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
8.2

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Kristina Gaddy

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When Action is Too Much and Not Enough: 
A Study of Mode in Narrative Journalism



“Have you read both of these? How are they different?” I asked my bookseller in Baltimore, referring to two new releases, both about the same series of events, written by authors with similar backgrounds, and with generally the same audience in mind.

Living in the city, I already knew the broad outline of the crimes that led to I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad (St. Martin’s 2020) by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg and We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption (RandomHouse, 2021) by Justin Fenton. They both told the story of The Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a police unit so corrupt, you’d be hard-pressed to believe it if the plot line had shown up on the HBO show The Wire. Led by Baltimore Police Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, the GTTF had not only been violating the constitution when they made illegal stops to purportedly seize guns and make arrests, they had been planting guns and drugs on suspects, robbing drug dealers, selling drugs, and falsifying police reports. An FBI investigation and wiretaps eventually led to the arrest of the whole force, and guilty pleas or verdicts from all the members of the GTTF. With the same subject, the same distance in time from the crimes, the same available source material, the same audience in mind (both books are trade nonfiction, written for a white audience) and similar perspectives (the authors are also all white men, who have been long-time crime reporters in Baltimore city), where did the books diverge? [1]

“I’ve heard that I Got a Monster reads like a novel and We Own This City is more like journalism,” one of the employees at the store told me. I wondered what it meant when a reader designated a nonfiction book as written “like a novel” or “like journalism.” After reading both books, I understood that they both had roots in the nonfiction novels of the 1970s and New Journalism, and that in fact, I Got a Monster had swift pacing and vivid scenes while We Own This City used more exposition. I also knew that I Got a Monster received less attention than We Own This City (which is being dramatized for an HBO show, and was reviewed in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post), and wondered why Fenton’s writing “like journalism” might have more appeal than I Got a Monster.

​Nonfiction novel and New Journalism aren’t well defined terms (more on that later), which left me wondering what particular craft techniques the reader picks up on to make a distinction between “like a novel” and “like journalism.” But more importantly, I wondered what the result for the reader is—the impact of the book, the perception of real events that transpired—when a writer chooses on style over the other. Karen Babine’s “A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision” provides a framework to compare and contrast the books and answer these questions. She outlines a system of literary classification modeled on Carl Linneaus’s system for organizing how all living things are related. The largest rank (equivalent to a domain or kingdom) is genre, which Babine breaks down into nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama. Below that are subgenres (“science, travel, nature, food, historical, etc.”), which are not limited to one of the genres and can overlap. Then comes the form, which is perhaps akin to family in biological taxonomy and exists only within the genre. “Forms have parameters and can be reproduced,” Babine writes, and gives examples of memoir, journalism, essay, flash, etc. People may be tempted to put essay, memoir, or journalism in the genre category, but as Babine points out, we get a much more precise understanding of writing as a craft when these are forms, not genres. So the form of these two books, I believe, is journalism, and in fact not narrative journalism or literary journalism, since those qualifiers demand a mode of writing (i.e. journalism written in a narrative or literary manner). [2] The next taxonomic rank is mode (what I think of as equivalent of genus in Linneaus’s system), or “what creates the energy and momentum of the page.” [3] The author creates a path that the reader travels down through the story itself (narrative mode), language used (lyric mode), or the activity of “the writer’s brain” (assay mode). It is in this rank where I Got a Monster and We Own This City diverge; where one relies on the story to drive the action, the other relies more on the writer’s quest for answers.
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I had intentionally written my first nonfiction book, Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis, like a thriller using techniques taken from fiction writing—á la the nonfiction novel of Norman Mailer or more recently, Erik Larson. Although this partially stemmed from it being targeted to young adults (who definitely don’t want to read boring history), I also just wanted to propel readers through the narrative, on-the-ground as the action was happening, as if they could have been my main characters. I built the chapters on scenes and reconstructed dialog based on Gestapo reports, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews done by others (all of the people I wrote about had died by the time I started working on the book). The sentences and chapters are short, and I bounce between characters, allowing me to leave them at a critical moment and create suspense.

