ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
  • 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)
  • Archives
    • Journal Index >
      • Author Index
      • Subject Index
    • 1.1 (Fall 2014) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 1.1 Articles >
        • Sarah Heston, "Critical Memoir: A Recovery From Codes" (1.1)
        • Andy Harper, "The Joke's On Me: The Role of Self-Deprecating Humor in Personal Narrative" (1.1)
        • Ned Stuckey-French, "Our Queer Little Hybrid Thing" (1.1)
        • Brian Nerney, "John McCarten’s ‘Irish Sketches’: ​The New Yorker’s ‘Other Ireland’ in the Early Years of the Troubles, 1968-1974" (1.1)
        • Wendy Fontaine, "Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir" (1.1)
        • Scott Russell Morris, "The Idle Hours of Charles Doss, or ​The Essay As Freedom and Leisure" (1.1)
      • 1.1 Conversations >
        • Donald Morrill, "An Industrious Enchantment" (1.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Amazon Constellations" (1.1)
        • Derek Hinckley, "Fun Home: Change and Tradition in Graphic Memoir" (1.1)
        • Interview with Melanie Hoffert
        • Interview with Kelly Daniels
      • 1.1 Pedagogy >
        • Robert Brooke, "Teaching: 'Rhetoric: The Essay'" (1.1)
        • Richard Louth, "In Brief: Autobiography and Life Writing" (1.1)
    • 1.2 (Spring 2015) >
      • 1.2 Articles >
        • Kelly Harwood, "Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders' 'Under the Influence'" (1.2)
        • Diana Wilson, "Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay" (1.2)
        • Randy Fertel, "A Taste For Chaos: Creative Nonfiction as Improvisation" (1.2)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "Why the Worst Trips are the Best: The Comic Travails of Geoffrey Wolff & Jonathan Franzen" (1.2)
        • Ingrid Sagor, "What Lies Beside Gold" (1.2)
        • Catherine K. Buni, "Ego, Trip: On Self-Construction—and Destruction—in Creative Nonfiction" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Conversations >
        • Doug Carlson, "Paul Gruchow and Brian Turner: Two Memoirs Go Cubistic" (1.2)
        • Patrick Madden, "Aliased Essayists" (1.2)
        • Beth Slattery, "Hello to All That" (1.2)
        • Interview with Michael Martone (1.2)
      • Spotlight >
        • Richard Louth, "The New Orleans Writing Marathon and the Writing World" (1.2)
        • Kelly Lock-McMillen, "Journey to the Center of a Writer's Block" (1.2)
        • Jeff Grinvalds, "Bringing It Back Home: The NOWM in My Classroom" (1.2)
        • Susan Martens, "Finding My Nonfiction Pedagogy Muse at the NOWM" (1.2)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Steven Church, "The Blue Guide Project: Fresno" (1.2)
        • Stephanie Vanderslice, "From Wordstar to the Blogosphere and Beyond: ​A Digital Literacy and Teaching Narrative (Epiphany Included)" (1.2)
        • Jessica McCaughey, "That Snow Simply Didn’t Fall: How (and Why) to Frame the Personal Essay as a Critical Inquiry into Memory in the First-Year Writing Classroom" (1.2)
    • 2.1 (Fall 2015) >
      • Editor's Note2.1
      • 2.1 Articles >
        • Daniel Nester, "Straddling the Working Class Memoir" (2.1)
        • Sarah M. Wells, "The Memoir Inside the Essay Collection: ​Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth" (2.1)
        • Chris Harding Thornton, "Ted Kooser's "Hands": On Amobae, Empathy, and Poetic Prose" (2.1)
        • Steven Harvey & Ana Maria Spagna, "The Essay in Parts" (2.1)
        • Megan Culhane Galbraith, "Animals as Aperture: How Three Essayists Use Animals to Convey Meaning and Emotion" (2.1)
      • 2.1 Conversations >
        • Barrie Jean Borich, "Deep Portrait: On the Atmosphere of Nonfiction Character" (2.1)
        • Tim Bascom, "As I See It: Art and the Personal Essay" (2.1)
        • Adrian Koesters, "Because I Said So: Language Creation in Memoir" (2.1)
        • Interview with Simmons Buntin (2.1)
        • Mike Puican, "Narrative Disruption in Memoir" (2.1)
      • 1.2 Pedagogy >
        • Bernice M. Olivas, "Politics of Identity in the Essay Tradition" (2.1)
        • Ioanna Opidee, "Essaying Tragedy" (2.1)
        • Crystal N. Fodrey, "Teaching CNF Writing to College Students: A Snapshot of CNF Pedagogical Scholarship" (2.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "Teaching Adventure, Exploration and Risk" (2.1)
        • Christian Exoo & Sydney Fallon, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of Sexual Assault to ​First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (2.1)
    • Special Conference Issue
    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • Bruce Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Anthony Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
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ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
6.1

Picture

Wendy Ryden

Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace



for Marco
​
A student from twenty years ago who became an accomplished high school English teacher in a challenging urban district wrote to me recently and said: “I miss creative nonfiction.  I want to enroll again.  I need to write like I used to in that class.” He also tells me that he tells his students—the ones who say they hate writing— about our creative nonfiction course and that one of his fondest memories of college is when the class went out to dinner at a Turkish restaurant and, as he describes it, watched the professor killing it on the dance floor.

