I’m thinking about the criticism of mainstream nonfiction being a product of milk-fed MFA confessionalism. As an MFA grad myself, the first/most common advice I received was to write “candidly” about “my experience”, usually resulting in “i went through this difficult/rare/

Meaningful thing and wrote about it” type essays, written in the “clean”, American style direct/active prose with the right dose of lyricism, with a clear arc and thus an injection of catharsis at the end that looked similar to authenticity.

But it isn’t just MFA programs— after all, most institutions serve the system, set up to help their graduates navigate the system better. I’m talking about the system of publishing in general, the book market including lit journals,

Award-giving institutions, arts grant authorities. But also the system of learned reading, the guided reading, and the implicit taste grooming, all perpetuating the single-focus practice of reading and writing, and the book economy.

And i have partaken in this practice too, writing more conventional, confessional essays with arc, etc. and it has been my experience that editors and publishers respond better to them. but I want to go further.

I don’t want to stop at the lived experience and what that “taught” me. I don’t want to teach anyone either. I don’t want to awe anyone with my experience. I want to think as I write, and know that someone else is thinking with me as they read what I wrote. I want that warmth.

I have felt that warmth when I read the nonfiction works of Han Kang, Lee Mireuk, James Baldwin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ursula Le Guin, John Berger, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Yiyun Li, Anne Carson, @jessicajlee, Judith Butler, @briangdillon, among others.

In that intensity of thinking and thinking with, I find a form of authenticity I feel comfortable with. Not in how aggressively the writer is peeling off layers of their skin to lay bare their untold or under-told secrets, often traumas. We call this brave. Why?

We call this powerful. Why? To be sure, it IS. It takes courage and strength to confess. But why do we encourage confession—itself punitive—so much from writers? To a point where many of them, especially those who have been through formal/institutionalized thinking about writing,

Feel the compulsion to pathologize their lives in order to tell a story, to sell it? There is something deeply unsettling about this practice that I want to try and upset. But I am not sure how. I suppose I can keep writing in the way that feels truthful

To me, keep reading/supporting the kind of writing that I feel aligned with, and whenever I have the platform, keep making this point and push for first the reimagining then the reforming of our reading/writing practice, in general but especially vis-a-vis nonfiction. Thoughts?