True, That

    A Note From the Literary Nonfiction Editor



          I 've gotten into the habit of carrying a little notepad wherever I go. I've scanned it so you can see:



    Notice that it's not one of those metal, spiral bound ones that tear the pockets of your khakis while you're trying to pull it out to write something important before it's forgotten, evaporates into the land of brilliant-stories-I-could-have-written-if-I-could-only-remember-that-line. I used to carry one of those notepads, but the spirals always bent, the front cover always came off before I could fill the first ten pages, so I found these in a little office supply store in the town in Massachusetts where I teach English. I bought two of them and was totally ripped off because most people buy their office supplies at Staples in the next town. If anyone out there knows where I can get these pads in bulk, please let me know (I checked at Staples; they don't carry them.) I want to give them to my writer friends.

          Since you can't lift the front cover of my pad to see what I've been writing, I'm going to share a few quotes that caught my attention, ones that I've applied to the genre of creative nonfiction and found useful as a writer in general.

    The presence of any observer alters the landscape.
    I found this in a great new book called Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, by Robin Hemley. The quote is a commentary on how the presence of television cameras caused a tribe in the southern Philippines to behave differently, but it can also be applied to literary nonfiction today. Too much emphasis is being placed on literal truth being the determining factor of whether or not a piece of literary nonfiction is veracious. The truth is that complete fact can never be achieved when we're depending on memory. Even if you're recalling something you swear was recorded most of the time, as Tom Wolfe claimed:
    All of the events, details, and dialogue I have recorded are either what I saw and heard myself or were told to me by people who were there themselves or were recorded on tapes or film or in writing.
    in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, there is still the issue of how the words will be presented. A writer will most certainly not publish a book made up entirely of recorded words (at least I hope not), so we have to talk less about fact and more about truth, which deals with- …at least in part by that writer's sensibility, as well as how that writer views/defines the genre. Someone who thinks that memoir should be an accurate, literal rendering of the past will compose a different kind of work from a writer who sees memoir as a form of self-exploration. Michael Steinberg, editor of the creative nonfiction journal, Fourth Genre, knows what he's talking about. Still, even if I see the genre as Steinberg does, a means for exploring myself, the product of that exploration is fluid. I'm sitting at my desk right now, all smoothed over on Vicodin because of a painful wisdom tooth. If I decided to recall a story from my youth today and put it down to paper, it would be different than if I wrote it tomorrow. Forget even the Vicodin. If I jotted down a recollection completely drug-free, tomorrow's result would still be different because each new day presents unique circumstances through which these recollections are filtered. It's the reason I probably won't write something like that again.

          I was upset when I heard Dave Eggers say this at a reading in Toronto last week. He was referring to dealing with adverse reactions to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by those close to him. What they have failed to understand – what many fail to comprehend – about the writing of personal essay or memoir is that it's not about the people who appear in the story, but about the journey of the person telling the story. Many people could have relayed the facts of what happened in Eggers' book to us, but only Dave Eggers could have told that story. It's a shame that he feels like he probably won't write memoir again, because that book is probably the best one I've read in the last ten years.

          “Service Dating” is the lone piece of creative nonfiction in this issue of Del Sol Review. I chose it because its author, Darcy Wakefield, speaks the truth. When she invites you into her life by using the second-person point of view, she's not doing so to be cute, pretentious, or clever. She's doing what all good creative nonfiction writers do, whether they use the second person or not: she's giving you her eyes. Feel honored.

          This notebook I told you about earlier: it's thin. You won't even know it's in your pocket until you come upon words in conversation or in your reading that will compel you to reach for it. Write these words down, look at them through your own eyes, then give us the privilege of seeing what you see.



    Contents

    		 



      Frank

      Tempone