CREATIVE NONFICTION

Lee Gutkind
Lee Gutkind is the author and editor of more than thirty books, including You Can’t
Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction–from
Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between, Almost Human: Making
Robots Think, The Best Seat in Baseball: But You Have to Stand, Forever Fat: Essays
by the Godfather, and the award-winning, Many Sleepless Nights: The World of
Organ Transplantation.

Recipient of grants and awards from many different organizations, from the National
Endowment for the Arts to the National Science Foundation, the Heinz Endowments
and the John Templeton Foundation, Gutkind has appeared on many national radio
and television shows, including  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Good Morning
America, andNational Public Radio’s All Things Considered.   He holds the position
of Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy &
Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the School for the Future of
Innovation in Society. 

Prior to being spotlighted in Vanity Fair Magazine in 1997 as “the Godfather behind
creative nonfiction,” Gutkind was its most active advocate and practitioner.  In 1991,
he founded Creative Nonfiction, the first and the largest literary journal to publish
narrative/creative nonfiction exclusively.  He was instrumental in starting the first
MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and the first low
residency program at Goucher College.  When Gutkind began pioneering creative
nonfiction, few if any university creative writing programs offered courses or degrees,
but he saw the creative nonfiction genre as a way of connecting students with the real
world through what he called “the literature of reality.” Today, creative nonfiction is
the fastest growing genre in the publishing industry and the academy.

Throughout his career, Gutkind has been practicing what he preaches — immersing
himself in diverse worlds for months and years and producing dramatic and intimate
creative nonfiction books about subjects as rich and varied as the motorcycle
subculture, child and adolescent mental illness, baseball umpires, veterinary medicine
and organ transplantation.

Continuing to be an outspoken advocate of the now beloved genre, Gutkind has

embarked on another creative nonfiction journey introducing the literature of reality
to a new set of practitioners—scientists, engineers, policy scholars, mathematicians,
roboticists, philosophers. He has presented his “True Stories That Matter” techniques
to record-breaking audiences at the National Press Club in Washington, to scientists
and engineers at the National Academy of Science, to advocates at Earth Justice, to
teachers and administrators at the Institute for Learning, to scholars at the
International Design Frontiers national conference, to the prestigious Council on
Healthcare Economics and Policy at Princeton University–and to librarians, museums
and creative writing programs—from China, to Australia to the Middle East.  Gutkind
was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA.

I’d Like to Thank the Academy

How a rebellious genre gained credibility from an unlikely source

Many of my students, and even some younger colleagues, think—assume—that

creative nonfiction is just part of the literary ecosystem; it’s always been around, like
fiction or poetry. In many ways, of course, they are right: the kind of writing that is
now considered to be under the creative nonfiction umbrella has a long and rich
history. Many, of course, look to Michel de Montaigne as the father of the modern
essay, but, to my mind, the more authentic roots of creative nonfiction are in the
eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe’s historical narratives, Benjamin Franklin’s
autobiography, Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, and Samuel Johnson’s essays built a
foundation for later writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. 

That is to say, even if the line between fact and fiction was perhaps a little fuzzy in
the early days, it’s not hard to find rich nonfiction narratives that predate the use of
the word “nonfiction” (1867, according to the Oxford English Dictionary)
and were around long before the first recorded use of the phrase “creative nonfiction”
(1943, according to research William Bradley did for Creative Nonfiction some
years ago).  

But in a lot of important ways, creative nonfiction is still very new, at least as a form
of literature with its own identity. Unfortunately, it took a long time—longer than it
should have, if you ask me—for the genre to be acknowledged in that ecosystem.
And, of course, you’ll still encounter people who are unfamiliar with the term or want
to make that dumb joke, “Creative nonfiction: isn’t that an oxymoron?”  

Be that as it may, there’s no real doubt at this point that creative nonfiction is a

serious genre, a real thing. You probably won’t find a “creative nonfiction” bookshelf
at your local bookstore, and maybe it’s not on the menu at Amazon the way “fiction”
is, but nonfiction narratives are everywhere. Newspapers, formerly the realm of
straight journalism, with its inverted-pyramid, who-what-where-when-why
requirements, have welcomed personal essays not only on their op-ed pages but in
many different sections. Memoir, labeled a “craze” in the 1990s, is a mainstay of the
publishing industry. Twenty or so years ago, almost no one was publishing essay
collections, and even the word “essay” was the kiss of death if you wanted a trade
publisher to consider your work, but now essay collections are routinely on best-seller
lists. And, increasingly, even non-narrative creative nonfiction like lyric essays and
hybrid forms have gained legitimacy and commercial viability.  
 It’s not hard to find rich nonfiction narratives that
predate the use of the word “nonfiction”

So, you might ask, what happened? How did we get to this era of acceptance and
legitimacy? The genre’s success, I believe, a gradual process over almost a half-
century, emerged in many important ways from an unlikely and dominant source. I
am not at all sure I would be writing this today, or that you would be reading this in
an almost thirty-year-old magazine devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction, if not
for the academy, and specifically departments of English.  

