Posts tagged: memoir

Watch Colette Brooks in Conversation with Jennifer Egan

On January 17, 2022, Greenlight Bookstore hosted a virtual book launch for Colette Brooks’ Trapped in the Present Tense: Meditations on American Memory. Jennifer...   Read More

Just What is Creative Nonfiction?

by Colette Brooks As a culture, we tend to associate imaginative work with fiction; we have traditionally looked to nonfiction for guidance, expertise, and...   Read More

by Colette Brooks

Nonsense-on-Stilts-cover-detailAs a culture, we tend to associate imaginative work with fiction; we have traditionally looked to nonfiction for guidance, expertise, and information, and nonfiction that doesn’t satisfy these aims is sometimes confusing. But just what is imagination? I thought it might be useful to consult the dictionary. The first definition of imagination I found is the one we’re most familiar with, the capacity to make things up; but the second definition, interestingly, relates to another kind of capacity: ‘the ability to confront and deal with reality by using the creative powers of the mind.’ This is actually an apt definition of creative nonfiction. It takes two essential elements, reality and the mind, and joins them in creative tension. There is a growing place for such complex nonfictional perspectives in our culture.   Much of what traditional nonfiction has always promised (guidance, expertise, information) is now freely offered throughout the web, and that opens up a welcome space for writers of more ambitious, reflective nonfiction.

maxresdefaultFamily pieces and personal memoir are the low hanging fruit of creative nonfiction – writers who don’t ‘make it up’ need to find material somewhere, and when one is just starting out this resource seems inexhaustible, until suddenly it isn’t. Many years ago at Yaddo, an artists’ colony, I was working on a piece about my family that would later be published in a literary journal, though I didn’t know that then. This was my third family piece, and I’d just gone through the grandparents. I began to look down the road of what I had hoped would be a long nonfiction writing life, newly worried about running out of material, having nothing else to say, while watching writers of all stripes pounding out what seemed to be massive manuscripts all around me. (One becomes self-conscious at a place like Yaddo. I later learned that everybody’s anxious, but that’s another story.) I hesitantly mentioned my anxiety to a new novelist friend and roomie, while sharing an end-of-day change-your-voice-1we-deserve-it bottle of Bordeaux. She made quick work of my angst. Nonsense, she declared, the world’s a big place and there are a million things to write about. To make a long story very short, she was right. Once one has exhausted the memoir material, the world opens up in all its idiosyncrasies to those curious enough to explore it. It’s liberating to tell someone else’s story, to give voice to the voiceless, or to take an idea, as one might take a musical phrase, and string it out and extend it.   To that end one needs to develop reflective powers –the capacity to amplify the ways in which one thinks about experience while also attending to the power of language and the development of an individual voice.

I came to realize that creative nonfiction was the kind of writing I found most deeply, inexhaustibly satisfying.

And that is what I try to teach in my nonfiction classes.

 

 

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On January 17, 2022, Greenlight Bookstore hosted a virtual book launch for Colette Brooks’ Trapped in the Present Tense: Meditations on American Memory. Jennifer Egan (Manhattan Beach, A Visit from the Goon Squad) joined Brooks for a singular discussion on memory writ large.

In Trapped in the Present Tense, Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies Colette Brooks (In the City, Lost in Wonder) explores the mechanics and malleability of the collective American memory. Revisiting some of the more forgotten aspects of recent events in the American story to explain our challenging and often puzzling present—including televised assassinations, the Doomsday Clock, and obsessive diarists—Brooks refreshes the American narrative in a lyrical and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay that “ruminates upon the past while reframing…our present perceptions of what matters most” (Booklist).

Watch the video below or on YouTube.