1.  Brevity. Edited by Dinty W. Moore, Brevity is an excellent online magazine of brief nonfiction, from some of the best writers in the field.  From Brevity’s description:

“For more than a decade now, Brevity has published well-known and emerging writers working in the extremely brief (750 words or less) essay form, along with craft essays and book reviews. Though still committed to the mission of publishing new writers, Brevity has enjoyed an embarrassment of recent riches, including the work of two Pulitzer prize finalists, numerous NEA fellows, Pushcart winners, Best American authors, and writers from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan. Authors published in Brevity include Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Terese Svoboda, John Calderazzo, Steven Barthelme, Mark Yakich, Ander Monson, Caitlin Horrocks, Jon Pineda, Brenda Miller, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, Rebecca McClanahan, Robin Behn, Abby Frucht, Barbara Hurd, Bret Lott, Ira Sukrungruang, Rigoberto González, Judith Kitchen, Michael Martone, and Diana Hume George.”

Work from Brevity has been anthologized and reprinted in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, the Short Takes anthology, the Best Creative Nonfiction anthology from W.W. Norton, and many recent writing textbooks.

2. Brevity Blog.  For news and commentary about the form, nothing beats Brevity magazine’s blog, which is updated frequently.  Any time there’s a debate in the world of creative nonfiction, you can count on some smart blog posts from a variety of contributors.

3. Creative Nonfiction. There’s a temptation to call Creative Nonfiction “the magazine that started it all.”  That’s not entirely accurate—people were writing this type of stuff for centuries before Lee Gutkind founded this magazine almost twenty years ago.  Still, it’s impossible to understate the impact this magazine has had on our genre.  Their website has a pretty generous selection of online reprints of pieces that originally appeared in the print magazine. From their “About” page:

“Creative Nonfiction was the first and is still the largest literary magazine to publish, exclusively and on a regular basis, high quality nonfiction prose. The journal has consistently featured prominent authors from the United States and around the world and has helped launch the careers of some of the genre’s most exciting emerging writers, as well as helping establish the creative nonfiction genre as a worthy academic pursuit.”

4. Quotidiana.  This collection of classical essays available through public domain is curated by essayist Patrick Madden.  He writes:

“Quotidiana, from the word quotidian, is a website dedicated to the essay. Quotidiana includes my writing and teaching portfolios, an online workshop community for me and my fellow O. U. Bobcats, a set of conference papers and annotated bibliographies, a collection of interviews with some of my favorite contemporary essayists, a selection of the ‘Essayest American Essays,’ from recent years, and, most importantly and most substantially, an anthology of hundreds of classical essays, all published before 1923, all partakers of the ruminative, associative, idea-driven form that predates and surpasses the current ‘creative nonfiction’ trendy stuff. Although most of these essays are available online elsewhere, some are not, and already Quotidiana is one of the biggest online anthologies of classical essays anywhere.”

5. Sweet: A Literary Confection.  I keep thinking of Sweet —which was founded and is edited by Ira Sukrungruang, Katherine Riegel, and K.C. Wolfe—as “that new online magazine of poetry and creative nonfiction.”  It’s not really new at all—it’s been around for years.  And in those years, they’ve published some great works by the likes of Joe Bonomo, Lee Martin, Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Maureen Stanton, Nicole Walker, and many others.  About their magazine and themselves, Sweet’s editors write:

“There’s a reason ‘sweet’ has come to mean ‘awesome’ in slang. It comes back to the mouth, to pleasure. We don’t believe pleasure has to be light, as our issues show. But we also don’t want readers to go away thinking, ‘That was really hearty’ or ‘What a healthy collection!’ We want you to think, ‘Mmmm, sweeeeet.’ We want you to find something here that you need, something perhaps not as practical as a potato, but just as vital.”

William Bradley: What would you say is the most challenging thing about teaching creative nonfiction?

Maureen Stanton: I’d say that the most challenging aspect of teaching CNF is to help students write works that readers will care about, and to understand that it’s not enough to just relate a story—after all, everyone has a story but why should readers choose to read this piece of writing among all the options available?  This is not something that I emphasize too much with undergraduates, who are just trying their hands at the genre and gaining practical writing skills, and who generally aren’t ambitious about publishing their work or even thinking about publishing.  But with graduate students, it’s difficult to raise this subject because mentioning the “Why should I or anyone care?” question feels like a personal criticism, or at least is sounds harsh.  I should add that I don’t express this thought in those blunt terms exactly —“Why should I care what happened to you?”—because that is destructive and difficult criticism to hear about one’s own work.  But it is the central question of creative nonfiction, especially memoir, and sometimes it is the only question left to ask in an otherwise accomplished piece of writing.  The good news is that there are many ways to make any individual essay or memoir reach beyond being a well-written conveyance of an experience, even though dealing with the “who cares” aspect may also be the most difficult thing to learn as well as to teach.

