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Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction

Rae Pagliarulo (Editor),

Donna Talarico (Goodreads Author) (Editor/Publisher)

4.56 · Rating details · 9 ratings · 4 reviews

Learn how to write creative nonfiction alongside some of the brightest minds in the genre.

Inspired by Hippocampus Magazine's annual conference, Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction features 20+ essays from some of the events' highest-rated speakers and writers behind a few of our journal's most-read craft columns.

Getting to the Truth is full ...more

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Paperback, 200 pages

Published August 10th 2021 by Books by Hippocampus

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Dec 10, 2021 Kelly rated it it was amazing

Great advice, fun to read, and especially useful for writing teachers!

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Dec 19, 2021 Amy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2021

So useful to anyone swimming in the CNF pool. If you write in this genre, or wish you did, or want to do it better, this book is for you.

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Dec 30, 2021 Brian Watson rated it it was amazing

Sometime between the middle of August, when I purchased Getting to the Truth; the Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction, and December, when I found the time to read it, I had soured on craft books. I suppose that is something that happens to writers now and again: you need a break from the learning.

In the intervening months, as I queried my memoir and taught a class on writing memoir proposals with a good friend, the urge to learn resurfaced. Happily, I discovered that Getting to the Truth i Sometime between the middle of August, when I purchased Getting to the Truth; the Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction, and December, when I found the time to read it, I had soured on craft books. I suppose that is something that happens to writers now and again: you need a break from the learning.

In the intervening months, as I queried my memoir and taught a class on writing memoir proposals with a good friend, the urge to learn resurfaced. Happily, I discovered that Getting to the Truth is precisely my kind of craft book. One where the lessons are easily understood and digested, and where I can skip from section to section, learning precisely what I need when I need it.

Within its pages, one essay on memoir packed a powerful punch. It was by Melanie Brooks, entitled Writing About Family; But Isn’t It Their Story Too?

The first impact came when the author quoted Andre Dubus III for me: You don’t have to tell the family story. You have to tell your story of being in the family. As I go back and revisit some of the memories that comprise my own memoir, I often struggle with the story. Is what I remember what others remember? Did the events of my young life truly happen as I remember them? Was I, as a result of the confusing morphoses of my memories, telling the story of my siblings, my parents?

Several paragraphs down, Ms. Brooks had a reassurance: Memoirists are not reporters. I had gone down several rabbit holes with family members. When was my father’s first heart attack? When was the trip I remember, on the floor at the foot of my mother as she sat on the only passenger seat in Frank Curtin’s beat-up panel van, her panic as palpable as the stench of Frank’s stale cigars? More importantly, what happened the night before my father died? I remember being told, after the fact, that my father called out for me and my brother as we slept. The adults in the room with him refused to wake us, the story went. And because my father died when I was at school later that day, that story cum memory rankled.

But no family member I spoke to in my ongoing year of memoir revisions could recall such a thing. Dropping the story had seemed wise at first, but now I think differently: I have to tell my story of being in the family. That memory became part of the grief and anger I did everything to avoid. It’s a detail, lodged in my memory, that contributed to who I once was, and it belongs in my story, my memoir.

Ms. Brooks then quotes another author, Monica Wood, that confirmed my new conclusion: What you are trying to get to is the truth of your experience, which isn’t the same as the truth of the truth, because there isn’t any such thing.

Getting to the Truth was an impulse purchase. But it turned out to be a correction for my mistaken writing impulses. I am grateful I read it. ...more

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Dec 25, 2021 Wendy Fontaine rated it it was amazing

An excellent collection of essays by writers for writers. Anyone who writes or teaches creative nonfiction will find something in this book. The advice is very practical and user-friendly, with exercises and prompts that are accessible and flexible for the kind of narrative you do. Whether you are writing about place or family, trying a lyrical or flash form, or struggling with a memory or with dialogue, there is something here for everyone.

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