In order to keep a close third-person perspective and the action flowing, my editor and I also made the decision to take out anything that my main characters would not have known at the time—sometimes it wouldn’t be until decades later that the inner machinations of the Nazi party were revealed. However, we both recognized that the narrative wouldn’t work without that context. I pulled that information out and put it into present-tense, second-person introductions at the beginning of each part of the book, letting the reader in on events that the Pirates might not have known about. Interspersed throughout are primary source documents, including translations of Gestapo reports and arrest records. It is not until the last section that I use the first person to discuss the political and social factors that led to the Edelweiss Pirates being branded bad kids rather than Nazi resisters. Some people love this approach and style; both adults and teens have told me that they couldn’t put the book down. Others have said they “don’t like the writing,” perhaps because it doesn’t read like nonfiction should.

Authors get to choose how to tell a story, and if two books about the same subject come out around the same time, (to oversimplify) they usually have fundamental differences, such as a trade press versus academic publisher or focus on different aspects of an important event or person. I Got a Monster and We Own This City have none of these differences. In fact, they would be closely related in Babine’s taxonomy, with the same genre, subgenre, and form: nonfiction, cop shop/ crime, and journalism. You could also say are both nonfiction crime novels or New Journalism, but if all of these classifications are the same, and yet the authors do not tell the story of the GTTF in the same way, where is their difference? Babine’s taxonomy provides a framework to analyze the ways the authors approached the story of the GTTF and chose to write about it. Because all of the other taxonomic classifications are the same, we can narrow in on mode. I Got a Monster relies on the narrative mode, closely following actions to keep the reader engaged—the what and when of the story. We Own This City relies on assay mode, where the energy of the book comes from Fenton guiding the reader through not the action, but what he is learning about the city and the police force—the how and why of the story. And their two diverging paths, the change in mode, ultimately lead the reader to two different places: one emotional with excitement and one cerebral with a development of insights.


​A Consideration of Narrative Journalism

Narrative, literary, and new are all descriptors that have been put in front of journalism to describe the style of nonfiction writing that many credit Tom Wolfe with defining and journalists at during the second half of the 20th century as championing. James E. Murphy wrote in 1974 that Wolfe and the other New Journalists employed “scene-by-scene construction, full record of dialogue, third-person point of view, and the manifold incidental details to round out a character (i.e., descriptive incidentals)” (6), which, as Lee Gutkind explained in the third issue of Fourth Genre, was different because most “people regarded nonfiction as academic...or journalistic…” even though these techniques in nonfiction were in fact not new or “revolutionary” (201).

Since 1972, others have added to Wolfe’s definition. Murphy contends that New Journalism “qualifies as a literary genre because of its utilization of dramatic fictional techniques” and journalism “because it applies these techniques to reporting events” (35). Lee Gutkind added “first-person point of view” (201) to one of the characteristics of the genre. In the first chapter of Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (1995), Norman Sims writes that literary journalism “focuses on everyday events that bring out the hidden patterns of community life as tellingly as the spectacular stories that make newspaper headlines” (3), which was not a commandment for the New Journalists (see “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”). He also notes that “The Literary Journalists broadened the set of characteristics [from Wolfe’s] to include immersion reporting, accuracy, voice, structure, responsibility, and symbolic representation” (9).

Others have removed the focus from specific narrative techniques. In Volume 1 of Literary Journalism Studies, editor John C. Harstock posited that literary journalism is “the symbiosis of narrative and descriptive modalities,” (5) without specifying the tools of fiction used. Sims also quotes editor Richard Todd as saying, “Voice and story are the only tools,” where story includes narrative techniques and intellectual substance and voice “advances the feeling of something created, sculpted, authored by a particular spirit” (9). In Good Prose, Todd and co-author Tracy Kidder don’t focus on specific techniques at all, but instead explore how story, point of view, characters, and structure make up a nonfiction narrative.

These definitions of journalism are broad and at times messy. In “Mapping Nonfiction Narrative: A New Theoretical Approach to Analyzing Literary Journalism,” William Roberts and Fiona Giles try to contend with this. They acknowledge generic definitions, but write, “[N]o theory will ever be complete or methodologically adequate until finer distinctions are made between several subcategories of texts” (102).

