Michael Steinberg on Creative Nonfiction
by William Meiners
For a first-time teacher like myself, about as calm and erudite as a young, professorial Jerry Lewis, it never hurts to bring a real expert into the classroom. When Michael Steinberg showed up to my creative writing class at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in February I learned very quickly, alongside my students, what a great teacher Mike has been for about three decades. And a deep source of knowledge about the field of creative nonfiction.
Mike and Bob Root wrote the book on creative nonfiction. Well one very good one called Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction that’s now in its sixth edition and used in college classrooms all over the country. We caught up at a bookstore in East Lansing last month to talk more on the subject. Then we kicked the following back and forth through emails.
William Meiners: You mentioned that your anthology, Fourth Genre, which you wrote and put together with Robert Root, and the same-titled journal that came out more or less at the same time. Could you talk about both the timing of the two, as well as your initial ideas for putting such a collection together?
Michael Steinberg: Both publications were, in some ways, coincidences. The anthology, which came out in 1998, grew out of a course pack of readings that Bob and I put together for our graduate classes. At the time, there were no anthologies that covered the genre’s spectrum — personal essay, memoir, literary/personal journalism, and personal/cultural criticism. Since it was a teaching text, we organized the course pack as a writer’s conversation on/about the genre. Part one contained a series of selected pieces that represented the four subgenres I just mentioned. In Part two, we chose essays on/about matters of genre and craft. In addition to craft essays that Bob and I, and a few other teacher/writers wrote, we found a handful of pieces written by some of the writers whose work appeared in Part one. That gave us the idea to add Part three. We chose four essays that our best students had written; and we asked them to write an accompanying commentary on/about how they wrote their pieces.
We taught and revised the course packs for two semesters before deciding to expand the first two parts by adding about a half dozen essays, memoirs, literary/personal journalism and pieces of personal/cultural criticism — by a variety or writers. We kept Part 3 intact. At a point, we found that we’d collected enough work to constitute a teaching anthology. We sent out a proposal to 22 publishers. A few trade houses liked the idea but couldn’t provide the permissions/acquisitions budget we needed. Allyn and Bacon, then a small textbook house that published books on/about teaching writing and literature, offered to publish it. And today, the anthology is in a sixth edition.
WM: And the journal?
MJS: The first issue of the journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, came out in 1999. It grew out of a conversation I had with an adult student in one of my graduate course in literary/creative nonfiction. She was an aspiring writer who’d never written personal essays or memoirs before. The readings and writing assignments, it seems, led her to believe that she could write with more ease and fluidity in this genre than she could in either fiction or poetry. Coincidentally, she happened to be the journals editor for the Michigan State University Press.
To make a long story short, she did some research and found that, at the time (1997), the only journal of literary/creative nonfiction was Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction (first published in 1995). As it turned out, The Michigan State University Press took on Fourth Genre. That was 17 years ago and today Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre (I‘m no longer the editor), and River Teeth (which first appeared in 1999, two months after we did) are still the three most prominent journals of literary/creative nonfiction in the field.
WM: I’ve read various articles about the genre. From Lee Gutkind getting the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” label to another on the thoughts about the “non” label, essentially calling something “not fiction.” It all reminded me about having read and been curious to learn more about In Cold Blood about 10 years back. And of course, I think two different movies about Capote were coming out around that time. But I read somewhere that he claimed to be writing a nonfiction novel, an oxymoron since a novel is defined as a work of fiction. Or maybe it’s getting into double or triple negatives. Nevertheless, does In Cold Blood come up much in the discussion of the genre? Or is it more linked to the writers/journalists who may have defined it a decade or so later?
MJS: There are a few different theories about this. Lee Gutkind (among others), for example, believes that the genre we’re now calling creative nonfiction, grew out of the New Journalism movement of the 60s; books of investigative reporting by writers such as Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Gay Talese, among others. Critics called these books “nonfiction novels.” Which really means that the writers of these narratives were journalists who were using a novelist’s tools — plot, character, scene, dialogue, setting, etc. —nin order to make their “true stories” read more like plotted narratives. In time, the term “nonfiction novel” got replaced by works of what we’re today calling “literary/investigative journalism.” Some journalists and critics will argue that literary journalism is the earliest and purest form of creative nonfiction.
