Sometimes a piece of nonfiction rolls around that, without even meaning to, puts in vivid perspective just how unwriterly a fair bit of nonfiction (especially memoir) can be. In the Fall 2009 issue of Ruminate, April Schimdt’s “40 Days” is just that piece—a captivating, expertly crafted story about intimacy, marriage, and faith, made searing by the periodic remembrance that it’s not a work of fiction.

Source: Ruminate

Image by Hammer51012, licensed under Creative Commons.

“If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?” asks  David L. Ulin in the 2009 music issue of the Believer. “I’ve been asking myself this question off and on since I was a teenager.” There’s no answer, of course, so he invented one.

Any invented record has to make sense as a Beatles album, to reflect the amalgam the band was, the formulas on which they relied. For all their innovations, the Beatles were formulaic as well, building albums that had a standard architecture (one or two songs from George, a balance of John and Paul, and a quick dash of Ringo). You can’t forget that when considering what they might have done.

After taking readers on a tour of post-breakup Beatle solo albums, Ulin fashions four hypothetical Beatles albums. Here’s one:

Too Many People

SIDE ONE

Imagine (John)
Crippled Inside (John)
It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo, cowritten with George)
Teddy Boy (Paul)
All Things Must Pass (George)
Another Day (Paul)

 SIDE TWO

Too Many People (Paul)
Jealous Guy (John)
Gimme Some Truth (John)
Awaiting on You All (George)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Paul)
Monkberry Moon Delight (Paul)

We needed to hear this hypothetical blockbuster, so we brought it to life over at imeem. Enjoy:

Image by Chamko Rani, licensed under Creative Commons.

The good people at the mortality-centric website Obit scan death notices in newspapers far and wide. It’s a respectable mission, especially when it turns up gems like the obituary for “teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper” Nancy Hixson. Want to know how to write an obituary? You can read the entire notice over at Obit. Don’t settle for this irresistible and inspiring taste:

(NANCY) LEE HIXSON of Danville, Ohio died at sunrise on June 30, 2009 … In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone's tea. She often volunteered as an ombudsman to help disadvantaged teens find college funding and early opened her home to many children of poverty, raising several of them to successful, if unwilling, adulthood … She was the CEO of the Cuyahoga Valley Center of Outdoor Leadership Training, where she lived in a remote and tiny one-room cabin in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Despite the lack of cabin space and dining table, she often served holiday dinners to friends and relatives and could seat twenty at the bed. She lived the last twenty-three years at Winter Spring Farm near Danville where she built a private Stonehenge, and planted and helped save from extinction nearly 50 varieties of antique apple trees, many listed in A.J. Downing's famous orchard guide of 1859 … She was predeceased by her father Dwight Edward Wood of the Ohio pioneer Wood family of Byhalia, who died in the Columbus Jail having been accused of a dreadful crime … Cremation has taken place. In lieu of flowers, please pray for the Constitution of the United States. 

Onward Nancy Hixson, wherever you are.

Source: Obit 

Just in time for summer, The Believer recommends eleven essential nonexistent books for your reading lists. Perfect for anyone who’s looking to either not read or imagine to read. Here are a few hilarious examples with descriptions:

1) Fibre Strands of Luxurious Abrasion (nonfiction), by Simon Gaspeth. “Surfaces—cheap carpet, a linoleum countertop after bread has been sliced, wet Astroturf—are what interest Gaspeth, an essayist and lecturer in material culture at King’s College London.”

2) Whole Hog (nonfiction), by Arthur Allens. The author “shows his willingness to stare his meat in the face as he follows a single Iowa pig from his first day’s suckling, through his corn-dosed adolescence, to his ultimate fate: divvied up among Korean wholesalers, makers of artisanal bacon, and an agribusiness conglomerate that serves what’s left of him back to his brethren.”

3) The Men Who Pour Cement (fiction), by Kimball MacAleese. “MacAleese is the great also-ran of the twentieth-century American letters, behind his contemporaries Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—whom he once challenged to ‘write about your own g-damn country, and let the matadors and spaghetti-eaters write about theirs.’”

