NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical and the Creative

Beth Peterson
Beth Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Grand Valley State University.  A wilderness guide before she began writing, Peterson is currently working on a book of lyric essays set in a disappearing glacial landscape.  She has writing in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Passages North and other journals.
Travis Scholl
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Introduction to "Theorizing Creative Nonfiction"
Corinna Cook
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Joanna Eleftheriou

Beth Peterson
​Theorizing Nonfiction

One of my first creative writing professors once told me, “Theory works best when it’s like a backyard shed; you go there when you need to get a rake or shovel, but you don’t move in.”  At the time, like many MFA students with little to no background in critical theory, I took those words in as a guiding principle of sorts, a cautionary beacon for those weary souls who might choose to make their beds in sheds, when the loveliest of houses (or in my case, fine arts studio workshop courses in poetry, fiction and nonfiction) were primed and waiting right next door.

This backyard shed philosophy worked for some time, until finally, one day, it didn’t.  For me, the first forays into theory came with problems I couldn’t solve, blind points in my thinking and writing that couldn’t be side-stepped with the limited strength of my own background, knowledge or even leaps into the creative process.

In the space of three years, my professor Craig Arnold disappeared while hiking a volcano in Japan and was not found.  Then my friend James disappeared while we were hiking a mountain in Norway together and was also, for some days, not found.  And then I took a thirty-foot fall myself, into a glacial crevasse (and thankfully was found, though perhaps not found the same as before the fall.)  And the glacier I was living on the edge of began vanishing at an alarming rate, some of the animals and plants never again to be found.  All around me was loss, but I had no taxonomy for it, no way to create a form that would invite the reader into this experience, that would embody rather than import the loss. 

To impose narrative on these non-narrative situations—situations full of gaps—felt violent, traumatic.  I couldn’t, even after the prodding of all the other students in all those workshop courses, come to a clear sense of change in my narrator’s persona or arc of the situation.  I wanted to essay: to think about disappearance, but I didn’t have a language for this thought; no straight way through the middle of my dark wood.  I began to wonder why I’d come to the dark wood in the first place, or if the dark wood had come to me.  And then I wondered if it was enough to assume that it was dark or even a wood at all.  Why and what and how seemed too large of questions.  

“We call sublime,” writes Kant, “that which is absolutely great.”  While the beautiful, to Kant, was quantifiable & knowable, the sublime was infinite, a subjective judgment that valued boundlessness and lack of form. “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless,” Kant writes, “so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”  To fall into the sublime is to fall into a dual understanding of terror and awe: terror and awe that are elicited not only by the subject or by the author, but by the space between them…the sublime occurs in the gaps. 

I first read Kant in a required PhD class—Introduction to Critical Theory—or I should say, I read the few pages of Kant required for that class, and then I kept reading because I recognized in Kant’s discussion of awe, Muir and Thoreau and Leopold, so many classic nature writers—but in his raw and primal sense of terror, the contemporary environmental work I was reading—Solnit, Macfarlane, Williams—and the prose I was writing too.  With widespread chemical corruption of rivers and soils lamented by Rachel Carson, fossil fuels changing oceans and ice-forms, and even technological progress sprouting roads and otherwise increasing access, the idea of an aesthetic or moral “nature” as pristine, untouched sanctuary—the work of many of the earlier naturalists—was no longer tenable.  Perhaps it never had been, but I, like so many other writers, had come to the wild (& even the wilderness of my own experience) seeking this one thing.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once described attempts at making meaning or building language without context like “walking on frictionless ice.”  Wittgenstein, the theorist, needed to re-center his ideas by returning to “the rough ground of ordinary language, language in use.”  In a surprising reversal, for me, context too was the key for finding my way back, but it was theory that provided the contextual discourse, the depth grammar as we’re calling it in this panel.  As I paired the terror and awe of the sublime with my own experiences of disappearance, I began to see a seeking of the awe of the sublime in nature, but a finding instead, in the gaps, the terror.

This realization, was to borrow, Thoreau’s term, a “wakening.” As my ideas, first about the sublime, and then later, about wilderness and about trauma and the essay, began to be rooted in theoretical contexts, the work broke open for me.  I didn’t feel so much like I needed to create a linear narrative or to fill in, for readers, the gaps in my remembering or my understanding.   Instead, I began to see my own impulses to seek out the sublime in ever-fading environments as part of longer substrate, and began to see the higher goal of the work as creating “a continuum of experience” for myself and for readers, one which invited us to participate in meaning-making together.   

Theorizing Nonfiction, Continued.

Joanna Eleftheriou
Theorizing Creative Nonfiction: The Essay Was Always in Between
Travis Scholl
Theorizing Nonfiction: My Friend Wally Benjamin
Corinna Cook
​Eating Our Neighbors: Giorgio Agamben, Animality, and Essaying North
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