WM: I suppose all writing is some sort of “truth-telling,” if only to attempt to write a story, poem, or play that smacks of the truth. What drew you specifically to telling true stories?
MJS: Although in my personal essays and memoirs I do use research and reportage, I don’t write “true stories.” Let me explain that. I’m one of many personal essayist/memoirists that use our experiences, our lives, as raw material for finding out what fiction writers call discovering “what we didn’t know we knew.” I think this process of exploration and discovery, in other words, writing out of a sense of “not-knowing,” is closer to the ways in which writers of literary fiction and lyric poems create their works than it is to the ways in which investigative journalists approach their craft. Many of the debates/controversies on/about truth in nonfiction — especially those on literary memoir — generate from these two differing approaches. Yet, along with many others, I consider both to be works of literary/creative nonfiction. In fact, some of the best work I’m reading right now combines the personal with reportage and research.
WM: You told my creative writing class that creative nonfiction might feel a little more natural to you. I think all writing is probably difficult. What’s the most difficult thing about writing in the “fourth genre”? What are the links to fiction and poetry?
MJS: Yes, all writing is difficult, especially when it’s required, like a class assignment or a job related project. But, in my case, I write because I feel compelled to do it. For years, I tried to express my deepest feelings and confusions in fiction or poetry. But, over time, I found that I could be my best self as writer when I wrote personal essays and memoirs. In those forms, I feel less inadequacy and doubt — less hesitant and self-conscious. More spontaneous, I’d say. There are a couple of quotes to that effect that I’ve taped up above my writing desk — one from the novelist/essayist David Shields, and the other from novelist/journalist Pete Hamill. Shields says, “Find the form that releases your best intelligence. Find what you do exquisitely well and play it to the hilt.”
In describing the shift from writing news stories to feature columns, Hamill writes, “From the beginning, the form felt natural to me. I was like a musician who had found at last the instrument that was right for him.”
Hamill adds, “It freed me from an impossible objectivity…”
That freedom, that feeling of being in sync as a writer, parallels my own discovery, when, after decades of struggling to write fiction and poetry, I realized that writing personal essays and memoirs came more naturally to me than either of those forms did. It was the writing breakthrough I’d been struggling toward for much of my adult life.
As for links between literary nonfiction and fiction and poetry, I think there’s an important relationship, at least in my experience, between good literary nonfiction and good fiction and poetry — and I’ll also include drama in that mix as well. That’s because what’s most important, most necessary, in all forms of writing — literary, critical, and popular — is how skillfully the writer shapes/structures the work. And that always comes down to matters of genre and craft.
Whether the work is narrative or lyric, all literary writers possess similar tool kits. For myself, a personal essayist/memoirist, I’ve learned from good fiction writers how to use narrative and plot; and how to create three-dimensional, fully rounded characters, (in my case, mostly first person narrators), as well as how to craft dramatic scenes.
The heart of the playwright’s craft is dramatizing conflict through the use of dialogue and scene. Poets, especially those who write lyric poems, bring a freedom of imagination, an ear for rhythm and language, an eye for imagery, and a comfort and ease with metaphor. And, literary journalists and cultural critics, we’ve increasingly found, are often combining research and reportage with more personal presence, and in some cases, more intimate, voices.
WM: Your memoir, Still Pitching, has baseball as a central theme, though of course it’s about much more. Why did you decide to frame, or at least build it, around these memories of being a young pitcher? I love the title, which resonates in many ways. On the mound, ball in hand and every part of the game depends on what this player does. In what ways has that been a metaphor for living your life?
MJS: All memoir, I believe, is, in one way or another, about identity (and loss). In my case, the catalyst for writing Still Pitching was an impulse/urge to try to go back into the past in order to better understand how being a kid baseball pitcher led me to being a midlife writer and writing teacher. It’s all speculation, of course; but that question sent me back to my New York childhood and adolescence to see if I could discover who and what might have been the most influential forces that helped shape my adult self. Baseball turned out to be one of those influences. That inquiry and curiosity also allowed me to focus the memoir on those early, formative years.
