Syllabus: Using Poetry and Fiction to Encourage Experiments in Nonfiction

“I’ve always been fascinated by less easily defined books—writing that combines genres, or writing that’s so good it seems to simply transcend its own classifications.”

In most nonfiction workshops I’ve participated in as a student, the only books discussed and recommended were nonfiction and memoir. This makes sense, of course, but I’ve always been fascinated by less easily defined books—writing that combines genres, or writing that’s so good it seems to simply transcend its own classifications. In a conversation with Allie Rowbottom in Gulf Coast Journal in 2013, Sarah Manguso said, “I’ve never wanted to make up stories, so before I could fill a page I was called a poet, and after I could fill a page I was called an essayist. But I’ve been doing the same thing all along, just ruminating on my existential problems.”

In my Catapult workshops, I encourage my students to write wildly first and refine later. I find that reading across genres can help inspire this, or at least grant a kind of permission. The following are a few poetry and fiction books that I find myself recommending to my nonfiction students over and over again as we ruminate on our existential problems.

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1. Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s

There may be no you—no other to receive and understand these revelations of myself. The Post Office may burn them for all I know. It’s not important. I only need you as a good idea—to make me apparent. I love you, even if you don’t understand me, even if you burn my attempts to reach you, even if you are no one, nowhere. After all, I burn my hands by the same fires.

This book (filed under “poetry”) pairs the absurdity of a fast-food restaurant with an existential meditation on life, art, and excess. I’ve read this book countless times, and it never loses its magic. The above excerpt reminds me of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick—“I’m wondering if you feel as I do—this incredible urge to be heard. Who do you talk to?” It’s a great literary tradition to write to someone, and I love watching profound realizations unfold via the act of writing to Wendy’s.

2. Sarah Manguso, Hard to Admit & Harder to Escape

Finally the person is famous. I read his books and think I know him. I fall in love with the famous person’s photograph. I attend his events and write desperate letters. I ask questions of those who know him, hoping to learn what I cannot learn. My shame feels like love to me. This shame is the best part of my life. If I call it love, it will no longer be shameful.

Sarah Manguso is the master of omission—her decisions about what to include and what to leave out are fascinating to me. I think this is something she implements wonderfully throughout all of her poetry and memoir/nonfiction books as well, but this book of paragraph-long stories is particularly interesting to discuss. I asked my students, how does Manguso satisfy us as readers if she only has five sentences to convey a scene or a thought? I love how her sentences accumulate in a specific way that makes it so each last sentence rings out.

3. May-Lan Tan, Things to Make & Break

When he tells me about Holly for the first time, we’re at the movies sitting too close to the screen. We’re watching the trailers and he’s tracing the shapes on the sensitive part of my wrist with his thumb. Every one of his exes has a thing—they’ve been molested or are a cellist or something. Holly shattered seventeen bones falling from a trapeze. She was wearing a cast and working in a library when he met her. Ten weeks later, when all the bones were knit, he finally saw her do her act. That’s when he dumped her. He doesn’t say, but I guess she must have looked too free and capable up there, swinging from the ropes. A girl like that could never honestly need you.

Reading May-Lan Tan’s sentences in this book of short stories is like being stabbed in the heart by a hundred tiny daggers—just when you think she’ll let up, another one comes flying at you. In addition to reading to study her sentences, I also read this book for its dialogue, which always comes at just the right time, for just the right length. I love to read these stories out loud the way I read poetry—perhaps as a way of attempting to unlock the mystery of her writing.

4. Catherine Breillat, Pornocracy

Desire doesn’t come from the longing to possess, or even to be possessed, which already implies a more burning imbrication, tangling up, the fusional scattering of flesh. No. Desire comes from the excessive novelty which makes all hope of a possible fornication be like the promise of a new life.

The back cover says this book is “as celebrated as it is reviled,” and the tampon scene I love so much might have something to do with that. Pornocracy is French filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s first novel to be published in English, and it’s a fascinating philosophical exploration of sexuality and gender. With an introduction by Chris Kraus and an afterword by Peter Sotos, it’s clearly not a book for the weak-hearted—there’s really nothing like it.

5. Patrick deWitt, Ablutions

You are dizzy from a strange rush of hot blood in your stomach and the closeness to something as fundamental as this canyon. You were not prepared to feel anything other than pedestrian amusement, and it weakens you in your spine and legs. Clutching your stomach through your shirt you say to yourself, There is too much of the earth missing here, and I just don’t want to know about it.

A little alarm bell seems to go off in the head of every workshop student when second person narration occurs in a piece. And sure, of course I think it should be “warranted” or “justified” or whatever, but Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for a Novel is 164 pages of “you,” in a manner so effortless it makes all those MFA rules seem useless. “What is voice?” we ask again and again. Well, here it is.