​Two subcategories they discuss are Ethnographic Realism (ER) and Cultural Phenomenology (CP), as developed by David L. Eason. Cultural Phenomenology is “associated with reflective, exploratory, and essentially personal forms of literary journalism” (102) and “makes observation—grounded in an epistemology and an ethics—a vital part of the story” (104) and Babine might consider these forms, rather than subcategories. On the other end of the spectrum, Ethnographic Realism texts “have an omniscient narrator and utilize literary techniques associated with social realism” (102) and the narrative needs more than “the scene and the actors’ experiences,” it needs “a social, cultural, or historical framework” (104). They use David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (Houghton Mifflin, 1991) as an example, where Simon writes from the perspective of the Baltimore police detectives in close third person using colloquialisms and staccato statements and no direct quotations when relating inner thoughts (110). However, even Ethnographic Realism and Cultural Phenomenology as subcategories don’t provide enough distinctions in journalism. I Got a Monster and We Own This City (as descendants of Homicide) are both on the Ethnographic Realism side of the spectrum. Although as reporters they could place themselves within the action unfolding (which Fenton does briefly when he receives a tip related to the death of a Baltimore police officer), they don’t. Instead, they write in the “omniscient authorial voice” using the ER techniques of social realism like scene building and dialog. Describing the books as Ethnographic Realism Journalism still isn’t enough to distinguish how and why they are different.


Subverting the Subgenre

In order to examine the modes of these two books and how they result in two very different books, I first want to explore what defines these as being (subverted) cop shop/crime journalism.  Cop shop books usually have cops in the role of good guy, while crime stories focus on murder (usually of women). Both books fall into these subgenres and subvert them, but I Got A Monster falls more into the crime subgenre while We Own This City is more in the cop shop subgenre. In Simon’s Homicide, he embeds with Baltimore detectives trying to solve homicides in a city plagued (then and now) by gun violence and in writing, takes on their voices. In “True and True(r) Crime: Cop Shops and Crime Scenes in the 1980s,” Christopher P. Wilson explains that Homicide inspired similar cop shop books at a time when the true crime genre was expanding (including through the influence of TV shows like America’s Most Wanted and COPS), offering readers “evocations of the modern American underside.”  By nature, cop shop is closely tied to crime. However, the authors also subvert crime conventions because of the type of crime they focus on. Wilson writes, “True Crime is clearly a murder-based genre; it overemphasizes female victims, older victims, and —intriguingly—white offenders and white victims” (719). In both books, there is no murder victim. Instead, a white police sergeant leads a predominantly Black unit as they commit crimes where the victims are predominantly Black men.

Like Simon, Fenton, Woods and Soderberg are all white male veteran crime reporters in Baltimore familiar with what Wilson defines as the “cop shop,” namely, “those police precinct bureaus that have, for over a century, typically provided the site of crime reporting” (719-720). Cop shop typically focuses on the police as heroes. Homicide was very much set in a time and place, “drafted from the headlines of the late 1980s: inner-city neighborhoods devastated by poverty, drug use, gang warfare, and record-setting homicide rates,” as Wilson points out (718-719). The public perception of police and policing has radically changed in the thirty years since Homicide was first published. Taking place in the late 2010s, the story of the GTTF is intertwined with the Black Lives Matter movement, police murders of unarmed Black men and women, calls for police to wear body cameras and be held accountable for their actions, and the uprising after Freddie Gray’s death following his arrest by the Baltimore City Police Department in 2015. [4]    

Furthermore, although the action of both books takes place at police headquarters and in unmarked cop cars, I Got a Monster and We Own This City must subvert the subgenre since the police within the cop shop are also the criminals. Published into a context that saw the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent conviction of his killers, these books exist in a particular time and readerly consciousness. A reader need only look at the cover to know this: I Got a Monster’s subtitle references the “most corrupt police squad” and We Own This City’s dust jacket refers to the GTTF as “a gang of criminal cops.” Readers are very familiar with the concept of corrupt cops.

