Editor's Notes

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Editor s Notes We are sometimes amused by critics who complain about creative nonfiction's defiance of genre conventions. If the selections in this issue's Essays and Memoirs section are any indication, contemporary practitioners of the fourth genre are forging new routes into subjects that have long defined some of the highest literary aspirations of essayists writing in the past century. Far from defying conventions, contemporary literary nonfiction, we believe, carries on a legacy of the American essay that values introspection and iconoclasm while probing subjects, far from congenial or genteel, that comprise our common, lived humanity. Consider, for example, some ofthe subjects and situations that charge the voices of writers coUected in this issue: the relationship between geography and sensibUity, the struggle to make relationships work (and the hard acceptance that they sometimes don't), and mortaUty (our own and others'). We lead off with Lee Martin's struggle to come to terms with a close friend's awful suffering and death in a house fire. How do we "practice an empathy," he asks, that puts us in the place of those who die? It's a step we rather not take, he admits, "when tragedy's victim is a stranger to us." He takes that step into his friend's last moments by retracing the long lost story ofhis great-great grandfather picking up the pieces ofhis young daughter's life after her mother dies. Somehow, the interleaving and moral reaction of the two tragedies bring him to a realization ofjust "how deeply and richly we're connected." DanieUe Ofri traces another hard encounter in "Positive." She turns over and over in her mind how to teU her patient, a young mother with two chüdren, that she has AIDS. "No matter what poets might say about the power ofwords," she reminds us, "the most deficate and thoughtful prose is quashed by the leaden weight ofa terminal iUness."The duty to speak to the dying about death and the difficulty offinding the words to do viFourth Genre so are also taken up by Jenny Spinner in a portrait of her father dying from pancreatic cancer. Like DanieUe Ofri, Jenny Spinner is tempted to find relief somewhere in the absence ofwords. But no matter how easy it might be to shrug off the topic of death around a man who never took much stock in words, a quote from Tim Brookes sets her on the harder course: "It takes courage to talk to the dying about death, but ifwe don't, we condemn them to gnaw on it themselves." "Place," as a topic for a roundtable ofwriters moderated by Robert Root and a subject for further reflection, is taken up elsewhere in this issue. In "The Enormous Phone CaU" Jane Bernstein peels off the veneer that is often mistaken for place. In doing so, she reveals what one doesn't expect from an idyUic suburb known for its clean streets, good marriages, flaxenhaired kids, and golden retrievers. Elsewhere, Lad Tobin's travelogue into cyber-places shows us how the Internet has complicated what it means to be "present" in a place as he wrestles with the vicarious seductions of taking a vacation through endless screens ofWeb pages. CB Anderson's portrait ofDogtown reminds us how subjects like place, relationships, and mortality can commingle into new permutations and insights. She explores the terrain of a deserted viUage on the outskirts of Gloucester, Massachusetts— once a throbbing red light district later abandoned to a pack of dogs—as a way into understanding her father's travails as age assaults his body and mind. Far from defying conventions, these pieces and their subjects carry on the tradition of the American essay Joyce Carol Oates describes as "springing from intense personal experience . . . linked to larger issues." Even writers like JiU Paterson and Roberta Gates who stretch the conventional boundaries of essay technique are only exercising the independence and mquisitiveness that Emerson, the sage of American prose, had in mind when he challenged future generations of freethinking writers to "insist on yourself; never imitate." We welcome you to spend some time with these and other writers as they decant old wine into new...