My favorite professor, Mary Cappello, is a creative genius. I was digging around (doing archeology on objects and documents in my life in my free-working-time, have been feeling the call to for months now; I did want to be an archeologist growing up) in documents I had saved from past classes, and found one I had titled, What Professor Cappello says about Creative Nonfiction:
"Relatively speaking, 'creative nonfiction' as a category was only recently coined so it’s really only in its infancy, though it could be argued it’s a name for something that people have always been doing. It’s an umbrella term for many different types of non-fictive practice; at its core, it is inventive. In super-flat times, it is a genre that is all about nuance; it is hospitable to competing truths. It invites the movement of 'a free mind at play' (to quote Cynthia Ozick) over and against a pre-determined course; it shares with journalism a dedication to truth-telling, witnessing, and the lives of others. It strives to ask the question no one else is asking. Like poetry, it understands the power of language as such; it doesn’t treat words as transparent vehicles to reality but as worlds unto themselves. Every few years or so, I try to offer a new contribution to the on-going discourse of what we mean by the category. One such can be found in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.
A semester doesn’t go by in which I’m not astonished by the beauty of what my students are able to invent. It’s been my experience that students of creative nonfiction enjoy the experience of multiple epiphanies across the course of a semester, starting with the fact that the essay you learned to write in high school bears no relationship to the long tradition of the literary essay, which is often multi-discursive, meandering, and unpredictable. There’s nothing more exciting than watching a student who previously knew nothing about the genre realize that they can, after much practice, a dose of inspiration, and always, an immersion in reading, create their own work in this form. Most students love the way the genre slows them down and asks them to discover their own meditative capacities. Whether you are grappling with the twists and turns of your own memories, or tapping into the beauty of an abstruse scientific theory; if you are dealing with personal or generational trauma, or seeking a form for your own confusion, creative nonfiction asks you to start from what you don’t know rather than what you think you know and see where that takes you."
To take the Nonfiction "Dream" class with her again... I wish for it often.