I want to propose here a possible way of accounting for the satisfaction that a lot of students and I seem to experience in the creative nonfiction class, and that idea is liminality.  It’s natural to talk about liminality with regard to CNF in terms of literary genre that defies easy placement.  Sometimes referred to as the fourth genre in literature, the essay and other creative nonfiction forms occupy a liminal space in the world of writing, existing at the interstices of various genres. As has been much discussed, the term itself—creative nonfiction—is paradoxical in several ways, including its definition by what it is not, the yoking of the word “creative” with what seems like the opposite of the imaginative, and even the implication that not all composing is, in effect, “creative.” Such generic liminality gives rise to similar institutional ambiguity as attested to in Douglas Hesse’s articles “The Place of Creative Nonfiction” and “Who Owns Creative Nonfiction?”  Hesse discusses the way creative nonfiction texts seem to challenge our textual classification systems and raises this point: “Where to put certain books on library and store shelves is metonymic of more complex questions regarding creative nonfiction's place in English studies” (“Place” 238).  The “creative” component of such writing has aligned it with a belletristic tradition and situated it within creative writing domains and pedagogies, while the “nonfiction” element invokes the expository mode, long the bailiwick of first year writing and advanced composition as well as the researched exploratory often situated in journalism departments. Where to put creative nonfiction still remains an active question.  Far from a vexed position, however, we can see this interstitial placement between creative and expository writing—this liminality—as powerfully productive, not merely in terms of genre but in terms of method and pedagogy for the writing classroom.  It is not the definitions of creative nonfiction that are important to the argument I am making here but instead the liminal space where the juxtapositions meet.  Creative nonfiction both bridges and frustrates the divide between creative and academic modes; the personal and the scholarly; indeed, it can function as a hinge between the two in a way that reveals the artificiality of these dichotomies.  Creative nonfiction’s generativity derives in large part from this liminality, an idea of liminality evoked not only in the anthropologist Victor Turner’s classic notion of the liminal but in more postmodern assertions of the principle, such as urban planner/geographer Edward Soja’s concept of “Thirdspace.”
​

In their Writing about Writing textbook, Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs consider the concept of the liminal in their discussion of threshold concepts for studying writing.  They reference the idea of liminality with regard to the learner’s entry into new discursive space:
While learners are struggling with the ideas [of a new discourse], they find themselves in a “liminal” space—a space where they move back and forth, start to get a handle on the ideas, then realize they don’t really have a handle on them.  Learning in this liminal space can be quite uncomfortable because learners have to examine their previous ideas and experiences and try to understand something that might conflict with those ideas.
     But when learners finally do grasp these threshold concepts, the way they see things is changed--transformed, likely for good. (6)
In this model of liminality as applied to writing, the novice writer is akin to the cultural initiates that Turner describes in his landmark work on cultural liminality, and the idea of liminality takes on a teleological dimension as a phase that must be worked through to achieve a new, transcendent identity.  In this way, liminality with regard to writing and being a writer is configured as a lack, one that eventually must be obviated.  The discomfort that Wardle and Downs refer to can be accounted for in Turner’s description of the liminal subject as one who is “at once no longer classified and not yet classified” (96). But while this description suggests a state of lack, it also describes potential, one which we might try to cultivate rather than simply resolve, not unlike Keats’s concept of negative capability, in which one dwells in uncertainty.  (Such tentativeness characterizes the subjectivity often found in the creative nonfiction persona, which the author might use to explore suggestions rather than eristically argue assertions.) As Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman note, liminality is something that can occur when boundaries are transgressed (23), and we are no longer in fixed territories.  It is this aspect in particular that Edward Soja articulates in his extension of the idea of liminality through the notion of Thirdspace that has particularly interesting applicability for creative nonfiction as both genre and method. As students practice resisting conclusion in favor of exploration in their writing, they try on the mindset of indeterminacy that invites this place of generative liminality, a liberatory place that can nonetheless be challenging to inhabit.
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Soja’s geographical concept of Thirdspace can be construed as both material and imaginary and can be described not as an uncomfortable intermediary of binaries but rather as a productive, transgressive site, as he says, “a meeting ground, a site of hybridity and mestizaje…moving beyond entrenched boundaries, a margin or edge where ties can be severed and also where new ties can be forged…it can be creatively imagined but obtains meaning only when practised and fully LIVED” (“Expanding” 276). Soja states that his notion of Thirdspace is an elaboration of Henri LeFebvre’s theorizations on spatiality and cites several feminist and postcolonial critics, bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa among them, as enacting some of the essence of Thirdspace in their work (“Expanding” 270-75).  Anzaldúa’s borderland epistemology of mestizaje, for example, which Soja references in the quote above, captures certain aspects of the feeling he is after in his corrective of geography’s traditional focus on what he calls “First Space” or “Perceived Space” and “Second Space” or “Conceived Space” (“Expanding” 265-66).  He describes Anzaldúa’s radical positioning as “being outside and inside at the same time” (“Expanding” 274), articulating a liminality of plenitude rather than lack that allows for not just hybridity but a questioning of both positions. This last point is key in my elaboration of Soja’s applicability to the creative nonfiction classroom. For in addition to his assertion of a logic of inclusivity in which Thirdspace invites thinking that is “both/and” rather than “either/or” (“Journeys” 5), I see a further prospect emanating from Soja’s rationale—what I would call a neither/nor positioning, a deep skepticism that aligns with essayistic thinking and practice. Far from a nihilistic position, it is one that is paradoxically productive, not just in the writing itself but in the way that writing comes alive, is “lived and practiced” in the physical space of the classroom. This possibility sometimes manifests when my students write about family and their placement within it from the perspective of an outsider, as they try the technique Lisa Knopp calls “perhapsing,” by writing an assignment about what happened the day they were born.  The imaginative leap required here as well as the research students do by reading newspaper articles from their fateful day positions them in a different relation to their family history than they previously occupied, one where they might, for example, imagine parents as people different from whom the students know, parents who were not yet parents, who were living somewhere else, who were not yet thinking about divorce, etc.  The students simultaneously locate that history in a broader context and speculate about events they can never know first-hand. This process of estrangement, of disengaging and re-engaging with their own story, takes on added momentum as they witness other students in the class participate in the same act of reimagination.     