I don’t think, that, in the writing I fully answered such a complex question. But, through a long, long process of drafting, revising, and rewriting, I was finally able to execute and to understand what Annie Dillard calls the process of “fashioning a text.” Which, in the end, is what all of us who write literary work are trying to do.
What you say about the title Still Pitching being a metaphor for living my life is something I never really thought about. But, since I do believe that persistence, tenacity, and determination are so important to becoming a writer — or, for that matter, to accomplishing anything else you’re proud of — the Still Pitching metaphor does have some truth to it.
WM: Having started a literary magazine about sports 21 years ago, I knew I wanted the focus to be on creative nonfiction. And in my mind, I thought maybe this is literature with a small “l.” After all, it’s about sports. But then an essay you shared with us, “Elegy for Ebbets,” was our first to get a nod in Best American Essays, in 2002. Some affirmation, for both of us, I suppose, that it’s not just about sports. What make writing about sports, beyond the daily coverage or “hot topic” sense, important as fodder for literature?
MJS: We both agree that there is a difference between sports writing and writing about sports. For the most part, sports are an arena I seem to be able to understand from the inside-out. In conversation, a colleague who, himself is an athlete, referred to this kind of sensibility as a “sports intelligence.” And so, in my writing, I often use sports as a lens; by which I mean, a way of seeing, a way of better understanding and utilizing the strategies, the tactics we need to know, in order to get ourselves through, or even to master ongoing personal problems and confusions. And these internal struggles are what all human beings have in common. Whatever I’m writing about sports, challenging relationships, family difficulties, serious health problems, personal losses — or anything else, really — I’m always hoping that readers (in my case, readers of memoir), can identify with the narrator’s (the “I’s”) internal struggles; that is, his fears and self-doubts — as well as his/her need to belong to something larger and/or to comprehend and overcome whatever human obstacles he/she might be facing.
WM: I hate whenever someone asks me who my favorite writer is. Probably because I think they’re going to judge me and then ask about 10 writers I’ve never heard of. No one really wants to interview me, but I’ve got this fear that someone might give me the Sarah Palin treatment and I’ll be shaking my head saying “I love all of it and read everything,” which I don’t. That said, who are your favorite writers? And why?
MJS: It’s a bit like writing; you don’t know what works or doesn’t work until after you see it on the page. And even then, recognizing whether it’s good or bad can take years, sometime even decades. Something that might have been a good choice years earlier, might today look like a poor fit. This kind of evolution and change also relates to the shifts in my reading preferences over the years.
Different authors have captivated my imagination at different times in my life. When I was growing up, for example, I loved reading Salinger and Twain, as well as Clair Bee’s popular novels about teenage sports heroes. Those writers created characters and situations, that, as a kid, I could identify with and understand. When I was a young adult, I admired and identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters — people, who like myself, came from a lower middle-class background and who entertained dreams of greatness and who aspired to a life of stature and privilege. When later on, when I became enamored of literary nonfiction, I cultivated an appreciation for writers like Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, E.B. White, Vivian Gornick, and Scott Russell Sanders. The list goes on and on. And, like most readers, I love the writer(s) and books I’m reading right now; that is, until I read the next author and next book.
WM: Fourth Genre is a staple textbook in creative nonfiction classrooms, and you’re up to six editions. Can you talk about the various additions to the book and where you see the genre heading in the next five to 10 years?
MJS: In the mid to late 90s, when the genre first began to get some recognition as a legitimate literary form, the majority of work that appeared in the first few editions and issues of the anthology and the journal, were largely internal, linear narratives; and by that I mean, “Montaignian” personal essays. In addition, I saw a sprinkling of memoirs and some works of literary/investigative journalism and personal/cultural criticism.
The works I’m seeing in journals today, as well as the best writing that my MFA students are producing, often are experiments in form, voice, narrative persona, structure, and language. For example: short pieces of prose that use language and form in most unexpected ways; increasing numbers of essays and memoirs that combine personal narrative with analysis, research, and reportage; as well as works of literary journalism and personal/critical essays, where the narrator’s persona (by which I mean, the “I”) is sometimes at the center of the piece and sometimes not.
