Lee Gutkind - The Best Creative Nonfiction (Volume 3)

coordinating editors

B RUCE D OBLER

H ATTIE F LETCHER

R EBECCA M. G ODFREY

D INTY W. M OORE

A s I write this in December 2008, change is everywhere.

Change was the mantra of the recent presidential election, of course, the promise on which Barack Obama and Joe Biden based their campaignand on which the McCain-Palin ticket opposed Obama. Each candidate insisted that heand not his opponentwas the force that could shake up the status quo and turn the country around, that could bring the kind of change to heal us and unite us.

Many have compared Obama to Kennedy or Lincoln, and others speculate that his election will come to be seen as one of the most significant events in our nations historythat what he will do next, the change he initiates, may shape the lives of many future generations.

When this book is published in the summer of 2009, Obama and his team of players will have been in office only seven or eight months, and it is entirely possible that Obamas promised change will not yet have materialized, or that it may have appeared in unanticipated form. (We should rememberas a former member of the previous administration pointed out in the early days of the Iraq warthat change can be messy.) Still, the nations mood at the moment seems to welcome changealmost any change.

This volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction is composed mostly of work published during the past year that engages fully in the current times and provides compelling arguments for both global and individual change. Creative nonfictions roots are in journalism, but the genre also allows writers to become intimately involved in their stories. Often this interplay between the personal and the political provides deeper coverage, and a stronger connection to the reader, than traditional journalism allows.

Wesley Yangs profile of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, is informed by his uncomfortable sympathy for Cho, based in their common background as Asian men, aspiring writers, and, perhaps, misfits. Tim Bascom reports from his classroom in a community college in Iowa; his students reasons for missing class, for dropping out, and for choosing their final paper topics add up to a portrait of a larger community undergoing cultural and economic transition. In What Comes Out, Dawnelle Wilkie reports from behind the scenes at an abortion clinica highly politicized topic that is here stripped of the usual drama and given a fresh new look.

Truth will always out, Wilkie writes, and now I have spoken its name and I am waiting for the world to crumble Waiting, that is, for change.

A S IT HAPPENS , right now I am also going through some major changes in my lifethe kinds of change many people often fantasize about and, simultaneously, resist. To begin with, I am changing jobs, leaving the University of Pittsburgh, where I have taught in the creative writing program for three decades, and where I was also an undergraduate student.

Starting this fall, I will be the writer in residence at the Consortium for Science Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and a professor in the Hugh Downs School for Human Communication at Arizona State University. Interestingly, CSPOs mission is to consider the impact of change in a variety of disciplines. In my new position, I will help scientists, engineers, attorneys, and physicians employ creative nonfiction techniques to communicate their ideas about our changing society.

But that is only the beginningand some of the changes I am facing seem less exciting, at least for me. My son, Sam, a high school senior, will soon be going to college somewhere and moving, perhaps, out of the house. The thought of this depresses me more than I can describe. My eighty-nine-year-old mother fears that my change in employment and locationthough I have promised her I will keep my house in Pittsburgh, to maintain dual citizenship, so to speakwill keep me from seeing her on a regular basis.

But on the whole, times of change can be heady, rich in possibilities, and full of questions. What does this change mean to me and to the people with whom I have intimate connections? What will I learn about myself, about others, about the world because of these changes?

As a writer and editor, this is what interests me most about change. It is complicated, painful, and promising, and therefore rich in literary possibilities, from plot and characterization to philosophical analysis, or what creative nonfiction writers refer to as reflection. Changefor better or worseprovides writers opportunities for contemplation, speculation, fantasy, and debate. Many of the pieces in this collection find their inspiration in intense moments of change or transitiona birth, a death, the beginning of a marriage.

Brenda Miller uses the format of a table of figures to examine herself over timeher relationships with her body, her family, her lovers. Marie Mutsuki Mockett travels to Japan for her grandmothers funeral and finds equal amounts of frustration and freedom in being only half-Japaneseas an outsider, she is not welcome at her grandmothers cremation, but her status also makes her privy to otherwise carefully guarded family secrets. Laura Bramon Good and her husband fight through the first year of their marriage in the thin-walled privacy of an apartment speckled with bloodstains from the previous tenants. The death of a favorite uncle brings home the true meaning of exile to Edwidge Danticat.

Many of the writers in this collection work primarily in other genres, but here they tell storiesconfessions, explorations, apologiesthat, in one writers words, I cant imagine handing overto fiction. Creative nonfiction allows for intimate and honest assessment of events, and lets writers engage fully with the rich possibilities of change.