While utopian in description, Soja sees Thirdspace as decidedly place-based in enactment, a literal space as much as a concept. Using a geographer’s material groundedness has particular utility in discussing creative nonfiction because the word geography literally means “earth writing” (Teverson and Upstone 9), a phrase that resonates with the terrain of CNF (pun intended) reliant on what Donaldo Macedo has called (somewhat disparagingly) the “discourse of experience” (18) and a concretized reality.  But this groundedness also allows educators to see the space of the CNF classroom itself as a literal meeting ground, one where the writing that is embodied through lived experience as an imaginary Thirdspace parallels the material Thirdspace of the classroom itself, serving as a point where the academic and other lives of our students meet.  When a student of Armenian descent describes for the class her participation in an event marking the anniversary of the genocide, I observe the impact on other students who appear to be learning about history in a way markedly different than if this information had been introduced to them through a disinterested text. In its assemblage of both student words and student bodies that accompany their writing, this space has particular potential to serve as a fulcrum of possibility, one that is “open” and “dynamic” rather than “fixed and closed” (Campbell 68) as the various discourses and experiences of student lives that might otherwise remain separate are placed side by side in tensive ways.  I find myself wondering if that is perhaps what my beloved student meant when he said, “I need to write like I used to in that class.”

​Much scholarship in recent years has taken a geographical turn in its interest in and insistence on the importance of place and the interdependence of locational ecologies.  We are never “nowhere”; we are always “somewhere”—physically, psychologically, socially, environmentally—and that “somewhere” affords possibilities and enacts limitations on our thoughts, our actions, our choices and their consequences. It behooves us to understand where we are and its effects on us, how we construct and are constructed by location—and to consider pedagogy in light of our embodied presences in overlapping and relational spaces. As Robert Brooke and Jason McIntosh compellingly argue in “Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-Conscious Education,” it is by exploring our “relationships to a place” that we begin “the critical and visionary work of writing for a place” (144) and that “Such work … is at the very core of rhetorical engagement” (147).  They and others offer place-based pedagogy and composing as corrective to a governing metaphor of what Nedra Reynolds refers to as “placelessness,” in which “successful pieces of writing are considered to be those that ‘overcome’ place and time, those that universalize an experience” (258) and, in effect, exist in some kind of fallacious vacuum. While Soja’s perspective undoubtedly is in line with this geographical thinking, I see an interesting contradiction evolving from his Thirdspace trajectory that at first glance might seem at odds with “grounded” earth writing and is connected to the provisional nature of classroom space.


To understand this, I consider further Reynolds’ idea of “placelessness.” Her criticism in “Cultural Geographies and Images of Place” is contextualized in response to a specific analysis of a Harvard University video, Shaped by Writing, that features professors and students at the university extolling the virtues of writing and its instruction at Harvard.  Reynolds’ critique is incisive in identifying a belletristic assumption in the video’s conception, one that relies on a traditional and privileged place of the liberal arts education and that in some ways belies the more interesting scholarship on rhetoric that places writing in active, meaningful contexts. Instead the video portrays writing as a “universal experience” steeped in the “values of a liberal arts education” practiced by graduates who are “products of one of the world’s finest institutions of higher learning” (257).  Further, this somewhat romanticized vision of writing and its role in intellectual development seems to ignore and exclude very different realities of non-elite institutions and writing located outside academic contexts. To be sure Reynolds’ methodology of place, which relies on cultural geography’s understanding of “how places reproduce the identities and power structures of those who occupy them” (252), gives her great insight into the video’s shortcomings.
​

But is it possible that in our attempts to compensate for the fallacy of an ungrounded epistemology, we unnecessarily limit the role of the imagined that Soja’s Thirdspace seems to invite and re-envision?  Is it possible to see potential rather than deficit in a notion of space temporarily unmoored from its place-based constraints to create a provisional, ludic geography of realized imagination? Place-based theories, such as Brook and McIntosh’s deployment of William Least Heat-Moon’s “deep maps,” allow for the abstraction of the psychological and the imagined, what Soja terms Second, or Conceived, Space.  But it is the liminality of Soja’s Thirdspace that asks us to think in terms of a carnivalesque collision of the imagined and real, as we might see in a classroom space that invites students to imagine and re-present lived experience safe in the assumption that it is a test, a try-on, not necessarily tied to lasting expectations or changes but something to exist within the transient classroom sphere.
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Some have seen the practice of creative nonfiction as aligned with expressivism and writing to learn (see Bourelle), thus emphasizing the teaching of such writing as exploratory method (rather than product or craft), one that fosters the development of subjectivity.  While the nature of personal writing itself may produce this effect, the classroom, where such writing is shared, contains the heightened potential for transgressive interloping.  But it is not a space completely given over to the personal discourse of student lives as those might be practiced with families or friends.  In fact, it is because the creative nonfiction class violates the terms of both those spaces—the academic and, let’s call it “civilian,” life—that I see a “critical thirding” (Soja, “Journeys” 5) occurring.  When a student, for example, writes of a gendered double-standard she sees enacted in her family with regard to policing sexual behavior, her bravery in disclosing for class her family secret is not only a betrayal of a family code where she exposes an unsavory domestic truth.  It is also an incursion into what constitutes academic protocol when she presents the problem as a personal, embodied reality rather than an abstract concept. But in writing the word “violate” above, I realize, in the time of “me too,” that it is not a nice-sounding term.  Don’t I mean to say something more pleasant and positive, happier, like merging or hybridity, or talk about the way the class serves as a bridge between different worlds, etc.?  Those nice sounding, community-oriented words.  I don’t mean to disparage or exclude the possibility of community at all, but I see that I want the violence, the edge, of the sister word violate, because it is that “nastiness” (another contemporary expression associated with female empowerment) that brings Thirdspace into play as a transgressive space, one that is not a “better” place per se, but which, in its provisional assemblage, allows us to call into question the tenets of those first and second spaces that bifurcate our lives.  The creative nonfiction classroom is both a conceived space, but also a real space, assuming you are not teaching an on-line course, yet there is something Brigadoon-like about it in its performativity.  It comes in and out of existence—for those times each week when the scheduled violation occurs.