4) Workshop (fiction), by Nick Lowey. “MFA students writing—and failing to write—form the subject of Lowey’s debut...Lowey displays an enviable judiciousness and a keen eye: a box of cheap wine is described as ‘a store-brand Lethe, a vermillion river of solace and forgetting.’”

Source: The Believer

High school field trips can be nightmarish under normal circumstances, but when your student secretly doses you with LSD, the outing isn’t likely to be fun. Luckily (or highly problematically, depending on how you look at it) John Moss had 10 years of following the Grateful Dead to train him for the experience. Writing for Bohemian.com, Moss recounts how he tried to keep his hallucinations under wraps, and keep the field trip from becoming a tragedy. Here’s a key quote: “Hallucinations were rare in my previous LSD experience, but I already had dancing trees, bouncy sidewalks and exploding flowers. Dangerous signs this early in the trip.” 

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Adapted from image by  Crystl , licensed under  Creative Commons .

For the Winter 2009 issue of The Hudson Review, the quarterly's editors have assembled a primer on non-English works from around the world. This "Translation Issue" is a heady collection, featuring excerpts from seemingly every genre and time period: classics like Antigone and Le Cid up through A Doll's House; 19^th century Japanese and Russian poetry; elegant contemporary reviews on books about language; and much, much more. Such a phenomenal swath of literary history in a single volume can't help but whet the appetite for more translated works (works that Utne, incidentally, has been championing for some time).

Barrelhouse is currently holding its “Barrelhouse Invitational: Office Life Edition.” The DC-based journal invites “cubicle drones to submit your fiction, essays, and poems about the highest highs and lowest lows of the disproportionate amount of time you spend in an Office Of Some Sort.”

According to the hilarious and snarky Interoffice Memorandum (pdf), your account of office life doesn’t have to resemble Dunder Mifflin, but still should have some relation to the official theme. “Barrelhouse understands fully the nature of the flexible situation vis a vis the modern office environment, in that this circumstance is increasingly flexible. . . . Therefore, submitted works of literary merit need not seek to portray said topic in a strictly cubicle-defined locality, but rather should ideally represent the mindscape of The Office in the broadest and most effective terms deemed appropriate for each specific work of literary merit.”

Submissions are due by March 1, and winners will be published in Barrelhouse #8, released in June 2009.

(Thanks, NewPages.)

Americans delight in bashing French movie clichés—the cigarettes! the adultery! the self-conscious seriousness! French films are perhaps an easy target for mockery. Still, I can’t help but laugh at this particularly creative send-up, a bit of one Netflix user’s review of François Ozon’s See the Sea, singled out by the blog A Whine Colored Sea:

Key elements to a french movie - slow as thick snot in January - moral depravity - infidelity - boobs are shown, sometimes crotch - people smoking…

These do not make for essential viewing:

Only recommended if you enjoy activities like sewing your head to the carpet…

Image by Nils Alsleben, licensed under Creative Commons.

It doesn’t sound like much of a paean:

F*** the Narrows. F***Amherst Rock, the gull shit, the Castle. F*** Marconi. F*** the charming little hippy-stained row houses in the Battery. F*** the Battery.  

But to hear author and playwright Joel Thomas Hynes tell it, that’s exactly how he’d like you to read “God Help Thee: A Manifesto,” his ragged tirade about home.

Home, in this case, is Newfoundland, and Hynes finds quite a few things worthy of his four-letter kiss-off there—three pages’ worth, in fact, and throughout those three pages, Hynes never once strays from the bilious style set down in those first two lines. The only things that change in his relentless harangue are the targets, whether he’s skewering “the ignoramus theatrics down at City Hall” or “every coulda/woulda/shoulda-been circle-jerkin ex-high school hockey star.”

