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  Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola is in its 3rd edition. Long a resource for writers and teachers of creative nonfiction, Tell It Slant aims to capture a glimpse of creative nonfiction in the wild. How to feed it. How to sharpen its teeth. This is a manual on how to track some of the many ways in which a writer can tell her truth slant. For writers One definition of creative nonfiction is “ true stories, well told .” Tell It Slant calls it “tricky business.” "In creative nonfiction—more so, perhaps, than in any other genre—readers assume a real person behind the artifice, an author who speaks directly to the reader. Just as in spoken conversation, it’s a symbiotic relationship. The reader completes this act of communication through attention to the author’s story, and the author must establish right away a reason for the reader to be attentive at all."   Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tel...

  Detail from Hanoi Ceramic Road. Photo credit: Karen Kao Lyric essay is a hybrid creature. It has the legs of memoir, the musculature of a polemic and the wings of poetry. Make it the way you would a mosaic out of fragments, shiny shards of memory and bits of string. Use a lyric essay to make an argument without ever stating your point or perhaps even knowing in advance what the point is supposed to be. The lyric essay meanders and surprises. It’s been around for a long time. Writers like Seneca, Bacon, Sei Shōnagon in the tenth century, Montaigne, hundreds of others: all could be said to write essays whose forms were inherently lyric; that is, they did not necessarily follow a linear, narrative line.  Brenda Miller, “ A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay ” in Tell It Slant, ed. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola Taking the plunge The term lyric essay, however, is relatively new. In 1997, the US literary journal Seneca Review chose to popularize the f...

Memoir is hot these days. At least, it was last year around this time when Michelle Obama’s Belonging was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Educated , a memoir written by Tara Westover, followed close behind. Soon thereafter, I sat in on a memoir writing class. Not because I wanted to write my life’s story but to cheer on the teacher, Ellen Keith, a fellow faculty member at the International Writers’ Collective . Memoir belongs to the genre of creative nonfiction , a broad tent that holds many circus animals: personal essay, travel narrative, memoir, blog, and autobiography. Unlike autobiography, which generally spans an entire lifetime, memoir is more thematic, focusing on a particular phase. It uses the same building blocks as fiction: a strong narrative voice and a story told in scenes. It made me wonder: where does memoir end and fiction begin? Then Ellen distracted me with a hermit crab exercise. Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as ...