The CNF class is particularly positioned to be this kind of authorizing class that can and should foster texts and lives by tapping into not just the communal, which is vitally important, but also the liminal that puts us in a place of wonderment about where we are and how we live.  In Lucille McCarthy’s composition classic “A Stranger in Strange Lands,” in which she follows a student progressing through the writing assignments of his various college classes, she discusses the reaction of students to the workshopping community that was created in a composition class, making the observation that “… an important social function [must have been] … served by these students’ work with each other” evidenced “by their clear memory, a year and a half later, both of their essays and of each others’ reactions to them” (255). This is no small thing, this important social function, when I consider that many of my students tell me they barely remember what happens in their classes as a whole from week to week, let alone semester to semester. But my hope is that the nature of the CNF workshop can take us even further, in terms of investment, insight, and self-efficacy, by mining the perspectival changes of creative nonfiction.  By inhabiting the liminal irony of the creative nonfiction space, students may become not just “mature” writers—those “able to satisfy … [their] own purposes with a wide range of audiences” (McCarthy 261)—but aware beings who appreciate the ecological range of their enmeshed existences.
​

As I mention above, in describing the potentialities of Thirdspace, Soja says that it opens up the possibility to “At least temporarily, set aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplate instead the possibility of a both/and also logic” (“Journeys” 5, my emphasis). If we add, as I suggest, the possibility of neither/nor logic too, then we have that which allows for something different to occur when all other avenues have been excluding a particular epistemological orientation to an idea.  The CNF class also has the power to take lived experience out of its home contexts and render that experience strange and secular, new and exciting, to leave it not just as it is, but to make it a world to be explored and created. This of course is the nature of the genre itself, but in creating a place where there is a real embodied audience to hear our words, the classroom changes the performance from an interaction with the anonymous audience that many creative (and other) writers have internalized to a vital one that will identify our stories with our actual selves, our embodied selves, that will not disappear once we read the last word of the text but that will remain stubbornly, obtrusively there.  Does/can this happen with workshop pedagogy for any genre of writing?  Yes.  But I think this dynamic takes on particular saliency when we have identified and performed our words as “true.” When students read their stories of love, betrayal, success, death, loss, family conflict, or the “tea cup” dramas of realism, romance, parties, getting drunk, favorite pets, these experiences are released from the claustrophobic constraints of domesticity and familiarity to be constructed, not as transcendent or universal, but as artifacts of our human narrative.  The sharing that changes them from private to public necessarily changes their meaning and significance for the teller when students hear how their stories, whether similar or different, exist in concert with the life experiences of others. When a student reads her essay about her mentally and physically abusive boyfriend, this violence is no longer just a social issue without referent, and neither is it just one individual story.  It becomes both those things, as it lives in the classroom. ​
__________
Soja’s “both/and” logic as opposed to “either/or” that he sees as a feature of Thirdspace suggests that thirding is in some ways about eliminating or re-seeing binaries. But perhaps more than that, it is about providing a means for negotiating the pathology of dichotomy.  And Thirdspace will do this by unveiling, allowing us to see first and second spaces in new ways.  It, Thirdspace, doesn’t transcend as much as it reveals (Miley 67).  This disruptive thing will take existing structures and bring them together paradoxically through dislocation. This is the kind of disruption described by scholars of intersectionality, such as Jen Soriano, who, in “Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form,” writes of “intersectional form” that rejects “homogenous truth in favor of a more complex reality … for the sake of conveying and even modeling new ways of being in the world.” The student who brings her story of patriarchal family oppression into the classroom changes for the moment not only the way she sees her family story but the way we see the “objective” classroom for that period of time, what counts as academic.  It is precisely because Thirdspace may be temporary, elusive—akin to a traveling show that sets up and breaks down—and free from the burden of definitive change that it can open up possibility. (The student perhaps is only beginning to question the values of her family or see their relationship differently. She is not willing to make some kind of permanent break or change with all she has known.)

What this means in the context of a college curriculum is that not every course can or should be this kind of space where the imaginary and the real collide.  But providing curricular apertures through courses like creative nonfiction that juxtapose disparate discourses can serve to help students re-see other parts of their curriculum and other parts of their lives and perhaps contribute to the transformation of both.  While the satisfaction of bonding over intellectual discussion may not always be apparent to all of our students, the sharing of represented lived experience can sometimes scaffold that connection.  As one of my CNF students explained with regard to her experience of sharing her work and hearing the stories of others, “we were more than just a class; friendships were formed there based on the stories we told.”  James Engelhardt and Jeremy Schraffenberger, in “Ecological Creative Writing,” identify this as a potential of creative writing classes generally in the way they can create zones the authors call “ecotones,” those “transitional areas” or “’between’ places” that foment “dynamic tension” (272-73).  Engelhardt and Schraffenberger extoll the advantageous positioning of such courses as trickster-like, able to “traverse seemingly rigid disciplinary boundaries” (274). This is by way of saying, then, that such courses are not luxuries but rather essential, strategic components of critical development based ultimately on fostering that cornerstone: agency.  Students may come to see their education not just as something to be endured or apart from them or, worse, “done” to them, as so many of my students seem to imply, but as something meaningful in which they are active participants.