William Bradley: That idea of asking students to think about why their readers should care about the events and ideas they write about calls to mind Natalia Rachel Singer’s essay “Nonfiction in First Person, Without Apology,” where she says that the question facing the nonfiction writer isn’t “Who cares?” but “Why do you care?”  I’ve cribbed that line in class, “Why do you care about this?  I can’t care until you show me why it matters so much.”  I think sometimes students enter the nonfiction workshop thinking that their personal stories will be compelling simply because they matter so much to them.

Which leads me to my next question: People have accused young people today of being more narcissistic than previous generations, using social media to record the minutia of their daily lives as if they’re being followed as closely as Kanye or Rihanna.  I don’t know if I think my students are more narcissistic than I was at 19, but I definitely think that our current students have grown up with this technology that sort of promotes the idea of revealing the self—or some aspect of the self—in a public forum.  Do you think that the type of “exhibitionism” encouraged by social media might have impact on student work written for a creative nonfiction class?

Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting question, about which I think the jury is still out. But I can see it going both ways. Creative nonfiction is a genre that draws from the individual’s experiences, thoughts, musings, imaginations, emotions, etc.  So the notion that the “self” as appropriate and rich for exploration, and to some extent, performance, would be perhaps more acceptable to this generation raised on self-exposure through social media.

As a creative nonfiction writer, at the beginning of my career I often felt a need to apologize for writing about myself or my life (and tried to suppressed that urge to apologize so as not to buy into any sense that such an endeavor is lesser, or suspect in any way; obviously it’s not but there has been that stigma).  So a positive result of social media exhibitionism might be the removal of any stigma about seeking and/or using the self as a source for art.  The negative result would stem from the fact that social media communication is so shallow, almost the antithesis of good memoir or essay writing, which requires going deep, waiting, mulling, meditating and discovering wisdom to share.  I think the short answer is that the desire to share stories and exhibit your life is a useful and interesting impulse (like my mother talking across the laundry line, so to speak, with other neighborhood mothers), and can help build a sense of community and communion, but social media may be too expeditious, too self-conscious of performance and hierarchy (or other unrelated–to-art goals) to yield deeper meaning and connectedness in the way that great essays and memoirs can.

William Bradley: I was thinking about the idea of persona in an essay, or developing one’s voice, and how some of the students I’ve become “friends” with on Facebook or who I follow on Twitter seem to unconsciously (I think) develop their own online identities—I had a student who was always very shy and retiring in all of my interactions with him, but to see his Twitter account, you’d think he was James Bond or John Shaft, what with all the talk of his own sexual prowess.  How much do you focus on developing the student’s voice and persona in a creative nonfiction class?  Do you have any strategies or assignments that are useful for this purpose?  Does your approach differ in an undergraduate vs. graduate workshop?

Maureen Stanton: That’s a really interesting observation about the performance of the self on social media, with the protection of impersonal communication, or messages tailored to a particular audience—your hip friends. Since I’m not “friends” on Facebook with too many of my undergraduates, I haven’t experienced anyone demonstrating a split personality that way.  As far as helping students develop voice or persona, I don’t set out to teach students this skill, per se, at least I haven’t yet. (This is making me think I should develop some “voice” exercises.)  With undergraduates, the focus is still on the mechanics, the basics of the genre, so something as subtle and potentially tricky to master as “voice” hasn’t been my focus. I think that my comments on their essays probably alert them to sections where the writing has successfully created a distinct voice or a mood or tone (which can suggest a persona or voice). Or the opposite: they are trying too hard to establish a voice and it’s clearly not their own; they are imitating Kerouac or Agee or David Foster Wallace, or trying too hard to be funny or cute or revealing, but it’s obvious that it’s not authentic. I applaud the effort to try out someone else’s voice, as you can learn through mimesis and experimentation, as long as you discover, recognize, develop or return to your own voice or persona.

Graduate students seem to have it under control; they know who they are, and they have distinct voices that I can see and hear in their writing.

William Bradley:  You’ve been teaching for a few years now—if I’m not mistaken, you started teaching at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the fall of 2005 (I remember, because I was on the search committee that interviewed you at MLA less than two weeks before my wedding).  If you had advice to give to someone just starting her career teaching creative nonfiction—maybe even the Maureen Stanton of seven years ago—what would it be?

