann offers up Montaigne as an example of a traditional essayist and quotes Samuel Delaney’s description of Montaigne’s essays as “meditations in which the sovereign self is the authoritative ground for analytical inquiry” (44). Savoy, Ali and Hoang’s essays, in contrast, fit with Fleischmann’s description of non-conventional essayists whose work exhibits “formal qualities” that “challenge any sense of authoritarianism on the writer’s part” to challenge how authoritative truth has been used to silence, exclude, and oppress communities in the margins (45). Authoritative truth is not challenged by replacing one dominant truth for another, nor by diving into postmodern inquiry about the nature of truth, but by expanding our notion of authority from a single individual truth to multiple collective truths: “by using the shifting, hidden, exposed, and expansive truths of the margin as collective tools to help us better understand the world” (Fleischmann 45). This is the type of understanding that most concerns writers of intersectional form. Their work does not stay in the confines of the existing margins, nor does it try to play in the narrowed lanes of expectations imposed from the center. Rather, their work examines where their identities bump up against the restraints of dominant society in such a way that it forges new space from the margins. This new space on the page can correlate to new space in society, as their multiple ways of being and seeing project multifaceted ways of understanding the world.


​In Trace, Savoy explores geology together with buried personal and social histories of African and Native American communities. In doing so she explicitly names the multiple perspectives one can take when undertaking this exploration:
What lies beneath the surface of maps and names? The answers, and their layers of meaning, of course depend on one’s point of view. Whether what came before 1492 is considered prelude to an American story beginning to unfold. Whether participants from places other than Europe are seen as supporting cast or props. Whether ‘we’ and ‘our culture’ embrace a much larger changing whole. (87)
It is this much larger changing whole that Savoy ultimately sheds light on through her investigations of geology, geography and history. She does this by uncovering layer by layer, place by place. For example, in her essay “Placing Washington D.C., After the Inauguration,” Savoy writes: “The [American] capital and its architecture of urban slavery inscribed the geography of race from day one” (180). She first orients the reader to the landscape around DC: “Here the Piedmont’s crystalline bedrock, cut by the Foundry Branch, by Rock Creek, and by the river itself at Great Falls and Mather Gorge, descends beneath the blanketing coastal plain” (161). And then she digs below the surface: “some of the most notorious [slave] markets and pens stood along the Mall where so many would come for Barack Obama’s inaugurations” (172). Savoy not only exposes the slave markets buried beneath the Mall, she positions them as critical to Washington DC’s status as capitol city of the United States. She writes, “Put simply, the first president wanted the capital embedded in the South, not too distant from his Virginia plantation…The permanent home for the federal government, in George Washington’s mind, had to be located where slavery would remain unmolested” (164). As a result, Savoy’s prismatic perspectives illustrate what dominant narratives seek to erase: that our country as we know it was founded on slavery and grew from slavery, and that slaves were not merely supporting actors or props, but were actors central to the creation of an America whose ascendance depended directly on their forced labor and dehumanization.

Similarly, in Bright Felon, Ali applies his focus to religion, sexuality, language and the geography of cities to undermine dominant narratives about Islam and homosexuality. In particular, he complicates Islam as both a religion under attack (18) and a religion that can be oppressively practiced (90), while spending the most time on the page writing of Islam as a religion in a third space of familiarity and change: “This is where people had gathered and my presence was accepted without question….Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside. / Asking that 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered” (83, 87). Ali refracts light onto the complications of feeling at once hopeful about and persecuted by his religion, positioning long histories of Islamic scripture alongside lengthy trials of homosexual men: “A labyrinth of time ties you back to the streets of Cairo, months after 52 men were arrested on a floating nightclub, taken to jail for crimes against society. Their trial will stretch out. / For years” (29).  He notes that the layers of these complications exist on all levels, within his identities, his own body, the bodies of queer people, the rules of society, the landscapes of cities: “Under any city other cities still exist. Under any body other bodies” (63).


