Panel Participants: Jen Soriano, Julie Marie Wade, Constance Collier-Mercado, Barrie Jean Borich, Marco Wilkinson
Description: Conventional approaches to nonfiction emphasize single stories, linear revelations, and verifiable facts, but pressure to conform to familiar narrative modalities can silence those who write from marginalized and non-normative perspectives. In this panel, five writers of hybrid and intersectional nonfiction discuss how their work disrupts norms, shatters singular narratives, and complicates facts—embracing instead the power of blended genres, multiple identities, and prismatic points of view. Download event outline and supplemental documents.
An exploration of forms that disrupt norms, shatter singular narratives, and complicate facts, for those writing from marginalized and non-normative perspectives.
BJB read from “Documentary Arts,” forthcoming in Conjunctions, a hybridity of visual images, archival research, and speculative CNF.
JS read from “381 Years” from the book Nervous, about colonization and resistance in the Philippines—the piece is divided into segments head-to-toe as embodied text, but also left-right alternating segments as call-and-response.
JMW read from “Meditation 38” from Otherwise, about 3 happenings in 1987: the AIDS quilt display/protest and 1st same-sex union in DC, a published article on declining moral standards including among butterflies, and herself in 2nd grade.
C C-M read from “Water-Bearer: A Reading from The Book Of” from The Book of Sounds, about black language and community, music and literacy/illiteracy.
MW read from “A Gardener’s Education: A Plant Journey,” a piece originally printed 3’ high and 9’ wide, a narrative of 10 years as a horticulturist.
Q&A:
BJB: what are the possibilities of hybrid and experimental forms, and how do they help us get to content not accessible by traditional narrative CNF forms?
- C C-M: it allows me to access oral tradition
- JMW: it let me move away from transitions and use more parataxis, which feels more immediate
- BJB: film montage techniques inspired me
- MW: Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed gave me permission—it seems a lot of us draw from poetry for permission for how to write CNF. Experimental/hybrid forms allow more access to unfiltered reality because of how they can break the rules or The Matrix.
- JS: it allowed me to unlearn traditional expository writing—it gave me permission and affirmation for alternative perspective, especially as a neurodivergent person, to not have to write in a linear fashion—it feels like my individual way of thinking on the page.
JS: my question is about the issue of hybridity versus clarity—the push for clarity can be good, but can dismantle wildness—how do you balance these?
- MW: if the lack of clarity is in service of making a point, it does its own work—but it needs to serve a function
- BJB: is clarity the wrong word? Because what we’re seeking with readers isn’t clarity, but connection
- JMW: I like there to be some mystery—I don’t necessarily want to solve the mystery, but rather articulate those mysteries, and what’s unsolvable, better—lean into being mystified
- C C-M: instead of a singular reader, I’m realizing there’s multiple readers. I agree with BJB’s idea of connection, and I’m trying to connect with multiple readers
JMW: to move between scope and intimacy, to zoom in and out—what techniques allow this?
- JS: for me it’s form—a braid of history with the personal. I also build image webs and sensory webs—repetitions that are woven through to connect the parts
- C C-M: I consult poetry for tightness/brevity/compression to contrast with the broader commentaries—I generally try to weave a poem in
- MW: for the piece I shared, the visual appearance/arrangement allows both a big picture and zoomed-in detail—not bound to paragraph, to the physical 8 ½ x 11 page
- BJB: I like JMW’s idea of sleuthing and mystery, which ties in with how I’m fascinated by ruins (Chicago), the contrast of enterprise versus ruin, how the identities of cities and individuals can change. I also use the braid.
C C-M: how are you intentionally using hybridity to engage in multiple conversations with multiple communities (especially for authors who are moving between multiple communities/code switching)?
- BJB: I have a self-interrogating speaker I imagine as an old drag queen.
- MW: I write family history using weeds metaphorically, but conversely a natural history about botany that uses family metaphorically.
- JMW: I’m always working against a presumed heterosexuality in CNF—in-between worlds of being in hetero-world, but also my early access to gay world at a time when I didn’t have the language for it.
- JS: I’m constantly thinking about audiences—my primary audience is Phillippinex persons, but also scientists, and those traumatized. This is reflected via form, how the text in places is divided into F1, F2 (for filial generation 1, 2, etc.).
MW: How do your texts teach people how to read them? How have texts of the past 30 years taught readers to be comfortable with this kind of writing, and has this helped or hindered your own work?
- BJB: the fluid identities of students have made them more open to these kinds of texts.
- JS: —social media also.
- C C-M: —and other technologies.
- JMW: The first wave of lyric prose came in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but I think now writers are seeing it’s not just for autobiographical content—it can be used for, say, documentary work.
Audience question: how might these work as audio performances? Would they work?
- JS: if I think of my work as different voices, then audio provides opportunities for that.
- C C-M: It would also allow opportunities for multiple languages in the work.
- MW: maybe not every piece does/should exist in audio?
Audience question: how might these techniques be incorporated into composition classrooms?
- BJB: through shared Google docs and other technological collaborations/accessibility
- JS: I wish teachers would allow more freewriting on a topic without putting it into chronological structures, and/or at least teach other structures.
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, the lyric essay collection Fluid States (selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose), and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
Visit Assay for nonfiction conversations, syllabi, and more!
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 