March 22, 2012
Mix Tape: The Art of Making Stuff Up
Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction, weighs in on the D’Agata scandal and what it means to “do a D’Agata”—new slang for “fudge”—in a piece of writing. “In creative nonfiction, […]
March 8, 2012
Mix Tape: My Dystopia Is Better Than Yours
Huxley had the nerve to write Orwell and claim that Brave New World trumped 1984. The John D’Agata fact-checking brouhaha continues. Check out Ned Stuckey-French’s Dear John letter from the AWP lyric […]
March 1, 2012
Mix Tape: Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover (or a Poet by Her Thermos)
Don’t head to AWP in Chicago this week without this hilarious field guide to the conference. “Consider yourself very lucky if you come upon a poet—they are an endangered species! […]
February 25, 2012
Short Takes: “Truth Broken into Prismatic Hues”
An argument for creativity as an inherent human feature—not an accident of the universe or luck, but something to be cultivated. Is there a line between “nonfiction writer” and “essayist”? […]
February 23, 2012
Doubling Down: an interview with John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
I’ve spent plenty of time and energy here already praising The Lifespan of a Fact, the strange and mesmerizing book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, and tempting as it […]
February 16, 2012
Missing the Point
I’ll admit at the outset to some frustration. I like John D’Agata’s work quite a lot. I liked Halls of Fame, I really liked About a Mountain, I think the […]
February 12, 2012
The Fact of a Poem
Earlier this week, while there were some interesting—and interestingly broad—reactions to the excerpts from the forthcoming/arriving book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal printed in […]