I’m also seeing more segmented and disjunctive essays, as well as an increase in lyric and lyrical essays, some of which take the kinds of imaginative and linguistic leaps that the best poetry does. In addition, there’s graphic nonfiction, as well as blogs, visual and video essays, and forms that combine different elements of media.
In short, this genre, like the contemporary visual arts, is, I believe, pushing at the boundaries that once separated the more traditional and experimental literary forms. And as a result, we’re seeing more existing hybrid, forms.
WM: You shared your story with me, and my class, about being a 20-plus year professor of English and writing courses, and then making a decision that you wanted to become a serious writer (in your 40s, I believe). And of course you’ve been successful as a writer over another 20-plus years. Was it as easy (and I know it’s not easy) as just making up your mind to do this? As a teacher of writing, what’s your best advice for anyone who wants to write stories about his or her life?
MJS: My decision to write grew out of an urgent midlife need to try to do something I’ve always dreamed of; that is, for decades, I’d yearned deeply to become a literary writer. When I was coming up, fiction, poetry, and in some circles, drama, were considered to be the only legitimate literary forms. I’m being kind to myself when I say that I was a less-than-skilled-writer in all of those genres. For as long as I can remember, my best, most compelling works were my personal essays and memoirs. I taught and wrote personal essays with my composition students for decades. Yet at the time, personal essays were considered to be the province of freshman composition. A deliberate slight, to be sure. And so, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to become known as even a workaday literary writer.
But life can be full of surprises. About five years before literary/creative nonfiction began to get some national attention, I had my first of what would be two cornea transplants. The surgery was a wake-up call — a first brush with mortality, if you will. My greatest fear was the possibility of losing my sight. At that point in time, I told myself that, even if I didn’t succeed, it was urgent for me to put as much focus, energy, and commitment into my writing as I could. Failure would have been devastating; but knowing my nature as I do, I don’t think I could have lived with myself had at least not tried. Plus, I knew, that time was running out.
Five years later, literary/creative nonfiction began to slowly enter the literary conversation. And today, it’s considered by many to be “the fourth genre.” Not fourth in terms of its stature; but fourth in that it’s inclusive of the other three.
So the very short answer to the first part of your question is that I became a writer through a combination of luck, circumstance, will, desperation, and readiness. As I’m fond of telling my MFA students, talent and a buck fifty (it used to be a quarter) will get you a phone call.
As for the advice I’d give to those who want to write stories about their lives, in addition to the David Shields and Pete Hamill quotes [above], I’ll offer two others, the first by Donald Hall, the next by William Stafford — both of whom, are, by the way, among our finest poets. Since I’ve talked a good deal about baseball and determination, I’ll cite Donald Hall’s advice first. *When Hall refers to “poems” or “poetry,” I’ve extended it to all four literary forms (see italics below).
I watch the old ones, the athletes without the talented young bodies. I watch the intense, concentrated pushing of the self past the self’s limits. It is like writing poems *{stories, essays, memoirs}, or it is what writing poems ought to be if you’re going to last as a poet; you have to bring everything to the poem that you have ever learned as to the painting if you are a painter, or to the swing of the bat if you are a hitter, and everything you ever do. You have to push up to the limit and past the limit.
Hall indicates here that what’s most important is that we bring, not just an “I”, but our fullest, wisest, most experienced (three dimensional) selves to the writing desk. And I also agree with William Stafford’s belief that, for many, many different reasons, we all too frequently talk ourselves out of writing.
Here’s what he has to say about that.
I believe that the so-called “writing block” is the product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance… One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.
And…
I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today; the assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.
And to that I’ll add something that my colleague Mimi Schwartz often tells her nonfiction students, “You’re the only one,” Mimi says, who can write your story.”
Michael Steinberg founded Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction in 1998. He’s written and co-authored five books and a stage play. Still Pitching won the 2003 ForeWord Magazine/Independent Press Memoir of the Year. An anthology, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, with Robert Root, is now in a sixth edition. Currently, Steinberg is the nonfiction writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor low residency College MFA program.