“Every single rule can and should be broken when necessary.” – conference presenter Helen Moffett, after George Orwell
Earlier this year I attended the national conference of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, held in Victoria. Inspiring presentations, reading and discussions left me both humble, amid such talent, and motivated to improve my craft. Part of the learning was conceptual: just what is CNF, and how does it differ from topical journalistic nonfiction, and fiction?
The bottom line, I gather as a rough consensus, is that we can approach our work in progress, or consider the finished project, as a unique offering, without stressing too much on pinning category labels.
Take, for example, my book, My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness. You might have to try both sides of the aisle to find this title, as it contains the full spectrum of approaches. The first section, Forest Walks and Other Exercises, comprises personal essays in the natural setting of the BC forest. The second section, Interior Rainforest, takes a narrative turn, with true stories from my two decades living in that environment. The final section, Mountain Dreams, stretches the narrative bounds to include elements of fantasy, fairy tale and magic realism, while still couched in the familiar Kootenay mountains.
As for work in progress, I have submitted a recently revised work called Red Rock Road, Light Blue Sea, which charts a real-life pilgrimage I made in 2000 to Spain and Portugal. In this book, a travel journal on the backpacking phase of the journey gives way to an experimental novel (aren’t all novels, by definition, experimental?) which the main character attempts to write on the island of Formentera. So how to describe this original synthesis, if not with that protective umbrella, Creative Nonfiction?
Other labels might be applied: nonfiction novel, metafiction, literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, involuted novel, or, turning to the German, Kunstlerroman—about a character in a book who is writing a book in which he is a character. With such a confusion of terms, I favor the approach of simplicity: Creative Nonfiction.
Yet another wrinkle in the equation crops up with Rendezvous at Jumbo Pass: A Twisted Tale of Wilderness Survival. Originally cast as a novella, a function of its length (20,000 words) and the fictional elements (altered person and place names, and plot variations embedded within the narrative structure), this second edition comes back to the CNF corral. Personal names remain fictionalized but place names (such as Jumbo Pass) have been restored; and while the plot variations remain necessarily fictional, they revolve around the core narrative based on a real-life adventure.
I return to the premise I took away from the CNF conference I attended. The labelling and categorizing of work is quite arbitrary, and secondary to the integrity of the work itself. More important, I think, is to provide the reader with a relevant description of what a given book offers. To some readers the allure of a story based on real experience is important; others will be intrigued by the way a given work navigates that mysterious boundary between artistic creation and the world of experience we hold as real. What emerges as a universal principle is that every literary work blends, whether we acknowledge it or not, the two complementary realms, fiction and nonfiction.
