Telling the Truth Beautifully
By Kerry Graham, written March 2021
from the creative nonfiction summer 2021 series
Your life is a collection of stories.
Powerful. Painful. Profound.
And it’s not just the milestones or the unbelievable tales you can tell again and again. Your life, even in its mundane moments, is a series of stories.
Many of us are raised to understand stories as fiction: made from imagination. Or if someone tells us a “true story,” it’s outrageous in some regard. Hard to believe.
But those aren’t our only options for storytelling. There’s a magnificent in-between, stories that are engaging, original, relatable.
And honest.
Creative nonfiction is telling the truth beautifully, even—especially?—when the truth is anything but. It’s crafting a story from the reality of your lived experience. It’s reflecting on what you’ve endured, accomplished, and explored, and finding narrative structure within that. When you write creative nonfiction, you chisel away the entirety of your days to the pieces you’d find in a plot: beginning, middle, end. You create characters out of the people you’ve shared conversations, meals, office space, children, bus stops, public parks with. You write the words shouted, whispered, thought. Your readers weren’t with you, but through your words, you make us feel like we were. For a few paragraphs, or pages, or maybe even the course of a memoir, you invite us into the world as only you know it.
As a writer, I’ve attempted numerous genres. My favorite, by far, is creative nonfiction. When I put the truth to paper, I not only get to do what I love—create art out of language—I get to remember, reflect, understand my own life. The opportunity to make meaning of any given moment reminds me that each instant is a blessing. When we write creative nonfiction, we “taste life twice,” as Anaïs Nin, a French-Cuban-American writer, famously said.
Although creative nonfiction can be about anything we know to be true, I write almost exclusively about one thing: my lovelies. This is my 10th year teaching high school English in Baltimore City public schools, and since my earliest days in the classroom, I’ve called my students “my lovelies.” I write about how they inspire, worry, nurture, frustrate me. I write because my lovelies make each of my days meaningful—so meaningful that, often, it takes the painstaking process of delicately arranging our interactions on a page for me to fully grasp them. I also write because of what it gives my readers, most of whom have never been to Baltimore, Maryland, let alone inside our public schools: a chance to learn. Empathize. Reexamine. Wonder.
The impact creative nonfiction has on its readers is another reason I revere this genre. Reading someone else’s true stories grants readers a chance to connect—to people, places, experiences—they might have never before considered.
Anaïs Nin said, “We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.” As a writer, I wholeheartedly agree, though I’d argue that’s also why we read, especially creative nonfiction.
Kerry Graham lives, teaches, writes, and kayaks in Baltimore. Her vignettes have appeared in The Citron Review, Crack the Spine, and Gravel, among others. Her personal essays have most recently appeared in HuffPost. Connect with her on social media @mskerrygraham.
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