Outcome10090807060 or belowStudents complete .docx

Outcome
100%
90%
80%
70%
60% or below
Students complete and successfully submit a draft of a longer
written assignment (a creative nonfiction essay, a short story, or
poems) that conveys the elements of craft that they have learned
in class thus far as well as imagination, experimentation,
creativity, and playfulness. The submission must adhere to
length requirements and submission formatting guidelines.
Student engages with many of the techniques and elements of
craft discussed in class, and the work shows imagination,
experimentation, creativity, and playfulness.
AND
All of the submission formatting guidelines have been followed.
AND
There were no typos.
AND
The student stayed within the page requirements.
AND
The submission was uploaded to Canvas on time.
Student engages with many of the techniques and elements of
craft discussed in class.
AND
AND
All of the submission formatting guidelines have been followed.
AND
There were no typos.
AND

The student stayed within the page requirements.
AND
Student engages with some of the techniques and elements of
craft discussed in class.
AND
AND
Some of the submission formatting guidelines have been
followed, but there are a few errors.
OR
There are several typos.
OR
The student vastly did not stay within the page requirement.
AND/OR
Student does not engage with the techniques and elements of
craft discussed in class
AND/OR
There are so many submission formatting errors and typos that
it is difficult to read.
AND/OR
The student vastly did not stay within the page requirement.
There are so many submission formatting errors and typos that
it is difficult to read.
OR
Student did not submit the assignment
OR
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Student plagiarized (see syllabus for more information)

Masthead Logo The Iowa Review
Volume 38 Issue 1Spring Article 36
2008Time and Distance Overcome
Eula Biss
Follow this and additional works at:
https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview
Part of the Creative Writing Commons
Recommended Citation Biss, Eula. "Time and Distance
Overcome." The Iowa Review 38.1 (2008): 83-89. Web.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.6414
This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by
Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The
Iowa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research
Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]
EULA BISS
Time and Distance Overcome
"Of what use is such an invention?" The New York World asked
short ly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his
telephone in 1876. The world was not waiting for the telephone.
Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new
invention anymore because it seemed too dubious an
investment. The idea on which the telephone depended?the idea
that every home in the country could be connected with a vast
network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one
hundred feet apart?seemed far more unlikely than the idea that
the human voice could be transmit
ted through a wire.
Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all
of us.
"At the present time we have a perfect network of gas pipes and
water pipes throughout our large cities," Bell wrote to his
business partners, in defense of his idea. "We have main pipes
laid under the streets communicating by side pipes with the
various dwellings_ In a similar manner it is conceivable that
cables of telephone wires could be laid under ground, or
suspended overhead, communicat ing by branch wires with

private dwellings, counting houses, shops, manufactories, etc.,
uniting them through the main cable...."
Imagine the mind that could imagine this. That could see us all
connected through one branching cable. The mind of a man who
wanted to invent, more than the telephone, a machine that would
allow the deaf to hear.
For a short time, the telephone was little more than a novelty.
For twenty-five cents you could see it demonstrated by Bell
himself, in a church, along with some singing and recitations by
local talent. From a mile away, Bell would receive a call from
"the invisible Mr. Watson." Then the telephone became a
plaything of the rich. A 83
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Boston banker paid for a private line between his office and his
home so that he could let his family know exactly when he
would be home for dinner.
Mark Twain was among the first to own a telephone, but he
wasn't
completely taken with it. "The human voice carries entirely too
far as it is," he remarked.
By 1889, The New York Times was reporting a "War on
Telephone Poles." Wherever telephone companies were erecting
poles, hom eowners and business owners were sawing them
down, or defend ing their sidewalks with rifles.
In Red Bank, New Jersey property owners threatened to tar and
feather the workers putting up telephone poles. One judge
granted a group of homeowners an injunction to prevent the
telephone company from erecting any new poles. Another judge
found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was
"obnoxious" was not
guilty of malicious mischief.
Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an
urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each
telephone?sometimes hun dreds of wires. And in some places

there were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables.
The sky was filled with wires.
The War on Telephone Poles was fueled, in part, by that terribly
American concern for private property and a reluctance to
surrender it to a shared utility. And then there was a fierce
sense of aesthetics, an obsession with purity, a dislike for the
way the poles and wires marred a landscape that those other
new inventions, skyscrap
ers and barbed wire, were just beginning to complicate. And
then perhaps there was also a fear that distance, as it had always
been known and measured, was collapsing.
The city council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota ordered
policemen
to cut down all the telephone poles in town. And the Mayor of
Oshkosh, Wisconsin ordered the police chief and the fire depart
ment to chop down the telephone poles there. Only one pole was
chopped down before the telephone men climbed all the poles
84
along the line, preventing any more chopping. Soon, Bell
Telephone Company began stationing a man at the top of each
pole as soon as it had been set, until enough poles had been set
to string a wire between them, at which point it became a
misdemeanor to interfere with the poles. Even so, a constable
cut down two poles holding forty or fifty wires. And a
homeowner sawed down a recently wired pole then fled from
police. The owner of a cannery ordered his workers to throw
dirt back into the hole the telephone company was digging in
front of his building. His men threw the dirt back in as fast as
the telephone workers could dig it out. Then he sent out a team
with a load of stones to dump into the hole. Eventually, the pole
was erected on the other side of the street.
Despite the War on Telephone Poles, it would take only four
years after Bell's first public demonstration of the telephone for
every town of over 10,000 people to be wired, although many
towns were wired only to themselves. And by the turn of the
century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America.