In their book The Meaningful Writing Project, Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner discuss the ways in which students might experience writing as agentive. They write, “[a]gency is strengthened by offering experiences that get students to notice they have the capacity to direct energies for themselves, in and beyond classrooms” (53).  We typically understand this in terms of assignments and classes inviting connections between what students see as their academic work and what they see as their lives—such as creating literacy narratives or service learning projects—or, as The Meaningful Writing Project suggests, assignments that connect students to future and past selves, or as applying writing to real-world problems, or even seeking outside publication of work. Indeed, this sounds right, and certainly the creative nonfiction class can and does participate in the project of fostering this kind of agency.  But I want to suggest that viewed through the lens of Thirdspace, the CNF class might do something else, too.  Rather than synthesizing the different, CNF understood as Thirdspace, disrupts and elucidates the normalized.  This is a different kind of agency, one that students might not realize they even want—until they do.

Recently I asked my students to practice place-based composing, using Derek Owens’s foray into such writing as inspiration.  In his book Composition and Sustainability, Owens writes about living on Long Island, NY, an apt example for my students who are well-acquainted with the communities he references and the problems he identifies.  Despite what almost seems like a begrudging acknowledgement of his privileged middle-class position, he presents an overwhelmingly negative view of his habitat, the “sea of suburban sprawl,” a view that my students seem both to agree with and resent him for expressing.  Owens is very thorough in cataloguing the natural, historical, and social dimensions of his environment, and he observes that the lack of authentic “public commons, of meeting places, of coffee shops or bookstores, or independent movie theaters or parks” (46) produces a dysfunction felt most acutely by the young and old.

Owens’s piece led my students to take on, with a new-found sense of irony, the ersatz “meeting places” passing for a public sphere that gobble up the suburban sprawl they and I call home.  One student wrote about her favorite Starbucks with a now jaded perspective, seeing its dystopic dimensions as evidence of disconnection and isolation even as the chain tries to project intimacy and creative/intellectual community.  She describes a world where sugar and caffeine are dispensed in an assembly line fashion to keep the alienated and disaffected functioning.  And yet she confesses to being no different, to craving her macchiato that she has been drinking since she was a little girl.  Another student revisits with fresh eyes the annual car show she has been attending since adolescence, describing as tawdry and banal that which is meant to celebrate elegance and affluence.  She wonders, then, what this says about her, that she will continue to attend this event with her family as part of their yearly tradition that has shaped her life. As the students discuss together these and other narratives, considering what it means to call Long Island home, they call into question the lives they lead and create a momentary space, suspended, free from the immediate constraints of first and second spaces, a “contracontextual space” that allows them to temporarily break the sutures of normalizing discourse (see Anderson 66-77) and to create essayistic worlds where the terms of such discourse can be examined.
​

When I think of my beloved student’s image of his dancing professor and his rendering of me that has taken on a second life with new students I will never even know—let’s call them my grandchildren—I find it to be not just an apt image of joy (although it is that) but a metaphor of eccentricity that captures some of the edge I am after here: the violation of space and dislocation where something that shouldn’t be is—the belly dancing body of a text-bound English professor amidst a group of students who have tested their definitions of what it means to be friends, students, colleagues, who in many ways now know each other better than they know their families, or at least differently, who now return to families and friends different people than they were, who bring some of that new self to those places (students tell me sometimes about how they read their essay to family members brought to tears by their revelations), who go back to their classes with a perspective of school that is a bit more wry, wise, ironic but also joyful and invested in themselves and the work they might do.  That, I think is an ideal, a “conceived” space, but an essential one, a brass ring worth striving for.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​

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Wendy Ryden is a Professor of English at Long Island University Post, where she oversees the writing across the curriculum program.  She teaches a wide variety of courses in writing and literature, including creative nonfiction and writing and healing. Publications include Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness (Routledge) co-authored with Ian Marshall and Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (University of Alabama), co-edited with Monika Elbert. She is also co-editor with Peter Khost of the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL).



