And this seems like a good opportunity to include the other publishing news I sent out in the newsletter.

The first item was regarding the publication of Elyssa East’s fabulous book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. Elyssa’s book is a true crime story, combined with the history of an abandoned colonial settlement and expanse of wilderness close to Gloucester, Mass. In a signature review for Publisher’s Weekly, Joyce Carol Oates called the book “…fascinating, richly detailed and remarkably evocative.”

I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of the book when I read it and offered some feedback, pre-publication. It’s a real page turner, and takes the reader deep into a mysterious, intriguing historical world. At Elyssa’s launch party, at Word, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on December 1, I was awarded “Top Dog” honors (along with some other people who had helped Elyssa’s book along the way, including her agent Brettne Bloom and her fiancé, Yulun Wang, one half of Pi Recordings). Pic of the award below — ain’t it pretty?

I also announced — not that she needed me to, considering the great reviews and exposure the book has received — Jessica DuLong’s debut book, My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America On the Hudson, an account of Jessica’s transition from the dot-com world to engineer of the John J. Harvey, a classic fireboat. Jessica’s compelling story is interwoven with fascinating, narrative-driven industrial history, made personal by her deep investment in the preservation of the Hudson river.

Jessica was a member of one of my first ever workshops, back when I was teaching though the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshops. She was honing her sample chapters then, subsequently found an agent and sold the book, and is now busy promoting and reading and being fabulous!

I love hearing about the publishing success of friends, clients, and students. If you have some to share with me, I hope you’ll be in touch.

To which I can only say: Yay! Looking at all the exhibits was like walking around inside a bunch of intelligent, creative minds. Now, I’m not an overly technical person, so much of the programming part of what these people were doing was totally beyond me, but what I found so fascinating was that they were all making interesting connections. Taking a concept from one area of thought and applying it somewhere else. Twisting ideas around to get new, more interesting ideas. And, along the way, quite possibly coming up with products that will be part of our daily lives in the near future.

Take Amanda’s project for example: Urban Windchimes. It’s so awesome. Check out the website for more info, but the basic concept is that, in our urban environments, people don’t always want to listen to other people’s windchimes. With this invention, you can place a wind sensor on your window ledge or fire escape and pay the chimes through your computer. There’s the possibility of placing sensors all over the world — ever wanted to listen to the wind on Mount Fiji? Or in the Bahamas? How cool would that be?

Then there were a few projects that were dealing, in one way or another, with memory. And this got me thinking about the connection between memory and technology, and how the digital revolution means we might well remember things differently in the future. This, in turn, has some pretty interesting consequences for future memoirists.

Already, online social media networks like Facebook provide a digital archive of our lives that just didn’t exist a few years ago. Want to know what you were doing the summer of your junior year? Check your status updates! Can’t remember when you started that college internship that proved to be so formative? Check out your LinkedIn page! Personally, I have long been haunted by my future memoiristic self: I can’t throw away my old Filofax calenders from 1995 or my journals from when I was twelve, just in case I’m working on some future project and I need an aide memoire, or to fact check my own life. But soon I won’t need paper records at all — it will all be online.

Here’s a project from the ITP show that takes it to the next level: a social network site combined with google maps to created an online memory repository. It’s called remmbr.

And here’s another project from the show that plays with how memory is linked to technology — and the idea that both can degrade: portrait of a memory in vhs.

Now all we need is a chip inserted into our brains that will record every memory we ever had, right? Scary thought, but perhaps not too far off. The question is, though: would this actually hinder memoirists? After all, creating memoir isn’t just about what you remember. It’s not just the facts — it’s what they mean. It’s being able to plumb memory for meaning. And we are able to do that, partially, because certain memories loom large and take up more room than others. What we recall, and the level of intensity with which we recall, is a guide to what’s important to us. It helps us piece together significance. If everything is retained without differentiation, wouldn’t we be autobiographers rather than memoirists? Perhaps one of the most important aspects of writing memoir is what we don’t know and so must create.

The online version of the magazine includes Kelly’s “Postcard from the Campaign Trail” that expands on her thoughts, and includes this paragraph:

I have an MFA in creative nonfiction: Reported, first-person pieces are what I do. I disclose information and use language to reveal my bias, and I expect the reader to take my work for what it is—the perspective of a single individual. I also take my task very seriously. I’m the eyes and ears for all the people who aren’t in the room, and I try to convey both the substance of what happens and also the mood, the setting, my own reaction and those of the people around me. These, the devices of fiction, are important in making a scene come alive. But they are especially critical in describing a presidential campaign, which can be sanitized by sound bites or spun into unrecognizable fluff by a press office. As citizens in a democracy, we need all the information we can get about the candidates and the apparatus that surrounds them. Creative nonfiction offers a lens that is colored by voice, tone, and critical intelligence.

Kelly’s thoughts remind me that, after all this time, creative nonfiction is still a term that a lot of people have problems understanding. I’ve had to define it innumerable times, sometimes even to people who work in publishing.

Literary nonfiction is perhaps a friendlier and more palatable term, or narrative nonfiction even, as these are handles of quality or function. But the idea that nonfiction could be both factually accurate and also creative — this seems to fry people’s brains. I like Kelly’s definition, above, but for the record, here’s my simple, one sentence version.

Creative nonfiction uses the techniques of fiction to tell a true story.

There. Said it. Simple, right?

For those looking for a fuller explication, check out Lee Gutkind’s response to the question “What is Creative Nonfiction” over at the magazine he founded and edits — Creative Nonfiction, of course. Here’s his summary, which dovetails nicely with what Kelly says too:

In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary and even cinematic techniques, from scene to dialogue to description to point of view, to write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world.

In other words, it’s a somewhat fluid genre, which draws from and combines different literary traditions — which is why it’s also so vibrant and powerful. By this definition, citizen journalists are looking like the new kings and queens of creative nonfiction — much more so than Ira Glass’s picks for his somewhat tired, traditional and borderline gender discriminatory book of the same title.