Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form, from UVic English instructor Micaela Maftei, explores the purpose and potential of non-fiction, along with the formats and styles it encompasses. It is a worthwhile addition to the library of any writer, scholar, or lover of non-fiction writing.
About the Book
Writers of creative non-fiction are often expected to be able to recreate reality, to deal with, or even access, a singular truth. But the author, like any human, is not an automaton remotely tasked with capturing a life or an event.
Whether we tell stories and understand them as fiction or non-fiction, or whether we draw away from these classifications, writers craft and shape writing, all writing. No experience exists on a flat plane, and recounting or interpreting events will always involve some element of artistic manipulation: every instance, exchange, discussion, and event is open to multiple interpretations and can be described in many ways, all of which are potentially truthful.
Writing Creative Non-Fiction: Determining the Form contains essays and original writing from novelists, poets, songwriters, musicians, and academics. The book covers topics that range from explorations of the role of the author, definitions and representations of the form, self and illness, to the spectral elements of non-fiction and its role in historical narratives. The essays included in this volume address everything from memoir, biography, and autobiography to a discussion of musical approaches to criticism and a non-fiction interview.
The book identifies key writers including Christopher Isherwood, David Shields, James Frey, Åsne Seierstad, John D’Agata, W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Coe, Hilary Mantel, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead, and Arthur Frank and is essential reading for students, researchers and writers of creative non-fiction.
About the Editors
Micaela Maftei holds a Ph.D from the University of Glasgow. Her book The Fiction of Autobiography: Reading and Writing Identity was published with Bloomsbury in 2013 and her fiction has appeared online and in print in the UK and North America.
Laura Tansley‘s creative and critical writing has appeared in a variety of places including ‘Short Fiction in Theory and Practice’, ‘New Writing’, ‘Versal’ and ‘The Island Review’ (with Amy Mackelden), ‘Kenyon Review Online’ (with Micaela Maftei), ‘New Writing Scotland’ and ‘NANO Fiction.’ She lives and works in Glasgow.