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    • 2.2 (Spring 2016) >
      • 2.2 Articles >
        • Micah McCrary, "A Legacy of Whiteness: Reading and Teaching Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land" (2.2)
        • Marco Wilkinson, "Self-Speaking World" (2.2)
        • Miles Harvey, "We Are All Travel Writers, We Are All Blind" (2.2)
        • Ashley Anderson, "Playing with the Essay: Cognitive Pattern Play in Ander Monson and Susan Sontag" (2.2)
        • Lawrence Evan Dotson, "Persona in Progression: ​A Look at Creative Nonfiction Literature in Civil Rights and Rap" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Conversations >
        • Julie Platt, "What Our Work is For: ​The Perils and Possibilities of Arts-Based Research" (2.2)
        • William Bradley, "On the Pleasure of Hazlitt" (2.2)
        • Jie Liu, "​'Thirteen Canada Geese': On the Video Essay" (2.2)
        • Stacy Murison, "​Memoir as Sympathy: Our Desire to be Understood" (2.2)
      • 2.2 Pedagogy >
        • Stephanie Guedet, "​Feeling Human Again: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Empathy" (2.2)
        • DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, "Exhibiting Speculation in Nonfiction: Teaching 'What He Took'" (2.2)
        • Gail Folkins, "Straight from the Source: ​Primary Research and the Personality Profile" (2.2)
    • 3.1 (Fall 2016) >
      • 3.1 Articles >
        • Chelsey Clammer, "Discovering the (W)hole Story: On Fragments, Narrative, and Identity in the Embodied Essay" (3.1)
        • Sarah Einstein, "'The Self-ish Genre': Questions of Authorial Selfhood and Ethics in ​First Person Creative Nonfiction" (3.1)
        • Elizabeth Paul, "​Seeing in Embraces" (3.1)
        • Jennifer M. Dean, "Sentiment, Not Sentimentality" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Conversations >
        • Interview with Robert Atwan (3.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "'Did I Miss a Key Point?': ​A Study of Repetition in Joan Didion’s Blue Nights" (3.1)
        • Julija Sukys, "In Praise of Slim Volumes: Big Book, Big Evil" (3.1)
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "​The Great American Potluck Party" (3.1)
        • Jenny Spinner, "​The Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History" (3.1)
      • 3.1 Pedagogy >
        • Heath Diehl, "​The Photo Essay: The Search for Meaning" (3.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "​James Baldwin: Nonfiction of a Native Son" (3.1)
        • Christian Exoo, "Using CNF to Teach the Realities of ​Intimate Partner Violence to First Responders: An Annotated Bibliography" (3.1)
        • John Proctor, "Teachin’ BAE: A New Reclamation of Research and Critical Thought" (3.1)
        • Richard Gilbert, "Classics Lite: On Teaching the Shorter, Magazine Versions of James Baldwin's 'Notes of a Native Son' and ​Jonathan Lethem's 'The Beards'" (3.1)
        • Dawn Duncan & Micaela Gerhardt, "The Power of Words to Build Bridges of Empathy" (3.1)
    • 3.2 (Spring 2017) >
      • 3.2 Articles >
        • Jennifer Lang, "When Worlds Collide: ​Writers Exploring Their Personal Narrative in Context" (3.2)
        • Creighton Nicholas Brown, "Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis" (3.2)
        • Nicola Waldron, "Containing the Chaos: On Spiral Structure and the Creation of Ironic Distance in Memoir" (3.2)
        • Charles Green, "Remaking Relations: ​Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Beyond James Baldwin" (3.2)
        • Joey Franklin, "Facts into Truths: Henry David Thoreau and the Role of Hard Facts in ​Creative Nonfiction" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Conversations >
        • Thomas Larson, "What I Am Not Yet, I Am" (3.2)
        • Amanda Ake, "Vulnerability and the Page: Chloe Caldwell’s I’ll Tell You In Person"​ (3.2)
        • "Interview with Gail Griffin" (3.2)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "On Best American Essays 1989" (3.2)
      • 3.2 Pedagogy >
        • D. Shane Combs, "Go Craft Yourself: Conflict, Meaning, and Immediacies Through ​J. Cole’s “Let Nas Down” (3.2)
        • Michael Ranellone, "Brothers, Keepers, Students: John Edgar Wideman Inside and Outside of Prison" (3.2)
        • Emma Howes & Christian Smith, ""You have to listen very hard”: Contemplative Reading, Lectio Divina, and ​Social Justice in the Classroom" (3.2)
        • Megan Brown, "The Beautiful Struggle: ​Teaching the Productivity of Failure in CNF Courses" (3.2)
    • 4.1 (Fall 2017) >
      • Editor's Note
      • 4.1 Articles >
        • Jennifer Case, "Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction"
        • Bob Cowser, Jr., "Soldiers, Home: Genre & the American Postwar Story from Hemingway to O'Brien & then Wolff"
        • Sam Chiarelli, "Audience as Participant: The Role of Personal Perspective in Contemporary Nature Writing"
        • Kate Dusto, "Reconstructing Blank Spots and Smudges: How Postmodern Moves Imitate Memory in Mary Karr's The Liars' Club"
        • Joanna Eleftheriou, "Is Genre Ever New? Theorizing the Lyric Essay in its Historical Context"
        • Harriet Hustis, ""The Only Survival, The Only Meaning": ​The Structural Integrity of Thornton Wilder's Bridge in John Hersey's Hiroshima"
      • 4.1 Conversations >
        • Taylor Brorby, "​On 'Dawn and Mary'"
        • Steven Harvey, "​From 'Leap'"
        • J. Drew Lanham, "​On 'Joyas Voladoras'"
        • Patrick Madden, "On 'His Last Game'"
        • Ana Maria Spagna, "On 'How We Wrestle is Who We Are'"
      • 4.1 Pedagogy >
        • Jacqueline Doyle, "Shuffling the Cards: ​I Think Back Through Judith Ortiz Cofer"
        • Amy E. Robillard, "Children Die No Matter How Hard We Try: What the Personal Essay Teaches Us About Reading"
    • 4.2 (Spring 2018) >
      • 4.2 Articles >
        • Megan Brown, "Testimonies, Investigations, and Meditations: ​Telling Tales of Violence in Memoir"
        • Corinna Cook, "Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke's How People Got Fire"
        • Michael W. Cox, "Privileging the Sentence: David Foster Wallace’s Writing Process for “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”
        • Sarah Pape, "“Artistically Seeing”: Visual Art & the Gestures of Creative Nonfiction"
        • Annie Penfield, "Moving Towards What is Alive: ​The Power of the Sentence to Transform"
        • Keri Stevenson, "Partnership, Not Dominion: ​Resistance to Decay in the Falconry Memoir"
      • 4.2 Conversations >
