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What is Creative Nonfiction?
By Pooja Makhijani, for Altogether Elsewhere
Reproduced and adapted with permission
One question that I have been asked more than once is: what exactly is creative nonfiction?
In short, creative nonfiction is the latest name for fact-based writing that includes literary journalism, essay (lyrical, personal, nature, environmental, travel, cultural, or graphic), memoir, and cultural criticism.
The genre "braids narrative telling with fictional and poetic techniques and combines portraiture and self-reflection with reportage and critical analysis." Above all, "creative nonfiction is based on actual events, characters, and places and is written with a special concern for language."
My bookshelves are full of great examples of the genre--from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion to The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi to Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama to back issues of The New Yorker and Harper's. But my personal library is largely US-centric.
So, I looked a bit closer to home. I asked and I searched and I browsed. Here are some of my "local" must-reads:
- Between Stations by Kim Cheng Boey
- A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
- "A Drinkable History of My Family" by Adrianna Tan
- "What We Talk About When We Talk About Walking" by Vinita Ramani Mohan
- "Of Small Places and Big Spaces" by Lee Seow Ser
- "Excuse Me, Are You Singaporean?" by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
- "A Star-Lovely Art" by Goh Poh Seng
- "Cold Currency" by Yew Leong Lee
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Other pieces by Singapore writers that we (Ruihe and Yu-Mei) recommend:
- "In Search of the Lotus Land" by Tan Hwee Hwee
- "In Stages: Dying, Death, Living After Death" by Chew Yi Wei
- "Bone Deep: An Introduction" by Alvin Pang
- Durians Are Not the Only Fruit by Wong Yoon Wah, trans. Jeremy Tiang
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