It is this vision of the coexistence of layers that is the expanded truth created by Ali’s prismatic perspective. He holds the binary myths of religion vs. sexuality, and rule-followers vs. felons up to a critical light, and what we see through his eyes goes beyond the surface of a targeted religion and his own targeted body to uncover a third way of being that is alive with “amniotic grit”—the vibrance that comes with embracing contradiction without the need for resolution.


Hoang uses her prismatics to examine how myth can both hide existing truths and be vehicles for aspirational truths. Hoang at first props up myths as fun house mirrors that reflect distorted realities of acceptance and rejection: “I strolled in and played a colorful tune and the rats followed me through the village and across the meadow and into the woods and through the pure white sand and far into the ocean. Later, the villagers called me a witch and threw me back into the ocean” (147). She then applies her prism to adapt these myths, both to lift up their utility and to poke holes to deflate their influence. As the work progresses, her adaptations shift from reflecting distorted realities to projecting possible futures: “It is not a wolf but a prince and his name is Charming. They are not pigs but little girls with delicate snouts and curly pigtails … It is not three houses but one … and one little girl huffs and another one puffs and the last one pushes Charming right out the door” (149). The interweaving of myth with anecdotes of a more shattered reality is how Hoang creates an expanded realm of aspirational truth. Faced with the realities of abusive relationships, a dead sister, and a heroine-addicted nephew, Hoang “unstitch[es] the real and out tumbles magic” (55). In this magical third space, a society of familial pain, oppressive misogyny, and racial hierarchy can be transformed into a realm of acceptance, imperfection, and belonging. In this way Hoang’s prismatic perspective creates a new mosaic by shining refracted light on familiar subjects of family and belonging.


​Writing intersectional identities in this way sheds light on what is, but the form then refracts light onto what has been assumed to be, in ways that help readers see these subjects anew. It is this re-assemblage of subjects as seen from the perspectives of the margins that constitutes expansive truth, or that at least contributes to an ever-growing space that can hold more expansive truths. In this context, writing toward expansive truths bypasses the offering of new knowledge from dominant to subordinate groups. Instead, writing expansive truths may be one important way to “reveal new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality” (Collins 238). More than this, by focusing their prisms on topics as varied as plants and rocks, sexuality and religion, zodiac animals and violence, these authors model how dominant truth is best confronted not by other relativist truths on the same plane, but by collective truths shared from the margins. Through their prismatic perspectives captured on the page, these authors model how intersectional form allows writers to go beyond a subversive oppositional consciousness of their own reality to achieve a generative consciousness that presents all of us with ways to “see the world anew” (Singer and Walker 5).


Multiple Genres: Embodied Narratives

Writing prismatic perspectives requires the refraction of conventional literary lines, particularly those that police boundaries between genre and those that fabricate traditional narrative arc. This third aspect of intersectional form is about how intersectional identities and perspectives are freed (rather than captured) on the page. The endeavor of telling a multiplicity of truths about a multiplicity of experiences and subjects, within the context of interlocking systems of power and privilege, is not well served by writing strictly in one genre. Writing expansive truths requires a blending genres and bending of conventional techniques to convey the complexities of marginalized minds contending with power.

While the blurring of genre and refraction of narrative are not new and may be true of all lyric and hybrid nonfiction, they take on a different necessity and importance for intersectional form.  People from marginalized communities carry collective traumas of silencing, violence and erasure in our bodies. Often, our nonfiction writing reflects these realities in both content and in form. For example, Ali, Hoang and Savoy all write in fragments and vignettes punctuated with questions and white space that symbolize experiences of brokenness, silence and erasure. In her book Schizophrene, Bhanu Kapil re-creates flashes of traumatic memory through vivid and fantastical scraps of recurring scenes. All of these fragments and scraps flow seamlessly between poetry and prose, nonfiction and fiction to free (instead of capture) the multivalent realities of survival and becoming in the face of oppression. None move through narrative arc. Instead, they move through association, rhythm and sensation. In these ways, intersectional form can be seen as a type of authentic and embodied hybrid form characterized by, as Bhanu Kapil writes, “not hybridity that comes from the activity of theft, collage or polyphony — but from the capacity of the body to form and extend a new gesture” (qtd. in Luczajko).


