The Place of Creative Nonfiction

Abstract

hen Becky received the author's copies of Pink Houses and Family Taverns, her lyric essays on life in rural central Illinois, she was surprised to read the Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data. The book had been assigned a call number beginning with F (that is, History: America) rather than the expected P (Language and Literature). The publication data initially locate the book in 1. Decatur Region (Ill.)-Social life and customs-20th century, with subsequent triangulations via Rural Conditions, Country Life, Biography, and Bradway herself, all of them plausible but hardly in the way a social scientist attuned to the F section of the library would expect. Cataloging creative nonfiction is a haphazard venture, as anyone knows from prospecting Borders or Barnes and Noble for outcroppings of its various genres. Banked along the Idaho Snake River in Standing up to the Rock, Louise FreemanToole's essays and memoirs also received an F, as did Kathleen Stocking's Letters from the Leelanau, about northern Michigan life, and Eddy L. Harris's South ofHaunted Dreams: A Memoir. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is located under Q (Science), while her Teaching a Stone to Talk earns an A (General Works) for 1. Na-