Maureen Stanton: Yes, I began teaching in 2005 at University of Missouri, and I’ve learned a lot through mistakes, mostly issues particular to the odd task of “critiquing someone’s life.”  Perhaps my mistakes will be helpful to new teachers.  For teaching undergraduates, I’d say that it is important to talk to students about what is appropriate to present to workshop right at the beginning of the course, when reviewing the syllabus.  I hadn’t really made this clear enough, but then I had a student who wrote about her attempted suicide that was still too fresh. (She withdrew from the university later that term due to depression.) Prior to that, I had thought that any subject was fine to write about. I didn’t want to be too restrictive or controlling, but after that, I realized that while it might have been therapeutic for her to write about her experience, it was not a great idea to share it in the workshop.  The subject was too tender and awkward for the group. They handled it really well, but nobody felt like they could actually provide literary criticism of this piece, so why bring it to a workshop? In future classes, I was very clear about what is appropriate and useful to bring to workshop.   That single experience with the student who was suffering from depression was a moment when I truly felt I’d let the class down, and that student, too, by putting everyone in an awkward position.

For teaching graduate students, I sort of caved in a bit to what they wanted to do in the course (not much reading, no exercises), because I remember that I wanted that sort of studio approach to a workshop. I knew my topic and my project and I just wanted to be left alone to work on it and then get comments.  So I became sensitive to this criticism in the evaluations at the end of the term. But in hindsight, I think it is useful and appropriate to have rigorous reading and exercises in a graduate workshop. Graduate students can be too comfortable in a groove with their writing (especially if they’ve had some publishing success) and be less willing to break out of that comfort/competence zone.  I do recall hating exercises in workshops in my M.F.A. program, but I have to admit that all the exercises I did turned into published essays, gave me new techniques, and generated new material. At the time, I didn’t appreciate this connection.  And what is sometimes hard to grasp is that in graduate school, you have time to read rich, difficult, challenging books. Once you get a job with a full teaching load, I think it becomes much more difficult to find the time for self-selected reading beyond reading the books on your syllabi.

I’m much less stupid now, of course, and as a result, I’m now able to really enjoy the opportunity to teach William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” an essay I just couldn’t appreciate the first time I read it in my early twenties, but find I enjoy—and “relate to”—more and more as I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, towards middle age.  And I’ve been developing ways to get my own students to appreciate—and perhaps even “relate to”—Hazlitt’s 19^th century text.

First of all, what’s not to love about an essay called “On the Pleasures of Hating”?  As far as awesome titles go, this one’s only approached by Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre.”  As a reader, when you see a title like that, all you can really do is blink, raise your eyebrows quizzically, then shrug and say, “Well, okay.  I’m listening.”  It’s like if someone said to you, “You know what I hate?  Orgasms.”  You’re pretty sure you’ll disagree with this person, but you’re dying to hear the reasoning behind such an outrageous position.

People frequently don’t want to agree with Hazlitt’s contention that hating is a pleasurable act– particularly well-intentioned college students (and even their bleeding-heart professors).  Hatred is a scourge, after all.  It’s something we’re trying to eradicate.  “Some people might find pleasure in hating, but I—as a liberated, open-minded person—certainly do not, and I don’t think most other people do either.”

Yeah?  Then tell me, why are the Kardashian Sisters famous?

Think about it—Kim, Khloe, and the other one only exist in our culture so that we can hate them.  You know it.  I know it.  And our students know it too.  Oh, sure—many of us have probably decided that those girls shouldn’t be judged so harshly, and that there’s something a little creepy and misogynist about our culture’s fascination with—and condemnation of—the things that these attractive though rather vapid young women say.  But nevertheless, these reality stars—and others like them—are presented to us for our collective loathing.  And frequently, we oblige—even if it’s just by laughing when Joel McHale or Beavis and Butthead belittle them.

“Nature seems (the more we look into it),” Hazlitt writes, “made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men.”  We’d be the lotus-eaters without the awesome buzz.  Without something contemptible to react against, I tell my students, there would be no progress or productivity—we’d simply be filled with an unearned contentment.

One of the main objections some students—and even this professor, once upon a time– have to this essay is the knowledge (eloquently expressed by James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son”) that hatred consumes and destroys people.  “Sure, anger is useful and important,” these people can say, “but you have to guard against being hateful, otherwise you destroy yourself.”  I do believe that’s true, but I also don’t think that truth negates Hazlitt’s point that hating can feel quite good.  Because Hazlitt does not advocate being hateful, he’s advocating hating— in appropriate measure.  Hazlitt tells us:

The echoes of liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the mornings of human hope dawned again: but that dawn has been overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving sounds stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition – man yielding (as it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to the innate perversity and dastard spirit of his own nature which leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment.

The hatefulness he sees in other people is one more thing to hate.  So we understand that hatefulness is never to be understood as virtue.  But certain types of hatred—perhaps, say, a hatred of ignorance, or intolerance, or injustice– is proper, necessary, and– above all– pleasurable.