If Hynes sounds upset, he is. But, as he observes in a post script to the piece, the carefully directed crankiness also reminds him what makes home unique—a “mutinous means of expanding the myth” of Newfoundland. Hynes has a point: “God Help Thee” sounds like the kind of trash-talking rant you share with friends over beers. There's a slow pleasure in these moments, a catharsis in staking your spot in the place you live.

Image by Greg Hickman, licensed under Creative Commons.

I’ll list everything. My wife passed away 7 years ago. Our apartment was at Bloor and Dundas. I had 2 children who I thought would help me. Instead they said: "There’s the door."

So begins Homeless Man Speaks, a blog started in October 2006 by Tony Clemens, the titular homeless man, and Philip Stern, his friend of 9 years who helps him type everything up. “Tony was aware of the Internet, though he hadn’t used it—or even seen it,” writes Stern in Spacing magazine.

Among the many blogs about homelessness out there, such as LA’s Homeless Blog and Homeless Family, Homeless Man Speaks stands out by featuring conversations between Stern and Clemens, instead of straight news or advocacy information. The collection of introspective vignettes read as if the two men are standing on the street, in front of the coffee shop where they met; the reader becomes a passerby, walking just slowly enough to overhear an episode.

While Homeless Man Speaks has allowed an otherwise marginalized man to tell his story, the caveat, of course, is to remember not to rely on this type of media for the whole story. Clemens himself points out the limitations of the Internet:

PHILIP: That fire you told me about, the one that’s supposed to have happened yesterday, the one you told me about.

TONY: Yeah the one we were going to write up on the blog.

PHILIP: I googled for a news story about that fire but I couldn’t find anything anywhere.

TONY: Sometimes I think that it should say in the Bible that not everything is on the Internet, if you know what I mean.

Photo of Tony Clemens courtesy Jim Allen, from Irked Magazine.

Immersion journalism requires writers to throw themselves into the thick of things, spending months and even years with their subjects. (Think Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, or more recently, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.) It’s a genre not without criticism—some fret about lost objectivity, while others dismiss it as “stunt” journalism—but its unique merits shouldn’t be overlooked at a time when deflated budgets increasingly deny writers opportunities to do deep reporting.

For one, the story that emerges is often different than the one a writer sets out to find. Lee Gutkind, founding editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction and a contemporary master of immersion journalism, tells Fresno Famous about working on his latest book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think.

“Almost all of the cutting-edge research, software writing, and engineering is being done by people, mostly men, and a few women, under 25 years of age. I was stunned by that,” Gutkind says to the Fresno Bee-owned website. “I thought I was going to go meet all these people who look like me, with gray hair. You know, Einstein-like characters….”

You might go into an immersion with a particular idea, Gutkind explains, but after a few months, you have a new one—or a variation on the original. “If you spend another year or two, your idea sophisticates and focuses even more,” he says.

It’s not to say that all writers ought to (or can) adopt an immersion model, but Gutkind’s statement does nudge at a dilemma haunting the general journalistic pursuit of objectivity in an era of quashed resources:

If a beleaguered writer, strapped for time or cash or both, “parachutes” in on a story and spends only limited time with the subject (be it person, place, or thing), then the window for maturing comprehension slams shut. Whether we’re talking about jumping directly into the fray or reporting from the sidelines, without time to make discoveries, vet assumptions, and evolve perceptions, isn’t a writer destined to deliver a story closer to what he or she expected to find in the first place? And isn’t that its own kind of subjective slant, in the end?

Compare that hypothetical to immersive, time-drenched work like Dave Eggers’ What Is the What. Eggers, one of Utne Reader’s 50 visionaries, and Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, spent three years working closely together to complete what evolved into a fictionalized autobiography—written by Eggers in Deng’s voice.

“It was not until six months ago that I saw the book in the form of a whole book,” Deng says in an interview on his foundation’s website. “It was very strange how [Eggers] envisioned events through my eyes. Because we had spent so much time together by that time, it is not surprising that he could guess my thoughts.”

