Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

Ever since the term ＂creative nonfiction＂ first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.

Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer’s innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genreis an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.

Features in the second edition:
-Updated introduction to the new edition
-Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and ＂Unconventions＂
-A new section on Resistances
-50 essays in all

Margot Singer is a Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA, where she directs the creative writing program. She is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (2017), winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and short-listed for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (2007), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her essays have appeared in the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions, the Sun, River Teeth, and elsewhere, have been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), as well as the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). The co-president of NonfictioNOW, she teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, USA and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.