"Time and dist. overcome," read an early advertisement for the
telephone. Rutherford B. Hayes pronounced the installation of a
telephone in the White House "one of the greatest events since
cre ation." The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, "annihilated
time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch."
In 1898, in Lake Comorant, Mississippi, a black man was
hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And
in Brook Haven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, where the hanged
man was riddled with
bullets. In Pittsburg, Kansas, a black man's throat was slit and
his dead body was strung up on a telephone pole. Two black
men were hanged from a telephone pole in Lewisburg, West
Virginia. And two in Hempstead, Texas, where one man was
dragged out of the courtroom by a mob and another was dragged
out of jail.
A black man was hanged from a telephone pole in Belleville,
Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man
was cut 85
down half-alive, covered in coal oil, and burned. While his body
was burning, the mob beat it with clubs and nearly cut it to
pieces.
Lynching, the first scholar of the subject determined, is an
American
invention. Lynching from bridges, from arches, from trees
standing alone in fields, from trees in front of the county
courthouse, from trees used as public billboards, from trees
barely able to support the weight of a man, from telephone
poles, from street lamps, and from poles erected for that
purpose. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the
middle of the twentieth century black men were lynched for
crimes real and imagined, for "disputing with a white man," for
"unpopularity," for "asking a white woman in marriage,"
for "peeping in a window."
The children's game of "telephone" depends on the fact that a
message passed quietly from one ear to another to another will
get

distorted at some point along the line.
In Pine Bluff, Arkansas a black man charged with kicking a
white girl was hanged from a telephone pole. In Long View,
Texas a black man accused of attacking a white woman was
hanged from a telephone pole. In Greenville, Mississippi a
black man accused of attacking a white telephone operator was
hanged from a telephone pole. "The negro only asked time to
pray." In Purcell, Oklahoma a black man accused of attacking a
white woman was tied to a tele phone pole and burned. "Men
and women in automobiles stood up to watch him die."
The poles, of course, were not to blame. It was only coincidence
that they became convenient as gallows, because they were tall
and straight, with a crossbar, and because they stood in public
places. And it was only coincidence that the telephone pole so
closely
resembled a crucifix.
Early telephone calls were full of noise. "Such a jangle of
meaning
less noises had never been heard by human ears," Herbert
Casson wrote in his 1910 History of the Telephone. "There were
the rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing of
steam, the flapping of
86
birds' wings.... There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and
rasping, whistling and screaming."
In Shreveport, a black man charged with attacking a white girl
was hanged from a telephone pole. "A knife was left sticking in
the body." In Cumming, Georgia a black man accused of
assaulting a white girl was shot repeatedly then hanged from a
telephone pole. In Waco, Texas a black man convicted of killing
a white woman was taken from the courtroom by a mob and
burned, then his charred body was hung from a telephone pole.
A postcard was made from the photo of a burned man hanging
from a telephone pole in Texas, his legs broken off below the
knee and his arms curled up and blackened. Postcards of
lynchings were sent out as greetings and warnings until 1908,

when the Postmaster General declared them unmailable. "This is
the barbecue we had last night," reads one.
"If we are to die," W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1911, "in God's
name let us not perish like bales of hay." And "if we must die,"
Claude McKay wrote ten years later, "let it not be like hogs...."
In Danville, Illinois a black man was hanged from a telephone
pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. "At first
the negro was defiant," The New York Times reported, "but just
before he was hanged he begged hard for his life."
In the photographs, the bodies of the men lynched from
telephone poles are silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes two
men to a pole, hanging above the buildings of a town.
Sometimes three. They hung
like flags in still air.
In Cumberland, Maryland a mob used a telephone pole as a
batter ing ram to break into the jail where a black man charged
with the murder of a policeman was being held. They kicked
him to death then fired twenty shots into his head. They wanted
to burn his body, but a minister asked them not to.
87
The lynchings happened everywhere, all over the United States.
From shortly before the invention of the telephone to long after
the first trans-Atlantic call. More in the South, and more in
rural areas. In the cities and in the North there were race riots.
Riots in Cincinnati, New Orleans, Memphis, New York, Atlanta,
Philadelphia, Houston....
During the race riots that destroyed the black section of
Springfield, Ohio a black man was shot and hanged from a
telephone pole.
During the race riots that set fire to East St. Louis and forced
five hundred black people to flee their homes, a black man was
hanged from a telephone pole. The rope broke and his body fell
into the gut ter. "Negros are lying in the gutters every few feet
in some places," read the newspaper account.
In 1921, the year before Bell died, four companies of the
National Guard were called out to end a race war in Tulsa that

began when a white woman accused a black man of rape. Bell
had lived to com plete the first call from New York to San
Francisco, which required 14,000 miles of copper wire and
130,000 telephone poles.
My grandfather was a lineman. He broke his back when a
telephone
pole fell. "Smashed him onto the road," my father says.
When I was young, I believed that the arc and swoop of
telephone wires along the roadways were beautiful. I believed
that the tele phone poles, with their glass transformers catching
the evening sun, were glorious. I believed my father when he
said, "My dad could raise a pole by himself." And I believed
that the telephone itself was a miracle.
Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires do not look the
same
to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I
would like to think, remains unrepentant.
88
One summer, heavy rains fell in Nebraska and some green tele
phone poles grew small leafy branches.
A Note on "Time and Distance Overcome"
I began my research for this essay by searching for every
instance of the phrase "telephone pole" in the New York Times
from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 370 articles. As I read
through these articles, start ing with the oldest and working
forward in time, I was not prepared to discover, in the process,
a litany of lynchings. I had not intended to write an essay about
lynching, but I found that, given what my research was yielding,
I could not avoid it. After reading an article headlined "Colored
Scoundrel Lynched," and then another head lined "Mississippi
Negro Lynched," and then another headlined "Texas Negro
Lynched," I searched for every instance of the word "lynched"
in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in
2,354 articles.
I refer, in this essay, to the first scholar of lynching, meaning
James E. Cutler, author of the 1905 book Lynch-Law, in which

