IN THE FALL OF 2001 I created a class called Creative Nonfiction for the graduate students in the writing program. Teaching the fiction workshop the year before had taught me that many of our students would never make a living as fiction writers and should have another outlet for their creative juices. I wanted them to understand that a writer should be able to write anything, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, journalism, papers, letters, love notes.
In order to teach the class I had to reread many of my favorite books. I was trying to choose books that showed the range of possibilities for nonfiction. In the end this is the list I assigned.
Plus I gave them a long list of recommended books, with emphasis on Truman Capote and Robert Coles.
The book the students liked most was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It inspired two women poets to write some really funny, hard-edged essays that I loved reading and took as much pride in as they did. Three of these essays were published.
A few of the students liked The Curve of Binding Energy and others came to like it when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Several of them told me their first reaction at the terrible news was “what if it is nuclear.” I had assigned the book on purpose because I worry that not enough people in the United States understand what nuclear energy is or how uranium-235 and plutonium are manufactured and stored.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was inspiring to a few students but the rest found it boring. I was amazed by it when I read it in the seventies but could not recapture that feeling when I reread it for the class. Perhaps Ms. Dillard has been copied so much that we forget what a brilliant thing she did by bringing her poetic skills to explaining nature in contemporary terms and using contemporary science.
I will change my list when I teach the course again next year. It was top heavy with physicists and left out many books that I love. Many of them have disappeared from my library and I am replacing them with the generous “start-up” money given me by the dean when I began to teach. Most new professors use the money to upgrade their computers but I am spending mine on books. Next year I will include The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen on my list. And either African Genesis or The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey. These are seminal books, written by the best writers in their fields. I want my students to read the best and most beautiful writing I can find for them. I’m still searching and reading and ordering books and charging them to the university.
It is difficult to call this work. I must be the luckiest woman in the world to have this job fall into my lap at this time in my life. I should be on my knees every day to thank the world for its blessings.
As Einstein wrote, “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”