Oftentimes, at the end of a long day of manuscript sorting high up in the Brevity corporate towers, we will push back our chairs, throw some Miles Davis onto the big speakers, pour small offerings of Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon, and wonder at people who have trouble defining creative nonfiction. “Really,” we might say to one another. “It’s not a mystery.  What we do is pretty straightforward.  Can you pass the Blanton’s, Mr. Jeeves?”

So we were pleased when running across poet/memoirist/blog-provocateur Steve Fellner’s discussion of definitions on his blog Pansy Poetics. Here’s a bit, but the entire post is worth reading as well.

I tell (my students) they need to break up the word. Creative. Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction=The Real=Autobiographical Experience and/or Texts and/or History=”The Content” of the Piece

For the “Creative” aspect of the definition, they need to ask the question, “Where would the author locate his artistry in the piece?”, “What special formal strategies does she employ?” (ie point-of-view, diction, organization, etc.”)

“That’s why,” I say, “Journalism and diary writing cannot be creative non-fiction. There’s nothing inherently special about its formal strategies. It’s simply meant to convey. To an audience. Or to oneself. It’s not meant to convey in a way that is special or artistic.”

Of course, there are an infinite number of ways to deconstruct this definition. (Even though I think it’s pretty good.)

The endless battles about this definition as a result of that can go on and on.

But it offers a starting point rather than simply raising your hands in the air, and offering nothing except to claim no one can pin it down, that it transgresses boundaries and refuses to be defined. Of course, it refuses to be defined; that’s why we’ve become writers, to fumble our way towards a useless, necessary naming.

You can imagine our excitement last week when Brenda Miller, author of so many beautiful Brevity essays and craft pieces (see here and here and here and here) dropped by the Brevity corporate offices last week as part of her visit to Ohio University’s BA, MA, and PhD in Creative Writing Program.  Brenda gave a wonderful reading from her newest collection, Blessing of the Animals.

Just today, we ran across a fine interview with Brenda in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Q: How much distance do you need from a topic to write elegantly and clearly about it?

A: It depends. For certain things, I still don’t have enough distance, even though the events may have happened thirty years ago. For others, I write about them as they’re happening. In either case, I don’t think it’s the literal time, but the mind’s perspective on the topic or event that creates enough breathing room for something literary to happen on the page. Also: form. If you find the right form, or voice, for a piece, it can provide just the “container” you need for whatever the topic might be. And some of my essays span quite a bit of time; so I might start off by writing about an image from my childhood, which leads me to something quite close in the present day; once I’m on that train I’m not going to jump off.

You can read the full interview here.

Kenyon Review editor David Lynn has a thoughtful post on the KROnline Blog about the debate between online and print.  What we like about David’s discussion is that he is honest about what worries many writers, especially those facing tenure or promotion in traditional English programs, but he also acknowledges that new technology and new media tend to win out in the end.

Having just finished a new short story, Lynn is considering whether he wants to send it to a more traditional paper-and-ink magazine — such as the one he edits and values so highly — or to an online journal:

Another possibility would be, as I’ve mentioned, to send the new story to any one of the dozens of electronic journals burgeoning on the Internet. But what would it mean for me to abandon print? Less status? Not least foregoing the tactile pleasure of holding the printed thing itself in my hand? How much is that worth?

I set out the questions this way to make the point that this is not merely a hypothetical: something precious to me as a writer is on the line. Because, of course, there’s the larger issue as well: what does the relationship between the print Kenyon Review and the electronic KROnline mean for the writing community? Should authors be as willing — more than merely willing, should they be as happy and enthusiastic — for their work to appear in our online journal as in print?

You can read the entirety of David Lynn’s post here.

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Well that’s a mouthful, but so is the title of Dave Egger’s annual anthology of Best American Nonrequired Reading.  We’re only attempting to say nonrequired notable three times real fast because we want to congratulate John Griswold whose Brevity essay “Three Graces” was listed among the notable nonrequired works of 2009.

Heck, we actually think it should be required, but we’re happy for John and happy to see Brevity getting the notice all the same.

Here’s the opening to “Three Graces” and a link to the rest.

Three Graces

By John Griswold

In the Sunflower Café the waitresses sat down in booths with elderly customers and watched them shuffle photos of grandkids like decks of cards, as if looking for a good hand. Some early retirees—robust, tanned, and laughing — described the waitresses to me as “booze hags.”

The women’s hands shook as they poured coffee. They moved round each other in a practiced dance, hollered obscene jokes over the din, ministered with buttered toast. Three of them said they’d drop by to see my dad on their way out to the bars. They’d be off at two but were going to someone’s house to shower and change first.

Read the Rest Of John’s Essay

Three new items for a Sunday morning.  Click the highlighted headings for more information on each one:

A Contest

Announcing the 2009 New Delta Review Creative Nonfiction Contest, judged by Peggy Shinner. NDR seeks pieces that activate the compelling bits of “real” life. We welcome hybrid essays, ones that expose the insides of things to risk making language do new things. Personal essays are welcome, too. Use a slice of memoir, but use also a dose of self-awareness. Autobiographical moments which are digested and used to engage the reader, not prove something to the reader, delight us.  Prize: $150 and publication in New Delta Review. Finalists will be considered for publication.  $10 submission fee includes option to purchase discounted two-issue subscription to NDR for an additional $10.