he writes, on the first page, "lynching is a criminal practice
which is peculiar to the United States." This is debatable, of
course, and very possibly not true, but there is good evidence
that the Italian Antonio Meucci invented a telephone years
before Bell began working on his device, so as long as we are
going to lay claim to one invention, we might as well take
responsibility for the other.
89
Weekly Required Reading
Part I: Reading:
This week, we’re going to read Eula Biss’s nonfiction essay
“Time and Distance Overcome”:
Part II: Show and Tell
How many people have heard the old adage, “Show, don’t tell”?
What does it mean?
There is a famous writer’s maxim: show, don’t tell. “Showing”
means to let the reader “see” something, experience it for
himself as opposed to simply having the information laid out
neatly for him by the narrator. Showing something—a character,
setting, anything—lets the reader experience it in a more
dimensional way than mere telling. Showing also more closely
mimics how we experience things in real life, where we see
things and draw our own conclusions rather than having
everything pointed out to us. In a sense, showing allows the
reader to have a more interactive reading experience.
To “tell” means to relate something in a factual way that is
detached.
This is telling:

The bank was robbed by two men wearing masks. Both of them
carried firearms, and it seemed as if they were willing to shoot
if anyone caused trouble for them. Everyone there was
absolutely terrified, none more so than the guard who had a gun
pressed against him.
To “show” means to render the experience, to physically take
the reader inside what’s being written about.
This is showing:
And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the
customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two
men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were
standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol
pressed against the guard’s neck. The guard’s eyes were closed,
and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off
shotgun. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol
said, though no one had spoken a word.
Which passage do you find more compelling and vivid?
The first passage gives us the bare facts. Telling often involves
clichés and summaries. The language is condensed. In the
second passage, we’re seeing a “scene.” We’re hearing what the
robbers say. We see how the customers move.
Additional examples
Tell
Show
Kate was tired.
Kate rubbed her eyes and willed herself to keep them open.
It was early spring.
New buds pushed through the frost.

Charlie was blind.
Charlie wore dark glasses and was accompanied by a seeing-eye
dog.
Sheena is a punk rocker.
Sheena has three piercings in her face and wears her hair in a
purple mohawk.
James was the captain.
“At ease,” James called out to the crew before relaxing into the
chair at the helm.
Often, your biggest challenge will be to convert exposition into
scene.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light
on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov
Showing forces you to be specific and include sensory detail.
Specific Detail
One way to show is to get specific with what you’re saying.
For example, you could write, “The car drove away,” but we can
picture it better if you describe it more specifically.
Look at these variations:
The Cadillac drove away
The cherry-red sports car drove away.
The rusty wreck of a car drove away.
The rusty wreck of a car sputtered away.
All of these variations do a better job than just “the car drove
away.”
Sometimes you can show more by getting more specific with the
names or descriptions you give objects.

The last example shows an active verb. Instead of “drove” it
says, “sputtered.” What’s the difference between these verbs?
The active verb uses one word to create a specific description of
how the car moves that matches the initial description of a
“rusty wreck.”
Specificity also means finding the specific details that best
bring the painting to life.
Let’s say you describe an apartment as: “The place was
decorated in a style that can only be described as tacky.”
It’s a good start but we really don’t know very much about it.
We can’t see it. We need more specific details.
Now take a look at the apartment described in Junot Díaz’s
short story, “Fiesta”
The place had been furnished in Contemporary Dominican
Tacky. The less I saw, the better. I mean, I liked plastic sofa
covers but damn, Tio and Tia had taken it to another level. They
had a disco ball hanging in the living room and the type of
stucco ceilings that looked like stalactite heaven. The sofas all
had golden tassels dangling from their edges.
What’s tacky about this place? Can you picture this tacky
apartment in your mind?
Literary theorist Jacques Derrida once wrote about how if you
mention an object, like a tacky apartment, then everyone will
imagine a different version, their own version, of a tacky
apartment. That’s why it’s necessary as writers to be as specific
as possible. So that when we describe a tacky apartment, it’s the
apartment of our creation and not the reader’s.
Specificity helps writers show, it also makes almost anything

interesting.
Sensory Detail
Another way to show is to use sensory detail, meaning that you
describe things in a way that appeals to the senses.
What are the senses?
Sight
Sound
Smell
Touch
Taste
E. L. Doctorow said, “Good writing is supposed to evoke
sensation in the reader, not the fact that it is raining, but the
feeling of being rained upon.”
What’s the first sense that we usually use when describing
something? Sight.
Definitely include sight in your description, show us that
object, that person. But also try to tell us what that thing or
person smells like, sounds like, feels like, etc.
Here are some examples from “Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan
(Sight) “I could see the yellow lights shining from our flat like
two tiger’s eyes in the night.”
(Sound) “I heard a chair moving, quick steps, the locks
turning—click! Click! Click!—and then the door opened.”
(Smell) “By daybreak, our flat was heavy with the odor of fried
sesame balls and sweet curried chicken.”
(Feel) “Each morning before school, my mother would twist and
yank on my thick black hair until she had formed two tightly
wound pigtails.”
(Taste) “I could smell fragrant red beans as they were cooked
down to a pasty sweetness.”

