I came to creative nonfiction first as a reader with a background in poetry, and began writing nonfiction seriously in a graduate fiction workshop, where professor Steve Tomasula encouraged me to write my own kinds of sentences—often imagistic fragments. I found myself noticing the striking and specific characters on the pages of my classmates and friends’ stories, the sense of being plunged into another world, the feeling of the noise of my own life and thinking falling away as another perspective (or, oftentimes, perspectives) captivated my attention. My debut work of nonfiction, The Wheel, began in that class. 

When I started teaching Foundations of Creative Nonfiction for The Porch, it was 2021, and The Wheel had recently been published. It felt liberating to teach prose because of its perennial newness in my imagination. I led the first class meeting with a playful declaration that I felt like an imposter, and that I wasn’t trained in nonfiction. (Perhaps this allowed me to enter the realm of prose without much regard for genre conventions, for what’s considered normal or desirable.)

I’m not sure if this comforted my students, but soon we were on our way, and the lived experience I’ve since gained with the form has somehow made it easier for me to remind myself and my students that I—like them—am still, and will always be, new to this.

But I know what I find to be alluring: dynamic play with memory and its fragility, attention to image and sound, and the incorporation of repetition and its opposite, which is probably either silence or fragmentation. 

I find this, too, in hybrid poetry, which facilitates the active incorporation, referencing, and repurposing of dominant elements of poetry and prose into an entirely new shape on the page. There is an urgency in hybrid texts—such as Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, or Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl—that suggests an innateness to the presence of the language on the page in the particular way that it’s been crystallized. In other words, the form of the text reflects the moment of its writing, its thinking, its embodiment. I trust hybrid forms because they ask me to move with them, they teach me how to read them through their unfurling, and they remind me that transformation is always required in this life.

With this penchant for the hybrid and amorphous, and with this appreciation for textual communications that engage with attention as a shared phenomenon between reader and writer, I have come to feel at home teaching creative nonfiction, and I’ve found it compelling to observe that, at The Porch, many of my students enter my class at a crossroads, their own kind of liminal space: some have just retired or quit their job to focus on a story that’s commanding their soul, some are fearless and/or funny and just want to try something new, some want to make friends and expand their sense of community in and beyond Nashville, some have lived through something unimaginable and have found the capaciousness to wield that event on the page for themselves or an audience (or both), and some want to return to an artistic expression that reminds them of their childhood—in this creative circling back, or creative reclaiming, these writers radically recenter on possibility.

My favorite moments as a facilitator of this Porch class are when students demonstrate their listening to each other. Sometimes, students will ask their classmate to re-read a particular line or sentence. Other times, folks will elaborate on unexpected moments in their peer’s text that incited empathy. As the weeks go on, a holistic kind of attention becomes the center of our work together.

In these moments of listening, and of affirming our attention, the writers being listened to often feel empowered, or encouraged, or energized. Something they tried is reaching someone—or, likely, the whole class. An experiment with image, or narrative, or syntax, is showing us why their story matters. We begin to see, together, the art of memory.

Even though writing might ultimately be—in its published form—the product of great control, the act of writing reminds me that I’m not in control. If we can honor the mystical pursuit of writing, of writing-as-listening, if we can try our damndest not to self-flagellate as we stumble and fail our ways into the right or intuitive-feeling way of expressing a particular thought, if we can let the detritus of drafting be generative, if we can slow down enough to see how the way we pay attention day-to-day might itself transform while we’re in the midst of a creative project, we might perceive our way through a story,

Even though writing might ultimately be—in its published form—the product of great control, the act of writing reminds me that I’m not in control.  If we can honor the mystical pursuit of writing, of writing-as-listening, we might perceive our way through a story.

To get to this place of sharing and noticing, students have to practice their writing. I offer prompts that can be treated as standalone or as intersecting, to be used as they explore different narrative projects (some have a vision for a memoir, others want to write a few short essays, and some don’t know yet). In this early stage it is crucial, I think, for writers to develop self-confidence and self-trust. Any event in our lives, seen through a kaleidoscope, can be approached from any number of those illuminated planes. Some subconscious sensation or feeling might draw us to one particular approach, or we might already have a clear intention of how we want to get at something we’ve lived through, or heard about, or are studying.

So, a student begins to articulate their story, and they begin to get other ideas, or adjacent memories emerge, or inspirations and echoes from preexisting art swim up to the surface of their thinking. With the unit of the sentence as the vehicle through which we might move from one expression to the next, I try to remind my students: everything is relevant. This might be a dizzying maxim, but if we can stay focused on the subtle but vital connection from one sentence to the next, there can be space to connect these threads of thought—and, indeed, these threads might ultimately affirm the necessity of the story to begin with.

When everything is relevant, a story that might once have seemed totally unique can expand into new forms of relation; we might consider autotheory, the hybrid form of prose that has my heart and that can facilitate the expression of subjective experience in a social setting. In autotheory, memory is treated as a text alongside innumerable references to philosophy, literature, art, music, politics, and so on. Whether or not my students adopt this particular genre in their nonfiction writing, the logic of autotheory reminds us that it is natural to notice complementary threads of thought even as we narrate what might seem like a straightforward (dare I say linear!) and singular experience. 

If we’re open to what else we notice as we write—whether that’s through keeping two notebooks at once (one for the essay itself, and one for a list of extemporaneous ideas) or embracing a slower writing pace (not to edit or censor ourselves, but to invite more insight into our early drafts)—the essay might teach us what else it wants us to communicate, to gesture toward, to include, to reach for. 

Even though writing might ultimately be—in its published form—the product of great control, the act of writing reminds me that I’m not in control. If we can honor the mystical pursuit of writing, of writing-as-listening, if we can try our damndest not to self-flagellate as we stumble and fail our ways into the right or intuitive-feeling way of expressing a particular thought, if we can let the detritus of drafting be generative, if we can slow down enough to see how the way we pay attention day-to-day might itself transform while we’re in the midst of a creative project, we might perceive our way through a story, so that we feel our way out of the dark with the story (or because of the story, or poem, or hybrid-thing).

Everything is relevant! Everything is relevant!

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