ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 11.2 (Spring 2025)
    • 11.2 Articles >
      • Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)
      • Amy Cook, "Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky: The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose" (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Conversations >
      • Thomas Larson, "The Reader's Mental Ear" (Assay 11.2)
      • Patrick Madden, "An Open Letter to My Late Friend Brian Doyle" (Assay 11.2)
      • Rhonda Waterhouse, "Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry” (Assay 11.2)
    • 11.2 Pedagogy >
      • Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler, "Avoiding Empathy Fatigue: What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist" (Assay 11.2)
      • Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger, "Essayism in the Age of AI" (Assay 11.2)
      • Marco Wilkinson, "Exquisite Copse" (Assay 11.2)
  • 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)
      • 2.1 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)
        • August 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)
        • Tonee Mae 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)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
1.1

Picture

Wendy Fontaine
​
​
Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails:
Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir



In the opening pages of The Liars’ Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr recounts the evening her mother torched her and her sister’s belongings in a giant bonfire in the backyard. She also recalls the pattern of Texas bluebonnets that decorated her pajamas and describes the pale yellow golf shirt worn by the doctor called to the scene, painting a vivid portrait that includes a chest of drawers tipped on its back “like a stranded turtle” and the nutty smell of the police officers’ coffee mixed with the odor of gasoline from the flames. Karr was only seven years old at the time this trauma occurred, but that night, she says, represents her sharpest childhood memory. Her ability to recall these rich, sensory details serves as the driving force behind her timeless memoir about an erratic childhood in East Texas, the reason why her book is often held up as one of the genre’s gold standards, an example that future memoirists should study and, perhaps, emulate.

But in her book, there is one memory that lies just beyond her reach for nearly thirty years, a moment so powerful and traumatic that its true clarity eluded her for decades. “It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here,” she writes. “I don’t mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head” (9). Neuroscientists and psychologists say that people who have suffered the kinds of trauma described in The Liars’ Club are capable of suppressing memories of their most painful experiences. Within the pages of her memoir, Karr expresses the sharpness of some memories and acknowledges the loss of others. With the power of both, she delves into the story of how she and her sister, Lecia, survived a childhood marred by alcoholism, domestic instability, sexual abuse and death. 

The controversy of truth in memoir is as old as the genre itself. But a different incarnation of that question involves the science of memory: scientific research shows that memory is biologically prone to distortion, making pure truth an unattainable goal. But in the hands of a skillful writer, distortions of memory create more truth than memory itself. The unconscious and biological act of distorting memory is a key element in Karr’s narration. Patricia Hampl, Joan Didion, Mark Doty and others routinely explore the limitations and contortions of memory in their writing. What’s most important to the story is not the memory itself, but the reason why it was distorted in the first place.

How Memories are Made and Lost

The process of writing about memory, as well as the controversy regarding the genre of memoir, is perhaps best understood through the neuroscientific research of Daniel L. Schacter, professor of the psychology at Harvard University. In The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Shacter categorizes the seven miscues of memory: transcience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, absent-mindedness, persistence and bias. Each of Schacter’s so-called sins of memory can be found in the writings of some of our most celebrated contemporary memoirists. 

Over the years, researchers have produced hundreds of studies and articles on these limitations of memory, with many of their most profound discoveries coming in the last few decades. To study how memories are made and recalled, neuroscientists use magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to detect changes in the brain’s blood supply, which shows areas of cognitive activity by measuring the amount of blood flow to specific regions of the brain. Two primary areas are more active when human beings are in the process of remembering: the inner left temporal lobe, which is associated with emotion, and the lower left frontal lobe, which is associated with word choice. As a result, associations that lead to remembering are called “triggers,” and they are usually sensory—sounds, smells, tastes, etc. In the opening pages of The Liars’ Club, Karr gives readers several sensory clues: the smell of gasoline and coffee, the black smoke from the bonfire. Creative writing teachers often use sensory triggers as writing prompts because of their power to tap into the regions of the brain associated with memory, emotion and word choice—all of which are essential elements of memoir. In The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction, Robert Root describes a technique he calls “captioning,” or using photographs as visual writing prompts. “I ask people to draw upon images stored in their minds, stuffed in their billfolds, tacked on their bulletin boards, and use them to trigger memory, develop descriptions, and spark reflection,” he writes. “The visual is one of the thresholds we can cross to enter all forms of nonfiction, especially—but not exclusively—memoir” (47).

The key to a healthy memory appears to lie in the strength of the NMDA receptor. George Johnson, author of In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, explains how British scientists tested rats in 1986 by dropping them into a tank of water. The rats had to learn to find a platform upon which to climb up out of the water. At first, they swam around the tank at random until they happened upon the platform, but after a while they learned to go immediately to the right place. Then, the scientists repeated the experiment on rats that had been dosed with a drug blocking their NMDA receptors. The untreated rats found their swimming platforms right off, but the drugged rats never remembered the way. Instead, they reverted to swimming around the tank at random (Johnson 87). 