Do you see how in addition to all of these passages including
sensory detail, they also included specific details?
Part III: Required Viewing
Here’s more guidance on showing vs. telling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNBhaEV2ESg
Part IV: Final Advice about Showing and Telling
Clear, specific, sensory details help bring stagnant, clichéd,
worn-out images to life. They make your writing accessible to a
reader. They enable you to create a physiological and emotional
reaction from your reader.
In analytical writing, we are asked to write about broad,
abstract, generalized judgements and concepts. In creative
writing, we use specific, clear, sensory details to make a world
tangible for a reader. We avoid the vague and clichéd, we yearn
for the concrete.
Verbs and nouns are the meat and potatoes of your writing.
Adjectives and adverbs are the dressing and seasoning – do not
overdo it.
99% of the time you want to show, but sometimes, it’s going to
be necessary to relate things to the reader in a clear, concise,
and factual way. So it may also be necessary to tell. But the
organization and placement of exposition is very important.
Here’s a new saying: “Mostly show, sometimes tell.”
Part V: Our Prose Genre Ambassadors
The results from the Introductory Questionnaire are in! Thank
you so much for completing this assignment. 14% of the class
listed creative nonfiction as their favorite genre of writing and
76% of the class listed fiction as their favorite genre of writing
out of our three options. That’s a lot of enthusiasm about prose!
As we begin to look at a new literary genre, I always ask

students to share what they enjoy about that genre so that
students can serve as genre ambassadors for each other,
introducing each other to new writers and types of writing.
Everyone’s answers in the questionnaire were so beautiful and
wonderfully insightful that I thought it would be a shame not to
share them with you as we explore each genre.
A Creative Nonfiction
When asked why creative nonfiction was their favorite genre in
the Introductory Questionnaire, students wrote:
“I love hearing about other's lives and experiences.”
“Creative nonfiction is my favorite genre because you get to
view life from other people's shoes and really see how they
perceive things by reading their works or works about them. For
example, I recently read the book Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
which was an autobiography about how he was brought up
during the times of apartheid in South Africa. It was such a
beautiful, sad, loving, hilarious story about his conflicting life
and relentless mother that touched a lot of social issues that I
feel are still issues we face today. So I really appreciate
nonfiction because it has the power to address political, social
and economic concerns while also giving entertainment.”
“I like writing personal stories based on experiences and
articles/blog posts. I enjoy reading reviews and blogs geared
towards activism and social change. I also enjoy reading about
pop culture and politics.”
Students listed some of their favorite writers of creative
nonfiction as:
Jenny Zhang
Roxane Gay
Joan Didion
Mary Karr
Augusten Burroughs
Fran Lebowitz
Mark Twain once said, “When in doubt, tell the truth.”

Nonfiction is not fabricated. Nonfiction must spring directly
from the way things are or were. Anything in the real world is
fair game.
Nonfiction is the most expansive type of writing, encompassing
the vast majority of what we see in newspapers, magazines,
bookstores, and libraries. It also sells much more than fiction.
Much of nonfiction isn’t considered creative writing. A legal
textbook for example is not creative writing. Creative Writing
has nothing to do with the subject matter. It has everything to
do with the way the work is written. You’ll find creatively
written nonfiction in every field from cookbooks to geology to
self-help, etc. Even grammar books can be written creatively in
a really entertaining way (like Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots, and
Leaves). Again, nonfiction relies heavily on observation,
imagination, and language.
We’re mainly going to focus on three types of creative
nonfiction:
Memoir
The personal essay
Narrative nonfiction, specifically feature articles
Memoir
Memoir refers to a personal story or an account of personal
experiences.
In the past, memoir meant a self-written chronicle of events in
the life of a noteworthy person, usually written in that person’s
sunset years. Memoirs were written by people like Theodore
Roosevelt, Mae West, or Johnny Cash. Now, memoirs can be
told by absolutely anyone.
The stories of regular folk are pretty interesting, especially for
those of us who are always kind of curious to peek into the lives

of other people. What was it like being raised by your mother’s
psychiatrist? How hard is it to kick the heroin habit?
Another crucial part of the “new” memoir is that the author does
not cover his or her entire life. Rather, the author focuses on
one aspect of his or her life, usually that aspect will fall into
one of more of these categories:
Coming of age – a tale of growing up (adopted, on a farm, with
unstable parents, etc.)
Relationship – a special relationship with an individual (sibling,
friend, pet, etc.)
Adversity – a struggle with something (addiction, disease,
abuse, etc.)
Career – a job (doctor, forest ranger, ditch-digger, etc.)
Travel – a journey of some sort (cross-country road-trip, year in
Iceland, day in Iowa, etc.)
Memoirs can be short or long. The long ones are the books
(such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, a tale of growing up
poor in Ireland or Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, a
tale of a chef’s life). The short ones run about the length of a
short story. David Sedaris specializes in the short memoir and
you’ll find them collected in such books as Naked.
Even with a book-length memoir, you can’t include your whole
life. You still need to zero in on an aspect of your life.
The contemporary memoir is closely related to fiction. It
deploys all the techniques in the fiction writer’s arsenal—in
depth characters, artful arrangement of events, a degree of
literary finesse. A memoir is, above all, a story; a story that
happens to be a true account taken from a person’s life.
Your story will need conflict to be interesting but memoirs
don’t have to be doom and gloom to captivate a reader. If you
are writing doom and gloom, however, pay heed to Frank

McCourt’s warning: “It’s not entertaining if it’s imbued with
self-pity.”
As in fiction, memoirs usually have a central character (you)
pursuing a goal against a slew of obstacles.
Memoirs are based on memory and memory isn’t perfect. It’s
absolutely all right to report how you remember things even if
the facts aren’t absolutely accurate.
For example, many memoirs contain dialogue. There’s no way
that one person could remember exact dialogue from the past
verbatim. But you are allowed to include dialogue as you
remember it if it helps your story.
It’s also okay to condense things a bit.
Minor liberties are fin. But, as with all nonfiction, there is an
unwritten contract between writer and reader assuring the reader
that everything is essentially true. Major fabrications are
unacceptable.
For example, don’t claim you were in jail for three years when
you were in jail for three hours. If you’re going to do that, call
it fiction.
Some memoirs contain a fair amount of telling (especially in the
way of relating thoughts) but you don’t want to neglect the
showing.
In Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, a tale of a troubled childhood,
a hurricane heads toward the family home on the Texas Gulf. In
the passage that follows, the author took a mental photograph of
a moment from her past then breathed it alive with both
physicality and thought:

