What’s the Story? Continued
Creative Nonfiction receives state arts
funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state
agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment
for the Arts, a federal agency.THIS ISSUE OF
CREATIVE NONFICTION
WAS MADE POSSIBLE
BY SUPPORT FROM:The Kiss “shameful, slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical, and revolting.” Across the
Atlantic, Mary Eberstadt, in England’s We e k ly S t a n d a rd, accused Harrison of inviting
“humiliation upon her own children... as misery was invited on her.” (Harrison had
two young children then, and her husband, Colin, a staunch supporter of her work, was
the editor of Harper’s.)
This was a big issue at the time, as it is today: writers write about people without their
permission, depicting innocent victims in ways that might violate their privacy and seem
unfair or embarrassing or even hurtful. There were many public dialogues and debates
in literary circles in Manhattan and in the popular press about sharing such intimate
material. Yardley and other well-known critics, like James Wolcott, the guy who named
me “the godfather behind creative nonfiction” in a 1997 Vanity Fair roasting of the genre,
were calling it “the memoir craze.” They were predicting a short-lived popularity;
surely, they seemed to suggest, we would all sooner or later come to our senses—not a
particularly accurate prediction, as it turns out.
Remember that this was around the time—throughout the ’90s, in fact—that the
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was under the gun in congressional circles for
funding art which, to some, challenged standards of decorum and decency, beginning
with threats and criticism of Robert Mapplethorpe. His The Perfect Moment” included
homoerotic photographs, images of sadomasochism, and, according to critics, child por-
nography. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, supported by the NEA, was attacked for
exhibiting a Chris Ofili painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, that featured sexually explicit
cutouts encased with elephant dung. The literary world was not so carefully scrutinized
(perhaps because our congressional representatives don’t read), and while it may be a big
leap from pornography to privacy, we were all on edge, very cautious, carefully
analyzing the content of every essay we published.
At Creative Nonfiction, we went to great extremes to be acceptable and not
elicit controversy. It seems quaint now, but we even struggled with the use of
the F-word: would readers be offended? On occasion, if we found content
uncomfortable in essays we accepted, we changed names or locations in
order to make certain everyone was safe from public scrutiny. Sometimes,
in the end, making pieces “safe” almost made them fictional—and, there-
fore, unpublishable, at least by us.
Of course, we continue to be careful to protect innocent victims and to
publish work we feel is in good taste. But things have changed over the years,
and mostly, I think, for the better. The risks that Harrison and other writers
took with their revealing and candid writing helped transform the lives of generations
of women who had spent a lifetime hiding similar secrets from friends and families,
suffering in silence. It took great courage for those writers back then, as it does now for
Roger Tolle and Sue Fagalde Lick and the half dozen other writers we are publishing
in this “Let’s Talk About Sex” issue, to bring the realities and secrets of their lives to
the surface to share.
I should note that we chose to focus only on stories involving consensual sex
(although it is certainly important to write and publish other kinds of stories, as
demonstrated by the impact of the #MeToo movement). There’s certainly a lot
more to say—and write—about this subject, and we know we are only scratching
the surface. But we chose this theme to send a message and to provide a platform
for writers to dig deep and capture contemporary life and, in so doing, encourage
others to share their ideas and experiences with daring and reflective readers.