Writing Creative Non-Fiction

Laura Tansley

Description

Writers of creative non-fiction are often expected to be able to recreate reality, to deal with, or even access, a singular truth. But the author, like any human, is not an automaton remotely tasked with capturing a life or an event. Whether we tell stories and understand them as fiction or non-fiction, or whether we draw away from these classifications, writers craft and shape writing all writing. No experience exists on a flat plane, and recounting or interpreting events will always involve some element of artistic manipulation: every instance, exchange, discussion, event is open to multiple interpretations and can be described in many ways, all of which are potentially truthful. Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form contains essays and original writing from novelists, poets, songwriters, musicians and academics. The book covers topics that range from explorations of the role of the author, definitions and representations of the form, self and illness, to the spectral elements of non-fiction and its role in historical narratives. The essays included in this volume address everything from memoir, biography and autobiography to a discussion of musical approaches to criticism and a non/fiction interview. The book identifies key writers including Christopher Isherwood, David Shields, James Frey, Asne Seierstad, John D'Agata, W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Coe, Hilary Mantel, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead and Arthur Frank and is essential reading for students, researchers and writers of creative non-fiction.

Informations

• Publié par: Gylphi
• Date de parution: 23 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780240268
• Langue: English

Extrait

Writing Creative Non-Fiction
Determining the Form



A Gylphi Limited Book
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Gylphi Limited
Copyright © Gylphi Limited, 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78024-024-4 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-78024-025-1 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-1-78024-026-8 (EPUB)
Cover painting by Mark Brooks ( http://www.markbrooks.net ). Design and typesetting by Gylphi Limited. Printed in the UK by imprintdigital.com , Exeter.
Gylphi Limited,PO Box 993, Canterbury CT1 9EP, UK




Contents
Notes on Contributors
Pathways to Determining Form
Laura Tansley and Micaela Maftei
A Bulgarian Journey
Kapka Kassabova
At the Will of Our Stories
John I MacArtney
She and I: Composite Characters in Creative Non-Fiction
Katie Karnehm
More Lies Please: Biography and the Duty to Abandon Truth
Rodge Glass
Ghosts of the Real: The Spectral Memoir
Helen Pleasance
‘One doesn’t have much but oneself’: Christopher Isherwood’s Investigation into Identity and the Manipulation of Form in The Memorial
Rebecca Gordon Stewart
Menna, Martha and Me: The Possibilities of Epistolary Criticism
Rhiannon Marks
An Introduction to ‘Schizoanalysis’: The Development of a Musical Approach to Criticism
Jo Collinson Scott
Eyes! Birds! Walnuts! Pennies!
Erin Soros
Just Words
Erin Soros
It is in their Nature to Change: On Mis-leading
Elizabeth Reeder
Index