The men’s close relationship roils the traditional tenets of objectivity—but the resulting book, which many consider a masterpiece, couldn’t have been produced any other way. Among various reasons, “because Valentino was very young when many of the book’s events took place, there is no way he can recount his life with a degree of detail necessary for a compelling nonfiction book,” McSweeney’s FAQ explains. In its fictional hybrid state, What Is the What is more truthful than the truth.

That might not make it an objective tale, but then what is the pursuit of objectivity other than the pursuit of truth—a straining toward some kernel of certainty, untainted by overt bias or agenda? Books like What Is the What chart a course toward a compelling new way to tell the truth: one armed with facts, but also rendered with intimacy, subjectivity, and slowly-developed insight. When lack of resources pinches much of the writing overtly aiming at objectivity, it may be time reevaluate what kinds of stories are really cutting to the heart of their matters.

Houghton Mifflin recently published its 2008 edition of The Best American Essays with Adam Gopnik serving as guest editor. The Best American series is always a good showcase of the year’s finest offerings in a genre, and a reliable gauge of each form’s contemporary direction.

While this collection is led, as usual, by standout pieces from the New Yorker and Harper’s, it also culls some brilliant offerings from smaller magazines and literary journals, providing a modest cross-section of the essay-writing talent in the independent press. Pieces from PMS (Poem Memoir Story), Transition, Pinch, Swink, and Open City have all made the cut.

Part of the fun of these collections for essay-geeks like me is to see which luminary they’ve invited to guest edit. David Foster Wallace presided over last year’s collection, and the essays he chose had an immediacy that previous editions lacked; several of them addressed pressing issues like war, class, and politics, contradicting the frequent charge that personal essays are too solipsistic.

Gopnik’s introduction is similar to previous editions’ in that it makes a compelling case for the importance of good nonfiction in today’s literary world, and continues to defend the form—especially the subgenre of memoir—against the too-frequent charge of self-indulgence. But Gopnik provides a solid argument about the universal urgency of even the most personal essay:

Certainly people attack the memoir, and the memoir essay, in exactly the way people once attacked the novel. . . as vulgar and above all self-indulgent. But “self-indulgent,” fairly offered, means that expression is in too great an ascendance over communication. . . .In truth, the impulse to argument that is part of the essay’s inheritance. . . makes the memoir essay, even of the mushiest sort, the least self-indulgent of forms, the one where the smallest display of self for self’s sake is practical. A novelist can muse motionlessly for pages on the ebb and flow of life, but if an essayist hasn’t arrived at the point by the top of page three. . . if the leap into a higher general case, from the specific “I” to the almost universal “you” doesn’t take place quickly, the essay won’t work. . . . Memoir essays move us not because they are self-indulgent, but because they are other-indulgent, and the other they indulge is us, with our own parallel inner stories of loss and confusion and mixed emotions.

Gopnik and the series editor, Robert Atwan, have chosen big names like David Sedaris, Lauren Slater, and Jonathan Lethem to sit alongside relatively obscure writers: Joe Wenderoth, Patricia Brieschke, and the British-Sudanese novelist Jamal Mahjoub.

I’m personally hoping John O’Connor’s “The Boil” makes it into next year’s collection—but I won’t hold my breath.

Being a music fan and a writer, I am very particular about the music I listen to while writing, and am careful to note which artists and albums are most conducive to a good writing session. (This way, if I get blocked or my prose is lackluster, I can always blame it on the background music.)

It appears I’m not alone; many writers give ample consideration to the relationship between music and their own work, and their musings on the subject are gathered by Largehearted Boy, which stands out from the overpopulated music blogosphere with its thoughtful prose, guest columnists, and mp3 downloads. My favorite department at Largehearted Boy is Book Notes, wherein authors “create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books.”

Book Notes includes some big names, like Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Klosterman, who have always made a point of incorporating pop music into their writing. But the roster is dominated by relatively obscure authors and poets (David Breskin, Christina Henriquez, Ander Monson) whose musical tastes are all over the map, from mainstream (The Eagles, Radiohead) to avant-garde (Arvo Part).

There’s also Note Books, which inverts the formula by having indie-rockers write about some of their favorite books. This list includes famously erudite artists like the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, the Jayhawks’ Mark Olson, and John Vanderslice.

(Thanks, Minnesota Reads.)

Image by el monstrito, licensed by Creative Commons.

What begins as a snarky takedown of cell phone culture evolves into a meditation on love in Jonathan Franzen’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from Technology Review (free registration required). Moving from a discussion of the technological developments that have shaped the past decade—most notably, the cell phone—to a careful consideration of the various ways people say, “I love you,” Franzen begins to wonder whether the person bellowing those three magic words into their cell phone in the checkout lane at the grocery store might not be honoring the sentiment’s spirit.

Having garnered plenty of acclaim for his 2001 novel The Corrections—and plenty of scorn after turning down Oprah’s book club invitation—Franzen has since evolved into a prolific writer of nonfiction, navigating his personal essays through moving, humorous territory in two collections, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” is no different, winding from stand-up comedy-style observations on the annoyances of cell phones to 9/11, then taking an unexpected turn into his parents’ marriage and a funny passage where a teenaged Franzen does everything in his power to avoid having to explicity reciprocate his mother’s affection:

The one thing that was vital was never, ever to say “I love you” or “I love you, Mom.” The least painful alternative was a muttered, essentially inaudible “Love you.” But “I love you, too,” if pronounced rapidly enough and with enough emphasis on the “too,” which implied rote responsiveness, could carry me through many an awkward moment. ... She also never told me that saying “I love you” was simply something she enjoyed doing because her heart was full of feeling, and that I shouldn’t feel I had to say “I love you” in return every time. And so, to this day, when I’m assaulted by the shouting of “I love you” into a cell phone, I hear coercion.

It’s this blend of the personal and the universal that draws me to Franzen’s essays. His observations on technological annoyances are astute and just this side of cantankerous, but he injects his arguments with enough personal matter to remind us of his—and by extension, our—humanity.

Image by Ed Yourdon, licensed by Creative Commons.

Baltimore’s Urbanite is a favorite here in the Utne Reader library. It’s a local/regional magazine, yes, but the sheer spunk and variety of its coverage propels its relevance right across the Mississippi. (If anyone further west cares to weigh in, please do so!)

Over the past year or so, I’ve come to think of its reader-submitted “What You’re Writing” section in the same breath as the beloved “Readers Write” section published by the Sun, winner of a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for best writing. We’ve culled short pieces from both of them for reprint in our magazine—Denise Herrera’s “The Purloined Library,” and Terri Solomon’s “I Just Started Smoking. Again.”

This month, I’m particularly taken with Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson’s mini-essay for Urbanite. She begins:

“Turn off the lights,” he’d say—leaving me in the dark.

“Keep the heat at 62,” he’d say—turning the thermostat to the left.

“Don’t flush the toilet every time.” I’d ignore that edict, even if he did not.

My father was not a conservationist. He was cheap.

Read the rest of it on Urbanite’s website.

Can better stories help repair the broken bonds between people and nature? Granta seems to think so and its latest issue, “The New Nature Writing,” is a collection aimed squarely at that goal.

“The new nature writing,” writer Lydia Peelle told Granta editor Jason Cowley, “rather than being pastoral or descriptive or simply a natural history essay, has got to be couched in stories—whether fiction of non-fiction—where we as humans are present. Not only as observers, but as intrinsic elements.”

Peelle continues, “In my thinking, it is the tradition of the false notion of separation that has caused us so many problems and led to so much environmental degradation. I believe that it is our great challenge in the twenty-first century to remake the connection. I think our lives depend on it.”

Select essays from the issue are available online as well as web-only features including photo essays and interviews with some of the issue’s authors.

Image by Sea Frost , licensed under Creative Commons.