In The Liars’ Club, Karr acknowledges that some of her memories have faded or have been lost entirely through the years. She wrote her memoir as a single mother, long after the events of childhood were behind her. When Karr writes about the death of her grandmother, she is not particularly sad when the mean, critical woman dies of cancer. She remembers capitalizing on sympathy from neighbors—tears, she said, could manifest free Popsicles. At least that’s how Karr remembers it. Her sister Lecia might say otherwise. “If I gave my big sister a paragraph here,” she writes, “she would correct my memory. To this day, she claims that she genuinely mourned for the old lady, who was a kindly soul, and that I was too little and mean-spirited then to remember things right” (47). Karr’s decision to defer to her sister accomplishes two things. It acknowledges that some of her memories have faded over time, which lends an element of sincerity to the text. It also flips the narrative and introduces an alternate reality, since her sister’s version of the memory is drastically different than hers. 

This move is what Schacter refers to as transcience, the natural process of forgetting. The past fades with new experiences, details are forgotten with age, and the neural connections that encode information weaken over time, he says. According to researchers Delys Sargeant and Anne Unkenstein, authors of Remembering Well: How Memory Works and What to Do When It Doesn’t, there are essentially two kinds of memory. Immediate memory is information that is received but not organized or processed in a way that is meaningful, like the phone number of a new acquaintance or a list of items to get at the grocery store. Enduring memory is information that is processed or manipulated in some way, and then stored for later retrieval. We may repeat it, spell it or write it down in order to give it meaning. A new friend’s birthday may be easier to remember if it’s the day before your mother’s birthday, for example. The area of the brain where information is transformed from immediate memory to enduring memory is the parahippocampal gyrus, located deep inside the left temporal lobe (Schacter 24).To understand how the past is forgotten, researchers point to the work of neurobiologist Joseph Tsien, who identified the NMDA receptor, a gene that facilitates retention. The receptor, which is found in neurons in the brain, creates a protein that assists the flow of information from one neuron to another. When the neurons are active at the same time, information is transmitted across the synapse, or the space between the two neurons. When this transmission is successful, a circuit is completed and an enduring memory is made. When it is unsuccessful, forgetting is likely to occur (Schacter 38). 

In another scene, where her father is driving the family to a restaurant to celebrate her birthday, Karr begins by writing about what she cannot remember but only assumes happened because it has happened before:
I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid-smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators. My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat...I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls (137).
Karr’s focus is not on the cuisine or the bayou café or even the hungry alligators. It is on the emotional state of her mother, a woman whose dramatic shifts in mood will shape the lives of her two children for years to come. Later in the scene, Karr’s mother grabs the steering wheel in an attempt to drive off the bridge. Her father fends off her mother by hitting her, which the girls know because they hear “a loud noise in the front seat like a branch cracking.” The scene ends as the two are fighting on the front yard, with the whole neighborhood watching. Karr begins the section by telling us what she cannot recall, but when her emotions are pulled into the scene because of her mother’s shifting mental state, her memories return. Karr’s decision to write like this shows readers how precarious and sensitive she is to her mother’s despair. The effect is much more powerful than if Karr had simply told readers that she was, at that moment on the bridge, worried about her mother’s feelings.

In a 2009 interview with The Paris Review, Karr explained why some of her memories are clearer than others. “Certain moments are vividly conceived during adrenaline rushes—falling in love, thinking you’re about to get hit by a bus,” she said. “But the brain isn’t a file cabinet. As I age, my memory fades…Plus, sometimes what you forget says as much psychologically as what you remember.”

When Memories are Elusive

Blocking occurs when there is information we know that we know, but we cannot retrieve it, often because it is emotionally charged. Blocked memories can range from something as simple as forgetting a friend’s last name to something more serious, like suppressed abuse. Schacter observes that people typically remember recent traumatic events in vivid detail, but under the right circumstances, they can block those experiences almost entirely (80). University of Oregon psychologist Michael Anderson has conducted extensive studies on selective retrieval, showing that people who have unwanted memories can push them out of awareness. According to neurological imaging, this cognitive unconsciousness is associated with reduced activity in the hippocampal region of the brain (associated with memory encoding and retrieval) and increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Anderson and his partner, Benjamin Levy, determined that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex worked to disengage, or shut off, the hippocampal region of the brain, resulting in suppression of undesirable memories (Anderson and Levy 191). In 1998, the question of traumatic amnesia was put to the test when a Toronto woman named Cynthia Anthony pleaded not guilty to a charge of killing her month-old baby. During the trial, photographs of the baby triggered a memory that she had not recollected during the police investigation—that she had tripped over a television cord and dropped her infant onto hard ceramic tile. A psychiatrist testified on her behalf, telling to the jury that severe and sudden trauma can account for such extreme cases of memory blocking. Anthony was ultimately acquitted of the murder charge (cited in Schacter 79-80).

