Of course, portfolios will come in and the days leading up to Christmas will be filled with frantic grading.  But I’m enjoying the peace right now, and am reflecting on all of the good work I have read from my students this semester.

Back in August, the students entered the classroom for the first time unsure of what to expect.  Everyone knows what fiction and poetry is, but the idea of a “creative nonfiction” workshop is foreign to most of them.  Some of these students are in my class because someone recommended me to them.  Others are majors who need the course in order to move on to more advanced classes.  Others just need to get an arts elective out of the way.  Most, though, aren’t taking the class because they already have a deep and abiding love for the essay or literary journalism.

I hope that, over the course of the year, they have grown to love these forms.  Not just because I love these forms myself, but because I have seen this group of students come together and understand each other better as a result of sharing their own personal narratives.  These 18 and 19 year olds began the semester a little nervous, sometimes reluctant to allow themselves to be too exposed in their writing.  But at this point, I think that we have all become friends—or, if not friends, then very supportive colleagues.  We have shared family secrets, discussed our private anxieties, and revealed truths that we usually keep hidden when we’re in the dorms, at the bar, or in a department meeting.  We’ve established a sense of trust with each other, even though—or, perhaps, because?—we didn’t know each other 14 weeks ago.

Some of these students will go on to study English and creative writing.  Some will go on to publish their work.  Most will not.  But I hope that these students will look back on the experience of taking this class fondly, and I hope they feel like they learned useful things during our time together.  Of course, if they find that they’re able to express themselves through writing more effectively, that’s great.  But more importantly, I hope that, through reading and writing creative nonfiction, they’ve come to understand that they’re not alone in the universe.  I hope they realize that their friends, their classmates, and even their professors struggle with private stresses and anxieties.  I hope they have learned that, sometimes, we all feel isolated, or freakish, or terrified.  And I hope that they’re able to take this knowledge with them after they leave my classroom, better equipped to try to understand someone else’s point-of-view.  This, I think, is the most important reason to study creative nonfiction.

I took it as something of a personal insult when a best-selling memoirist turned out to have deliberately embellished his experiences with addiction and incarceration, or when another supposed nonfiction writer turned out to have invented her criminal background for the sake of drama.  “Here I am,” I thought, “struggling to find those conflicts and contradictions that shape my life, that inform who I am, that make me me—and I’m trying to write it well, without fabrication, so that others will find this work worth reading.  And then there are these people.  They cheated.”

It was an issue of ethics, I thought.  Phillip Lopate wrote in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay that, in an essay, “a contract between writer and reader has been drawn up: the essayist must then make good on it by delivering, or discovering, as much honesty as possible.”  I believed then—and, frankly, believe even now—that the same could be said for other nonfiction forms, including memoir and literary journalism.  The fraudulent nonfiction writer, I reckoned when I was obsessed with a type of “artistic integrity” that bordered on narcissistic contempt for those who disagreed with me, was a threat to serious literature (and thus, a threat to humanity in general).  And I used to make this point clear to the students in my workshops.

I wasn’t completely wrong, but I probably didn’t need to be quite so pompous about it.  Lopate also reminds us that “[t]he enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness”–    such smug self-regard discourages honest and nuanced reflection about our own lives and minds.  And make no mistake, I was smug when it came to discussing—and writing about– the perceived ethical shortcomings of other writers, when I probably should have been using that time to work on my own flaws as a writer.

I still prefer to not read the works of dishonest nonfiction writers—those who have been caught lying and publicly shamed, as well as those who are still believed to be credible but whose books caused me to roll my eyes and proclaim (to myself, to my wife, to my cats—whoever happens to be around) “There’s no way this happened.  Not like this.”  I think I can tell when someone is lying in a work of nonfiction.  Joan Didion tells us that, for a while at least, “We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”  A writer of Didion’s caliber, of course, isn’t satisfied with a simple story, a narrative line that is too neat or convenient; she  reexamines, she calls into question, she complicates.  A less honest writer, though, keeps things tidy, simple, and uncomplicated.  The work winds up too perfectly shaped—the result of having the narrative line imposed rather than having disparate strands of thought presented together and explored without an attempt to force them into a structure that resembles an inverted checkmark.  When things in a memoir or essay seem too neat—or too familiar, or too predictable—I tend to feel that the work has failed on an important level.