        • Interview with Jericho Parms (4.2)
        • "Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors"
        • Amy Monticello, "The New Greek Chorus: Collective Characters in Creative Nonfiction"
        • Stacy Murison, "David Foster Wallace's 'Ticket to the Fair'"
        • Emery Ross, "Toward a Craft of Disclosure: Risk, Shame, & Confession in the Harrowing Essay"
      • 4.2 Pedagogy >
        • Sonya Huber, "Field Notes for a Vulnerable & Immersed Narrator" (4.2)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "In Other Words" (4.2)
    • 5.1 (Fall 2018) >
      • 5.1 Articles >
        • Emily W. Blacker, "Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays" (5.1)
        • Marya Hornbacher, ""The World is Not Vague": Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact" (5.1)
        • Rachel May, "The Pen and the Needle: ​ Intersections of Text and Textile in and as Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Jen Soriano, "Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Conversations >
        • Matthew Ferrence, "In Praise of In Praise of Shadows: Toward a Structure of Reverse Momentum" (5.1)
        • John Proctor, "Nothing Out of Something: Diagramming Sentences of Oppression" (5.1)
        • Alysia Sawchyn, "Essaying the World: ​On Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions" (5.1)
        • Vivian Wagner, "Crafting Digression: Interactivity and Gamification in Creative Nonfiction" (5.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "On Beauty" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Spotlight >
        • Philip Graham, "The Shadow Knows (5.1)
        • Miles Harvey, "The Two Inmates: ​Research in Creative Nonfiction and the Power of “Outer Feeling”" (5.1)
        • Tim Hillegonds, "Making Fresh" (5.1)
        • Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)
      • 5.1 Pedagogy >
        • Meghan Buckley, "[Creative] Nonfiction Novella: Teaching Postcolonial Life Writing and the ​Hybrid Genre of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place" (5.1)
        • Edvige Giunta, "Memoir as Cross-Cultural Practice in Italian American Studies" (5.1)
        • Jody Keisner, "Gender Identity in Personal Writing: Contextualizing the Syllabi" (5.1)
        • Terry Ann Thaxton, "Workshop Wild" (5.1)
        • Amanda Wray, "​Contesting Traditions: Oral History in Creative Writing Pedagogy" (5.1)
    • 5.2 (Spring 2019) >
      • 5.2 Articles >
        • Nina Boutsikaris, "On Very Short Books, Miniatures, and Other Becomings" (5.2)
        • Kay Sohini, "The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object: ​ Narrativizing the Self in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?" (5.2)
        • Kelly Weber, ""We are the Poem": Structural Fissures and Levels in ​Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Conversations >
        • Sam Cha, "​Unbearable Splendor: Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre" (5.2)
        • Rachel Cochran, "Infection in “The Hour of Freedom”: Containment and Contamination in Philip Kennicott’s “Smuggler”" (5.2)
        • Katharine Coles, "​If a Body" (5.2)
        • A.M. Larks, "Still Playing the Girl" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Spotlight >
        • Charles Green, "In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica" (5.2)
        • Sarah Kruse, "​The Essay: Landscape, Failure, and Ordinary’s Other" (5.2)
        • Desirae Matherly, "Something More Than This" (5.2)
        • Susan Olding, "Unruly Pupil" (5.2)
        • Jane Silcott, "Essaying Vanity" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Tribute to Louise DeSalvo >
        • Julija Sukys, "One Mother to Another: Remembering Louise DeSalvo (1942—2018)" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "The Essential Louise DeSalvo Reading List" (5.2)
        • Nancy Caronia and Edvige Giunta, "From the Personal Edge: Beginning to Remember Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Richard Hoffman, "DeSalvo Tribute, IAM Books, Boston" (5.2)
        • Peter Covino, "Getting It Right – Homage for Louise DeSalvo" (5.2)
        • Mary Jo Bona, "Pedagogy of the Liberated and Louise DeSalvo’s Gifts" (5.2)
        • Joshua Fausty, "The Shared Richness of Life Itself" (5.2)
      • 5.2 Pedagogy >
        • Ashley Anderson, "Teaching Experimental Structures through Objects and ​John McPhee’s 'The Search for Marvin Gardens'" (5.2)
        • Trisha Brady, "Negotiating Linguistic Borderlands, Valuing Linguistic Diversity, and Incorporating Border Pedagogy in a College Composition Classroom" (5.2)
        • Kim Hensley Owens, "Writing Health and Disability: Two Problem-Based Composition Assignments" (5.2)
        • Reshmi Mukherjee, "Threads: From the Refugee Crisis: Creative Nonfiction and Critical Pedagogy" (5.2)
        • Susan M. Stabile, "Architectures of Revision" (5.2)
    • 6.1 (Fall 2019) >
      • 6.1 Articles >
        • Lynn Z. Bloom, "The Slippery Slope: ​Ideals and Ethical Issues in High Altitude Climbing Narratives" (6.1)
        • Tanya Bomsta, "The Performance of Epistemic Agency of the ​Autobiographical Subject in Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice" (6.1)
        • Lorna Hummel, "Querying and Queering Caregiving: Reading Bodies Othered by Illness via Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir" (6.1)
        • Laura Valeri, "Tell Tale Interviews: Lessons in True-Life Trauma Narratives Gleaned from ​Jennifer Fox’s The Tale" (6.1)
        • Arianne Zwartjes​, "Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Conversations >
        • Tracy Floreani, "​"Sewing and Telling": On Textile as Story" (6.1)
        • Tessa Fontaine, "The Limits of Perception: Trust Techniques in Nonfiction" (6.1)
        • Patrick Madden, "​Once More to 'His Last Game'" (6.1) >
          • Brian Doyle, "Twice More to the Lake" (6.1)
        • Randon Billings Noble, "The Sitting" (6.1)
        • Donna Steiner, "Serving Size: On Hunger and Delight" (6.1)
        • Natalie Villacorta, "Autofiction: Rightly Shaped for Woman’s Use" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Tribute to Ned Stuckey-French >
        • Marcia Aldrich, "The Book Reviewer" (6.1)
        • Bob Cowser, "Meeting Bobby Kennedy" (6.1)
        • Sonya Huber, "Working and Trying" (6.1)
        • Carl H. Klaus, "On Ned Stuckey-French and Essayists on the Essay" (6.1)
        • Robert Root, "On The American Essay in the American Century" (6.1)
      • 6.1 Pedagogy >