As Karr continues The Liars’ Club, details of her previously blocked memory begin to reveal themselves. One hundred and forty pages after she introduces “the dim shape” of her unwanted memory, the traumatic events unfold in the book’s most emotionally intense scene. In it, Karr’s mother is in the midst of mental collapse; she is burning the children’s belongings in a backyard bonfire, ransacking the house in a drunken rage and finally, standing at the doorway to her daughters’ bedroom with a kitchen knife in her hand.

Memory returns to Karr through sensory triggers: the smells of turpentine and lighter fluid, the familiar pattern made by the setting sun against her bedroom window, and the shade of pink lipstick in her mother’s scrawl on the bathroom mirror. Karr explains how she psychologically removed herself from the moment as it occurred, giving readers cause to understand why she would have blocked it from her memory for so long. “No sooner do I choke down that scream than a miracle happens,” she writes. “A very large pool of quiet in my head starts to spread. Lecia’s face shrinks back like somebody in the wrong end of your telescope. Then even Mother’s figure starts to alter and fade” (155-6). By delaying the revelation of this emotional experience, Karr shows how the magnitude of the moment, and the subsequent blocking of it, shaped the rest of her childhood. The decision to allow the memory to be blocked until the middle pages of the book, rather than revealing it in the opening chapter, illustrates how deeply she was affected by her mother’s emotional collapse. The event, and how Karr endured it by disappearing into herself, became a defining moment in her childhood—and a defining moment in the pages of her memoir. 
​

When We Misremember

Misattribution happens when the memory is present, but some part of it is wrong. This distortion of memory could present itself as déjà vu, the nagging feeling that most of us have had that we are reliving a previous experience. Or it could manifest in something more serious, such as the wrongful conviction of a criminal based on inaccurate eyewitness testimony. The infrequent but intense feeling of déjà vu is often interpreted as evidence for the existence of reincarnation, but science sees it as false memory. In a New York Times Magazine article in 2012, Evan Ratliff described the research of Canadian cognitive psychologist Endel Tulving, who in the 1970s discovered a distinction between episodic memories (memories of our experiences and events in our lives) and semantic memories (facts and information we remember). When we recall an experience, we tend to do so in pieces and flashes that may not be linear. As we summon our episodic memories, we mentally recreate, or relive, the original experience as we see it in the present, Tulving said. That feeling of familiarity that comes when recreating a memory further validates the belief that we are reliving an experience that was real. Schacter reports that brain activity is similar whether people are remembering memories that are true or memories that are false. Both the frontal lobes and the inner temporal lobe near the hippocampus are active in true and false recognition, which could explain why people so adamantly stick to their so-called memories even after those memories have been proven false.

In Firebird: A Memoir, Mark Doty recalls moments so vivid that readers picture them like frames from an art film: the cool darkness of his local movie theater, the tea-like stains of his grandfather’s tobacco spit, and the “jagged curve of black wire pulling together a violet seam” (25) of the cut his father suffers when he falls on broken glass. By first examining these clear memories, we can more easily make sense of the distorted ones that come later. Doty’s memoir is about growing up gay and finding voice as a poet, but it primarily explores his relationship with an artistically talented but alcoholic-dependent mother who he loves intensely but feels he disappoints by being gay. In chapter six, he describes the afternoon she caught him singing in his bedroom dressed in drag as Judy Garland. Later in the book, she pulls a gun on him one day after school. “I can only see us—them—through a diminishing lens, the telescope’s wrong end: they’re tiny, in the impossibly elongated hall, the mother swaying a little from side to side in order to maintain her balance, her eye lined up with the sight at the top of the pistol, lined up with the heart of the boy, who stands with his hands at his side, as if in acquiescence,” he writes (177).

Interestingly, both Doty and Karr describe pivotal emotional moments as though they were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The use of such a metaphor, which appears often in literature, conveys a sense of withdrawing from reality and shifting perception, perhaps as a coping mechanism. Lewis Carroll’s fictional Alice in Alice in Wonderland saw things as too small or too big, and even became small herself after slipping down the rabbit hole. Carroll used the metaphor to explore identity, perception and the changes people go through, particularly during the move from adolescence to adulthood.

