I have very little experience with creative nonfiction.  Now that I have that alarmingly inaccurate sentence down, let me explain it.  I’ve read many books over the years that would be filed under creative nonfiction, if I organized my personal library that way.  Of course, I barely organize my personal library in the first place, so there’s little danger of that happening.

For that matter, I’ve written a respectable amount of creative nonfiction, in that I keep this blog on as regular a basis as I can (and I’ll be steadier once the semester begins, but I may take a break for the residency), I post intermittently in a private LiveJournal account, and spill thoughts and memories all over perfectly innocent paper on a purely random basis.

I have even taken an undergraduate level class through the U.C. Berkeley Extension, and enjoyed it a great deal.  Still, I feel as though I have very little experience with creative nonfiction, because I’ve read very little of it from the perspective of a writer.

Well, the new semester hasn’t started yet, but I can already feel that changing.  I’ve started on my reading assignments, and I noticed that all three of the selections in my Craft of Creative Nonfiction class had a common element: each told multiple stories that all related to an event-driven common theme.  For example, in only one chapter of Passage to Juneau I’ve learned more about commercial fishing, the Alaskan fishing run, its risks, the fishing community, and the American Indians native to the region (and their art) than I ever knew before*, and all of it related to the author fitting out his boat for a voyage.

Up until now, I had thought about writing essays and the like in terms of framing a given story, often with a goal of conveying a related idea, but it seems to me now that this showed me only the surface of what it should be doing, or at least what it could be doing.

I can’t say this surprises me, since I know that a given work of fiction will certainly contain more than a single story, but it is interesting to see what the other side of the coin looks like.

Hmm, if fiction and nonfiction are different sides of the same coin, where does that leave poetry?  On the edge, of course, binding the two together with its approach to expression.

*which, admittedly, was very little

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