So, someone else has to be the “good guy” who solves the crime. I Got a Monster develops the opposing forces from the beginning of the book, with the cops as the antagonists and defense attorney Ivan Bates as the protagonist who will take down the GTTF. The first chapter follows sergeant Wayne Jenkins and detectives Marcus Taylor, Maurice Ward, and Evodio Hendrix as they stop Oreese Stevenson, force Stevenson to take them to his home, enter the home without a warrant, remove money and drugs, and then create a video recording where they pretend to find the remaining money and drugs for the first time. Bad guys. The second chapter begins with defense attorney Ivan Bates waiting for Stevenson’s wife to tell the story of his arrest, writing that Jenkins would not want Bates representing Stevenson because “Bates knew about sneak and peaks [the police lingo for entering without a warrant]. He knew Jenkins took money. And if Stevenson told him how much money was missing, Bates might listen” (32). This early on, they foreshadow that Bates can take Jenkins down. Later, Bates gives Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise, “a folder full of other cases he might want to look into if he was building a case against Jenkins” (162).

In We Own This City, Fenton casts Harford County Police, Baltimore County Police, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorneys as the protagonists, creating a good cop/ bad cop dynamic which begins during part II of the book, “Launch of an Investigation.” Fenton introduces Baltimore County Police Detective Scott Kilpatrick, who knew to be wary of city police detectives. “Kilpatrick said Jenkins’s cases had raised concerns. ‘You’d read the search warrants, and the probable cause wouldn’t make sense,’” (95) Fenton quotes Kilpatrick as saying. As Kilpatrick and another officer from Harford County begin investigating another drug dealer, it leads them to members of the Baltimore City Police, which means the investigation is turned over to the FBI and U.S. Attorneys, who Fenton ultimately gives credit for bringing down the unit. With a form of police as the good guys, We Own This City remains more in the cop shop subgenre than I Got a Monster.

At the center of both of the books and the GTTF is Wayne Jenkins, who is white. In her analysis of the development of the true crime genre, Laura Brower asserts, “We are in the realm of the psychopath or, more frequently, of the sociopath, whose evil has no visible cause: legislation cannot remove the source of the problem” (126). Neither book states that Jenkins is a sociopath but they portray him as an amoral person without remorse for his actions. Jenkins’s lies and deceit are on display in the first chapter of I Got a Monster, as Woods and Soderberg recount the arrest of Oreese Stevenson. This comes out through Jenkins’s actions rather than any backstory. He lies to Stevenson about being a federal agent (12), calls his bail bondsman-drug dealing friend and lies about how much Stevenson might have that they could steal (14), makes an illegal entry into Stevenson’s home (15), and takes cash and drugs from the home before they get the search warrant and film the fake drug bust (19).

In his concise backstory of Jenkins in chapter two, Fenton writes about a lawsuit filed against Jenkins in 2006 where the plaintiff Tim O’Connor accused Jenkins of “punching him in the face” and fracturing his orbital bones (20). Fenton uses the opportunity to introduce the reader to Jenkins’s ability to lie and manipulate, writing that O’Connor’s lawyer, “said he had noticed Jenkins trying to work one female juror in particular. Jenkins turned and smiled at the jury, drawing laughs from them as he raised his hands in a ‘Who, me?’ pose” (21). Fenton makes sure to add that the jury found in favor of O’Connor and that nothing went on Jenkins’s police record, before recounting an incident a few months later where Jenkins was on the stand contradicting evidence from a security camera in another physical altercation while on duty.

​In both cases, the reader understands that Jenkins lies, doesn’t respect the law, is aggressive, and doesn’t feel remorse—some of the traits of a sociopath. If his “evil has no visible cause,” (Brower 126) then there can’t be an easy solution, either. Here, I Got A Monster remains more in the crime subgenre than We Own This City. Through his use of mode, Fenton explores the reasons why Jenkins committed crimes and how he was able to get away with them.


​Mode

In “Recognizing the Art of Nonfiction: Literary Excellence in True Crime,” J. Madison Davis writes, “it isn’t the oddity or excess of the crime that allow true-crime books to earn the designation of literary excellence. That only comes from the writing,” (12) but he doesn’t explain what excellent writing in true crime would be. Someone might say, “I’ll know it when I read it,” but can we be more scientific than that? Is it to make the nonfiction work read more like fiction? What would be the purpose in constructing a narrative vs standard omniscient journalism to explore this one subject?

