Some recent creative nonfiction

And some thoughts on hybridity and The Lunatics' Ball

I write both creative nonfiction and flash (often nonfiction flash) on many subjects besides lunatics and I published some creative nonfiction recently while I was in the last stages of completing The Lunatics’ Ball.

I suppose my most recent essay, about my aunt and myself, qualifies as memoir about lunatics. I posted about the publication of “Normal” on an earlier Substack. You can read “Normal” here, which was published in Nerve to Write, if you didn’t already.

So many great magazines have disappeared. When I first started publishing creative nonfiction, I was dying to get into South Loop Review. They went under a couple of issues after publishing my essay “Doorbells,” which they nominated for a Pushcart Prize. This may have been my first braided essay, also the first essay where I pushed speculation beyond fact. I employ those devices in a number of the essays in The Lunatics’ Ball. “Doorbells” was recently reprinted in Doubleback Review.

J.T. Hill at the Writer’s Chronicle asked me if I’d like to contribute a Creative Nonfiction Writing Prompt to their “Prompted” series, which was fun, and made me think about what I miss about teaching (the students, their essays, the classroom interactions) instead of what I don’t miss about teaching (bureaucracy, department meetings, committees, constant talk about the waning enrollments and the shrinking state budget). When I shifted from scholarship to creative writing, it was such a joy to read Writer’s Chronicle instead of PMLA. I know I would have felt I’d really arrived if my name appeared in their pages. It still is (a joy). I still do (feel like I’ve arrived). The hyperlink I shared above is behind a paywall. Only AWP members can access it. But I know from attending the AWP conference that there are thousands of AWP members, so maybe you are one of them.

(I’ve known and admired J.T. Hill for a long time—his memoir, his novel, his editorial skills. He accepted my flash fiction “Nola” for Monkeybicycle and nominated it for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, which inspired me to put together my flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl. which won an award at Black Lawrence Press. I’m very grateful to him for the inspiration. It’s not something I would have thought of on my own.)

Past Ten is a cool project where editors give you a month and day and ask you to write a short essay about what you were doing on that date ten years ago. My essay in Past Ten was somewhat overshadowed by a recent health scare. (Since overcome, I’m happy to say.) They included the essay in a beautifully produced anthology from Cornerstone Press, and I participated in a great reading for the anthology at the Los Angeles AWP. I skipped this year’s AWP in Baltimore, but will attend next year’s in Chicago. It’s a pretty overwhelming event. When else will a writer go to a conference with thousands of attendees?

I also published “A Wild Goose Chase” in Hunger Mountain. One of those trippy, wandering essays I like to do, this one inspired by how much Geoff Dyer’s books made me laugh, also by the hotel we stayed at in Santa Cruz called Hotel Paradox. I love Hunger Mountain, published by Vermont College of Fine Arts.

excerpt: “I keep thinking of Dyer in Amsterdam, a scene where he struggles to put on a new pair of trousers in a tiny bathroom not unlike the one in the Hotel Paradox. The room in the Hotel Paradox was barely large enough for a queen bed. You couldn’t exit the small bathroom if the sliding closet door was open. Dyer’s on mushrooms. The trousers end up inside-out. He is staying, by the way, at a hotel he calls Hotel Oblivion. Since his girlfriend is called Dazed, and they do a lot of drugs, it appears that names have been changed, along with a lot of other things, in this only apparently nonfictional book. Back to hybrid writing again. What would an essay look like that was turned inside-out?”

And I’ve been working hard at CRAFT. I’m very proud of the flash creative nonfiction we’ve been publishing. I hope you’ll browse our archives. I’ve been the creative nonfiction editor at CRAFT since we started publishing creative nonfiction in 2020. In that time, five of our essays have earned Notable Essay mentions in Best American Essays. A couple of years ago (during the health scare mentioned above), I divided my job in half, so now I do flash creative nonfiction and Shara Kronmal does longform creative nonfiction. I can’t quite imagine how I managed to do both, since just half is plenty for a part-time job, especially when our annual contest season rolls around (right now).

I have to quote the latest description of CRAFT at Chill Subs (the cool kids’ alternative to Duotrope): “Top-tier stuff. Not Paris Review, but close enough.”

Maybe I should get a tattoo.

Shara sometimes consults me when longform submissions seem to exceed the boundaries of nonfiction. Really I’m the wrong person to consult, because I think anything goes and I’ve published some creative nonfiction that we probably wouldn’t call nonfiction at CRAFT. Here’s another excerpt from “A Wild Goose Chase” (one of the things I pursue in that essay is a definition of “hybrid writing,” I mean I guess I pursue it, with lots of detours and no clear conclusions).

excerpt: “In my nonfiction, I frequently include dreams, as well as speculation, and alternate scenarios. Sometimes I call my creative nonfiction ‘hybrid,’ but the term is pretty vague, at least open to multiple meanings. You could call Dyer’s writing hybrid, if you wanted to. In Yoga for Those Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he says: ‘Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too.’”

I love that.

I’ll probably reflect on hybrid writing in a future Substack, starting with a great new textbook that includes my flash “The Lunatics’ Ball” along with my craft essay on hybridity: Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante’s The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton).

Back to The Lunatics’ Ball, which I feel pretty sure is a hybrid essay collection, because it’s what I’m calling “(auto)biography,” or “hybrid memoir,” combining my story and my aunt’s story with the stories of over thirty “lunatics.” And because some of the writing is lyric, some narrative, some expository. Because I include 14 illustrations. And because the essays are written in different voices. (Something I was far too anxious about as the project evolved.) Because I explore gaps in the histories of my lunatics through imaginative speculation. And because occasionally I explore the inner lives of my lunatics by turning to fictional monologues. I worried while I was writing it that the genre police wouldn’t let me do that.

And then I thought, what genre police?

The book will be coming out in the “21^st Century Essays” series (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press) next March, which really blows my mind, not just because it’s prestigious and I own many of their books, but because they’re calling these “essays,” when I wasn’t sure what to call some of them. I never perfected an elevator pitch either. When people ask me what my book is about, I usually say, “Um…”

A medieval illustration of a harpy. I’m fascinated by hybrid creatures in mythology, and Horace’s cautions against hybridity in writing in his Ars Poetica. Mix genres and you’ll end up with “monstrous combinations,” he says, like a harpy or a centaur or a woman with the tail of a fish. Stay away from mad poets, he says! I guess we’re the ones writing hybrids about madwomen.