Today is the first day of class. I have put on an extroverted and caffeinated version of myself. I’ve had conversations with writers about whether or not teaching is “good” for one’s writing, and I think I’m in the category of those whose writing is served by teaching. On good days, I feel as though the conversation in my classes stokes the fire of my own writing by making me consciously articulate the things I care about it writing, the routes I believe are most effective for producing good writing. But some days, too, there’s just an exhaustion that makes the alphabet seem foreign, from space. I have one class to go and I wonder what I should do with these minutes to “refresh” so that talking about writing is not a deathless abstraction.

One of my students, Brett Dickerson, has an eloquent answer to this question:
“It’s the same type of storytelling we use everyday. When my wife asks how my day was, when Dad tells me about the livestock sale, or when my brother tells me whey he drank so much last weekend, it’s all creative nonfiction.”

“Faction” is Wole Soyinka’s word. It’s also been described as literary journalism, personal essay, impersonal essay, reportage, autobiography, memoir, lyric essay, meditation… <a href= “http://www.billroorbach.com”>Bill Roorbach</a> (in the wonderful Writing Life Stories) describes all these terms and others as fitting under the umbrella of the term “creative nonfiction,” which I also like.