I enjoyed Doug Bridges' rambles and snarls on creative non-fiction.

I've taught courses on the stuff (with great pleasure) and done some
reading and thinking about it.  As Doug rightly implies, efforts have been
made to define "creative nonfiction" or similar terms in such a way as to
"prove" that it began with this writer or that . . .  but the efforts
strike me as pretty unconvincing.

They mostly remind me of an ancient country joke--
Q.:  If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does the dog have?
A.:  Four, because callin' it a leg don't make it one.

A list of the finest American creative nonfiction could certainly begin
with St. Mark of Hannibal.  And yet, I believe that even before him there
was a feller named Hank who went to live by a pond up  Massachusetts way
for a couple of years.....

Somewhat more seriously, in both America and Britain the landscape of great
non-fiction is enormously rich and diversified, and continues to grow.  Yet
even for many sophisticated readers it's unknown terrain, simply because
they've never mentally categorized books or other writings that way.

Nor do most bookstores view it as a category: If they carry Death in the
Afternoon, they'll stash it with Hemingway's novels; and Roughing It and
Life on the Mississippi, with Twain's novels; and Travels with Charley,
with Steinbeck's novels. John McPhee's various books might be split and
scattered by their subject matter (geology, or whatever), rather than
grouped together to reflect a stellar contemporary nonfiction career.  Bill
Bryson will be stashed in "Humor," and  Capote's In Cold Blood in a "True
Crime" section......

There seems to be very little general perception of artistic nonfiction as
a  worthy genre.

Mark Coburn
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