Robert Root

The Fourth Genre is the first teaching anthology to draw on the common ground both of the practicing writer and the practical scholar. It offers the most thorough, comprehensive, and teachable introduction to the cutting-edge and still evolving genre widely known as “creative nonfiction”. While focusing on the genre’s varying shapes and forms, it also highlights creative nonfiction’s literary qualities, as well as the singularities that identify it as an integral part of the literary spectrum that includes poetry, fiction, and drama. In an effort to bridge the gap between the teaching of composition, creative writing, and literature in English departments, The Fourth Genre points out the pedagogical connections between creative writing practice and composition theory. The selections represent the full range of contemporary creative nonfiction: personal narrative, essay, memoir, literary journalism, and personal cultural criticism.

Authors anthologized in Part 1 cover the complete spectrum of contemporary nonfiction. They include prominent writers, such as Mary Clearman Blew, Patricia Hampl, Pico Iyer, Phillip Lopate, Bret Lott, John McPhee, Richard Rodriguez,and Scott Russell Sanders, as well as an impressive array of emerging writers, such as Jo Ann Beard, Steven Church, Meghan Daum, and Michello Morano. The essays about nonfiction forms, genre issues, and writing strategies in Part 2, mostly written by authors whose work appears in Part 1, give readers an inside view of the writers' creative processes and, at the same time, substantiate the academic study of nonfiction as a literary genre. Part 3 consists of essays and memoirs paired with companion pieces in which the authors explain the methods, processes. and strategies by which the works were created. Two alternative tables of contents organize the readings by sub genres and approaches to writing.

Twenty-six of the seventy-four selections are new to this fifth edition. Major contemporary authors newly represented in Part 1, “Writing Creative Nonfiction,” include such established authors as Vivian Gornick, Jonathan Lethem, Nancy Lord, and Patricia Hampl, as well as emerging authors such as Emily Gould, Kate Petersen and Kate Torgovnick. Part 2, “Talking About Creative Nonfiction,” now has added groundbreaking pieces on the lyric essay by Brenda Miller and Judith Kitchen and a discussion of brief nonfiction by Peggy Shumaker. New selections are drawn from journals and magazines as varied as The Seneca Review, Esquire, and the New York Times,; from top journals devoted exclusively to nonfiction, including River Teeth and Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction; from internet journals such as Brevity and Guilt and Pleasure; and from the anthology Generation What? Dispatches from the Quarter-Life Crisis.

The introduction to the anthology, long a vital source of the most expansive discussion of the fourth genre, expands the conversation with a new discussion, "The Contentious Issue of Truth," that explores ethical considerations in creative nonfiction in response to recent controversies exposing falsified memoirs. Brief notes on the authors in the anthology serve as an aid to further reading. A revised and updated Instructor’s Manual is available that offers suggestions for designing courses in nonfiction literature and writing, as well as comparisons and comments on/​about the readings.

ALSO AVAILABLE

WORDSMITHERY: A GUIDE TO WORKING AT WRITING

This writing guide for students of composition emphasizes the ways writers work. The chapters are organized around the elements of Wordsmithery and guide writers through the composing process with plentiful examples of student (and author) writing. First published in 1994 by Macmillan, the second edition was published in 1998 by Allyn & Bacon.

THOSE WHO DO CAN: TEACHERS WRITING, WRITERS TEACHING—A SOURCEBOOK
Edited by Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg

Based on the Traverse Bay Summer Workshops for Teachers, this book collects ideas and strategies for teaching poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, describes the workshops writers English language arts teachers participated in as writers, and publishes the writing, journals, and log entries of the teachers as they went through the workshops. Donald Murray wrote, “The book instructs and inspires as it reveals writers teaching and being taught. . . . Root and Steinberg will be on the shelf near my desk that holds the most important books about the teaching of writing.” And Tom Romano wrote, “The ideas shared here can be used in classrooms tomorrow and in the lives of teachers forever.” Published by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project.