Creative poetic non-fiction

I’ve been musing about literary genre’s, how with the expansion of the civilized world  as defined by upticks in worldwide literacy rates, the rise in the granting of MFA degrees that specialize in writing, the proliferation of writing programs, writing conferences, writing workshops, critical thinking about writing, (the elevation of the supposed quality of the sentence for instance,  as in, she or he writes beautiful sentences to the point of a beautiful sentence taking precedence, it seems, over an otherwise well-constructed whole) has expanded exponentially to include a category called, “creative nonfiction.”

Build a bigger umbrella and they will come. Creative non-fiction is certainly the bigger umbrella. As defined by one of its specialists*, creative non-fiction is “on its baseline a literary genre. Some people call it the fourth genre, along with poetry, fiction, and drama…an umbrella term for the many different ways one can write what is called creative non-fiction…Memoir, for example, personal essay, biography, narrative history and long form narrative reportage may all fit under the creative nonfiction umbrella.” There are lots and lots of creative nonfiction umbrellas, as it’s now raining umbrellas.

Yet, is creative nonfiction a legitimate literary genre? If memoir is under the big umbrella, creative nonfiction is certainly hovering right over it. Notice though that nonfiction itself, according to the definition cited above, is not cited and instead creative nonfiction is cited as being the fourth literary genre along with “poetry, fiction, and drama.” Therefore, it seems that good old nonfiction does not have a seat at the table, nor an umbrella, if I am reading the genre categories correctly.

Regarding literary genres, I propose a kind of circle theory, or taxonomy, granting creative nonfiction its place, to be joined by creative memoir, creative poetry, pure fiction, purer fiction and so on, with all literary genre roads circling back to 4 basic food types: poetry, fiction, drama, and that often-overlooked genre, pure, unadulterated nonfiction.

*’What is Creative Nonfiction?’, from ‘The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders and Ne’er-do-wells Created Creative Nonfiction’, by Lee Gutkind, Yale University Press.