My name is Jake and I am addicted to addiction memoirs. So of course I am caught up in the sordid web of David Carr’s harrowing, sprawling, unsentimental, booze- and drug-addled, New-York-Times-best-selling, luridly compelling addiction memoir, The Night of the Gun.

It’s more than simply an addiction memoir, however, and Carr takes great pains to assure himself as much as his readers that he is not simply throwing another perversely boastful drug confessional into a literary market already glutted with the genre. He is primarily concerned about the accuracy of his memory, warped as it is by time and chemicals, and the questions of subjective versus objective truth that both plague and compel writers of nonfiction—issues which seem academic until they arise, perennially, amidst scandals involving fabricated memoirs.

Because he is a reporter—an award-winning writer for the New York Times—Carr gathers as much hard evidence as he can about the hard living he did in the 1970s and 80s while working as a journalist in Minneapolis. He pores over police and court records and interviews friends and witnesses from the era, but suspects even before he’s done that his project will most likely remain incomplete.

What emerges instead is an absorbing tale of addiction and recovery that does dwell a bit too long on Carr's countless bad decisions, recounting war stories long after the reader has gotten the point: he was a miserable asshole. Carr also veers dangerously close to the clichéd narrative perils of ruin and redemption that so often befall memoirs, but always manages to pull away before it’s too late. The second half of the book, tracing his slow recovery, is intriguing for its discussions of the paradoxes of substance abuse and cultural attitudes toward addiction.

Ultimately, The Night of the Gun isn’t so much about drugs and addiction as it is about something more universal: our relationship to our own histories, and how our memories are altered and ablated by time’s inexorable, unsympathetic progression.

From the John Jay College of Criminal Justice comes the new J Journal: a strange and delightful hybrid of literary, creative writing on crime, criminal justice, law, and law enforcement published by the college’s English department. The inaugural issue contains a fair amount of poetry in addition to the expected prose—which, alas, is not classified, making it difficult at times to distinguish between short stories and creative nonfiction.*

One of the standouts in the issue is Jason Trask’s “New Plantation,” a frank recollection of teaching writing to high school students on Rikers Island. In his first week, Trask tries to earn cred by doing a lesson on the origins of profanity, an attention-grabbing routine that opens with writing FUCK, then INTERCOURSE on the board:

I picked up the chalk again and wrote “INTERCOURSE.” I waited. “You guys know this word?”

“Intercourse,” a couple of them said.

“Right. Now is that a bad word?” I asked.

“It mean ‘fuck.’ ”

“Well then, why isn’t it a bad word too if it means the same things as ‘fuck.’ ”

. . . They sat there waiting for me to tell them. I looked around at them. “You’ve got two words that mean the same thing. How does it happen that one of them is a bad word and one of them is a good word?

I waited, but no one said anything. I returned to the board and wrote, “SHIT.”

But this is no Dangerous Minds Part II. Trask pulls off no mind-boggling feats of academic resurrection; for every success he recounts a perfectly human blundering or insecurity. It’s a good story, and perhaps a nonfiction one, if Trask’s contributor bio, which cites an early 90s stint teaching at Rikers, can be considered as evidence.

* I often grumble about this decision to not classify prose, which is shared by many publications in the Utne Reader library, but truth be told, I’m torn. There’s a rigid part of me that just wants a piece of writing plopped down in the appropriate category. But then I have to admit: It’s the hybrids of the writing world that most excite me. What’s more interesting: What actually happened—or how someone remembers it? Is that any less of a true story? Or consider David Carr’s new “memoir,” Night of the Gun, a fully-reported account of his life. Perhaps this band of magazines and journals that refuse to identify their prose are doing all of us a favor, kicking us out of literary ruts.

Image by  dideo, licensed under Creative Commons .

For anyone who ever has picked up an unfamiliar photograph and pondered its meaning, LA-based arts magazine X-Tra runs a captivating column. “1 Image 1 Minute,” curated (so to speak) by visual/performance artist Micol Hebron, always features two images, each one complemented with a one-minute narrative from an artist or writer describing the significance therein.

