I’m taking a course in Creative Nonfiction with Anne Kaier at Rosemont this semester. Anne is an excellent teacher. Creative Nonfiction is hard to define. I think of it as “Telling truth through story.” By this I mean that when one writes Creative Nonfiction one makes a promise to the reader that one will stick to the truth, in a “whole truth and nothing but the truth” sort of way. That’s the nonfiction part. The creative part comes in telling the story in as engaging a way as possible. “Whole truth and nothing but the truth, but let me put some lipstick on this pig.”

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at a a literary magazine called Etude. They bill themselves as “New voices in Literary Nonfiction” (Literary Nonfiction is another name for Creative Nonfiction). They produce an excellent quartly journal. Each quarter they include a column discussing the craft of Creative Nonfiction called on Craft.

I’ve linked into the magazine here. Links go to the home page for each particular issue and directly to the on Craft essay for that issue. Enjoy.