Now, if you’ve been following my writing over the past thirty or so years, you may be
surprised to hear me say this. After all, I’ve written a great deal about the power
struggles that went on in the early 1970s, when I was teaching at the University of
Pittsburgh and to a lesser degree at other universities and trying to expand the
curriculum to include what was then called, mostly because of Tom Wolfe,
“new journalism.”  

I find that many of my students today aren’t very familiar with the New Journalists—
Wolfe, Gay Talese, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Barbara Goldsmith, and Jane
Kramer, among others—and it’s probably also true that some of the work from that
time hasn’t aged terribly well. Sure, sometimes some of these writers went a little
overboard, like Tom Wolfe, for example, interrupting his sentences with varoom-
varooms and other stylistic flourishes. He was being playful and maybe a bit silly and
arrogant, or it might seem so today, but he was also trying to loosen things up, to not
be as predictable and sometimes downright boring as journalists then could be, and in
that regard, he was quite successful. 

You have to realize that the New Journalists were doing some very exciting

stuff, seemingly groundbreaking. They were writing in scenes, recreating dialogue,
manipulating timelines, and including themselves—their voices and ideas—in the
stories they were writing. Stuff we pretty much take for granted now, but back then,
with journalists especially hampered and handcuffed by rules and guidelines, so
liberating.  

Remember this was all happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rule
breaking, change, and defying the establishment were in the air everywhere, and the
idea of the “new” in journalism captured the tone and spirit of the times. But I am not
just talking here about journalism. Other writers, recognized for their literary
achievements, were also taking chances, pushing boundaries. Truman
Capote’s In Cold Blood, his “nonfiction novel,” stunned and obsessed the
literary world when it was published first in the New Yorker in 1965 and then, the
following year, as a book. In 1969, another novelist, Norman Mailer, was awarded
both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award for Arts
and Letters for The Armies of the Night, about the Washington, DC, peace
demonstrations. Mailer was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1980 for
his intense, thousand-plus-page deep-dive into murder, obsession, and
punishment, The Executioner’s Song, which became a centerpiece of a national
conversation about the death penalty. Mailer’s award for his self-described “true-life
novel” was for fiction, but all three books, if published today, would be considered
creative nonfiction. 
I couldn’t see why this kind of work—which was as exciting to students as it was to
me—didn’t belong in the classroom. In an English department. Not just as a one-off
work, to be taught once in a while, but as part of the curriculum. Why wasn’t
there a category for writing that wasn’t poetry or fiction or essay or
journalism but that could bring the various literary and journalistic techniques used in
all of those forms together into one unique work of art and
craft? Why didn’t this amalgam of literary and journalistic richness belong . . .
somewhere? 

Thinking back, I didn’t really belong either. I had pushed my way into the English
department first as a part-time lecturer and then as tenure-track faculty
by campaigning for this new or different way of writing nonfiction. And to be honest,
I think I began to succeed, to make inroads, because, for one thing, most faculty at the
time did not want to teach this stuff—nonfiction—especially if it was called or related
to journalism. It’s also true I was a bit of an interloper—I was a published author in
what might be described as a more commercial vein (books about motorcycles,
baseball, backwoods America, targeted to general audiences), a rarity in English
departments. And worse, I was a lowly BA. No advanced degrees. But in many
ways, I was also fortunate; during this time, with student protests confronting the old
guard on campuses, I got by as a token of change, tolerated but not yet
completely accepted. I felt like a misbehaving adolescent, rough around the edges and
not yet ready to grow up, learn the rules, and pay my dues. I didn’t even know how to
pay my dues. There were few options. Creative-writing programs, ubiquitous today,
were rare and in many ways faced resistance in English departments. 

Of course, part of the resistance to creative-writing courses, generally, was just the

kind of turf defending that goes on in any academic department, where resources can
be unfortunately scarce. Giving a tenure slot to a novelist or a poet, after all, can
mean losing a tenure slot and resources for research and travel for a literature PhD.  

But I think the resistance to creative nonfiction as being part of creative writing went

even deeper and had something to do with how we define literature. I remember one
particularly contentious debate back in the early 1970s, after one of my students had
made a presentation arguing for an entire course devoted to new journalism. (I’d been
incorporating pieces into my classes, but there was no entire course devoted to the
stuff.) One of the English professors slammed a pile of books—classics—down on the
table; his argument, I think, was that my student should have to prove he’d read those
works before he was remotely qualified to weigh in on the curriculum. Anyway,
perhaps predictably, it turned into a heated debate about which particular works were
classics, a debate the department chair ended by observing, “After all, gentlemen, we
are interested in literature here—not writing.”  

(Were there women in the room? Of course there were.) 

