Why I Write Creative Nonfiction
By Melissa Nunez, written December 2021
I will never forget the mix of anger and incredulity coursing through my body during my first fiction workshop. As the author, I sat silent as my peers debated not the style or form of my piece submitted to the class, but the credulity of my words. “There’s no way all this happened to one person,” spoken in various versions and on repeat. And I was peeved. It did all happen. It happened to me. The death of my best friend, the disastrous dissolution of my parents’ marriage (and the resulting familial fallout), the abortion, the love triangle, the abusive partner. As if the dramatic and tragic politely take turns in the timeline of your life, giving each event exclusive spotlight shine. I wanted people to believe all these things happened to someone, successively and simultaneously, but was unwilling to claim that someone as me. It took me a semester of battling this wariness, of defending the veracity of characters and probability of plots before finding my home in the Creative Nonfiction chapter of the MFA program.
This decision involved more than logical next steps, more than simple solution. It was not just hanging three letters, the n o n, in front of the word fiction. It was letting go of all the stigma that came to mind with putting my unfiltered self out into the world. And there was still the craft of it, the charge of engaging your audience, of giving them reason to read and heed your words. There was still deciding what to say, how and when to say it. Which experiences to detail, to what length or breadth, and how to organize them on the page. When you get right down to it, there are so many possibilities even with a single happening.
There should be a sense of truth in all writing but deciding to only write what is true was both liberating and distressing. I love the fact that everything around me is my possible next story. The words I speak and those spoken to me tumble around in my head and many end up in the notes app on my phone or the pages of my notebooks. Conversations with my children or husband, insightful lines from a book or television show that make a certain idea click into place. That part comes easy to me as a naturally introspective person. The hard part comes after. In having my thoughts and perspectives, experiences and emotions laid bare to be scrutinized by others. It is something I live so many times in my own mind as I write, on amplification when I’m actually getting feedback. I channel the strength of those before me who have told their stories bravely, stories that have impacted my life and the lives of others. Books like The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson (where she frames visceral vulnerability within a deeply insightful and moving metaphor), Paula by Isabel Allende (masterful amalgam of maternal missive, memoir, and elegy), and the collected essays of Samantha Irby (whose words are an homage to honesty and self-acceptance in the most raw, real, and hilarious forms).
Every time I write, I learn something about myself and the world around me. Things I was previously unaware I needed or wanted to know. Because of creative nonfiction, I have gotten to better know family members, both close and further distant. I was introduced to my great grandfather for the first time and was shown pieces of my grandfather previously unshared in conversation with my great aunt. I have become better able to identify the plants that grow along the canal banks and nature trails close to my home, the birds and insects that dwell there. I plan to plant Turk’s Cap, a hummingbird favorite, in my yard this coming spring and make further strides towards de-lawning. I hope to include some nopales, set along the back fence to avoid accidents, as I have recently discovered that the prickly pear is one of my favorite fruits, seeds and all. Because of creative nonfiction, I am now too aware of the microscopic arachnids that make their homes in our skin, of the bacteria exchanged with those around us independent of physical contact. I have discovered the shared root of my most painful choices, listed among the “unbelievable” events above.
I have come to love the act of self-discovery as art, as communion with the world around me, as conversation with others who also watch for wonder. With those who are willing to rethink everyday experience, to revisit rumination often dismissed as mundane, to combine and recombine these moments in novel ways—here Creative Nonfiction transforms, is made something more magical.
Melissa Nunez is a homeschooling mother of three from the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas. She is a staff writer for Alebrijes Review. Her essays and poetry have also appeared in FEED, Lammergeier, and others. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook @MelissaKNunez.
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