Assay's Special Conference Issue

2015 was a great year for nonfiction! Over the past few months, we've been party to great conference conversations that reinforce that academic inquiry into the work of nonfiction is not only vital, it is energetic. As we have worked to provide reports of conference panels at AWP and NonfictioNow, it's clear that archiving summaries of the conversations is a good start--but with two conferences (ASLE and NonfictioNow) happening biennially in 2015, as they do, we have an opportunity to do something special.

Rather than publishing individual voices, we have brought together four panels from three different conferences to post in their entirety. Each panel contains the paper presented by the panelists. We have chosen panels that discuss topics best considered from multiple viewpoints, from craft to practicality.

-Karen Babine, editor

Hydra-Headed Memoirs & Well-Connected Essays: Negotiating Your Book-length, NonFiction Thing

NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona
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Born out of a collective essay-into-memoir-into-essay-collection angst, this panel explores the question of what it means to do this work, moving back and forth between essays and memoir and books and chunks, the ever-evolving nonfiction process.

Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical and the Creative

NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona
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​Writers have long used philosophical ideas as inspiration or framework for their narratives but when the work of philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, or Judith Butler is labeled “critical theory,” it is thought of as a tool for literary analysis, rather than literary production. This panel reclaims the artist’s power to apply theory and philosophy to nonfiction. 

Confronting Our Fears: Turning Adversity into Art

AWP 2015, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Seasoned memoirists know that writing about our personal misfortunes, fears, and demons can produce rich, even urgent, writing. But that is only true when we use those hardships and struggles not simply for confession or disclosure but as raw materials for creating literary works. Citing their own and others' work, five writer-teachers will offer strategies designed to show aspiring memoirists how to transform frightening, disturbing experiences into artfully crafted, shared human narratives.

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory

ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) 2015, Moscow, Idaho


Any event that occurs within a place, it could be argued, never really goes away. Our roundtable discussion will tease out some of the semiotic complexity of places, both literary and actual. Each of our six panelist will offer ten-minute, focused close readings of different geographies, investigating and interpreting various forms of ‘earth writing’ along the way. In particular we will be concerning ourselves with the (often hidden) dynamism of various geographies. We will focus on investigating the ways that places have multiple, sometimes invisible layers of accumulation of past ecological, historical, and personal moments, seeking to discuss how places reflect what cultural geographer Tim Cresswell calls “the hauntings of past inhabitation.”
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