Creative nonfiction essays

To write about the present with any authority requires a keen eye for the past. To write from our lives into meaningful creative nonfiction requires a firm understanding that experience is the composite of life experience blending into the current moment. The writing is then drawn irreversibly towards emotion: indulgent and oppressive. The extremity of emotion dictates the difficulty of transcribing the experience onto the page, and violence is a source of both extreme emotion and experience. It is important to note that I am primarily considering personal violence for this essay, while societal and institutional violence have their own important role in creative nonfiction, I am most interested in understanding the craft of violence at a more intimate degree. Essays like Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” Christian Wiman’s “The Limit,” Diane Seuss’s “I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were,” and Kim Barnes’ “The Ashes of August” all manipulate different – albeit related – elements of craft to express personal violence in their respective essays. These adjustments in craft are most effective when they come from an author’s efforts to construct a dilation or contraction of narrative distance, alter the pace or perceived time of a piece, or in the syntactical structure that holds a work together.