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
The light in our windows was gradually turning a darker and
darker shade of charcoal. Mother was hanging draperies over
the big picture window, and through that window, I could see
the Sharps’ Chevy backing out of their driveway, tarp and all.
“What if old Mr. Sharp’s right about God and Jesus?” I must
have said out loud. Or maybe I suggested we pray just in case—
I don’t remember. What’s dead clear now is how Mother lifted
her middle finger to the ceiling and said, “Oh, fuck that God!”
Between that and the tornado sirens and the black sky that had
slid all over our windows and Grandma stone deaf to that
blasphemy because she was tatting those weensy stitches, I
began to think we’d be washed out to sea for all our sins at any
minute.
Notice how Karr shows this moment, rather than just
summarizing it or telling us about it. She draws an image for the
reader to draw us in. She is honest about what dialogue she
remembers and doesn’t remember.
Personal Essay
If the word “essay” makes you shudder with bad memories of
rigid high school assignments—thesis, body, summation—you
can relax. The personal essay is much freer (and more personal)
form than what you were doing in school.
The personal essay form originated in the fifteenth century
when Michel de Montaigne (French writer) was essaying on
everything from drunkenness to glory. One of his favorite topics
was kidney stones.
The personal essay is a piece where you share your personal
thoughts on a specific topic. Feel free to rant about carpet in no
particular order. Feel free to try to convince me that beets are
better than squash.
Essays are short, usually running the length of a short story but

some have run as long as a book.
If your essay cites facts, however, you do need to get them right
otherwise your opinion loses claim to credibility.
Both the personal essay and the memoir are written in first
person and both feature the writer as the main character or at
least the main voice.
The major difference between a memoir and a personal essay:
A memoir is predominantly a longer story. (Showing > Telling)
An essay is predominantly shorter rumination. (Telling >
Showing)
For this reason, essays are the once place where it’s fine to have
more telling than showing. Often, essays are nothing but telling.
A personal essay will start with a personal rumination on a
rather small or specific topic and then the observations will
ripple outward, reaching for a larger picture.
Types of things you might write a personal essay about:
Things – perfume, hunting knives, ladles, etc.
Society – multiple marriages, Internet dating, adopting foreign
babies, etc.
Politics – women in power, mendacity among politicians, a case
for benevolent dictatorship, etc. (Op-ed pieces are a close
cousin to the personal essay.)
Arts – Jane Austen, train station architecture, indie bands, etc.
(Criticism is also a close cousin to the personal essay.)
Philosophy – leisure time, morality of being a carnivore, seeing
the change of the guard by being around grandchildren, etc.
Joseph Epstein says this about the personal essay: “Two of the
chief ways an essayist can prove interesting are, first, by telling
readers things they already know in their hearts but have never

been able to formulate for themselves; and, second, by telling
them things they do not know and perhaps have never even
imagined.”
See if you find either of those aims accomplished in this
passage from Epstein’s essay on time, “Time on My Hands, Me
in My Arms:”
“Time on My Hands, Me in My Arms” by Joseph Epstein:
Time had a different feel when I was young. It felt, to begin
with, much longer. Summers especially seemed lavish in their
lengthiness. I can recall endless sunny summer days, when I was
ten or eleven, playing a variant of baseball called line-ball on
our gravelly school playground, with breaks for nickel-a-bottle
grape soda drawn from an ice-laden metal case at Miller's
School Store, days that seemed longer than entire fiscal quarters
do now. Drives on vacations with my parents on 487 to visit
relatives in Canada stretched out longer than reaching Mecca
must have seemed to Sir Richard Burton. Events one looked
forward to—the end of school term not least among them—took
what felt like millennia to arrive. Now the minutes and often the
hours move quite as slowly as then. It is, alas, only the months,
years, even decades that rush by.
Sorry to strike so downbeat a note so early, but the difference
between time now and time when I was young is the prospect of
death.
Narrative Nonfiction: the Feature Article
We’re going to talk about investigative journalism and narrative
nonfiction that moves beyond the self.
If you don’t feel like writing about yourself or exposing
yourself in public, there’s always narrative nonfiction.
Narrative nonfiction refers to true stories that are about
something other than you.

Narrative nonfiction resembles journalism in that the
information must be extremely accurate but here the facts are
molded (not distorted) into a compelling tale. It’s about
bringing those facts to life, giving them the narrative power of
fiction.
A typical piece of journalism might read something like this:
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing
squad this morning, the first man executed in the United States
after a ten-year ban on capital punishment was lifted by the U.S.
Supreme Court. Despite the efforts of many to stop the
execution, Gilmore himself resisted all appeals of his case.
Here’s an example of narrative nonfiction from The
Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer:
Then the Warden said, “Do you have anything you’d like to
say?” and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said,
“Let’s do it.” That was it. The most pronounced amount of
courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, not
throatiness, right down the line. Gary had looked at Vern as he
spoke.
The first account gives us the facts, nothing more. The second
account puts us right there, in the room with Gilmore. With
narrative nonfiction, you’re taken inside the events, made to
care about the people, compelled to know what will happen
next.
Narrative nonfiction became popular in the 1960s when great
writers turned their talents to a new kind of journalism, leading
to such well-known narrative nonfiction books as Truman
Capote’s In Cold Blood, a tale of murder in Kansas, and Tom
Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, a tale of the Mercury space program.
Though most narrative nonfiction uses third person point of
view, it became acceptable for writers to use the memoir-type of
first person if they were on the scene, a technique used in John