Doty’s vivid recollections in Firebird are powerful and significant, but his most effective and meaningful memory is one that is distorted to the point of misattribution. In it, Doty remembers his childhood friend, Mikey, who is teased for being mentally disabled. Doty comes home from school one afternoon to find police cars in the driveway at Mikey’s house. The boy’s father has shot and killed his family, including Mikey, and then himself (61). Decades later, Doty finally learns the truth about this false memory, and the truth that emerges from distortion is the most striking revelation in Firebird:
Thirty-seven years later I’ll have dinner with my father in a Tucson steakhouse, and we’ll set to reminiscing about East Twenty-second Street, that raw, dusty corridor where the wind pushed the tumbleweeds down the middle of the street. He’ll say, “Remember when that woman killed her family?” And I’ll say, “Wasn’t it the father?” but in fact I’ve got it wrong. And maybe that’s why I can’t remember the reaction of the boy I was to the erasure of a family, to the detonation of a parent’s rage: I wasn’t paying attention, exactly, to the facts of the story; I was revising it into something I could bear” (62).
This steakhouse conversation reveals Doty’s innermost truth: as a boy, he was so enamored with his mother that he could not comprehend the horror of a mother killing her own family. Just as Mikey was teased for being disabled, so was Doty disdained for being gay—and the biggest source of contempt for Doty’s homosexuality was his own mother. The notion that his mother’s shame would drive her to consider murder is too much for him to bear.

In a 1999 review in The New York Times, Michael Upchurch notes that Doty tips off readers in Firebird’s prelude that distortion and the correction of distortion will play important roles in his memoir. Doty opens with a description of a perspectyfkas, a 17th-century Dutch perspective box with multiple lenses through which viewers see the box’s contents. From one angle, the contents are distorted. From another, they are clear. “Maybe around some corner, at some angle I’ll finally discover, if I lean into the eyepiece, if my eye works hard enough to probe the hidden recesses—I’ll find them…the family I can’t seem to see through any more direct means,” he writes. “They are hard to approach; they don’t want to be known. Memory confounds and veils them, and were they ever clear to begin with?” (6).

The Power of Suggestion

Research also shows our tendency to incorporate information from outside sources into memory. When we remember something, the information is rarely recalled exactly as it was received. Suggestibility is why judges sometimes order juries to be sequestered. Psychologists Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott experimented with suggestibility and its influence on false memory. Their test subjects were read a list of associated words, such as “thread,” “pin,” “sewing,” “sharp” and “point.” Later, subjects were asked which words they had been read. Subjects often recalled hearing the word “needle” though it had not been read to them (cited in Schacter 98).

In Firebird, Doty occasionally recasts people from his past, including members of his own family, as actors and actresses from movies. For example, his neighbor, Vi, comes over with her husband to play pinochle and crazy eights with Doty’s parents, only to end the evening in some kind of argument. This recreation reveals to readers the significance of art and film in Doty’s life, as well as how the imaginative world of make-believe has colored his childhood experiences. He writes, “Vi is a total blank to me: I find that my memory has completely replaced her with Vivian Vance: broad-hipped, salty and vivacious, quick with a retort” (92).

For Patricia Hampl, the illuminating falsehoods that turn up in first drafts often lead to greater revelations of truth. In her essay, “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl observes that writing from sheer memory is a myth because other elements, whether they are associations or suggestions from outside sources, are bound to creep in: “No memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory” (25). In this revealing essay about her first piano lesson, Hampl recalls how the first draft of her text included a particular music book decorated with pictures of children and animals. She later realizes that she didn’t actually own the book but envied children who did. She allows the book to exist in revised versions of her essay. In doing so, the book becomes a symbol that reveals the deepest meaning of the piece.

If we, as readers, were given opportunity to read only Hampl’s revised draft of the piano lesson, in which the music book is scrubbed out in the name of accuracy, we would never know the significance of the author’s distorted memory. With the distortion, we get a direct line into her consciousness. The red music book is the embodiment of the author’s desire: “Now I can look at that music book and see it not only as a detail but for what it is, how it acts. See it as the small red door leading straight into the dark room of my childhood longing and disappointment. That book becomes the palpable evidence of that longing” (31).
​

Losing Our Places

Absent-mindedness occurs when information fails to become part of our memory because we are distracted, aging or ill. It is the reason we can drive home after work and arrive in our driveways without any memory of having driven there. Mistakes of absent-mindedness can range from something annoying like misplacing the car keys to something alarming like forgetting your identity. Research shows that absent-mindedness is most likely to occur when a person is distracted just as the brain is receiving new information. The distraction interrupts the encoding process, so the new information is never developed as enduring memory. Neuroimaging tests have shown that research subjects asked to perform two tasks at once have less activity in the lower left part of the frontal lobe, the area that plays a vital role in encoding (Schacter 44-7).