Even though I’ve spent a lot of time exploring their genre, subgenres, and form, calling both books nonfiction, cop shop/ crime, and journalism, this shouldn’t be what is interesting to us, according to Babine. “The more interesting conversation is what it’s doing-- and how it’s doing it,” she writes. And this is the most interesting part of the conversation, especially for these two books, because what they are doing and how they are doing it is wherein their differences lie.  To narrow in on mode, you have to ask “What creates the energy and engine in the piece?” as Babine writes. What captures the reader’s attention and keeps us reading? How does the author want the reader to move forward through the writing? She offers three modes of writing (narrative, lyric, and assay). [5]  I Got A Monster relies on Narrative Mode while We Own This City relies on Assay Mode.

In Narrative Mode, the energy comes from the movement of the plot. We want to know what happens next, which feels like the most obvious method for writing about crime. Neither the “nonfiction novel” nor true crime started with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but the creation of both have been attributed to him and his book, and not without cause. Browder argues that Capote, “ushered in the serious, extensive, non-fiction treatment of murder” (121) and any article on true crime or the emergence of “narrative nonfiction” books seems to need to acknowledge the book’s place in the canon. There is a crime or crimes and they have to be solved: what could be more plot-driven than that?

Like the word essay, Assay Mode is trying something. The author’s thoughts are not just on the page, but what the author is thinking and processing as things unfold is why we keep reading. In a recent conversation with author Saumya Roy about her book Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai, she told me that she felt, “The most important role [of a nonfiction writer] is a seeker, seeking on behalf of the reader.” When we as writers are seekers and the readers experience our seeking, we are writing in Assay Mode. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be action in the book. Babine offers Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as an example of memoir in the Assay Mode, and while we may be curious how Machado gets out of the abusive relationship, her exploration of why she got into the relationship and how it was changing her is much more interesting to the reader.


​Narrative Mode in I Got a Monster

In I Got A Monster, Woods and Soderberg use Narrative Mode, and rely action and the forward momentum of plot to tell the story of the GTTF. It’s not so much a whodunit (we all know that the GTTF is committing the crimes), but a how’d-it-come-crashing-down. The authors show us how attorney Ivan Bates began realizing that his clients were being framed by the GTTF (and likely committing other crimes) and how that led to further investigations, and ultimately, the GTTF arrests.

In an interview with Baltimore Fishbowl, Baynard Woods explains the basics of how they created a story that fell within the cop shop/ crime journalism book as subgenre and form: “The first thing we had to realize is that we were telling a story, not just dumping out everything we knew about the GTTF.” This was not going to be an inverted pyramid book, but a narrative about the GTTF. Brandon Soderberg expands, “We wanted to really give readers a sense of what this all felt like,” and to do so, the narrative would advance the story. He adds, “I thought of the book as more like a camera following them around. To make that feel visceral and real, you needed a lot of detail. And the detail is also where you saw just how terrible this was.”