Krakauer’s tale of tragedy on Mt. Everest, Into Thin Air.
Since the writer is focusing on something other than his or her
own life, a ton of research is required. It’s necessary to review
books, photographs, documents, interviews, and travel to
locations. It can take years to properly research a narrative
nonfiction book, let alone write one.
Fortunately, there is a short-form version of narrative
nonfiction: the feature article.
Features tend to run between 500 and 2,500 words.
Features are sprinkled throughout most magazines and
newspapers, little stories that bring a human face to the news.
The last page of The New York Times Sunday Magazine usually
has a feature article.
Feature articles often arise from one of these categories:
“Hard” News event – a kidnapped journalist, a controversial
election, a hurricane, etc.
“Soft” News event – the Super Bowl, a breakout movie, the
gene that gives us a sense of humor, etc.
Trend – the renaissance of croquet, reality shows about the
physically disabled, jungle-inspired clothing, etc.
Slice of life – a high school woman’s basketball team, an
unusual corporate board, the friendly bear at the zoo, etc.
Profile (a portrait of a noteworthy person) – someone who has
written a book, stopped a nuclear meltdown, won the lottery,
etc.
History – the last aristocrat beheaded in the French Revolution,
Alaska becoming a state, the assassination of Malcolm X, etc.
There are two key elements a feature must have, both of which
are present but less pressured in nonfiction books.
Timeliness: Features usually relate, in some way, to something

current in the news. They don’t have to be as timely as straight
news, which ages almost overnight, but features must almost
always have current relevance. For example, a feature about the
French Revolution would only appear near Bastille Day or if the
revolution were back in the news for some curious reason.
An angle: Features require focus that means a slant on the story
that slices it into manageable bits. Usually a new way of
looking at an issue.
Features work artfully but fast:
They pull us right in with an enticing opening
Consolidate their premise
Then back up the story with researched facts and quotes from
relevant people
All while maintaining their narrative flow and bringing things
to a quick conclusion.
Here’s an example of how that first person looks in a feature
article from “Desert Samaritans” by Jessica Weisberg:
On the day I met Bruce Parks, the Pima County medical
examiner, his office held the remains of 55 people. “Bodies”
would be an overstatement. Pima County includes Tucson and a
thick slab of the Arizona–Mexico border, and most of the
deceased in Parks’ office are discovered in the desert. A few
days under the untiring Sonoran sun, and a corpse becomes a
spattering of bones. “Skeletonized remains” is the term Parks
uses when he gives me a tour. In the examination room, I saw a
cranium and a thin, medium-length bone sharing a plate with the
same lack of intention as two items from a large buffet. Every
few minutes, Parks lathered his hands with sanitizer and
apologized for the smell. There’s a locker room where he stores
objects interred along with dead: ornate belt buckles, rosaries,
lists of phone numbers, prayer cards of the Virgin of
Guadalupe. When he comes across an identification card that
hasn’t wholly melted, he brings it to the Mexican Consulate.
The summer of 2005 was a scorcher. Two hundred and eighty-

two migrants died in the Arizona desert that year, most from
heat stroke or dehydration. When there were too many bodies,
or bones rather, for Parks and his low-slung office to
accommodate, the city purchased an external refrigeration unit,
the size of an industrial truck, which remains visible from his
window.
It’s not unheard of for feature articles to grow into books.
For example, John McPhee began writing a feature on oranges
but had to expand to a book, Oranges, once he started gathering
so much information that it would not all fit within a feature.
B. Fiction
When asked why fiction was their preferred genre in the
Introductory Questionnaire, students wrote:
“I always loved being able to escape reality and get lost in
magical creative worlds.”
“I feel like fiction lets me dive deep into my imagination. It is
fun to simply let your ideas run wild.”
“I can become absorbed by whatever fictional story I am
reading”
“I think a good novel cannot only substitute you into the story
but also it is a deep communication with the author.”
“I love sci-fi.”
“What I most enjoy about the fiction genre is the sub-genres of
fantasy and sci-fi. I find the fantastical elements more gripping
and intriguing than non-fiction, and I love to see how individual
authors develop their own fictional worlds.”
“I have always loved thriller/horror novels.”
“I enjoy creating a character and plot that never existed before.
I also find this genre the most enjoyable to read.”
“Growing up, fiction was what I most often read. It began with
my mother reading to me, then me reading myself, and
eventually me writing myself. I’ve always enjoyed a genre
where I can take my own emotions and experiences and turn
them into a story as a way of capturing and sharing them. I

believe that even if a story isn’t directly true, it can still hold a
lot of truth in it, whether it’s a microcosm for life, a
commentary on society, or a more dramatic way to express real
emotions. It’s also just plain fun to read about worlds that
aren’t our own.”
“what I like about science fiction is its willingness to take an
unrealistic concept and treat it logically, as if it were realistic.
Stories incorporate both what is and what could be, and invite
thought about deep concepts, like what it means to be human,
how technology affects even the subtlest of interactions, or
what the future of civilization will hold.”
“I do think that fiction is the best literary mode for exploring
the implications of human nature, how this nature butts up
against society, etc.”
“fiction allows for a limitless implementation of storytelling
and world-building. Exploring a whole new world is always
exciting I think.”
“I appreciate the specific type of craftsmanship that goes into
the creation of novels and short stories. I enjoy writing/reading
in that genre because I find it to be more immersive and
memorable.”
“It's very interesting to read since you are taken into a brand
new world”
“The mundane tapestry of reality can be ripped apart to portray
the impossible.”
“fiction is a way that I can deal with my imagination and satisfy
my curiosity.”
Students listed some of their favorite novels or authors as:
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Book Thief
1984
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Fahrenheit 451
Frankenstein
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Eric Jerome Dickey
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Catcher in the Rye
Twilight
The Lord of the Rings series
The Harry Potter series
The How to Train Your Dragon series
Terry Pratchett
Terry Goodkind
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Gillian Flynn
Stephen King
Celeste Ng
Ernest Hemingway
Herman Melville
H. G. Wells
H. P. Lovecraft
Isaac Asimov’s Stranger in a Strange Land and The Three-Body
Problem
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Fiction is a lie that feels true.
Ernest Hemingway said that “People who write fiction, if they
had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”
Fiction is like lying in that we’re making up something and
we’re not reporting on something that is factual or actually
happened but at the same time, fiction feels true.
William Faulkner said “The best fiction is far more true than
any journalism.”
Many works of fiction are closely based on the life of the author
but for something to qualify as fiction it should be somewhat
fictional, somewhat fabricated. If you don’t feel like making

