Passing the torch of the creative nonfiction movement

“Excuse me for interrupting, but you’re The Writer, right?” 

I looked up from my conversation at a coffee shop in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood to see a burly man with a chest-length beard the color of steel wool. He wanted to know if my coffee companion was, in fact, Lee Gutkind — the writer, editor, and professor whom Vanity Fair in 1997 called “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction.”  

It was. The bearded guy introduced himself as a writer-friend of someone whom Gutkind had taught in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where Gutkind had founded Creative Nonfiction, a literary journal-turned-magazine that catalyzed the evolution of the genre. 

After telling us about the novel he had (finally) finished, the bearded man spent 10 minutes fan-girling over Gutkind, a soft-spoken, white-haired, bespectacled professor who had no idea who this guy was (a ceramic artist and lead guitarist for a band called Old Money Jesus). Then the man turned to me and said, with the earnestness of a Swiftie:

“This is like an Elvis encounter!” 

Gutkind and I were three hours into what was intended to be a one-hour chat, and this was the fourth celebrity sighting. As we introduced ourselves to each other outside Jitters café, an award-winning playwright stopped him on the sidewalk. As the playwright filled my ear with praise for Gutkind, a woman passing by on the sidewalk reached in, without a word, to hug Gutkind’s neck and kiss his godfatherly cheek. When we moved to Georgie’s Corner for lunch, the owner thanked him by bringing us a free cupcake and chocolate chip cookies. 

And, of course, he was receiving extended attention from me. I was in Pittsburgh to celebrate my grandmother’s 100th birthday. When I realized Gutkind lived there, too, I invited him for coffee to talk about “Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue,” an anthology of 32 essays representing the kaleidoscope of nonfiction writing published by the magazine over 30 years. I was still mourning the end of Creative Nonfiction’s publishing run in 2022. But I was grateful for the unusual parting gift: “The Final Issue” is being mailed to his 2,800 subscribers — free. 

“I felt I owed you guys something,” he said. 

Flashback: It’s the early 1990s, and Gutkind is an English professor at Pitt — the only one he knows of there “without any advanced degree whatsoever.” He is surrounded by poets, fiction writers, and playwrights who consider nonfiction inferior. He wants to write nonfiction that reads like fiction. 

True stories, mind you — based entirely on fact — but stories deployed with the tools of fiction: scenes, dialogue, point of view, voice, characters as fully rounded as any found in literature. 

“I was an outlier,” he said. “But I thought there were so many writers like me, writing nonfiction that read like short stories.” 

He had long admired the characters and craft experiments of the New Journalists, rebels who started rewriting the rules of nonfiction in the 1960s. Think Gay Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra — written without any real access to the star — in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966). Or the hallucinogenic narrative fugue of Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). Or Joan Didion’s artfully fragmented portraits of young hippies, forming her mosaic of Haight-Ashbury counterculture in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). 

“I thought, this is really something,” Gutkind said. “And I wanted to do that.” 

Whatever “that” was needed a name. Something other than “New Journalism,” because the J-word was off-putting to folks in the literary world, who considered factual writing antithetical to creative writing. 

Gutkind embraced the term “creative nonfiction,” because he felt it encompassed the broadest spectrum: memoir, essays, narratives, profiles, immersion reportage, and so on.

“I wasn’t the first person to use that term,” he said. “But I was the first person who really hung onto it.” 

Journalists recoiled. “They hated the word ‘creative,’” Gutkind said. “They thought it meant you could make stuff up, which wasn’t true.”

Creative writers took umbrage, too. “They resisted the evolution of the essay and the idea that creative nonfiction could take shape and read like fiction.” 

Literary critics were among the harshest naysayers. As Gutkind recalls in the introduction to “The Final Issue,” an editor for The New York Times Book Review described creative nonfiction as “bullshit. … If it is creative, then it’s not nonfiction and if it is nonfiction then it’s not creative.” 

