Two professors from the Creative Writing Program at Western Washington State University in Bellingham, Washington have put together Tell It Slant, an enlightening, comprehensive and very satisfying text on writing and shaping creative nonfiction.  The book includes a 237-page bonus anthology of 32 essays by notable writers Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston and David Sedaris among them.

If you are writing prose from personal experience, you will enjoy working with this text and its accompanying website, which provides additional sample essays and instruction.

The authors, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, are themselves successful writers of creative nonfiction, and helpfully, they begin their book with a discussion of what the term “creative nonfiction” means. They introduce sub-categories of creative nonfiction, and they indicate which essays in their anthology represent the forms.

The authors assert that in writing creative nonfiction, you find “a truth … that you want to claim as your own” and you strive to establish “a bond of trust between reader and writer.”  They believe that “nonfiction assumes a particular creating self behind the nonfiction prose” and when “you set about writing creative nonfiction about any subject, you bring to this endeavor a strong voice and a singular vision.  This voice must be loud enough, and interesting enough, to be heard among the noise coming at us in everyday life.  If you succeed, you’ll find yourself in a close, if not intimate, relationship with the reader, a relationship that demands honesty and a willingness to risk a kind of exposure you may never chance in face-to-face encounters.”

Miller and Paola quote essayist and teacher Scott Russell Sanders on the subject of writing in this genre:

Feeling overwhelmed by data, random information, the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos…The essay is a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble.

The idiosyncratic voice of the single consciousness, Miller and Paola explain, is one that uses images, scenes, metaphors, dialogue, and satisfying rhythms of language, just as the authors of fiction do.  “Behind the story” in creative nonfiction, “the individual imagination still pulses, gives the text its heart blood, its language, its life.” However, most importantly, the authors inform us, “The creative non-fiction writer continually chooses to question and expand his or her own limited perceptions.”

 When I teach, writers often ask, “What keeps personal essays and memoir from being self-indulgent?”  My answer is that it’s this attitude of looking for insight, of questioning, of using writing as journey toward finding answers, not merely a stating of what the author already knows.

The creative nonfiction essay becomes a matrix constructed by the writer and filled with memory’s and imagination’s carefully selected contents.  The making of the matrix and the filling of it with just the right contents create an emotional double helix, providing the DNA for insight. But insight must come a bit at a time for writers and readers to absorb it.

In Tell It Slant, the authors are inspired by one of Emily Dickinson’s poems:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

“The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind—“ seems to me to tell us exactly why we need our work to come upon its part of the truth quietly and intuitively, more like a photographer stalking wildlife for a revealing shot rather than a search party using floodlights. Like the surprise in the Cracker Jacks box, truth is always there and expected among the other contents.  The writer can dig or pluck it out and hold it before the eye. The essay must be the eye and hand that finds the truth among the morsels that mask its presence.

The forms inside the general form “creative nonfiction” are tools for accomplishing this revelation.  The personal essay, according to the authors, includes these forms:

• Memoir, where prose derives its narrative drive from an exploration of the past
• Literary New Journalism, which stresses the act of reportage and avails itself of literary techniques and personal voice
• Meditation, which is a probing of events until they yield deeper meaning
• Sketch or portrait, where description provides the ability to leap from surface to essence
• Persuasive writing, which aims to convert us to the author’s point of view
• Humor, which aims to make us laugh

A second category called lyric essays are, according to the authors, songlike and rather than follow a narrative line, “hinge on inherent rhythms of language and sound.”  The quest, the authors say, is the focus of this essay.  It is the asking, not necessarily the fulfillment or answer that the lyric essay desires, and the asking relies on intuition, on the putting together of “disparate images into a ‘segmented essay’ to create a beautiful and original rendition.”  The lyric essay comes in these varieties:

• Prose poems or flash fiction, all under 1,000 words with a focus on a particular image
• Collage essays made up of fragments in juxtaposition
• Braided essays, which are made of two fragments that repeat and continue
• Hermit crab essays, which appropriate other forms as an outer covering—i.e. mock interviews, lists, recipes and traveling directions

These delicious forms are well described in Tell It Slant, where the authors point to essays in their book’s anthology for strong examples. Here is a view into how the selected essays support the authors’ classifications of creative nonfiction:

In the very first sentence of Robin Hemley’s memoir, “Reading History to My Mother,” he announces that we will visit the past: “’Everything’s mixed up in those boxes, the past and the present,’ my mother tells me.” “

In Pico Iyer’s essay, “Where World’s Collide,” we know we are in the midst of literary New Journalism:  “It is commonplace nowadays to say that cities look more and more like airports, cross-cultural spaces that are a gathering of tribes and races and variegated tongues; and it has always been true that airports are in many ways like miniature cities, whole, self-sufficient communities, with their own chapels and museums and gymnasiums.”

Fabrio Morabito’s “Screw,” which is a meditation, includes these words early in the essay: “A screw is morose and circumspect, like oil.  It is like a lubricated nail, manufactured to be mindful of other materials and to get along with them, careful not to impose its laws on them.”  The essay ends, “That profound longing for a more fiery world is clearly visible in the head of a screw, a head always split painfully into two, like the face of frustration or a heart that’s been deeply wounded.”

Mary Gordon’s essay, “Still Life,” provides an example of a portrait with a description of the author’s ninety-year-old mother:  “My mother was once a beautiful woman, but all her teeth are gone now. Toothless, no woman can be considered beautiful.  Whenever I arrive, she is sitting at the table in the common dining room, her head in her hands, rocking.  Medication has eased her anxiety, but nothing moves her from her stupor except occasional moments of fear, too deep for medication.”

In addition to using the text of Tell It Slant, I have no doubt that you will enjoy investigating the book’s accompanying webpage.  Here are specific links to components of the page, so you can zero in on particular information of interest to you:

• Sample essays by students
• Sample essays by professionals including Richard Rodriquez, Suzanne Paola, Brenda Miller, Judith Kitchen, Patricia Hampl, Carol Guess and Andre Dubus
• Exercises from the text
• Information on writing the spiritual autobiography
• Publishing information
• Websites of interest
• An instructor’s manual

Start exploring the links and reading this book, and you will find a valuable new resource for inspiration and help in writing your own personal essays.