anything up, then call your work nonfiction.
Since you’re expected to make up some things while writing
fiction, try to conjure things that will make your story as
compelling, dramatic, and intriguing as possible. You want to
write something that a reader can’t put down.
The great strength of fiction is that you can make up anything
that you want. “The possibilities are endless” when it comes to
fiction.
The author Jane Yolen pinpoints it nicely by saying, “Fiction is
more than a recitation of facts or author embellishments. It’s
reality surprised. It shakes us up and makes us see familiar
things in a new way.”
According to literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, fiction is a
practice in defamiliarization, it makes the familiar unfamiliar, it
makes us step out of the monotony of our lives and see the
world around us in a new way.
I want to make sure that we understand the greater landscape of
fiction, especially in terms of the publishing marketplace.
There are two major types of fiction—genre fiction and literary
fiction.
How do we tell the difference?
Traditionally, in genre fiction: plot > character and in literary
fiction: character > plot
Where genre fiction leans toward the melodramatic, out of the
ordinary, literary fiction tends to provide more of a mirror of
the real world, finding its interest in life-size events.

For example, Stephen King’s horror novel Carrie is about a
misfit teenage girl who wreaks revenge on those who torment
her through her powers of telekinesis. J. D. Salinger’s literary
novel, Catcher in the Rye is also about a misfit teenager,
Holden Caulfield but the protagonist of the story wrestles with
his problems in ways that are much closer to everyday reality.
Here’s the most common understanding of the difference: Genre
fiction is meant for the masses, more interested in entertaining
the reader and less language orientated. Literary fiction is
beautifully crafted prose that is high-minded and meant for an
elite audience.
But that’s simplistic. Some brilliant prose stylists have been
genre writers: Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Brabury, Ursula LeGuin,
among many others.
There are also many works of literary fiction that are best
sellers such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Many writers cross genres and there’s great writing in both
camps. There’s also lousy writing in both camps. One camp
isn’t better than the other, they’re just different. You should
write what appeals to you most, what you like to read the most.
All of these genres are marketing tools. They make it easier for
publishers to market and sell books to certain perceived
demographics. I want you to question this value system. I want
you to question the divisions between these genres.
Regardless of what type of fiction you’re writing, you can write
long or short, novels or short stories.
Novel
Titles appear in italics

Length: At least 50,000 words (150-300 pages in published
form) although most contain at least 80,000 words which is 320
pages double spaced in a 12 point font.
Wide scope with many characters, settings, moods, etc.
A novel can span 100 years and many continents or follow one
mixed up teenager spending a couple days in New York City.
Examples: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
Novella
Titles appear in italics
Length: 20,000 – 50,000 words.
A shorter version of the novel.
Examples: Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café and
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
Short Story
Titles appear in “quotation marks.”
Length: 10-25 pages when published in a book or magazine. But
short stories can run as short as one sentence (these being
known as “flash fiction”) or as long as 60 pages.
An example of early flash fiction would be Ernest Hemingway’s
6-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” (That’s it.
That’s the entire story.)
Most magazines impose a limit of 10,000 words on submission.
Long Story, a publication specializing in long stories imposes a
limit of 20,000 words.
Short stories usually stay focused on one or more of the
following:
A single character
A single incident
A single time
A single place
A single mood
The brevity of short fiction can make it more difficult to write
although it also gives the writer lots of leeway to experiment.
Literary stunts that may grow tiring in a novel might turn out
very effective in short form.

Example: “The Telephone” by Dorothy Parker consists entirely
of the thoughts of a woman waiting expectantly for a certain
man to give her a call. It’s very similar to a Shakespearean
soliloquy, only it’s hysterically funny.
Unrelated short stories or related short stories in which the
same characters reappear (for example) can be placed in a
collection.
Example: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is composed of short
stories, all of which are about four Chinese immigrant families
that know each other.
Note: short story collections are not published as stand alone
covers as often as novels.
There are several magazines and anthologies that publish short
stories alone.
Your Last Name Here Next to the Page Number
Title of Paper or Story

Your name here
Name of the course
The date of your submission
General Introduction
Your paper or story starts here. This handout serves as an
example of standard submission formatting for almost all
literary and academic journals. This handout aims to prepare
you to submit work for this class and for publication after class
ends. It is based on recommendations from The Chicago Manual
of Style. All papers and stories must be typed and double
spaced. Most of your work will be submitted electronically
online as a .doc or .docx file, but if you ever need to print out a
paper, please make sure that it is stapled. Please use a legible,
serif font like Times New Roman. Use font size 12. Please
include one-inch margins on all sides. When submissions have a
required word count or page length, the cover page rarely
counts toward that word count or page length.
By indenting new paragraphs, the text will be clearer and the
reader’s experience will be smoother. Make sure to check all of
your work for typos before submitting it. New sections usually
have headings that are bold. I would also recommend including
an extra space between sections. New sections with headings are
commonly used in nonfiction articles and academic papers.
Section II of this handout will provide more information about
submission formatting for these genres of writing. Fiction
typically does not include a bibliography and may or may not
include section headings. Section III of this handout will
provide more information about submission formatting for
fiction writing.
Formatting Requirements Specific to Academic Papers

