NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical & the Creative

​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.

Beth Peterson

Joanna Eleftheriou

Corinna Cook

Travis Scholl

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Joanna Eleftheriou
Introduction to "Theorizing Nonfiction:
​Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Critical & the Creative"

Theorizing Nonfiction: Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Critical & the Creative brought together four writers of nonfiction whose brief papers recounted the ways critical theory informs their practice as working writers. Nonfiction writers have long used philosophical ideas as inspiration, or as a framework for their narratives.  In fact, many seminal nonfiction texts—from Rousseau’s Reveries to Thoreau’s Walden to Sontag’s On Photography--have been built on philosophical premises. This panel reclaims the artist’s power to apply philosophical and theoretical principles in nonfiction by explaining how theory can be seen as part of that long tradition of philosophy that supplies writers with a “depth grammar” that deepens our work. 
 
We each employed a different metaphor in our effort to describe the role philosophy and theory play in our writing process, and most compared theory to some sort of tool, though Beth Peterson described theory as a (tool) shed, best located behind the house of creative writing. In addition to the idea that theory is a tool to be used, we also come back again and again to the metaphor of seeing, and each narrate a moment when theory allowed us to see complex problem with greater clarity. We discovered, each via a distinct route, something about the way the language we use every day –to speak, to write – relies on codes and ideologies that we can't always see. Corinna, for example, gives us the example of the human  as a category. If the assumptions embedded in the word human were evident at all the time, language would fail at the task of efficient, daily communication, and it’s reasonable that only special seeing-tools are required to reveal them. But revealed they must be, at least for the nonfiction writers we four want to be, and for the stories we wish to tell.   
 
The papers published here bear the physicality of narrative—there is a pulse, and energy, and desire, and for Travis at least, there are two accounts of “fun.” We wanted to say that theory is not any more confined to the bodiless mind than “creative” writing is, and we wanted to question – by way of writing creatively and critically at once – whether the critical/creative binary has been attributed more force than is really warranted.
 
We hope these four short essays will chip away at whatever might have inhibiting some writer-readers from reading, or citing, or even writing theory of their own. Above all, we hope to spark further conversation from and about nonfiction writers who theorize, because we are eager to learn from other writers’ richly varied experience.

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Theorizing Nonfiction, Continued.

Joanna Eleftheriou
Theorizing Creative Nonfiction: The Essay Was Always in Between

Travis Scholl
Theorizing Nonfiction: My Friend Wally Benjamin

Beth Peterson
Theorizing Nonfiction

Corinna Cook
​Eating Our Neighbors: Giorgio Agamben, Animality, and Essaying North
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