Showing papers in "Narrative in 2001"

Mining a Rough Terrain: Weighing the Implications of Nonfiction

Abstract: Years ago, a childhood friend and I used to take long hikes behind my house through the rock-strewn fields of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Like a lot of kids our age, we paused to pick up about as many rocks as we passed. My friend loved to classify his finds; he would study books about rocks and divide them into piles of sedimentary, metamorphic, and the occasional igneous. He hauled the rocks home, pasted them to pieces of cardboard he salvaged from throwaway grocery cartons, and carefully labeled each new variation he discovered. I was different. I never worried that much about classification. I liked to heft the stones in my hands, to get the feel of their shape and weight. I liked to think about where they came from, about who might have held them before me, about how many days of sunlight and shadow they had seen. Had someone hurled them here? Did they form the outer ring of some long-ago campfire? If a rock or two did make its way home with me in my pockets, I'd likely as not chuck it against a tree or a traffic sign. I liked the way it sounded when it smacked a metal sign, the way the sign's tin face danced and shimmered. Other times, I'd pound the stone with a larger rock until it broke in two. Then, I might touch its clean, cool interior to my tongue, tasting its solidity, its story, its history. I've always treated narrative that way, too. I leave to others the task of sorting stories into piles. I prefer to heft them, to taste them, to smack them against a sign and hear it twang. I've never been that keen on genre, but because I love to write and read nonfiction?a form of discourse named after something it is not?I have never been able to avoid entirely this matter of classification.