Generally, the titles of novels, plays, poetry collections, long
epic poems like The Faerie Queene, and nonfiction books
should be italicized. The titles of short stories and poems like
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” should be placed in quotation marks.
Please note that if you refer to or summarize a work, even if
you do not quote specific lines from that text, I would still like
you to cite this work in the bibliography. You will find the
bibliography on the last page of this document.
Citations of source material are required. The Chicago Manual
of Style requires footnotes as well as a bibliography. Footnotes
typically only appear when you are quoting a specific line from
a text. Please note that the formatting of the citation in the
footnote will be slightly different from the formatting of the
citation in the bibliography. The author’s name will appear
differently, for example. In general, footnotes rely heavily on
commas and bibliographies rely heavily on periods. While the
bibliography will also be double spaced, the indentation will be
different. Please make sure that your bibliography is in
alphabetical order and that it is double spaced.
Perhaps you would like to include a line of text from a primary
source and you notice that the original line of text includes
additional quotation marks within it. You are going to use
single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks where
those additional quotation marks appear inside the quotation.
For example, I would prefer that you not rely on Wikipedia as a
source, because “it is ‘not a primary source’ and that ‘because
some articles may contain errors,’ you should ‘not use
Wikipedia to make critical decisions.’”[footnoteRef:1] For more
information, I strongly recommend reading the rest of this
article online using the URL found below. [1: Mark E. Moran,
“The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On
Wikipedia,” Finding Dulcinea: Librarian of the Internet,
October 27, 2011,
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/march/Th
e-Top-10-Reasons-Students-Cannot-Cite-or-Rely-on-
Wikipedia.html ]

Perhaps you would like to include a long quotation that runs
more than three lines in length. Then you will need to include a
block quotation. A block quotation involves indenting the text
by half an inch on the left side. You also do not have to include
quotation marks at the beginning and end of the block
quotation. Please remember to double space the text within the
block quotation.
In New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, for example, film
theorist Stella Bruzzi argues that documentary images never
represent reality.
A documentary will never be reality nor will it erase or
invalidate that reality by being representational. Furthermore,
the spectator is not in need of signposts and inverted commas to
understand that a documentary is a negotiation between reality
on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the
other.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A
Critical Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. ]
After the block quotation, you will typically want to continue
writing in the same paragraph so that you can analyze the
quotation. Notice that if I am writing in the same paragraph
after the block quotation, then I do not need to indent the first
line after the quotation.
Are you unsure how to cite a specific short story published in a
large collection edited by multiple people? Well, fear not. I will
give you an example from “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story
written by James Baldwin that is featured in the collection 100
Years of the Best American Short Stories, which was edited by
Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. Baldwin writes, “He was a man
by then, of course, I wasn’t willing to see it.”[footnoteRef:3]
Please note that if a book or article has three or more authors or
editors, you can get away with using “et al.” after the first name
in the footnote. Also note that the bibliography includes the
entire range of pages in which the short story is featured in the
collection. [3: James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” in 100 Years

of the Best American Short Stories, ed. Lorrie Moore and Heidi
Pitlor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 199. ]
What happens if you are using the same source multiple times?
If you quote the same source back to back, you can use the
abbreviation “Ibid” in the footnote. So let’s say that I want to
quote another passage from the same short story by James
Baldwin. Baldwin goes on to write that “All I know about music
is that not many people ever really hear it.”[footnoteRef:4] Note
that only the page number has changed in the footnote. [4:
Ibid., 207. ]
But what if you quote one source, then quote a different source,
and then go back to the first source? Well, after you have
referenced one source, you can use a short-hand in the footnote
when you refer to it again. In the book I mentioned earlier, for
example, Stella Bruzzi argues that “narration-led
documentaries. . . posses a dominant and constant perspective
on the events they represent to which all elements within the
film conform.”[footnoteRef:5] Notice how the footnote is
abbreviated. [5: Bruzzi, 42-43. ]
When in doubt, you can always check The Chicago Manual of
Style, which is available online at
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org.
Formatting Requirements Specific to Creative Writing,
Specifically Short Stories
In terms of style, there is greater flexibility when submitting a
creative work. You should still check the submission
requirements for specific agents and editors. Some editors may
wish to read submissions “blind,” for example, meaning that
they do not want the writer’s name to appear anywhere on the
manuscript.
Short stories typically only include block quotations when the
writer wants to convey the text from a letter, email, or other

work.
“Should new lines of dialogue be indented?” you may ask.
“Yes,” your teacher will tell you. “New lines of dialogue should
be indented as well. If a new character is speaking, you should
also put their text in a new indented line.”
“But what happens if a character speaks for a long period of
time?” you may ask. “What happens when a character quotes
someone else while they are speaking?”
Your teacher will say, “Let’s say a character is telling a long
story and they need to start a new paragraph. Then you would
just start a new paragraph with quotation marks at the beginning
of the new paragraph to signify that their speech is continuing.
“Please note that you do not need to end each middle paragraph
of their speech with a quotation mark.
“If a character is quoting another person in their dialogue, then
you will use single apostrophe marks inside the quotation
marks. For example, Mark Twain said, ‘I have never let my
schooling interfere with my education.’ Hopefully, these
examples are clear,” your teacher will conclude.
All essays that discuss external sources will include a
bibliography (see the following page for an example). A
personal essay, such as a story about your life that does not
refer to any external sources, does not need to include a
bibliography. Most short stories, poetry assignments, and
dramatic writing assignments will not include a bibliography
unless it is necessary to cite sources referred to in the text.
Bibliography
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” In 100 Years of the Best
American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi
Pitlor, 181-210. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. New
York: Routledge, 2000.
Moran, Mark E. “The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or
Rely On Wikipedia.” Finding Dulcinea: Librarian of the
Internet. October 27, 2011.

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/march/Th
e-Top-10-Reasons-Students-Cannot-Cite-or-Rely-on-
Wikipedia.html
Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed
August 25, 2017.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-
56d22aafa45b2
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. London: Routledge,
1843.
The University of Chicago. “Notes and Bibliography: Sample
Citations.” The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Accessed
August 25, 2017.
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citatio
n-guide-1.html

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