Journal 8 from Dana

Last year, I started to get seriously into creative nonfiction. I remember reading Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, among other books, and what surprised me was how professional the tones of those two specific books tended to be in spite of their form. They shifted between being in scene, giving a narrative account of a time from the author's perspective while they were interacting with their subject, to giving hard, solid facts about their subjects. I wasn't used to that. I had thought all nonfiction was essentially a list of facts that were smashed together into the introduction-body-conclusion format. Impersonal. I had wondered if the books I were reading were strange, because besides the New Yorker, my only experience with creative nonfiction was dry, flavorless school texts. I didn't know that creative nonfiction was a bridge between storytelling and teaching.

What I've learned from the creative nonfiction chapter so far is that an essay doesn't have to be dry and impersonal to be quality. While I wasn't a fan of Montaigne, his essays really drove home the idea that the introduction-body-conclusion format wasn't the only way to go. "Someone, I have forgotten who, having won a naval battle, cut off the thumbs of all of his vanquished enemies, to render them incapable of fighting and of handling the oar." Someone? Who knows who! He could have been reporting on his time's equivalent of an urban legend. That reminds me of the "My name means..." piece I wrote for the fiction section of this class, which in hindsight is really more creative nonfiction. "I had read in my encyclopedia that a man named Dana won then Nobel Prize for literature which I cannot confirm the truth of day..."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/the-price-of-a-life

The New Yorker, in the coming years, may become the last bastion of investigative journalism. There's no shortage of quality, and readers often complain that the amount of time it takes to read and digest one copy, the next one comes out. I don't like to pick and choose what I read out of it, myself, but there are so many hours in the day and an unending supply of things to read! The essay breaches the topic of exoneration by talking about a specific case of John Restivo being wrongfully convicted and then freed. Then, it starts talking about the damage of being imprisoned and then exonerated. It reaches out from Restivo's case to talk about more specific facts and information, then reaches out to give a little scene at one point of an office dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted.