Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

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Ever since the term "creative nonfiction" first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways. Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer's innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground. Features in the second edition: -Updated introduction to the new edition -Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and "Unconventions" -A new section on Resistances -50 essays in all

Reviews

Come for talk of the essay in all its formal wildness. Stay for a consideration of the forms power and politics of resistance. Even deeper and more expansive than its first edition, Bending Genre 2.0 is essential reading for serious students, teachers, and writers of nonfiction. * Julija ukys, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Missouri, USA, and author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughters Reckoning (2017) *
As creative nonfiction continues to break new ground, Bending Genre gives writers and readers a marvelous map to new literary terrain, as charted by some of the forms most interesting cartographers and practitioners. By turns earnest, argumentative, lyric, playful, and provocative, the authors of these pieces explore nonfiction forms as refuge, as rebellion, as intellectual practice, as erotics and aesthetics, as mode of making, and as liberating community. Encouraging exploration and seeded with compelling readings of familiar and less familiar texts, Bending Genre is suggestive rather than scholarly, offering a mode of making and a gloss on the meanings made by this rich, shifting, wonderfully hard to define literary playground that we call creative nonfiction. * E. J. Levy, Associate Professor, Colorado State University, USA *
Bending Genre is published into a landscape that has changed so much in the past ten years and will change even more in the next decades, and the essays that are the most convincing are those advocating that we cross, bend and break genre open in more disruptive ways as writers and readers and use our creative-critical powers to undo systems that have not been serving us. This book provides a solid anchor for thinking into genre-bending writing, and if readers supplement this text with the reading of many and diverse contemporary hybrid texts, they will experience first-hand how hot genre-bending writing can make their brains, how spacious it can make a heart. * Elizabeth Reeder, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, UK, and author of microbursts (2021) *
Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about truthtelling to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a whos-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers push the line, the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail. * Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US [about the 1st edition] *
What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortabletoo comfortablewith lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, mis-shelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. Its time to shake things up. * Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre [about the 1st edition] *
Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft...The essays of Part II, 'Structures', offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay...an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements,montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor...I would recommend this collection to all serious writers. * Heidi Czerwiec, Rain Taxi [about the 1st edition] *
A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader's assumptions and expectations of the text--and they do so successfully...Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text. What is particularly noteworthy of Singer and Walker is that their project--much in vein of "queer" and of the notion that writing, like critical thinking, is interminable--remains alive online. They have harnessed the powers of new media to keep the discussion going, both on Facebook as well as the project's website. * Marcie Bianco, LambdaLiterary.org [about the 1st edition] *

Author Bio

Margot Singer is a Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA, where she directs the creative writing program. She is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (2017), winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and short-listed for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (2007), winner of the Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction. Her essays have appeared in the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions, the Sun, River Teeth, and elsewhere, have been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), as well as the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). The co-president of NonfictioNOW, she teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, USA and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.