Sometimes the narratives are straight-forwardly analytical; in the Summer 2008 issue, for example, writer Chas Bowie responds to photographer Bill Thomas’ disturbing self-portrait Rats and Syringes. Other narratives are more personal, poignant peeks into the lives of others. In the Spring 2008 issue, writer Paul Minden describes deciphering a photograph taken of his father in Romania in 1939 (article not available online):

“What’s interesting about this picture,” my father asked. This was clearly a quiz, and I was failing. At 86 he was sharp as a tack, found these old photos much more compelling than his stomach cancer, and had no intention of leaving this world till I understood why this literally pedestrian photo struck him as monumental.

As it turns out, the photograph was taken just hours before Hitler attacked Poland. “Five teens with time for a campy snapshot,” Minden reflects, “with no clue how drastically life was about to change…. This was the calm before the storm troopers.”

Image by freeparking, licensed under Creative Commons.

Literary journals have notoriously small readerships, with only a few venerated juggernauts—the Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, to name a few—standing out from a profuse field that seems to grow exponentially every year. Fourth Genre, published semiannually by Michigan State University Press, is another name that deserves inclusion on the reading lists of lit journal devotees. Trafficking exclusively in nonfiction (the other three genres, as FG defines them, being poetry, fiction, and drama), the journal publishes new material from writers working in a genre that has gained considerable traction over the past few decades.

It’s more than just memoir: Fourth Genre’s website promises “interviews with prominent nonfiction writers, roundtable discussions of topical genre issues, mini-essays by selected photographers and visual artists, letters from readers, and reviews and capsule summaries of current books.”

The Spring 2008 issue features 11 fine examples of literary nonfiction, such as Leslie Haynsworth’s essay-memoir hybrid “My Volvo, My Self: The (Largely Unintended) Existential Implications of Bumper Stickers,” which examines the deceptively simple memes and identity politics perpetuated by bumper stickers. There is a roundtable discussion on “Teaching the Classical Essay,” several full-length and capsule book reviews, and a “comment on the form” by D.K. McCutchen called “The Art of Lying—Or Risking the Wrath of Oprah,” which considers the recent scandals arising from fabricated nonfiction and acknowledges the slippery nature of truth in memoir.

Fourth Genre’s admittedly underpopulated website doesn’t do its content justice; you’re better off seeking out the print edition at an independent bookstore or subscribing online. You won’t be disappointed: Handsomely assembled, meticulously edited, and densely packed with good, diverse prose, Fourth Genre stands as an excellent bellwether for the current state of creative nonfiction.

I first encountered Toni Mirosevich’s elegant prose in the Spring 2007 issue of food and culture journal Gastronomica. “The Prize Inside,” a dreamlike account of dinnertime rituals in her Croatian-American fishing family, was so gripping we rushed to reprint it in our September-October 2007 issue.

That essay and 24 others are now collected in Pink Harvest, Mirosevich’s first book of creative nonfiction, published this past November by Mid-List Press. Having previously published a few volumes of poetry and prose, Mirosevich demonstrates no less linguistic prowess in her nonfiction foray. Her words, above all, seem impeccably timed. She beckons great surges of language with sequences of commas, and then tempers her prose with judicious breaks, periods, and alternations of sentence length and structure.

Of course, rhapsodizing about her writing, I don’t mean to neglect the content; Mirosevich’s personal narratives are touching, often funny, and sharply recounted. In “Tilting” a suitor interrupts a widow’s gardening. Mirosevich writes:

There was a rustling, leaves or the scrape of grapevines on the trellis. He cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to change the subject but will you marry me?”

The breeze died down, and with the question, as if slapped, she revived, her sense of smell suddenly keen, as if she could smell the man who had inhabited the suit jacket before Dragovich, could remember the way her husband’s scent laid on the pillow in the mornings, a mix of cigar and fish and the sea.

She stopped, weighing the proposition. “What you got?” she asked.

—Julie Hanus