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, neurologist Oliver Sacks details the cases of his patients, many of whom have suffered memory loss due to certain medical conditions. One patient, Jimmie, has lost the ability to create new memories because of a neurological disorder called Korsakoff’s syndrome. In the book, Jimmie thinks it is still 1945, that he is nineteen years old and fresh out of the Navy. He has lost the ability to remember events, even those that occurred only moments earlier. Mira Bartok, author of The Memory Palace: A Memoir, suffered a brain injury following a car crash, rendering some of her memories lost both temporarily and permanently. In her elegant and compassionate memoir, Bartok, who is an artist and children’s book author, sets out to reexamine her life. While rediscovering her art and her past, she reunites with her mother, a once-talented pianist whose life has been ravaged by schizophrenia. Throughout the book, Bartok triggers her memory with certain objects, particularly pieces of art or her mother’s belongings, and she uses these triggers to tell the stories of her past:
I held the photo album up to my nose. It smelled like my mother used to smell—cigarettes and Tabu, her favorite perfume—our sense of smell, the strongest trigger of all, the only sense that travels directly into the limbic system in our brain. I thought of my mother’s small white face in the hospital bed, her delicate, cold hands. Then another picture of her rose up in my mind, her hands hovering over mine at the piano—a younger Norma; my mother in the bloom of life, a dark-eyed beauty in a red silk dress, her face unreadable, listening to something no one else can hear (31).
In that sentence, which is long and lovely, Bartok writes exactly as memories come—impulsively and associatively. The act of remembering takes her places she did not know existed until she smelled her mother’s favorite perfume. Her decision to let objects unlock the past mimics the neurological process of using sensory cues to trigger memory and rediscover her mother, as well as her own identity.

In her 2009 memoir, Past Forgetting: My Memory of Lost and Found, Jill Robinson writes about the slow process of memory retrieval after brain trauma. The work, which is based on her own amnesia following an epileptic seizure, reflects on how certain memories are lost while others remain and whether emotion influences recollection. Robinson’s text begins in a fragmentary style—short sentences, short paragraphs. This slightly broken language and piecemeal cognition appropriately conveys her experience to readers. She is fresh from a coma, using her observational skills to figure out who she is and what has happened. As she grapples with finding her place, so do readers:
It is night. Someone brawny is sitting beside me. “Hello...”—male voice -”now have some soup.” He tries to feed me. I can’t taste the name of it. “You could have drowned,” he is telling me, “but you got out of the pool somehow.”

I touch his arm lightly. “This is very patient, nice of you to sit here with me.”

“I am your husband.”

“I know—but I don’t know.” Tears. “If you know what I mean” (2).


​When the Mind Consumes

When we cannot help but recall things we would rather forget, it is called persistence.  In one study, psychologist Kevin Ochsner showed subjects a series of positive, negative and neutral photographs. Later he asked them which photos they recognized. They recalled more positive and negative pictures (smiling babies and disfigured faces, for example) than neutral pictures (such as plain buildings). When Ochsner asked questions about the positive photos, his subjects said the images were familiar. When he asked about the negative photos, subjects recalled specifically what they thought and felt at the time they first saw the pictures. Ochsner’s research (cited in Schacter 164-5) showed that our attention is drawn to that which is emotionally charged. Trauma, shock and sadness can lead to persistence thoughts, and persistent thoughts lead to obsession. 

In My Brother, a memoir about a sibling who is dying from AIDS, Jamaica Kincaid uses a distinctive, cyclical style of prose to explore the complexities of familial relationships and the meandering nature of memory. The book is characterized by disturbing thoughts of death and intense honesty regarding how we feel about the people we are supposed to love. By examining the illness and, ultimately, the passing of her brother, Kincaid also explores her deteriorated, precarious relationship with her mother, of whom the author is not particularly fond. Kincaid’s writing style is obsessive; she often repeats words and phrases that conjure intense images of suffering and resentment. Her sentences are long and rambling, bordering on distracting. She presents memories without context, over and over, in the same way that people retell parts of their lives that are painful. As readers, we understand through her chosen writing style that she is attempting to come to terms with the horrible details of not only her brother’s death, but also of her childhood: “Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love (51).

