.a new 'body' of work: creative nonfiction.

In high school and college I always avoided reading or having to write 'creative non-fiction.' I felt like the term itself was confusing since it basically, in my naive mind, described two very different writing genres.  Non-fiction, to me, meant boring facts laid out in bland jargon and hard-to-pronounce terms - mostly my view of nonfiction came from science textbooks.  Instead I browsed the Fiction Bestseller lists, which were a good fit for me at the time.

Needless to say, I've since learned that creative non-fiction is, indeed, a fascinating genre of writing, one that I quite enjoy both reading and writing.  For my final quarter as a grad student I've decided to take a creative non-fiction course. I already enjoyed Feminist Memoir last year, my first real encounter with creative non-fiction, and I'm currently working on a creative memoir essay for my Writing the Body course.

For my 'body essay' I've decided to intersperse Sandra Bartky's theories of the female body with my own experiences, specifically describing times in my life that I've felt my body has been controlled or not controlled, despite or because of societal norms.  It's made up of four different chapters, the first starting with my body image as a child, choosing for myself whether I wanted to be a tomboy or 'girly' girl, wearing dresses or dirt.  The second describes the terrifying details of my first-grade classroom when we were forced to train the very movements and natural tendencies in our bodies, keeping our feet in small boxes made of strips of tape on the floor beneath our desks.  The third chapter details a time in my life that my parents and I lovingly refer to as my "Butterfinger Girl" phase; I gained weight because of my changing body and metabolism.  And the final (for now) describes my early high school years of rigorous physical training for sports, my body resembling that of a boy athlete rather than a teenage girl.

Some of the fascinating creative non-fiction we've been reading in this class include:

An Autobiography of Face by Lucy Grealy 

Plain Text: Essays by Nancy Mairs

Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker

And a couple books I purchased today at a used bookstore (hopefully I'll get around to reading them this summer):

Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists edited by Sullivan & Martin

Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett