Issue 16: Vulnerability in creative nonfiction writing
Hello friends,
Welcome back to my newsletter where I share short, poorly edited notes about stuff I find interesting.
Like a lot of people in the writing business, I went down to Seattle last week for the annual orgy of craft discussions and literary ambition that is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (or AWP for those in the know). I went to take part in a panel called TMI in the Classroom: Navigating Vulnerability in Creative Nonfiction Pedagogy alongside writers Lindsay Wong, Tara McGuire, Mandy Catron and Tariq Hussain who generously agreed to host.
While writing my presentation, I got to thinking about the different kinds of vulnerability we experience during our lives as writers. And I recalled two particular incidents from my early days of learning the craft.
The first happened during my first ever creative nonfiction course in undergrad. Every class, the instructor would read aloud from student work and, without naming names, either praise or critique them in front of everybody. It was a harrowing experience, one very much built on the concept of the professor as arbiter of quality. It felt great to be praised, but on one occasion, he read aloud from a short piece I wrote about my father and joked that he found the language overwrought. He called the writer (me) a “repressed novelist” rather than an essayist.
The second was my experience as a student journalist. I was an arts and culture reporter and eventually an editor of the section, but during my time there, I was encouraged to try writing for different sections of the paper. It was challenging to take on different genres, but I would work closely with the editor who would help me understand the requirements of the form to make something publishable, if not perfect.
The first was vulnerable because I was writing something intensely personal in an academic context. The instructor made the experience negative by imposing his expectations of the genre in a way that left me feeling humiliated and reluctant to take such a chance again.
The second was also an experience of vulnerability because I was moving from a form of writing that I was relatively comfortable with to one that was new, that challenged me to build new muscles. But I was able to take that chance because I was working in a collaborative environment with my peers, and the goal was not just to finish a piece of writing, but to explore and develop my practise in the longterm. Through those short forays into the news and sports sections, I learned skills that I still use to this day.
This second kind of vulnerability tends to be particularly acute for those who are new to creative writing or who come from pedagogical backgrounds that reward perfectionism and certainty over the messy work of creative exploration. So my presentation was about how to shift grading focus away from finished product to writing process in order to lower the stakes for students struggling with both those kinds of vulnerability. But I have so many more thoughts on the topic.
In the evening on the same day as the panel, I had the pleasure of reading a short excerpt from my memoir in progress at an event hosted by the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, which I took part in a couple of years ago. Here I went from presenting about vulnerability to experiencing it once again before an audience.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a live reading, so I was a bit out of practise. I chose a funny piece because I find those tend to bring the room up, and the audience was as warm and receptive as I could have hoped for. But in conversation after, I remembered a certain thing about reading memoir aloud—you never really know what details an audience will hang on. In fiction or poetry, you at least have a bit of (sometimes pretend) distance from what you’re writing about to shield you from this, but in memoir, you’re right there. This is your life—you know it and the audience knows it.
In the past, I’ve found this experience deeply disorienting, but this time, I was able to step back from it a little and just take note of what they connected with. It is my story, but I have a great deal of control over how I tell it.
When we talk about vulnerability in writing, we often get stuck on the first version I mentioned, but confession is a mode that most seem a lot more comfortable with these days. Simply saying, “this happened to me,” is not the hardest part of the writing process for most writers I’ve worked with (me included). The really hard part of writing creative nonfiction is finding meaning in your experiences and articulating that meaning on the page. This shifts a writer into the second kind of vulnerability—confronting your understanding of yourself in order to craft a legible persona for the reader requires one to grow not just in openness, but in skill. And learning new skills is a vulnerable process, particularly if we’re used to being praised for our natural talent in a form.
Do you have experience of these two forms of vulnerability in writing? I’d love to hear your experiences! You can also usually find me on Twitter. And if you liked what you read, please hit the heart button below, leave a comment and feel free to share widely.
~Erika