Writing the Community “We”: Approaches to First-Person Plural Point of View
Memoir is typically a first-person singular affair—the intimate story of a particular childhood or adolescence or other slice of life. But first-person plural, which I’ll call the community we after Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s suggestion in Tell It Slant, can create what they call “community” or “communal” memoir and can convey the experience of...
Advice to My Friend Beth’s Undergraduate Creative Nonfiction Students
One thing I like about creative nonfiction is that it allows us to tell our weird, jacked-up stories without having to change little details and try to pass them off as made-up. After all, we’ve probably each read our peers’ work in some English class during the short story unit and thought, Wait a minute …...
Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction
When I was studying fiction for my MFA degree, one of my teachers told me that “voice is everything.” As true as this is in fiction, it’s equally true in nonfiction. For even though I’m telling my own personal story, the voice I use isn’t my everyday speaking voice. In fact, my observation, both from...
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