There is any number of directions to take a class after a discussion of Hazlitt.  We might have a group discussion about the things we hate, and note the enthusiasm and giddiness and pleasure that people exhibit as they say things like, “Yes!  I think Coldplay sucks too!” or “Man, those talking baby E-Trade commercials are annoying!”  Of course, this essay might lend itself to a cool writing assignment.  I have been thinking about asking students to write about the things they hate, but I’ve been a bit concerned that I would get a collection of essays expressing their authors’ contempt for racism or sexism or homophobia or hate crimes or the last season of Lost—you know, low-hanging fruit.  But recently—as a result of editing and revising this very blog post—a friend pointed out to me that an exercise devoted to writing about hating something everybody else loves might make for an insightful, reflective assignment.  I’m now brainstorming an idea for an essay about why Tom Hanks should have just called it quits right after Bachelor Party…

How would you go about teaching Hazlitt?  Any thoughts on writing assignments his essay might inspire?  Most importantly, what do you hate that everyone else seems to just adore?

To be sure, I don’t think I’m talking about the male equivalent of the type of essay Berry is talking about.  She writes that “only once or twice in the nine years I’ve been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.”  I haven’t really read that essay either.  The type of relationship essay I’ve read from male writers tends—more often than not– to be more angry than reflective.

I first encountered this type of narrative during my senior year of college, in a workshop where a fellow student ended his own end-of-the-affair narrative with the triumphant line, “I was sick of playing that bitch’s games.”  Even typing that line now, fifteen years later, I cringe both for her and for him—she was, after all, a fellow student on a campus of just over two thousand, and he certainly had no idea how committing such a line to the page and handing out photocopies to the class made him seem… well, less than gentlemanly.  I came upon my second such narrative in the same class, where another student writer decried his ex-girlfriend as “promiscuous,” but only after lavishing attention on her “large-yet-firm” breasts as he lost his virginity in the front seat of a car.

This trend continued in grad school.   There was the guy from my M.A. program who gave a paragraph to each girlfriend in a five page essay, each paragraph devoted to chronicling the woman’s flaws (usually, the problem involved the woman’s lack of intellect, but a few were dismissed with disparaging remarks about their appearance).  And I’ll never forget the guy from my Ph.D. years who described—in pornographic detail– the sex with his ex-girlfriend while Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer” played on his stereo.  Honestly, if you’re going to write about having sex while that song is playing (and you really shouldn’t, because, let’s face it, you really owe it to yourself to not do that), and you’re going to provide us with Trent Reznor’s lyrics, you probably don’t also need to include words like “thrusting” and “pulsating.”

The above examples come from former classmates, but I’ve occasionally received these types of essays from my own students, too, and it always seems to me that the men who write these narratives of the break-ups—with their unflattering descriptions and their potentially embarrassing sexual revelations—are writing not to reflect on “why a relationship has fallen apart,” the way some of the women Berry has taught do, but are instead writing as a form of revenge, an attempt to “get back” at those who either broke their hearts or somehow became a romantic disappointment.

I was talking about this phenomenon with my own nonfiction students last week—before I even read Berry’s article – as we were discussing Dinty W. Moore’s observation in his anthology/ textbook The Truth of the Matter that “A helpful way to approach the question of memory in creative nonfiction is to occasionally investigate your own motives.  Are you remembering something a certain way in order to make yourself look more like the hero of the situation, or in order to cast your lazy brother-in-law in an even more unpleasant light?  If so, you are being dishonest.”   I would say the same thing is true when writing about relationships—in fact, I think it’s even more true.  It seems to me that a failed romance provides fertile ground for self-deception and self-serving excuses, which will inevitably lead to a dishonest essay or memoir.

I don’t want to tell my students not to write about things that make them angry, or that they have strong feelings about—such subjects might lead to brilliant insight, either in their writing or in their lives.  But I do caution them to ask themselves, honestly, if they’re ready to write about these subjects.  Can they reflect without being overwhelmed by their emotions?  Because if the answer is no, and the piece of writing lacks that critical, honest interrogation of the self, then the essay or memoir will ultimately be unsuccessful.  And above all else, I try to discuss with my students why we write what we write.  If a student is genuinely trying to come to an understanding of an experience, trying to figure out something about himself or an event or relationship he lived through, awesome.  That’s the point.  But, I caution my students, if the whole point is to vilify, degrade, or humiliate another person in front of a classroom full of people, then perhaps this is an essay that ought not be written.  Once it’s written down and submitted for workshop, it’s out there, and can’t be taken back.  And I doubt too many of us would want to be judged by the things we say—or write—in the heat of an angry or heartbroken moment.

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.