​Using wiretaps taken on two of the officers, body camera footage, and testimony at the trials, the authors have the source material that allows them to follow the officers as they commit crimes. Woods and Soderberg begin the first chapter with a scene of the officers making the illegal stop and arrest of Oreese Stevenson, complete with play-by-play action:
Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was going the wrong way. He steered a silver Malibu full of plainclothes cops against traffic on a residential street, rolling past brick row houses with white trim and pitched roofs resting atop dappled hills spotting with resurgent spring grass. He was looking for a monster (7).
They follow this with a description of who was in the car, details like a Quaker Oats box stuffed with cash, and reconstructed dialog:
“What money?” Brown [the passenger in Stevenson’s car] asked, moving the backpack that held a Quaker Oats box packed with $20,000 out of view with his feet. (9)
“[W]riting in scenes was really important to both of us,” Woods told Baltimore Fishbowl, and they rely on action scenes like these to move the story forward, jumping from one arrest to another, one conversation to another. We see what the officers are doing, hear how they speak with one another, and realize they think they are invincible. Their authorial choices—to focus on scenes, reconstruct dialog, and place the reader with the cops—make the reader invested in the outcome of each scene. We find ourselves asking the characters: Are you really going to take that cocaine? Are you going to plant that gun? Are you going to get away with it? Similarly, we understand the different personalities of individual officers in the GTTF.
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With vivid details of the GTTF’s misdeeds, the reader also becomes emotionally invested in the victims of the crimes. Woods and Soderberg recount the story of when, in April 2010, Jenkins and two other officers attempted to arrest Umar Burley, who Jenkins thought might be a drug dealer. When one of the officers “jumped out [of an unmarked car] gripping a gun and wearing a black mask,” Burley sped away, followed by the cops until Burley crashed into another car. The elderly driver Elbert Davis suffered a heart attack on impact and the passenger was taken to the hospital in critical condition. When Jenkins didn’t find drugs or money in Burley’s car, another officer planted heroin in it. For the end of the scene, rather than just recounting what happens, they place the reader at the hospital:
Jenkins found Burley in the hospital and waited for him to get out of a CT scan.
“You’re definitely going to jail for the rest of your life now,” Jenkins told Burley.
“What? Why?” Burley said.
“Mr. Davis just passed,” Jenkins said.
The state charged Burley with Davis’s death, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged both men with the planted heroin. (119)
In the introduction to Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession, Patrick Radden Keefe writes that in true crime writing, there is a danger “when we focus on stories of individual characters and crimes, because the greatest crimes, now and always, have been systemic, and systemic stories are harder to tell” (np). For Woods and Soderberg, narrative often comes at the expense of exploring the reasons the police believe they can act with impunity. As Jenkins and the others arrive at Stevenson’s home, the authors write, “Jenkins wanted to get into the house for an exploratory, pre-warrant excursion he called ‘a sneak and peek.’ The trick was to do it without leaving a trace. Witnesses, cameras, or alarms could show he’d entered without a warrant” (15). They don’t tell the reader that entering without a warrant is unconstitutional, that a prosecutor might simply drop a case in which drugs were found through an unlawful search, or why police continue to do these kinds of illegal searches.  In the case of Umar Burley, they do mention that Burley “had a gun case that went federal the year before,” but don’t explain what the impact of that case beyond this scene. Did that contribute to why Jenkins went after him as a suspected drug dealer? How does that impact his believability once the heroin has been found in his car?

​In “Imagination in Nonfiction,” Philip Lopate writes about the temptation to make nonfiction more like fiction, since “fiction still enjoys greater literary cachet and status than nonfiction.” He focuses on why nonfiction writers should avoid imagining a “scene unfolding, moment by moment, that one did not witness firsthand,” arguing that those scenes will never feel authentic. The scenes in I Got A Monster do feel authentic, and make the book exciting and readable. However, by relying exclusively on Narrative Mode, the authors leave out the thinking work that enhances the reader’s understanding of the social condition that is intertwined with the events that transpire.


​Assay Mode in We Run This City ​

Justin Fenton’s version of the story of the Gun Trace Task Force is about something more than just the police officers in that unit. Fenton is the seeker, using Assay Mode, and his thinking and quest for an answers to “How could it get this way?” create energy. We see him sorting through the history of Baltimore and the police force, and the lives of Wayne Jenkins and the other officers so that he and the reader can arrive at new ideas about how these crimes could occur and possibilities to prevent it from happening again.

For him, Wayne Jenkins is a main character not because the action centers around him but because he is the mule who carries the story forward. “I wanted to pick up right where Jenkins started, and the agency that he was coming into,” Fenton tells the Baltimore Fishbowl, and tracing Jenkins’s time in the force “allowed me to tell the story of a city, and how we got to this place.” He’s not just telling a story, he’s trying to answer that question: how did we get to a place where “Baltimore’s Black communities have been both overpoliced and underpoliced” (268)? Fenton still uses narrative techniques like reconstructed dialog and scene-setting, but ultimately, his attempts at trying to answer this question are what drive the book.