Joan Didion writes similarly in her book, Blue Nights, in which she describes the devastation of losing her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo, to illness. Blue Nights is a companion text to Didion’s earlier work, The Year of Magical Thinking, which is the story of her husband’s sudden death. Unlike Kincaid, Didion’s prose in Blue Nights is characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs that serve to slow down the narration in a way that implies fragmentation of thought. She repeats certain words and phrases exactly as a troubled mother would, ruminating on haunting memories and pain she cannot escape:
“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember (64).
When she was five or six years old, Quintana told her mother that when someone dies, those who survive shouldn’t dwell on the death. But in Blue Nights, Didion does exactly that—she dwells. She ponders and persists, through repeated phrases and rhetorical questions that convey to the reader a sense of persistent thought. The repetition becomes most obsessive in the last several chapters, where Didion’s writing style mimics the turbulent thoughts swirling inside the mind of a tormented mother: 
The light outside was already darkening. The summer was already ending and she was still upstairs in the ICU overlooking the river and the surgeon was saying she wasn’t in great condition when they put her there.
     In other words she was dying.
     I now knew she was dying.
    There was now no way to avoid knowing it. There would now be no way to believe the doctors when they tried not to seem discouraging…She would die. She would not necessarily die that night, she would not necessarily die the next day, but we were now on track to the day she would die.
     August 26 was the day she would die (159-60).
Hamna Zubair, a writer for the media outlet Dawn.com, wrote in a book review of Blue Nights that Didion’s relentless questioning and intense self-examination give insight to readers about her emotional status. “Enough of Didion’s trademark literary cool is intact for us to appreciate how she leaves a trail of questions unanswered in the wake of her narrative, forcing us to form our own opinions about her behavior,” Zubair writes. “Vivid imagery and relentless repetition do the rest of the work, giving Blue Nights a haunting poeticism that echoes Didion’s inner distress.”

When Memories are Filtered

Schacter’s seventh sin of memory is the distortion of bias, or remembering past experiences through the filter of some other frame of knowledge. He divides bias into five categories: change, consistency, stereotype, egocentric and hindsight. Most relevant to memoir is hindsight, which involves filtering experiences of the past through knowledge held in the present. Here, the literary use of hindsight and the neuroscientific explanation of hindsight diverge; what science sees as a distortion of memory is, for memoir, a critical component of storytelling. It is how writers make sense of their experiences and how they convey that perspective of understanding to their readers.

To examine this type of bias, scientists asked a group of subjects on the day before the 1980 presidential election (which was, of course, held on a Tuesday) to make a prediction about who would win—Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter. Other subjects were asked on Wednesday who they would have predicted would win had they been asked to do so on Tuesday. Those who were asked on Wednesday predicted a much higher percentage of votes for Reagan, the ultimate winner, than for Carter (Schacter 147).  The experiment showed the social influence of knowing the reality of a situation after it has occurred—or what can be considered the “I knew it all along” mentality.

When it comes to writing, however, hindsight emerges as something entirely different.  Hindsight in memoir happens when a writer finds some new element of awareness, knowledge or clarity that allows her to see the past in a more illuminated light—or what could be called the “what I didn’t know then” mentality. The ability to look back at an event or series of events with this new frame of awareness need not distort or falsify the writer’s memories. It need not diminish the memory or attempt to reconstruct the past. Rather, it serves to add a dimension of understanding that the writer did not previously have access to. Once the deeper understanding is reached, the writer can put the experience into proper context or perspective, for herself as well as for her readers.

In his critique of the genre, Sven Birkerts, author of The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, contends that hindsight is what distinguishes memoir from autobiography. Without hindsight, writers simply recount the events of their past. With it, they connect their past to their present, which allows them to make meaning of their life experiences. “The point—the glory—of memoir is that it anchors its authority in the actual life; it is a modeling of the process of creative self-inquiry as it is applied to the stuff of lived experience,” Birkerts writes. “Through its careful manipulation of vantage point it simulates the subjective sense of experience apprehended through memory and the corrective actions of hindsight” (190-1). If memories are the bricks in memoir, then hindsight is the mortar. Or, as Vivian Gornick might say, hindsight is the tool writers use to connect their situation (the circumstances of their lives) to their story (the emotional experience of their lives). In The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, she writes that connecting to story is what reveals the memoirist’s most authentic truth. “What happened to the writer is not what matters,” she contends. “What matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened” (92).

In the first chapter of The Tender Bar: A Memoir, J.R. Moehringer describes his father, Johnny Michaels, as a popular New York City radio personality. Even though his father was absent, Moehringer listened to him growing up, and referred to him as The Voice. The passage reveals the sense that Moehringer makes of his actions and circumstances, but more importantly how those actions and circumstances open to a specific element of the author’s sense of self:
When Grandma and Grandpa went to war over the grocery money, when Aunt Ruth threw something against the wall in anger, I’d press my ear close to the radio and The Voice would tell me something funny or play me a song by Peppermint Rainbow. I listened so ardently to The Voice, achieved such mastery at shutting out other voices, that I became a prodigy at selective listening, which I thought was a gift until it proved to be a curse. Life is all a matter of choosing which voices to tune in and which to tune out, a lesson I learned long before most people, but one that took me longer than most to put to good use (17).
In The Liars’ Club, the author carefully balances two personas. She presents the innocent, unguarded observations of Mary Karr the child with the insightful, discerning perspectives of Mary Karr the survivor. What connects the two personas is hindsight; her voice is in the scene relaying the situation but it is also somewhere floating above, telling the story from a more reflective vantage point. In a scene that takes place at the zoo, Karr describes how her mother seems restless and confined, like a panther stuck in a cage: “Looking back from this distance, I can see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence…Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her” (55). It is hindsight, revealed by the phrase “from this distance,” that connects Karr the child at the zoo to Karr the adult daughter of a mentally unstable mother. It casts the zoo experience in a context that can only be fully understood and appreciated after Karr has grown up, after she has become an adult herself and can view her memory through a lens of maturity and experience. 