        • John Currie, "​The Naïve Narrator in Student-Authored Environmental Writing" (6.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "The Humble Essayist's Paragraph of the Week: A Discipline of the Heart and Mind" (6.1)
        • Reagan Nail Henderson, "Make Me Care!: Creating Digital Narratives in the Composition Classroom" (6.1)
        • Abriana Jetté, "Making Meaning: Authority, Authorship, and the Introduction to Creative Writing Syllabus" (6.1)
        • Jessie Male, "Teaching Lucy Grealy’s “Mirrorings” and the Importance of Disability Studies Pedagogy in Composition Classrooms" (6.1)
        • Wendy Ryden, "Liminally True: Creative Nonfiction as Transformative Thirdspace" (6.1)
    • 6.2 (Spring 2020) >
      • Guest Editor's Note to the Special Issue
      • 6.2 Articles >
        • Maral Aktokmakyan, "Revisioning Gendered Reality in ​Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era: Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life"
        • Manisha Basu, "Regimes of Reality: ​Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men"
        • Stefanie El Madawi, "Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale"
        • Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz, "Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other: Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown"
      • 6.2 Conversations >
        • Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, "Daughter(s) of Rubanga: An Author, a Student, and Other Stories in Between"
        • Victoria Brown, "How We Write When We Write About Life: Caribbean Nonfiction Resisting the Voyeur"
        • David Griffith, "Wrecking the Disimagination Machine"
        • Stacey Waite, "Coming Out With the Truth"
      • Tribute to Michael Steinberg >
        • Jessica Handler, "Notes on Mike Steinberg"
        • Joe Mackall, "Remembering Mike Steinberg: On the Diamond and at the Desk"
        • Laura Julier, "Making Space"
      • 6.2 Pedagogy >
        • Jens Lloyd, "Truthful Inadequacies: Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches"
        • George H. Jensen, "Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
        • Gregory Stephens, "Footnotes from the ‘Margins’: Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico"
    • 7.1 (Fall 2020) >
      • 7.1 Articles >
        • Jo-Anne Berelowitz, "Mourning and Melancholia in Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Carlos Cunha, "On the Chronicle" (Assay 7.1)
        • Bruce Owens Grimm, "Haunted Memoir" (Assay 7.1)
        • Colleen Hennessy, "Irish Motherhood in Irish Nonfiction: Abortion and Agency" (Assay 7.1)
        • James Perrin Warren, "Underland: Reading with Robert Macfarlane" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Conversations >
        • Alex Brostoff, ""What are we going to do with our proximity, baby!?" ​ A Reply in Multiples of The Hundreds" (Assay 7.1)
        • Steven Harvey, "Lyric Memory: A Guide to the Mnemonics of Nonfiction" (Assay 7.1)
        • Lisa Low, "Proleptic Strategies in Race-Based Essays: Jordan K. Thomas, Rita Banerjee, and Durga Chew-Bose" (Assay 7.1)
        • Nicole Walker, "The Concrete Poetry of Ander Monson’s Essays" (Assay 7.1)
      • 7.1 Pedagogy >
        • Audrey T. Heffers, "Positionality and Experience in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • James McAdams, "Ars Poetica, Ars Media, Ars COVID-19: Creative Writing in the Medical Classroom" (Assay 7.1)
        • Freesia McKee, "Feedback as Fan Letter" (Assay 7.1)
        • Anthony Moll, "Teaching and Writing True Stories Through ​Feminist, Womanist and Black Feminist Epistemologies" (Assay 7.1)
        • Jill Stukenberg, "“Inspiration in the Drop of Ink”: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Observations in Introduction to Creative Writing" (Assay 7.1)
    • 7.2 (Spring 2021) >
      • 7.2 Articles >
        • Whitney Brown, "Melting Ice and Disappointing Whale Hunts: A Climate-Focused Review of Contemporary Travel Writing" (Assay 7.2)
        • George Estreich, "Ross Gay’s Logics of Delight" (Assay 7.2)
        • Wes Jamison, "'You Are Absent': The Pronoun of Address in Nonfiction" (Assay 7.2)
        • Zachary Ostraff, "The Lyric Essay as a Form of Counterpoetics" (Assay 7.2)
        • Kara Zivin, "Interrogating Patterns: Meandering, Spiraling, and Exploding through ​The Two Kinds of Decay" (Assay 7.2)
      • 7.2 Conversations >
        • Sarah Minor
        • David Shields
      • 7.2 Pedagogy >
        • Megan Baxter, "On Teaching Brian Doyle’s “Leap” to Students Born After 9/11" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Case, "'Toward a New, Broader Perspective': Place-Based Pedagogy and the Narrative Interview"
        • Kelly K. Ferguson, "Cribbing Palpatine’s Syllabus: Or, What Professoring for the Evil Empire Taught Me ​About Instructional Design" (Assay 7.2)
        • Jennifer Pullen, "Seeking Joy in the Classroom: Nature Writing in 2020" (Assay 7.2)
    • 8.1 (Fall 2021) >
      • 8.1 Articles >
        • Allison Ellis, "Nonfiction Ghost Hunting" (Assay 8.1)
        • Lisa Levy, "We Are All Modern: Exploring the Vagaries of Consciousness in 20th & 21st Century Biography and Life Writing" (Assay 8.1)
        • Ashley Espinoza, "A las Mujeres: Hybrid Identities in Latina Memoir" (Assay 8.1)
        • Cherie Nelson, "The Slippery Self: Intertextuality in Lauren Slater’s Lying" (Assay 8.1)
        • Amie Souza Reilly, "Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Conversations >
        • Amy Bowers, "The Elegiac Chalkboard in Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”" (Assay 8.1)
        • Theresa Goenner, "​The Mania of Language: Robert Vivian's Dervish Essay" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kathryn Nuernberger, "Writing Women’s Histories" (Assay 8.1)
        • Louisa McCullough, "The Case for In-Person Conversation" (Assay 8.1)
        • Kat Moore, "Rupture in Time (and Language): Hybridity in Kathy Acker’s Essays" (Assay 8.1)
      • 8.1 Pedagogy >
        • Mike Catron, "There’s No Such Thing as Too Much of Jason Sheehan’s “There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Barbecue”: ​A Pedagogical Discussion" (Assay 8.1)
        • Brooke Covington, "Ars Media: A Toolkit for Narrative Medicine in Writing Classrooms" (Assay 8.1)
        • W. Scott Olsen, "​A Desire for Stories" (Assay 8.1)
        • C.S. Weisenthal, "​Seed Stories: Pitched into the Digital Archive" (Assay 8.1)
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