And so began years of  “literary fistfights” — the theme of his memoir, published last year by Yale University Press, which is as much a history as it is a memoir. “The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting” chronicles not only Gutkind’s personal arc but the evolution of creative nonfiction from an incite-fully oxymoronic term into its own legitimate genre.  

“My mission was always to make creative nonfiction the ‘fourth genre,’” Gutkind told me — as respectable as fiction, poetry, and playwriting. “I wanted people to accept it. I got a little crazy about it. I really pushed.”

Gutkind fought so hard to legitimize the genre that a Vanity Fair writer called him “a human octopus.” Which, in retrospect, could be considered a back-handed (or eight-handed) compliment. In the same derisive critique of “Creative Nonfiction” (both the magazine and the genre), the critic dismissed memoir — including Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer winning “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Liar’s Club” by Mary Karr — as “navel-gazing” and “civic journalism for the soul.”

Flash forward: It’s 2024, almost 2025. The Vanity Fair critic who snubbed memoir as “navel-gazing” published his own umbilically contemplative memoir 10 years after writing those very words — figuratively and literarily eating them. 

Creative Nonfiction had evolved from a perfect-bound literary journal with 150 subscribers to a quarterly magazine with a small but devoted readership of 2,800 paying subscribers and 35,000 on the email list. It had published writing by the likes of Valerie Boyd, John McPhee, Richard Rodriguez, Charles Simic, and many other “outliers.” It had become a literary lab for Pulitzer Prize winners and National Book Award recipients and even some non-writers with a great story to tell — all of them true-storytellers experimenting with craft and form.  

It had become legit. 

The genre, meanwhile, had evolved from a concept that irritated both journalists and English majors into a genre worthy of its own MFA programs. Gutkind helped start the first ones — at the University of Pittsburgh and the low-residency program at Goucher College — both in 1997. 

Acceptance expanded. As Gutkind writes in “Literary Fist-Fighting”: 

“There are more than 200 MFA creative writing programs and three dozen PhD programs — not just in the U.S. but in Asia, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland the UK, and other countries. Nearly every week, creative nonfiction books appear on the bestseller lists of The New York Times and The Washington Post; they are featured and reviewed and excerpted in major magazines and on literary websites. Many newspapers today, once critical of creative nonfiction (and the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s), regularly solicit and publish personal essays for opinion and feature pages. News stories, once limited by the five Ws — who, what, when, where, why — are often written as dramatic narratives.”

Creative nonfiction is now one of the fastest-growing disciplines in both academia and publishing, Gutkind says. Which seems like an appropriate setup for a mic drop. So I was astonished when Gutkind told me that he had never been invited to speak at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference at the University of North Texas or the Power of Narrative Conference at Boston University (formerly hosted by the Nieman Foundation). 

What? Why?! 

It seems that the parallel universes of literary journalism and creative writing still haven’t fully merged; they coexist as a sort of Venn diagram, with a little overlap between two curiously siloed disciplines. As a writer who haunts the overlap, I have witnessed this: at conferences attended by journalists but few MFAs; at writers’ residencies where I was the lone journalist among poets and novelists, even in my own classrooms. 

I’ve taught creative nonfiction in English departments where I had to find a word other than “reporting” to teach students how to research better material for their stories, and I’ve taught feature writing in journalism programs where I struggled to get experienced reporters to understand what a scene is, or the difference between dialogue and quotes. 

Both camps could benefit from the sort of cross-pollination that Gutkind sought to infuse in his magazine and his classrooms. But even after 30 years, he feels rejected by literary journalists who can’t seem to get past the C-word — as if “creative” implies making stuff up instead of the creativity of the craft. 

Gutkind has been pressed through the years to define “creative nonfiction.” He has refused, because he didn’t want to define boundaries that might limit the creativity and experimentation of writers. He felt that writers should be the ones to define the genre through their writing. That said, his magazine’s tagline offers a sort of definition, with plenty of room for interpretation: 

True stories, well told. 