While Woods and Soderberg build Jenkins’s background through his actions, Fenton’s second chapter provides a biography of Jenkins intertwined with a history of Baltimore. Jenkins was born in 1980, the same year that a shopping complex in the Inner Harbor opened in an attempt to boost “the city’s tourism and sense of pride” (10) and when General Motors and Bethlehem Steel were cutting jobs. Fenton juxtaposes Jenkins’s life growing up with the crack epidemic, no-tolerance policing, and the homicides that Simon was writing about, revealing to the reader the world that Jenkins grew up in and one that created today’s Baltimore police force.  He writes that even in the suburb of Baltimore where Jenkins grew up, “a hidden drug culture took root” (11) with a drug-related quadruple homicide happening on Jenkins’s street.     

A couple years after Jenkins joined the force, two officers were convicted on extortion, drug conspiracy, and handgun charges, which “city officials treated…as an aberration…and continued to swat away claims of misconduct within the force” (19).  This control of the narrative places the reader on a journey where they begin with the knowledge that drugs and homicides are a problem, but so too are the police.
​
Throughout the book, Fenton tells us what the officers are doing, why they might have been doing it, what was illegal about it, and why they might have gotten away with illegal behavior. Using the same arrest that I Got a Monster begins with, Fenton describes the scene, adding the valuable detail that when Jenkins was out on patrol, he was lauded for profiling Black men with backpacks:
For Jenkins, the backpack set off alarms. He was known in the department for having “the eye”—like an outdoorsman spotting a hawk in the trees, Jenkins was said to be able to register the smallest signs of possible criminal activity on the streets--things that others might never have noticed. A lot of the time, however, it was simple profiling (126-7).
​Fenton begins chapter four explaining how hierarchy in a police department works, and how that structure could allow the officers to get away with their crimes:
In the Baltimore Police Department’s paramilitary structure, the most crucial supervision occurs at the sergeant level. Sergeants are the bosses who directly observe and interact with the officers on the ground….And just as good sergeants can ensure that information makes its way to the top, they can also screen problems and keep complaints from going any further (36).
To call Assay Mode an energy might feel a little odd, since it doesn’t have to be flashy and fast, and in fact, can be slow and meditative as the writer sorts through thoughts. And perhaps precisely because we are talking about nonfiction (after all, you can just Google Gun Trace Task Force and get the gist of what happened in minutes), the what (narrative) is less interesting, and the why and how (assay) is what the reader really wants to know. When the Baltimore Police Department learns that they are going to be placed under a consent decree from the Department of Justice, an internal newsletter “highlighted the work of the Gun Trace Task Force as a model for the department” (174). Fenton doesn’t explicitly say that he is wondering “How can that be? They’ve been committing crimes,” but by introducing the idea that the GTTF is still being praised, we ask that question. And Fenton answers: although they had “seized 132 handguns and made 110 arrest on handgun violations….40% of Jenkins’s gun cases were dropped by prosecutors, higher than the department average” (174), meaning the police didn’t care about whether these were legitimate arrests. These sections of text come in the form of exposition (the dreaded telling), but provide the information that satisfies the reader’s need for answers.

​Fenton also spends more time on what may seem like tangential side stories. He goes into the death of Freddie Gray and the uprising that occurred after his death and how that manifested a distrust and disdain for the Baltimore Police. He also tells the story of Detective Sean Suiter, who died after having been shot by his own service weapon the day before he was going to appear before a grand jury relating to the GTTF. [6] He uses these side stories to explore his bigger question.


​Conclusions

Writing a nonfiction book that relies heavily on the tools of fiction and where the reader is driven know what happens and the outcome of the story can leave us with strong emotions. However, it might fail to dig deeper and build out a rounded reality. Having the author serve as a guide who asks questions and looks for can provide a more complete understanding of real events that transpired.

Woods and Soderberg are not exploring
how the actions of police, politicians, prosecutors, the court system, or society at large engage with each other in I Got A Monster. When the authors follow the crimes, the investigation, and the downfall of the GTTF tightly, the reader gets the “visceral and real” feeling of the crimes the GTTF committed they want to convey. I finished their book being disgusted by the GTTF in a way I don’t even want to admit. The authors have truly created monsters. I knew all of the crimes in detail and how those crimes had impacted their (mostly) Black victims. I was glad they were in prison. I was disappointed that it was a defense attorney—not the State’s Attorney’s Office—that had helped bring the officers down.