Now, what was going on here? Why didn’t these professors think of this writing as
literary? And I mean not just contemporary works like In Cold Blood but the work
that came before it, too—the nonfiction written by H. L. Mencken and Mark
Twain, James Baldwin and Jack London, not to forget the father of English
journalism, Daniel Defoe. And what about pioneering narrative journalists like Nellie
Bly and Ida Tarbell? I guess I have a few theories.  
First, the lack of a unifying name—what to call it—was definitely a complicating
factor. “New journalism” wasn’t great because (the argument went, in English
departments, at least) journalism was a trade, not a literary pursuit. There were other
names floated—“the literature of fact,” “literary nonfiction,” “belles lettres” (which is
what the National Endowment for the Arts was using at that time). But using the word
“literary” to describe contemporary writing, meaning that a person would have to say
“I write literary nonfiction” . . . well, that felt sort of presumptuous, didn’t
it? “Creative” sort of had the same problem; who was to say what that meant, and it
also sort of implied that other kinds of writing weren’t creative, and that didn’t feel
good, especially to the scholars. And to the journalists, “creative” sounded like it
meant you were making stuff up. As for “belles lettres,” well . . . it just sounded
pretentious.  

Even more than that, I think there was something about the writing itself—and the
writers—that felt threatening. Not just because of the rule breaking. So much of this
new nonfiction was about real people and events and was often quite revelatory. We
were really a no-holds-barred crew. Wherever there was a story we were there, boots
on the ground, bringing it to life—and often revealing the darkest side of things, of
war, of poverty, of inherent societal racism. And revealing our own foibles and
flaws along the way. And it wasn’t just Mailer and Capote and Baldwin who were
writing this stuff, but real people capturing their own lives and struggles in dramatic
detail. The “new” whatever you wanted to call it was truly an awakening. 

Students, undergrads mostly, at first, especially recognized and were energized by the

appeal. Suddenly the doors were open to other options far more interesting than the
inverted pyramid or the five-paragraph essay, and considering these new possibilities
for what to write about and, more important, how to write their stories was liberating,
challenging, and downright enjoyable. Student interest and subsequent demand
invariably led to more courses, and more courses led to more writers and scholars
who would agree to teaching what had once seemed so controversial.  

So much of this new nonfiction was about real people and

events and was often quite revelatory. We were really a
no-holds-barred crew.

I should also point out that as the dialogue and debate about nonfiction began to
grow, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was traveling widely. I got invitations from not
just universities, but also book clubs and local conferences, from Wyoming to
Birmingham to Boston, and met not only with students but also with many of these
“real” people who wanted to write. Some were professionals—doctors, teachers,
scientists—but there were also firefighters, ambulance drivers, and what we then
called homemakers, all with stories to write. They, too, saw the appeal of this
nonfiction form that let you tell stories and incorporate your experiences along with
other information and ideas and personal opinions.  

These folks cared much less than the academics did about what it was called. But—
after the dust had settled to a certain extent in academia; after the English department
at Pitt had agreed, first, to a course called “The New Nonfiction” and then, nearly two
decades later, to a whole master’s program concentrating on creative nonfiction
writing (the first in the country, I believe), which later became an MFA program; and
after the NEA, in 1989 or so, also adopted the term “creative nonfiction,” a tipping
point for sure—well, it mattered tremendously to those folks that it had a name, this
kind of writing they wanted to do. It brought a validation to their work, to know that
there was a place or a category where their work belonged. The writing itself wasn’t
necessarily anything new—people had been doing it forever, if you knew where to
look for it—but now people were paying attention to it, and they had something to
call it. 

And then, a little later, when this journal (now, this magazine) started publishing, in

1993, that added another form of legitimacy. And, in fact, work from many of those
writers I met during those years on the road was published in the first few issues
of Creative Nonfiction. In the early issues of the journal, we attracted all kinds of
writers who were, perhaps, tired of being locked in or limited. We published
journalists and essayists and poets, all of them exploring and reaching.  

All of this did not happen overnight. English departments did not jump right in and
embrace nonfiction; it was, as I have said, a much more gradual and often reluctant
acceptance, but clearly an inevitable—and eventually gracious—one, maybe
mostly for practical reasons. Creative writing programs were becoming quite
profitable, especially at a time when literature and liberal arts majors were
waning. Adding nonfiction brought in an entirely new breed of students, not just
literary types, but those interested in science and economics or those students who
were just interested in finding a job after graduation. Learning to write true stories in a
compelling way could only enhance future opportunities. 

CN sample write-up:

The Hill is Where the Heart Is

The Indian paintbrushes are distinct, vibrant with their crimson

petals spreading out at the end of pencil straight stalks. “Mommo,
did the Indians really use these as 19 of 21 paintbrushes?” I ask,
staring at the feather-like centers of the red flowers, my favorites
of the multitude of wild blooms that spring up every spring and
summer to add their bright tones to the chorus of colors that blur
their voices together and define the visual boundaries of our hill.
She chuckles that chuckle that belongs only to her—the one that I
would know even if I heard it in a room full of chuckling
grandmothers, “They surely might have. They used everything they
could get their hands on.” She stops and reaches down to pull up
some Texas Bluebells. They come up roots and all, showering dirt. She
shakes out more dirt and adds this prize to the wad of color she
holds in her other hand. I follow her as she continues her trek up
the hill, stopping every now and then for more blooms. Soon I hear my
sisters calling to me from the fort. “Hey! I’m comin’ just hold
your horses.” She’ll pick up some more and then plod back down to
her house and arrange them in a quart jar in the center of her
kitchen table, but me, I’m finished with the flowers. I’m going to
play . . .