These new gestures appear throughout the works of Ali, Savoy and Hoang. Ali employs poetic form and meter to enliven his prose in an act that subverts the prosaic normalcy of heteronormativity on the page (Ali 27). He writes, “Walking down the street and seeing a young man with dreadlocks and blue long johns on underneath his cargo shorts./ Sometimes a poem is enough to seduce you or blue long johns worn underneath shorts” (39). Hoang employs mythical fiction to breathe new feminist possibilities into imperfect realities of patriarchy and racism. Similar to Ali, her act of blending genre is a symbol of resistance in and of itself. She alters myth to both deflate the power of myth, and to use the power of myth to project a future of expansive possibility for women and girls. Savoy does this as well, by bringing the poetic meter of rumination to her otherwise scholarly prose: “Neither man could understand Earth itself as a trickster creation. Instead they wrote false obituaries. And as a child I honored their elegies rather than the continuing presence of vital, fluid cultures” (58). Savoy meditates on her own role in uplifting the stories of the settlers who appropriated, erased, and retold Native American history. Rather than directly refute authoritative history, her poetic inquiry quietly erodes the dominant narratives upon which this country was founded.


These are examples of how genre-blending in intersectional form serves the function of conveying expanded truths. Intersectional form also serves this function by employing non-conventional narrative techniques that not only tell of expansive truth, but create experiences of expansive truth. In these works, the reader is not pulled along by a cognitive plot with a beginning, middle and end.  Instead, these works invite the reader to immerse themselves in both marginalized experience and expanded possibility by appealing to the somatic experiences of metaphor, meter and sensation. It is work that moves through, as Barrie Jean Borich writes, “the image and sense base…of body-centered narrative.” Savoy, Ali and Hoang’s works all move through non-linear journeys that ebb and flow through poetic meter, metaphorical recursion, and webs of sensation and reflection. In these ways these works are not anti-narrative per se, but are characterized by what Ali describes as “not an explosion of narrative but a new way of narration” (Ali, “Genre-Queer” 35).


This mode of narration, not surprisingly, allows for a multiplicity of narratives that break, stutter and recur. This allowing is not simply for the sake of experimentation, but becomes a necessity when telling the collective and expanded truths of the margins (Browne, “A Conversation with Bhanu Kapil”). For Kazim Ali, in the face of violent recrimination for his “sins” as a lover of men, he tells fragmented and recurring stories of isolation as “the wolf-tongued son” (85), the “drift less star” (93), but also gives glimpses of power and redemption: “It’s always the broken that holds the universe in place./ That’s what I would say about poetry and prayer” (9). Together this isolation, persecution and redemption through the broken pieces create a layered landscape of Ali’s version of expanded truth. For Lily Hoang, fragmented stories of failure and a longing for acceptance recur almost cyclically throughout her work, “A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats.  You desire the human equivalent” (95), juxtaposed with fortune-cookie-like strips of wisdom about the power of coming in last: the end of the race is sisterhood, a sisterhood of “not pigs but little girls with delicate snouts and curly pigtails” (149), who refuse to run the rat race and who push the big bad wolf and Prince Charming out the door. Together, these multiple narratives of false starts and failures, along with fragments of feminist myth, form Hoang’s Zodiac wheel of expanded truth.


The examples of Ali’s and Hoang’s multiple narratives told through blended genre embody the author’s many identities and perspectives on the page. What’s more, in intersectional form the overall structure of the works themselves constitute another layer of embodiment that could be considered the collective body that holds the multiple narratives together. For Ali it is the metaphorical structure of tiered cities where the coexistence of past and present and emerging future defy the false binaries that separate criminal from saint; for Hoang it is the wheel that contains the twelve animals who ran the Great Race and who all are part of the Zodiac, regardless of who came in first or last; for Savoy it is the geological palimpsest made up of layers upon layers of dominant and dominated stories of humans in relationship to the land. These metaphorical frameworks serve the technical function of containing the vast content of intersectional form, while also serving the deeper function of embodying the expansive truths the authors seek to convey.