In his analysis of Homicide and two other early 1990s cop shop books, Wilson contends, “We hear too little, for example, linking downtown development and inner-city unemployment,” which, “turns the terrain into the property of the homicide investigator, a site of clues not to social condition but to individual criminality and predation” (732). Wilson might see a similar problem with I Got A Monster. When a writer focuses on that action—the narrative story of a crime or cop drama—they might lose sight of systemic problems, which require Assay mode to explore. “Very little in these books is said about theories of economic underdevelopment, about debates over the underclass, about different typologies of gang affiliation” (732), Wilson writes. Through juxtaposing the story of the GTTF with Baltimore’s social and economic problems; exposition on how law and law enforcement are supposed to operated; and including narratives outside of the main thread, We Own This City explores systemic problems. There is a sense of revelation that comes with a writer’s use of Assay Mode, where the reader experiences what the writer is sorting out and perhaps thinking, “I never thought of it that way before.” If the writer only takes the path of action, they lose the change for the reader to have a revelation that could change their perception of the Baltimore Police department or Baltimore in general.

​I read We Own This City immediately after I Got a Monster, so I already knew the crimes of the GTTF in detail, but Fenton’s use of the Assay Mode left me with greater understanding and more complex feelings. The officers are still terrible, but rather than just being disgusted by the eight GTTF officers who were found guilty, I felt waves of disappointment: at the Mayor’s office for continuing to not have solutions for gun violence other than violating civil rights; at the police department for failing to follow up on internal complaints; at the State’s Attorney’s Office for continuing to trust the testimony of police who were unreliable, to name a few. I saw how white flight, federal drug policies, and Freddie Gray’s death; how a whole system had failed. This wasn’t about “individual criminality and predation,” as Wilson puts it, but the systemic problems that strengthen the arguments for defunding the police, bringing in prosecutors who will go after the police, and ending the police officer’s bill of rights. Using the story of the GTTF, I saw how we got to this place, and maybe, how we can get out of it.

End Notes

[1] The writers all assume the reader should be shocked by the actions of the GTTF. Reading D. Watkins "Only A Mile And A Big World Separated Us An All-American Story Of Two Boys From The East Side Of Baltimore" (Huffpost, May 13, 2020), the reader understands that for Black Baltimoreans, the crimes are not shocking, but a part of their everyday life. "[GTFF member Danny Hersl] stood for all the abuses and evils the BPD committed against me and my family," Watkins writes at the top of the piece.
​
[2] I want to add that nonfiction cop shop and crime writing does not need to be tied to journalism as a form; Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir and Natasha Threthewey’s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir are two recent examples where the form is memoir, but with a crime subgenre. Books about cops and crimes are often described as being taken “from the headlines” and journalism—writing with some element of newsworthiness, probably about recent events—does often conform to what writers are trying to do when they write in the cop shop or crime subgenres.

[3] Babine’s final taxonomic level is what she calls shape, how the subject matter relates to its form and how the text can be represented visually. The shape of these two books is outside the scope of this essay.

[4] I use “death” rather than “murder” here because no police were found guilty of Freddie Gray’s death, a subject explored at length in Fenton’s We Own This City.

[5] Lyric mode relies on the language of the piece to move the reader forward. Not impossible to do for a nonfiction crime journalism book, but not the first mode a writer would turn to.

[6] The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but a later investigation found it to be a suicide. Suiter’s family denied that it was a suicide. In January 2021, a memo showed that weeks before his death, the FBI had accused Suiter of planting drugs at a crime scene.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​

Picture
Kristina R. Gaddy, author of Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis (Dutton YR 2020), is a Baltimore-based writer and fiddler. She has received the Parsons Award from the Library of Congress, Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, and Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Rubys artist award. Her next book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History (W.W. Norton 2022) is a literary exploration of the little known history of the banjo in the Americas, its role as a spiritual device in the hands of enslaved Africans, and the instrument's legacy in today's culture and society.


Related Works

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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
Assay 1.2 (Spring 2015)

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        • 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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