Description
Book SynopsisEver 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. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction,
Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer''s
Trade ReviewCome for talk of the essay in all its formal wildness. Stay for a consideration of the form’s power and politics of resistance. Even deeper and more expansive than its first edition,
Bending Genre 2.0 is essential reading for serious students, teachers, and writers of nonfiction. * Julija Šukys, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Missouri, USA, and author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017) *
As creative nonfiction continues to break new ground,
Bending Genre gives writers and readers a marvelous map to new literary terrain, as charted by some of the form’s most interesting cartographers and practitioners. By turns earnest, argumentative, lyric, playful, and provocative, the authors of these pieces explore nonfiction forms as refuge, as rebellion, as intellectual practice, as erotics and aesthetics, as mode of making, and as liberating community. Encouraging exploration and seeded with compelling readings of familiar and less familiar texts,
Bending Genre is suggestive rather than scholarly, offering a mode of making and a gloss on the meanings made by this rich, shifting, wonderfully hard to define literary playground that we call creative nonfiction. * E. J. Levy, Associate Professor, Colorado State University, USA *
Bending Genre is published into a landscape that has changed so much in the past ten years and will change even more in the next decades, and the essays that are the most convincing are those advocating that we cross, bend and break genre open in more disruptive ways – as writers and readers – and use our creative-critical powers to undo systems that have not been serving us. This book provides a solid anchor for thinking into genre-bending writing, and if readers supplement this text with the reading of many and diverse contemporary hybrid texts, they will experience first-hand how hot genre-bending writing can make their brains, how spacious it can make a heart. * Elizabeth Reeder, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, UK, and author of microbursts (2021) *
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. * Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US [about the 1st edition] *
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. * Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre [about the 1st edition] *
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. * Heidi Czerwiec, Rain Taxi [about the 1st edition] *
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. * Marcie Bianco, LambdaLiterary.org [about the 1st edition] *
Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Second Edition
I. Hybrids 1. Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t,
Lia Purpura 2. Queering the Essay,
David Lazar 3. The Everbent Genre,
Patrick Madden 4. Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!,
Lawrence Sutin 5. Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries,
Kazim Ali 6. On the EEO Genre Sheet,
Jenny Boully 7. Reading Samuel R. Delany,
T Clutch Fleischmann 8. Beautiful Muddied Waters: On Genre and Veracity,
Sean Prentiss 9. Listening for the Sound,
Sejal Shah 10. Split Tone,
Lee Martin 11. Lyrebirds in the Impasse,
David Carlin 12. Headiness,
Karen Brennan 13. What's in Your Purse?: Essays Through the Eyes of a Character Actor,
Elaine Passarello 14. Propositions; Provocations: Inventions,
Mary Capello II. Structures 15. On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document,
Margot Singer 16. Text Adventure,
Ander Monson 17. Adventures in the Reference Section,
Kevin Haworth 18. Meeting the Ancestor on the Road,
Tina Makereti 19. Autogeographies,
Barrie Jean Borich 20. Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water,
Ingrid Horrocks 21. “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Courage and Creative Nonfiction,
Brenda Miller 22. Traumatized Time,
David McGlynn 23. Escapology,
Justin Hocking 24. Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics,
Wayne Koestenbaum 25. A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order,
Ira Sukrungruang 26. My Mistake,
Nicole Walker III. Unconventions 27. On Convention,
Margot Singer 28. Losing Language,
Camille Dungy 29. What the Bottles Know,
Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas 30. 44 Tattoos,
David Shields 31. Creative Exposition—Anther Way that Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good,
Dave Madden 32. This Photograph is Evidence of You,
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil 33. Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History,
Michael Martone 34. On Fragmentation,
Steve Fellner 35. Single Mindedness and Whole Heartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop: An Essay in Many Parts,
Jenn Ashworth 36. Positively Negative,
Dinty W. Moore 37. Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay,
Robin Hemley 38. A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by FeiMan,
Xu Xi 39. The Inclusivity of Metaphor,
Nicole Walker IV. Resistances 40. The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal,
Catina Bacote 41. The Essay as Resistance,
Aviya Kushner 42. Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly
Francesca Rendle-Short 43. Exposition as Resistance: Tell Me the Moon Is Shining,
Matthew Batt 44. The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance,
LaTanya McQueen 45. It Is What It Is,
Eula Biss 46. How It Is: Writing Towards Wonder,
Jessica Hendry Nelson 47. On Not Being Able to Write It
, Wendy Rawlings 48. Hermes Goes to College,
Michael Martone 49. The Convex View,
Karen Lloyd 50. The Moral Map,
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