​The practice of intersectional form as an experience of expansive truth lies not just on the page, but in the action of writing and the interaction of reading and interpretation. By employing narration that both reflects and invites lived experiences at the intersections of poetry and prose, fantasy and reality, brokenness and remembrance, intersectional form encourages us to come back to our guts and our minds. “My body begins and ends with writing,” said Bhanu Kapil (Luczajko). This in itself is a radically rebellious and generative statement. Writing like Kapil’s, Ali’s, Hoang’s and Savoy’s invites re-embodiment in the face of the disembodiment that results from violence and trauma. It is an act of positioning marginalized bodies to project a new and imperfect wholeness made not from easy unity but from the painstaking re-assemblage of fragments.


Not a Conclusion but an Expansion

                       Q: What are shoes for?
                       A: Silence.
                       Q: Wrong. The answer is, to protect your feet.
                       A: Or…they’re mostly for style and they actually hurt your feet with their          needlenose toes
and jackhammer heels. Or they’re a status symbol. Or a          signification of gender

                       ​identity. Or for throwing at American Presidents.     Actually, I was gonna say that shoes are
                       for giving jobs to children in the global     south. Like, to      my cousins in the Philippines. To make
money for WalMart or        Ivanka or Jimmy Choo.

                       A: Oooh, I see. Getting sassy now, are we?
While we don’t need permission to write multiplicity, we do need the space. It often feels like there’s no space for expansive truth in our day-to-day lives. The era of 2-minute reads, crossfire debates, digital clapbacks and tweet-driven federal policy can fuel the narrow myths that serve to uphold systemic oppression. Because of this, literary nonfiction can play a unique role in resistance. Literary nonfiction deals with the molding of the actual, and like a sculptor molds the actuality of clay (Pape) it has always carried the potential to help us see reality in new ways. Literary nonfiction written in intersectional form can go a step further by allowing marginalized writers the space disproportionately denied to us in quotidian life—the space to re-assemble our minds and bodies, to expand on ourselves and on how we see the world. On the page we can write voices into silence, multiplicity into singular truth, embodiment into erasure.

When you write from the margins and have so long seen your communities being written for, silenced or violently erased, this practice of intersectional form can become no less than a significant step toward collective liberation. If the success of oppression depends on the narrowing of minds, then the success of liberation depends on the expansion of minds.  Beyond strict memoir, literary nonfiction in intersectional form can become a way for authors from marginalized communities to write the collective truths that live both within our bodies and in the collective bodies of our communities. This allows marginalized authors to become agents of the expansion of minds, and therefore agents working toward liberation for all.
​

Intersectional form is not so much a subgenre of literary nonfiction as it is an approach, a practice, an evolving third space, a journey of possibility. The journey begins with confronting power and privilege through writing multiplicity onto the page. The acts of refusing to choose among identities, refracting new light on familiar subjects, and bending the rules of telling, together constitute a writing practice with the potential to reassemble what has been broken within and among us and around us, and the potential to evolve the notion of what it means to truly live with humanity. ​
Click here to download the PDF with Works Cited.

Picture
Jen Soriano is a Seattle-based Filipinx-American writer whose work blurs the boundaries between nonfiction, poetry and speculative fiction. Waxwing has nominated her work for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her chapbook Making the Tongue Dry was a finalist for the 2018 Newfound Prose Prize. Jen holds a BA in History of Science from Harvard and an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.



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  • 9.1 (Fall 2022)
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    • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
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        • 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)
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        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
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        • 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)
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      • 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)
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        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
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        • 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 >
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        • 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)
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        • 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)
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        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
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        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
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        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
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        • 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)
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        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
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        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
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        • 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"
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        • 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"
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      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
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    • 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"
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        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
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        • 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)
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        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
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        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
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        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
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        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
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        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
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        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
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        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
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    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
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        • 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"
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        • 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)
        • Bruce 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)
        • Anthony 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)
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