A Craft Essay by Emma Rowan
NO “I” IN CNF ? A Less Reflective Approach to Creative Nonfiction

Could I be the only CNF writer, the only memoirist, who doesn’t like to talk about myself? Or even worse, my feelings? Let alone write about them. Am I a living oxymoron?

Sometimes, I just don’t want to include so much interiority, so much reflection in my essays. Is that so bad? (Yes, I have an avoidant attachment style. Why do you ask?)

I do have my reasons.

I know the arguments for CNF writers to give either the same weight to the “I” that is living through the experiences on the page and the “I” that is reflecting on those experiences (sometimes called the “current I” or the “now I”). Or, in many cases, to give more weight to the “reflective I” than its counterpart. Both can work, of course.

But personally, I like to kick that “reflective I” to the curb occasionally. I like to leave my readers with gaps to fill in, gaps where they can not only infer my reflections based on what I’ve described, but where they can place themselves into the work. How do they feel about the story I am telling? How does it relate to something they’ve lived through?

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During my first workshop ever, Foundations of Creative Writing, my first semester of college, I was a floundering biochem major eating lunch in the mail room and having panic attacks in bathroom stalls—but that class was the life raft I clung to. It was the first time I realized writing was something I could pursue, and I was falling in love with creative nonfiction a little more each week. When my turn on the chopping block came, I submitted the first personal essay I’d ever written and had to sit on my hands to stop them from shaking.

The workshop discussion went okay. Better than okay, even. People understood what I was doing, people really got it. I wasn’t a total flop! Back in my dorm, smiling, I flipped through all of the feedback (my professor had everyone write comments on printed copies of workshop submissions). The smile fell from my face when I got to the last copy and read, in neat handwriting on the last page: “This kind of feels like a college application essay :/” (yes, a half-frowning emoticon).

I’d learn later that sometimes writers get workshop critique that knocks us sideways with sheer truth. This was my first time. My classmate was right. My essay did have the air of those corny, overzealous 600-word declarations of selfhood high school seniors submit to college admissions offices. I couldn’t tell exactly why; something about it was just off. I went to office hours a few days later and talked to my professor, who said something like, “Well, it might be because of all these assertions you’re making, all these moments of ‘I felt’ or ‘I learned,’ all these telling moments. There might be more concrete, visual scenes to show those feelings instead.”

Years later, that remains the simplest yet most important writing advice I’ve ever gotten. It completely changed the way I approach CNF. I realized I needed to trust my reader more—pull them in by giving less away, convey personal histories and growth without qualifying with plain, emotive statements, without relying on the “reflective I.”

*

Over time, I discovered many outstanding writers who use less interiority and reflection in essay, writers who beg a connection from readers by inviting them to play in the pages.

Whether consciously or not—and probably like so many other CNF writers—I’m often trying to emulate Annie Dillard’s approach. As she does in “Total Eclipse”, I also often avoid reflection in favor of multifaceted, rich descriptions and figurative language—or try to at least. I have an essay undergoing its hundredth round of revision about my dad, my home, and my sense of responsibility as the oldest daughter in a motherless family. In that essay, I thought of what Dillard might do, and I described my front lawn at four in the morning instead of detailing my nostalgia. I described my empty fridge and messy kitchen instead of listing my feelings of inadequacy and duty. I described the blue jay that flies past my window in Ohio instead of emphasizing that I feel that attachment to my home and my family in New York no matter where I am. I find that these metaphorical, yet specific images more compelling and interactive than interruptions from the “now I” that simply state how I feel. They give the reader objects and fleeting scenes to connect with, to make greater sense of.

I’ve been similarly inspired by Ross Gay’s “Loitering is Delightful,” turning to present tense in my writing of the past—often when I don’t want to reflect on what I’m sharing either because it’s too soon, too painful, or too uncomfortable. My flash CNF piece, “The Red Hots at the Bottom of my Mom’s Pocket Book” published in Spellbinder, about my late mother, is almost entirely in present tense. While writing, I knew I didn’t want to display or pick apart my tumultuous feelings of grief. I didn’t want that to be necessary for the reader to understand what I was getting at, to relate to the sense of grief and longing I was trying to illustrate. I hoped that by inserting my readers into my childhood car rides back to my mother’s studio apartment from the dollar store, sucking on the bright red cinnamon candies she coveted, readers would be immersed in the memory with me. And that when the time came in the essay, they would feel the same hurt, reading the lines that reveal my mom’s passing, the lines that reveal that memory is the only place my mother now exists.

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I recently led a workshop about this approach to CNF writing in Bowling Green, Ohio at Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing. Though I was shaking so much I nearly spilled my coffee and kept botching the pronunciation of “retrospection” with an anxiety-induced lisp, we had a lively conversation. People pondered if the “then I” is more prosaic and the “now I” is more poetic, discussed what writers even mean when we say our work should be layered (I said it means there’s gaps in the strata to dig in and hoped I sounded smarter than I felt). A friend shared a lovely micro piece she wrote solely with the “then I” with beautiful imagery depicting her and her third-grade classmates huddling like penguins in the snow during recess.

I invited discussion of additional methods or techniques for CNF that utilize less reflection. Someone mentioned hermit crab (or borrowed form) essays, one of my favorite subgenres. I thought about a flash hermit crab piece I wrote a few years ago in the form of a scaled grading rubric about my relationship to femininity and womanhood, a topic I had struggled to write about. It felt embarrassing, too vulnerable, and I kept finding myself trying to overexplain or justify my feelings. The hermit crab format provided me with the distance and structure I needed to include key details—like holding back tears in a department store dressing room when prom dress shopping or my inability to use a curling iron—that held thematic weight without being clouded by my reflective input.

Another workshop member mentioned a piece they were working on about an abusive partner. They found it difficult to write about suffering a particular act of violence, until writing in the form of a phone call with their mother—a call that was happening at exactly the same time as the abuse. They said that utilizing the script format of a phone call combined, with the present tense, offered a new angle, an open window to crawl through. I found that powerful; the technique freed the narrator to write about their abuse, and it also freed the reader to enter the work. Finding an open window allowed the writer to open the door from the inside, empowering them to control one scene of an uncontrollable situation, to immerse readers in the exact, terrible moment, and to release the need to explicitly state their feelings or their pain, the need to intervene with the “reflective I” and instead, to let—and trust—the readers to do the interpretive, reflective work on their own.

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As I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve realized the importance of giving the reader places in the story and in the form to play in, and enough pieces of the story to put together—but not everything. I’ve found that less retrospective emotions on my part, less interference from the “now I” provides readers with more opportunities to decipher, ponder, and examine.

Emma Rowan is a writer from New York. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Miami University, where she is the CNF Editor for Ox Mag. She is also a prose editor for temporal lobe and a reader for Beaver Magazine. She has work published in Hominum Journal, Spellbinder, Bruiser, and other places.