In the second chapter of The Memory Palace, Bartok describes a photograph in which her schizophrenic mother is holding Mira the newborn. “If you could see the entire picture, you would notice me on my mother’s lap looking up at her, smiling,” she writes. “What you can’t tell from the photo is that not long after it was taken, my mother tried to fly out of a second-story window” (33). Only through hindsight, the kind that results from a lifetime spent with a mentally-ill mother, can Bartok the adult author truly “see the entire picture.” Only through hindsight can she show that picture to her readers—because without it, the picture is incomplete.

Why Bother with Memoir?

In “Memory and Imagination,” Hampl explores the “little lies” that reveal themselves in first drafts of memoir—lies that are more telling than facts, she says, because they lead to places where undiscovered truths reside. Even Hampl, known for her introspective and honest essays, questions the point of memoir, given the subjective nature of memory. But memoir, she says, is a hybrid form that mimics the quality of the memories from which it is made. It can only be what it is—a personal perspective on why certain events in our lives occurred in the manner that they did:
Memoir must be written because each of us must possess a created version of the past. Created: that is, real in the sense of tangible, made of the stuff of a life lived in place and in history. And the downside of any created thing as well: We must live with a version that attaches us to our limitations, to the inevitable subjectivity of our points of view. We must acquiesce to our experience and our gift to transform experience into meaning. You tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine (32).
According to Birkerts, the literary critic, it is fair and reasonable to hold journalistic writing up to the demands of absolute truth. Newspapers report truth. Documentaries investigate subjects or events. They must be factually accurate. But that doesn’t work with the genre of memoir, he says. If everyone has a different definition of absolute truth based on their personal biases, experiences and perceptions, then what frame of reference do we use to establish what is true and what is fabrication? Memoir is not so much about the true recounting of events as it is about how the author made psychological sense of those events. To debate otherwise is to miss the point of memoir entirely. “Every memoir,” Birkerts writes, “is a more or less successful working out of the old Socratic injunction: ‘Know thyself.’ The pressure on the individual to find meaning—an integrated narrative of personal experience—is as intense as it has ever been, and the need for exemplary works, for vicarious enactments, is, if anything, growing” (190).

If the neuroscience is correct and human beings are biologically prone to manipulating their experiences in order to create and recall memories, then what is the value of memoir and how does this information fit into the ways writers conceive the genre? One might ask, if memory is intrinsically prone to distortion, then why not simply refer to all memoir as fiction?—but such a question is overly simplistic and not conducive to substantive discussions of memoir as study into the genre itself progresses.  Sometimes the truth of memory lies not in its reality but in its distortion, which is something that expert memoirists have discovered and used to express the meaning of their experiences, and with this research into the brain functions of memory, we have new ways to understand the stories we shape into memoir. The effect of this neuroscientific research on how memories are created and how they deteriorate has profound implications for how memoirists come to understand the stories that shape their lives. Writers who understand the neuroscience of memory can use the absences and the distortions of their memories to reveal their deepest truths. Sometimes the story lies not in what we remember, but in how we misremember.  If we can understand that our brains do not manipulate us into deception on the page, we can start to consider the reasons and implications for how and why we remember what we do, which provides new avenues for deep memoir.
Click here for a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Picture
Wendy Fontaine is a writer and professor in southern California. She holds a masters degree in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where she specialized in creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Readers Digest, Brain Child Magazine, the Huffington Post, Role Reboot, Literary Mama and other international publications. Currently, she teaches journalism courses at Pepperdine University in Malibu and is working on her first book, a memoir. 