An Interesting Article About Brief Content

The new brevity has many virtues … It may seem as if we have entered a nightmarish attention-deficit culture, but the situation is not nearly as gloomy as you have been told. Our culture of the short bit is making human minds more rather than less powerful.  The arrival of virtually every new cultural medium has been greeted with the charge that it truncates attention spans and represents the beginning of cultural collapse—the novel (in the 18th century), the comic book, rock ‘n’ roll, television, and now the Web. In fact, there has never been a golden age of all-wise, all-attentive readers. But that’s not to say that nothing has changed. The mass migration of intellectual activity from print to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information.

An Article on Sherman Alexie, Contributor to Brevity 31

From The New York Times:

He likes to talk about his writing as a responsibility and admits that it can, at times, feel like a burden. He recalled that in 1992, when The New York Times Book Review assessed the state of American Indian literature and declared his debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” “one of the major lyric voices of our times,” he promptly went into the bathroom and vomited.

“I’ll write whatever’s going well for a few months at a time and move around from poetry to stories to the novel to a movie script,” he said. “I’ll write 150 pages in three or four days, and maybe I’ll scrap it all because it’s terrible, or it’ll become four lines of a poem.”

The broad portfolio is another thing Mr. Alexie sees as part of his mission. “I can’t think of any younger Indian writers who are multi-genre like I am,” he said. “In fact, it seems like most of them are poets. And besides Louise Erdrich, I feel like the only one who’s not a college professor. Where are the Indian mystery writers and romance novelists?”

In our effort to seem young and jazzy, the Brevity editorial team hangs out on Facebook way too much.  Along the way though, we noticed that former Mid-American Review nonfiction editor Karen Babine had posted a thoughtful, personal reaction to the latest Best  American Essays volume, edited by Mary Oliver.  We like her enthusiasm (as a reader and a teacher) toward the BAE series, so we asked Karen if we could post her Facebook review to Brevity as a bonus between-issues book review, and we did, and we hope to spark some discussion here.  If you want to comment, go ahead and comment here, or if you have your own review of BAE 2009, send it to us for the blog.

Here’s an excerpt from Karen’s full review:

When my 2009 Best American Essays arrived and it was only half the thickness of my Best American Travel Writing, I frowned at it. What is this? Where’s the rest of my book? But I sat down on the couch with it and my highlighter and did what I always do: I flip to the back and check out the Notables, because this is where I think the neat stuff is happening. I highlight people I know or magazines I really like. My highlight was back in 2003, when my brother-in-all-but-blood Matt had an essay in the Notables. This time around, there were quite a few names I recognized and that thrills me as much as anything else about my BAE.

Here’s my overall impression of this collection: well done. I’ve got a fairly specific aesthetic, one that likes to see essays not only work through an idea, but I want to be able to see the author’s brain on the page working through the idea. But there has to be more than that. I want the author’s work to illuminate some other area that I didn’t expect, something that’s at stake for me as the reader.  And I want language. Too many of the essays I’ve seen in past years have completely neglected the language.

Karen goes on to discuss specific BAE essays by Brian Doyle, Sue Allison, Richard Rodriguez, Jill McCorkle, Gregory Orr, and Janna Malamud Smith.  We really think the full review is worth reading, with Best American Essays 2009 at your side.

The folks at the Potomac Review have come up with an innovative and intriguing use for their blog, offering discussions of pieces that the magazine did not decide to print but considered closely, including a dialogue with the writer.  Termed the “Maybe Dialogue,” the feature begins with a discussion of Mary Aker’s story “House of Refuge,” plucked from the Potomac Review slush pile.  The editors weigh in with some thoughts on what does and doesn’t work in the submission, and ultimately Mary adds:

I realize there’s no question to answer here, but I just wanted to interject and say that as an author, I find it very comforting to know editors and readers watch and recognize writing over time even if they may not comment when sending rejections. I believe other writers would take comfort in this, too, so it’s a point worth stressing for all those still toiling in the trenches: just because we aren’t getting personal rejections, doesn’t mean our work isn’t being followed by an editor waiting and hoping for the perfect story to generate a yes.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.  Should we do it for Brevity, too?

Well, we wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but it is comforting to us nonetheless (and we hope to other writers) to hear that even the likes of Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz suffer that moment when writing just seems too damn hard.  Here is an excerpt from a very honest essay on writing that he wrote for Oprah’s O Magazine.

Want to talk about stubborn? I kept at it for five straight years. Five damn years. Every day failing for five years? I’m a pretty stubborn, pretty hard-hearted character, but those five years of fail did a number on my psyche. On me. Five years, 60 months? It just about wiped me out. By the end of that fifth year, perhaps in an attempt to save myself, to escape my despair, I started becoming convinced that I had written all I had to write, that I was a minor league Ralph Ellison, a Pop Warner Edward Rivera, that maybe it was time, for the sake of my mental health, for me to move on to another profession, and if the inspiration struck again some time in the future…well, great.

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.

If you have a few seconds free, Read it right here.   Thanks.

Oronte Churm offers a fascinating, thoughtful interview with Ninth Letter fiction editor Philip Graham over at his Inside Higher Ed blog today.  Graham talks about the pitfalls inherent in writing about other cultures, the false assumption that a year abroad will inevitably be idyllic, and the flawed assumption that living overseas is always “enriching” for one’s children. He says a good bit that is wise about the process of writing as well.

An excerpt:

“We’re all fiction writers of a sort, throughout our lives shaping characters out of the selected and often misleading signals we receive from the people we think we know. A spotty business at best, this. But what’s the alternative except deepening isolation?

“The same goes for travel, since every country on the globe shares a second, secret name of Pitfall  …  In The Moon, Come to Earth, I tried to separate from myself any notion of being an expert. I was and remain simply your run-of-the-mill flawed fellow, awkwardly nosing about another culture, never quite sure what I might come upon, what might resonate inside me, attract or appall me.”