Notes on Contributors
Jo Collinson Scott is a lecturer in commercial music at the University of the West of Scotland, where she helped develop the MA in Songwriting and Performance. She is also a professional songwriter and popular music performer working under the name Jo Mango. Under this guise she has co-written songs and collaborated on performances worldwide, with artists such as David Byrne, Teenage Fanclub, Vashti Bunyan and Devendra Banhart. Her AHRC-funded doctoral research at the University of Glasgow focused on the development of radical creative methodologies for analysing contemporary music. Jo’s current research focuses on further developing these interdisciplinary and creative approaches to methodology and exploring their applicability to popular music with a focus on creativity studies, songwriting pedagogy and practice-based research contexts.
Rodge Glass is an author, editor, academic and critic. His books include No Fireworks (Faber, 2005), Hope for Newborns (Faber, 2008) and Dougie’s War (Freight Books, 2010). His non-fiction work, Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography (Bloomsbury, 2008), won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2009 and his latest novel, Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs (Serpent’s Tail, 2012), was published as Voglio la testa di Ryan Giggs in Italy in 2014 (66thand2nd, Roma). His latest collection, LoveSexTravelMusik: Stories for the Easyjet Generation (Freight, 2013), was widely acclaimed and nominated for the International Frank O’Connor Award. He is a BA Programme Leader in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, and in 2013/14 spent a year researching and writing his next novel, Once a Great Leader, in Latin America.
Rebecca Gordon Stewart holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen. She was the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2009–10. Her work includes ‘I was obsessed by a complex terrors and longings connected with the idea of “War”’, in First World War Studies; ‘Christopher and Frank: Isherwood’s Representation of Father and Son in Kathleen and Frank’, in A/B: Auto/Biography Studies; ‘“How Can I Know What I Think Till I See What I Say?”: Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster, and Literary Self-Reflection’, in Bloomsbury Influences. She is currently researching the influence of D. H. Lawrence on Isherwood›s writing and is a lecturer at Bath Spa University and Oxford University’s academic exchange programme Advanced Studies in England.
Kapka Kassabova is a poet, novelist and travel writer. Her family emigrated from Bulgaria to New Zealand just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Street Without a Name (2008) is her coming-of-age story of communist Bulgaria; it was short-listed for the Prix du livre européen and the Dolmann Travel Club Award. Twelve Minutes of Love (2011), short-listed for the Scottish Book Awards, is a story of Argentine tango, obsession and the search for home. Her novel Villa Pacifica (2011) is set in South America and her poetry collections are Someone else’s life (2003) and Geography for the Lost (2007). She is also a translator from Bulgarian and a regular contributor for the Guardian , Intelligent Life , and the Scottish Review of Books . After spending her late teens and twenties in New Zealand, Kapka moved to Scotland and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Katie Karnehm is Associate Professor of Writing and English at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. She graduated from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, with a PhD in Creative Writing and an emphasis in creative nonfiction and poetry. She is working on a memoir of living and studying abroad in Europe. When she’s not writing essays, she’s walking her dogs and teaching yoga.
John I MacArtney completed his PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics in 2011. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. As well as his continuing interest in CAM and self-help, he is currently researching patient and carers’ experiences of end of life and palliative care.
Micaela Maftei holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her book The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity was published with Bloomsbury in 2013 and her fiction has appeared online and in print in the UK and North America.
Rhiannon Marks is a lecturer in Welsh at the School of Welsh, Cardiff University. Her fields of specialism include literary theory and contemporary Welsh literature. She pursued her undergraduate studies at the University of Aberystwyth, completed an MSt degree at the University of Oxford and returned to Aberystwyth to write her PhD thesis on the work of Menna Elfyn. She has recently published her first academic volume with the University of Wales Press entitled ‘Pe gallwn, mi luniwn lythyr’: golwg ar waith Menna Elfyn (2013), an experiment in epistolary criticism.
Helen Pleasance is a writer and researcher based in Manchester. The subjects she finds herself returning to are the relationship between photography and embodied identity and the histories and fictions of Manchester. Her research on Manchester may get turned into stories called ‘From Peterloo to Primark’ and ‘Balotelli Stories and Other Stories’. She is completing a full-length memoir about the Moors Murders entitled ‘Ghosts on the Hill’. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing for the Open University.
Elizabeth Reeder, originally from Chicago, now calls Scotland home. Her short writing has been widely published in journals and anthologies and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as stories, drama, and abridgements. Her debut novel, Ramshackle, is published by Freight Books and was shortlisted for the 2013 Scottish Mortgage Investment Best First Book Award, the 2012 Saltire First Book Award, and longlisted for the 2013 Author’s Club Best First book. Her second novel, Fremont, is published by Kohl Publishing. She teaches on and co-convenes Creative Writing at University of Glasgow.
Erin Soros of Vancouver, British Columbia, has published fiction and non-fiction in international journals and anthologies, and her stories have been aired on the CBC and BBC as recipients of the CBC Literary Award, the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story, and as a finalist for the BBC Short Story Award. ‘Still Water, B.C.’ was recently a finalist for the UK’s Costa Short Story Award. Erin also collaborates with other artists, studies philosophy, and teaches psychoanalysis, modern literature, and human rights. Morning is Vertical, a collection of prose and photographs that builds on the archival and oral history of logging communities on Canada’s West Coast, is forthcoming from Rufus Books.
Laura Tansley’s creative and critical writing has appeared in a variety of places including ‘Short Fiction in Theory and Practice’, ‘New Writing’, ‘Versal’ and ‘The Island Review’ (with Amy Mackelden), ‘Kenyon Review Online’ (with Micaela Maftei), ‘New Writing Scotland’ and ‘NANO Fiction’. She lives and works in Glasgow.




Pathways to Determining Form
Laura Tansley and Micaela Maftei
The essays in this collection are remarkable for two reasons. First, they have exceeded expectations in a number of ways (style, originality, content and scope) throughout their development. Second, they form a record of a process, perhaps we might call it a journey, which began several years ago and will hopefully continue with every reader that comes across this book.
In June 2010, the editors organized and hosted a conference at the University of Glasgow. We were both studying there and we were, and continue to be, researchers and practitioners of a kind of writing that seems to reject its label, a label that is nevertheless employed for the purposes of advertising, marketing and editing, and recognized as a distinct genre (though how exactly this distinction manifests is contentious). During this t