AUTHOR’S NOTE

I have never studied journalism. Until my early twenties, in fact, I almost never read nonfiction. When I first started writing for magazines, I imagined that I would use nonfiction writing as a way to fund my fiction writing. This did not go exactly as planned. Insofar as I am known as anything today, it is as a nonfiction writer. Earlier in my career, I was neurotic enough to let this bother me. When I started out as a writer, I regarded fiction—novels, especially—as the supreme achievement of the human imagination. While I still hold fiction in very high regard, and continue to write it, I no longer believe in genre chauvinism. Life is difficult enough.

When I am asked by students and younger writers for advice on how to get started as a nonfiction writer, I tell them to start small and look around. You need to find a story you are uniquely well situated to tell, a story that literally cannot be told without you. In my case, my first stories concerned my experience of republishing the work of Paula Fox and a film shoot in my hometown of Escanaba, Michigan. No one was particularly crying out for these stories, I knew, but both, I felt certain, had larger implications if properly explored. Shortly after “Escanaba’s Magic Hour” was published, a magazine editor asked me if I wanted to go to the Canadian Arctic and write about NASA’s Mars training camp. Yes. Yes I did.

Shortly before the trip, though, I had second thoughts and called the editor. “You’re aware,” I said, “that I’m not actually a journalist? That I have no idea how to interview someone?” The editor was undeterred. “Look,” he said, “just go up there and write about what you see.”

Most of what I have learned about writing nonfiction has come, practically speaking, on the job. However, I am quite certain that my years of writing fiction provided me with the necessary tools of storytelling, observation, and empathy—all that stuff that is as hard to teach as it is hard to learn without doing it badly for a long and necessary time. When I began to think about assembling a collection of my nonfiction, I noticed how often I wrote about people engaged in some aspect of creation. To create anything—whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom—is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic—which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

—TCB Portland, OR October 19, 2011