In 2022, Gutkind left his final professorship at Arizona State University and returned to Pittsburgh, coming full circle (like a good essay) back to where he began. After shutting down the magazine and co-editing the anthology with Leslie Rubinkowski, his former student, he has more time to focus on his own writing, wrangling a narrative that has been incubating for some time and thinking about the future of creative nonfiction. 

Not long after the magazine ceased, Gutkind received an email from Narratively, a storytelling platform that champions true storytelling in many forms: written stories, podcasts, TV, film, and an educational arm called Narratively Academy, which offers online writing workshops.  

Not knowing the magazine had stopped publishing, the crew at Narratively asked if Gutkind might want to share a piece they had published. He was already “a fan and admirer” of Narratively and found the timing a moment of kismet, because he’d just been thinking about reaching out to the site “with some ideas about how we might work together.”  

Narratively’s founders, Noah Rosenberg and Brendan Spiegel, were journalists who found themselves stymied by the storytelling constraints of what they call “big journalism.” Their story ideas were repeatedly rejected as “too quirky, complex, or in-depth for mainstream media,” according to their website. So in 2012 they built a platform “that champions diverse, indie journalists and storytellers and celebrates humanity through the most authentic, unexpected and extraordinary true narratives.” Narratively has since been lauded as one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites (2013) and Columbia Journalism Review’s 11 Best Experiments in Journalism (2015). 

These journalists, who are of a younger generation, didn’t see themselves as part of a separate camp. When Rosenberg discovered Creative Nonfiction 20 years ago, he thought: I’m not alone. I’ve finally found my people. And Gutkind was one of them. 

“He’s the consummate player-coach,” Rosenberg told me on the phone. “He has practiced the craft. He has helped define the craft in so many powerful important ways, while also becoming an important teacher and mentor.” 

Synergy can be an off-putting word. So let’s call what happened next a syzygy.

The journalists and the creative nonfictionist got on the same page (which would be a cliché if it weren’t a double entendre). In February they announced a partnership. Their first collaboration is a series called “The Art of Narrative Storytelling,” which invites writers to examine the stories that move them and try to crack the code that makes them work. Narratively will also offer a discounted subscription to Creative Nonfiction subscribers, but more importantly, an alternative to the void left by Creative Nonfiction, with the Godfather’s blessing. 

“The advice he has offered us has demonstrated that he’s willing to pass the baton,” Rosenberg said. “Which is a responsibility we don’t take lightly.” 

If this were a news article, that would be a fine kicker. But in homage to the Godfather, this is a story, and we will end it with a flashback. 

It’s 1965 and Gutkind is a freshman at Pitt, taking Composition 101. His professor is teaching the five-paragraph essay: intro, three paragraphs supporting three points, conclusion. It feels limiting and frustrating and not what young Gutkind thinks writing should be — at least not any writing he’d want to read. 

So he goes rogue. Instead of an academic-style paper, Gutkind turns in a story. 

His professor catches on. Sees what he’s doing. Purses his lips and tells his student: 

“You ought to think about becoming a writer.” 

Seven years later, Gutkind published his first book, “Bike Fever: On Motorcycle Culture.” He would go on to become a leather-clad professor who stomped into class in motorcycle boots and smoked cigarettes during his lectures. He credits his 101 professor for unlocking the door to this life.

Over the years, Gutkind wrote letters and email trying to reach the prof to thank him. He never heard back. Perhaps he’d been “way too overboard in appreciation and praise.” Maybe all that fan-girling had made the poor man uncomfortable. 

Then, one day, he was sitting in a coffee shop and saw his teacher walking by on the street.

I’ll let the Godfather finish the story:

“I rushed outside and pursued him, calling his name quite loudly to get his attention. When I caught up with him and told him how he had been instrumental in launching my writing life — I had by then published two books — I realized why he had never replied. … He had no idea who I was.” 

***

Kim Cross is the author of creative nonfiction stories and books, including “What Stands in a Storm” and “In Light of All Darkness.”