Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
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Overview
Ever since the term “creative nonfiction” first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. This debate over ethics, however, has sidelined important questions of literary form. Bending Genre does not ask where the boundaries between genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from today’s leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, and David Shields. Each writer’s innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.
Written for the advanced writer or student of creative writing, Bending Genre critically engages the forms of creative nonfiction.
The first book to engage creative nonfiction from a literary point of view.
Contains readable short essays that are accessible and engaging, unlike conventional critical editions.
Contributions from leading creative nonfiction writers: Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, David Shields
Includes an anthology of exemplary creative nonfiction writing.
Introduction
I. Hybrids
David Lazar, “Queering the Essay”
Lia Purpura, “Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t”
Lawrence Sutin, “Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!”
Kazim Ali, “Genre-Queer”
Jenny Boully, “On the EEO Genre Sheet”
T. Fleischmann, “Ill-Fit the World”
Michael Martone, “Hermes Goes to College”
Karen Brennan, “Headiness”
Mary Cappello, “Propositions; Provocations: Inventions”
II. Structures
Margot Singer, “On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False
Document”
Ander Monson, “Text Adventure”
Kevin Haworth, “Adventures in the Reference Section”
Barrie Jean Borich, “Autogeographies”
Brenda Miller, “’Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!’: Courage and Creative Nonfiction”
David McGlynn, “Traumatized Time”
Lee Martin, “Split Tone”
Nicole Walker, “My Mistake”
Wayne Koestenbaum, “Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics”
III. Unconventions
Margot Singer, “On Convention”
David Shields, “42 Tattoos”
David Madden, “Creative Exposition: Another Way that Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good”
Michael Martone, “Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History”
Steven Fellner, “On Fragmentation”
Dinty Moore, “Positively Negative”
Robin Hemley, “Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay”
Eula Biss, “It Is What It Is”
Nicole Walker, “The Inclusiveness of Metaphor”
Bibliography
Contributors
Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about “truthtelling” to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a who’s-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers “push the line,” the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre? Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail.
What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortable-too comfortable-with lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, mis-shelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities – creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. It’s time to shake things up.
Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft...The essays of Part II, ’Structures’, offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay...an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements,montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor...I would recommend this collection to all serious writers.
A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader’s assumptions and expectations of the text--and they do so successfully...Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text. What is particularly noteworthy of Singer and Walker is that their project--much in vein of “queer” and of the notion that writing, like critical thinking, is interminable--remains alive online. They have harnessed the powers of new media to keep the discussion going, both on Facebook as well as the project’s website.
- Title: Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
- Authors: Nicole Walker, Margot Singer
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441117250, 9781441123299, 1441123296, 1441117253
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441117250
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T14:57:48Z
Margot Singer is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., USA. She is the author of a collection of stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, the Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose and the Thomas Carter Prize for the Essay.
Nicole Walker received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah and currently teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, USA. Her nonfiction book, Quench Your Thirst With Salt, won the 2011 Zone 3 nonfiction prize and will be published next year. She is also the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street, 2010). Her work has appeared in the journals Fence, the Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Shenandoah, New American Writing, the Seneca Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has been granted a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.