For a long time now, I’ve wanted to feature a suite of creative nonfiction pieces that brilliantly showcases what an intelligent, innovative, and high-performing genre this is.
Creative nonfiction can meld great story telling, truth, and ideas into an experience that leaves us marveling at the result—in other words, into an experience that we call literature.
“Is Mr. Mom Dead?,” by Allen Lulu, takes a contemporary social issue, dramatizes it by using real-life experiences, and thus synthesizes the abstract with the concrete, all the while driving home a point that very much needs to be made. Only creative nonfiction, in the hands of an artist, can do all of this.
“Empathy,” by Marie Shield, is yet another marriage of story, truth, and ideas. If the purpose of creative nonfiction is to tell true stories through the evocative strategies that originally developed in fiction, then this piece is a stellar example of the game. What is personal and true is not merely personal and not merely true anymore, but transcendent for us all.
“Annals of Unlikelihood, No. 1,” by Andrew Tonkovich, is not only a brilliantly complex, engaging, and funny piece of social activism, but it heralds what is perhaps a new genre, one we might call meta-creative-nonfiction. It is an ingenious undertaking, and you must read it and see for yourself.
Finally, “Homemade,” by Cherise Wolas, explores the different ways in which love and home become metaphors for the ways in which we envision and create our lives. Again, this is a true story that resonates with all of the drama, introspection, and fine characterization of the best fiction—and in doing so, it becomes, like the other stories this month, the best of creative nonfiction.