Keep in mind, I’ve never had a problem with writers who employ exaggeration or sarcasm for comedic effect—there’s a difference between joking and lying, after all.  And I’m not talking about writers who try to expand nonfiction’s horizons—those writers like Ander Monson, Steven Church, and Lauren Slater who experiment with these forms in order to see just what they can do, and how we might use these forms to explore complicated, personal truths.  No, I’m talking about the writers who adopt manufactured identities and describe experiences that didn’t happen in an attempt to mythologize themselves.  I still tell my students to avoid these writers, but not necessarily because I feel like a dishonest memoir will inevitably lead to the fall of western civilization.  Instead, I simply point out that it’s been my experience that such books—with their tendency for the formulaic and clichéd– almost always represent a failure not of ethics, but of aesthetics.

But, as I said, I try not to be a jerk about it.  These days.

It’s as obvious as it is glib to point out that so-called “reality” television doesn’t resemble the world in which most of us actually live, but I worry that some people—and by some people, I mean some of my students—might mistake this manipulated footage and manufactured drama for something that resembles life on planet earth.  Chuck Klosterman suggested in his essay “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite” that MTV’s The Real World fundamentally changed how young people relate to each other—“People started becoming personality templates,” Klosterman wrote, “devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama.”  Over the years, dozens of students have told me about auditioning for one reality show or another, and I could always tell which “type” they wanted to be—Sensitive Heterosexual Guy, Wild Party Girl, Intellectual-Yet-Approachable Black Dude.  The problem with reality television, really, is its tendency to reduce actual human beings into characters.  Static, superficial, underdeveloped characters at that.

This is why I like to teach creative nonfiction to undergraduates.  While some writers, like Phillip Lopate, suggest that a nonfiction form like the personal essay is more suited for middle-aged people (who are, presumably, prone to reflection), I believe that it’s important for students to examine and write about their lives.  I know the complaints about college students’ supposed self-absorption, and I feel like it’s lately become fashionable to bemoan our students’ interest in writing about their own lives.  The suggestion is that writing about the self—particularly the young self, the self who hasn’t experienced very much of the world—convinces students that they can be writers without taking risks that involve experiences, adventures, and other people.

I don’t subscribe to that theory.  To be sure, I don’t subscribe to the opposite theory, espoused by some composition scholars, that personal writing is good for students because they are already experts in their own lives.  I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and very few of them seemed to have much expertise when it comes to discussing themselves.

When I ask my college students to write nonfiction, I am asking them to disregard the superficial, melodramatic narratives that tend to pass for reality in our popular culture and, instead, dig deeper.  A show like Bad Girls Club or Road Rules traffics in abstraction and stereotypes, but in memoir and essay writing, we’re looking for the concrete, for the unique individual consciousness.  We’re stripping away the constructed persona and focusing instead on the person, with all of the complexity and contradictions that would be sure to get her application to live in the Jersey Shore beach house rejected.

Some of my students have become talented essayists and memoirists.  I’ve directed three phenomenal MFA theses concerned with post-traumatic stress disorder, the plight of undocumented immigrants, and growing up in an orphanage in the early 1960s.  I’ve seen students get accepted to Ph.D. programs and publish their work.  And while I take pride in whatever role I might have played in my students’ success, if I’m being honest, I have to tell you that I’m a little more proud whenever a student—through reading and writing creative nonfiction—achieves a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the world and himself.  It’s deeply gratifying to find out what happens when people stop being ridiculous caricatures, and start getting real.