Related Works

Douglas Carlson
Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner:
​Two Memoirs Go Cubistic

Assay 1.2 (Spring 2015)
Jo-Anne Berelowitz
Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir
Assay 7.1 (Fall 2020)

Philip Graham
The Shadow Knows
Assay 5.1 (Fall 2018)


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        • 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)
        • August 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)
        • Tonee Mae 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)
    • 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)
    • 9.2 (Spring 2023) >
      • 9.2 Articles >
        • Brinson Leigh Kresge, "Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Amy Mackin, "A Structural History of American Public Health Narratives: Rereading Priscilla Wald’s Contagious and Nancy Tomes’ Gospel of Germs amidst a 21st-Century Pandemic" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jeannine Ouellette, "That Little Voice: The Outsized Power of a Child Narrator" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Lee Tsai, "The Figure of the Diseuse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee: Language, Breaking Silences and Irigarayan Mysticism" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Conversations >
        • Blossom D'Souza, "The Imagery of Nature in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet" (Assay 9.2)
        • Kyra Lisse, "Relentlist Women: On the Lists & Catalogs of Natalia Ginzburg & Annie Ernaux" (Assay 9.2)
        • William Kerwin,​ “Life as a Boneyard”: Art, History, and Ecology in One Tim Robinson Essay" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jill Kolongowski & Amy Monticello, "The Mundane as Maximalism of the Mind: Reclaiming the Quotidian" (Assay 9.2)
        • Eamonn Wall, "A Land Without Shortcuts: Tim Robinson and Máiréad Robinson" (Assay 9.2)
      • 9.2 Pedagogy >
        • Khem Aryal, "Beyond Lores: Linking Writers’ Self-Reports to Autoethnography" (Assay 9.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "Carework in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom: ​Toward a Trauma-Informed Pedagogy" (Assay 9.2)
        • Liesel Hamilton, "Creating Nonfiction Within and Against ​Nature and Climate Tropes" (Assay 9.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Late Night Thoughts on What Street Photography ​Can Teach Us About Teaching Writing" (Assay 9.2)
    • 10.1 (Fall 2023) >
      • 10.1 Articles >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Give Them Space: ​Memoir as a Site for Processing Readers’ Grief" (Assay 10.1)
        • Anne Garwig, "Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame, Illustration, and the ​Legacy of Collective Memory of the First World War" (Assay 10.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, "All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out" (Assay 10.1)
        • Kathryn Jones, "Conveying the Grief Experience: Joan Didion’s Use of Lists in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights" (Assay 10.1)
        • Erin Fogarty Owen, "How to Write Well About Death" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Conversations >
        • Beth Kephart, "On Reading Fast and Reading Slow" (Assay 10.1)
        • Mimi Schwartz, "The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 10.1)
      • 10.1 Pedagogy >
        • Angie Chuang, "Dear(ly) Departed: ​Letter-Writing to Engage the Issue of Racialized Police Brutality" (Assay 10.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Where and How We Might Teach Hybrid: A Pedagogical Review of Kazim Ali’s Silver Road" (Assay 10.1)
    • 10.2 (Spring 2024) >
      • 10.2 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Vanishing Points: Memoirs of Loss and Renewal "(Assay 10.2)
        • Lindsey Pharr, "Brave Person Drag": ​Identity, Consciousness, and the Power of the Cyclical in Gamebook-Formatted Memoir" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Conversations >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "On Difficulty" (Assay 10.2)
        • Thomas Larson, "Paraphrase, or Writer with Child" (Assay 10.2)
      • 10.2 Pedagogy >
        • Amy Bonnaffons, "Writing from the Big Brain: ​An Argument for Image and Process in Creative Writing Education" (Assay 10.2)
        • Micah McCrary, "Normalizing Creative Writing Scholarship in the Classroom" (Assay 10.2)
        • Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
    • 11.1 (Fall 2024) >
      • 11.1 Articles >
        • Anna Nguyen, "A Question on Genre: The Binary of the Creative/Theoretical Text in Elif Batuman’s The Possessed" (Assay 11.1)
        • Rachel N. Spear, "Saving Self and Others in Telling: Rhetoric, Stories, and Transformations" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Conversations >
        • Jehanne Dubrow, "The Essay's Volta" (Assay 11.1)
        • James Allen Hall, "Wholly Fragmented" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Spotlight >
        • Kim Hensley Owens & Yongzhi Miao, "Six Words is Enough: Memoirs for Assessment" (Assay 11.1)
        • Elizabeth Leahy, "Creating Space for Writing Tutor Vulnerability: Six-Word Memoirs in the Writing Center" (Assay 11.1)
        • Jennifer Stewart, "Six-Word Memoirs as Programmatic and Pedagogical Reflection" (Assay 11.1)
        • Katherine Fredlund, "Six Words Toward Knowing and Feeling" (Assay 11.1)
      • 11.1 Pedagogy >
        • Abby Manzella, "In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: ​A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand" (Assay 11.1)
        • Peter Wayne Moe, "Grocery Shopping with Leonardo DiCaprio: On Time, Routines, & Writing" (Assay 11.1)
        • Gwen Niekamp, "The Case for Situating Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative ​in the CNF Classroom and Canon" (Assay 11.1)
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