Editor's Notes

Abstract

Editor's Notes Shortly before we went into production with this issue of Fourth Genre, the Chicago Tribune (September 2, 2001) ran a feature story by cultural critic Julia KeUer on a new Uterary movement tagged with what she described as the "agonizingly oxymoronic" label "creative nonfiction." The essay, she explains, is being swept up by a sea-change of innovations. Once the most conservative and buttoned-up of Uterary forms, the essay is suddenly striking out into unfamfliar territory, making new claims, questioning old assumptions, and hanging out with a different crowd. To contemporary readers the new essay strikes the kind ofpose thatWaltWhitman took in the frontispiece engraving to the inaugural 1855 edition ofLeaves of Grass: saucy, cocky, irreverent, feisty, and nonchalant. And, like Whitman's contemporaries , lots offolks today are distressed and uneasy, as weU as intrigued, by the genre shift that is reshaping the essay. We at Fourth Genre welcome the attention. We like to think that we are playing a smaU role in the current redistricting ofthe Uterary genres. Co-editor Michael Steinberg along with Editorial Board member Patricia Hampl andThomas Lynch (interviewed in this issue) are quoted in the Tribune story. As responsible participants in the conversation, we'd Uke to respond to a couple of assumptions that color KeUer's take on creative nonfiction. First, the new essay is marked, KeUer points out, by a radical change in the writer's posture, affect, and voice. The "stately grace" and dignity ofthe traditional essay has given way to the "wit and irony," the "preening and posturing" and breezy contrivances employed by practitioners of creative nonfiction. If the old essay was aU turtleneck and tweed, the new essay has what KeUer caUs a "lamp-shade-on-the-head look" that sacrifices "earnest reflection" and "patient rumination" in favor of"wisecrack" and "bon mot." Moreover, creative nonfiction, KeUer continues, is messing with veracity, the epistemologica! bulwark of the traditional essay. Citing Joseph Epstein's viFourth Genre comment that the conventional essay is anchored in "the hard gravel offact," KeUer notes that contemporary essayists seem to prefer "the soft marshes of what the creative nonfiction crowd calls 'invention,'" something that would have unnerved essayists of old. The new essay abandons the sacred confines of fact, she implies, for the profane back streets of identity, self-exploration and discovery, imagination, and emotional or aesthetic truth. At Fourth Genre we feel neither emboldened nor constrained by the claims KeUer makes about voice and veracity. Having pubUshed hundreds of pieces of creative nonfiction, we tend to locate the contemporary essay somewhere between the alternatives that drive KeUer's argument. The work we pubUsh is sometimes graceful and dignified, sometimes flip and playful— sometimes factual, sometimes truth-seeking. The best of these essays reside somewhere in the gray spaces. The contemporary essay looks to us more tentative and complex, stfll evolving, and, as such, hard to pin down and explain. We tend to view the fourth genre as exploring the ground between truth and imagination rather than defying the traditional boundaries offactuaUty One thing we know for certain: there's an entire landscape between hard gravel and soft marshes, and there are many good writers occupying that ground, using new techniques, redeploying traditional ones, making discoveries, and revisiting old places. We take our subtitle seriously: Explorations in Nonfiction. We believe that a literary form ought to live, as Diane Ackerman says of the natural world, "as variously as possible." Creative nonfiction, to our way of thinking, is far more populist than it is revolutionary. We'U take the Walt Whitman of "Democratic Vistas" as our standard bearer. ? The work we've assembled for the current issue carries on in the spirit of Explorations in Nonfiction. Some of it is memoiristic and personal. Other pieces are literary, critical, and expository. These essays engage a variety of subject matters, ranging from the portrait of a grandfather richly grained with baseball lore to a "discourse on love in the information age." Some of the writers strike cheerful poses, wearing their subjects loosely. Others, knowing they are headed into painful territory, are wary, cautious, severe. Despite the diversity ofsubjects, sensibilities, and styles, aU the writers in...