CHAPTER THREE

Research and History

The first two chapters about creative nonfiction have focused a lot of attention on memory and experience. For good reason. Creative nonfiction not only allows us to include such things in our writing, it embraces the personal as a primary means of knowing about the world. Let’s shift our attention in this chapter to another means of knowing about the world, namely research. Just because we’re focusing on research, however, does not mean that we leave the personal and experiential behind. The creative essay that relies on research does not necessarily erase the personal. These two approaches can be mutually reinforcing, or they might even coincide in surprising but fruitful ways. For our purposes, we will not focus on the nuts-and-bolts tools of conducting research (for which you are invited to consult your friendly local librarian!) but rather the potential uses of research in your writing once you’ve located it, especially as a way to generate new material for further development. To be clear, the kind of research you do for creative writing will differ in both method and effect from research you do in other kinds of classes. When writing a critical essay for another class, for instance, you would be wise to work within the boundaries defined by your instructor, as well as the conventions of that academic discipline. While the practice of creative writing is, indeed, a subject taught in the academy, it is primarily an artistic discipline rather than an academic one. You don’t need a degree to write compelling stories, poems, and essays, but you likely do need a degree to become a physicist, a sociologist, an economist, and so on. Either way, I hope you can approach research for your essays with the same urgency and passion you pursue your creative work with.

You can experience great joy in conducting research for your creative work. One of Lance Larsen’s “Aphorisms for a Lonely Planet” puts it this way:

Said Sappho, said Milton, said Simone de Beauvoir, said Harry Houdini. I love doing research. I love to corral quirky minds into one paragraph until they coalesce. It’s like throwing a dinner party for the ages, and all the genius misfits gather around the same chipped punch bowl, and they’re a little pissed.

Through research, you can invite any number of “genius misfits” to your party. You only have to go find them. But where do you start? All research starts with a question—or at the very least a curiosity. This question or curiosity need not be clearly articulated for it yield fruitful results. In fact, it might be quite fuzzy. Regardless, you must be curious enough about something to try to find an answer, even if an absolute answer is impossible. For instance, in the previous chapter about memory, you might remember snippets and fragments of your childhood, but some details remain unclear. Perhaps you could consult older family members to find the answers, but they themselves might not remember all the facts. Even personal questions can require research to answer: What was the name of the camp you went to in sixth grade? Where did your ancestors live? How long has that restaurant you worked at been in your home town? Who built your house?

Beyond research to find the details behind your personal experience, you might also wish to develop more fully the social and cultural context around your memories. In my half-remembered earliest memory above, I described a blue Mickey Mouse book rack. This memory prompted me to do a little digging. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Disney company published a series of books featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi, and other characters. These books represent one thread of the larger history of the Disney Company, beginning with Walt Disney in the 1930s through the Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s and beyond. My little memory might be the spark of a longer essay not about relocation and the pain of moving from one house to another as a child, as I had imagined above, but about the commercialization of children’s entertainment in the twentieth century, my own experiences being only small examples of this global phenomenon. The final form such an essay might take would be determined by the angle you take as a writer and researcher.  

The point here is that research is never a singular activity. As a creative writer, you must remain open to the possibilities that arise when investigating one thing or another. In fact, in other research contexts, you are compelled to remain focused on your research question, tuning out other facts and distracting details that pop up as you proceed. In creative writing, however, I would encourage you to follow any and all leads that strike you as interesting, especially if you are finding connections you hadn’t anticipated. For instance, William Stobb’s brief essay “Doom” exemplifies the ways that research can open many different paths. In this case, he doesn’t shut any of them off, letting each unfurl, flitting from one image or idea to the next, from the opening of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the video game Doom, to the original meaning of the word in Old English. Regardless, Stobb connects these disparate pieces through his attention to the various senses of doom.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Traci Brimhall’s essay “Philematophilia” discusses her desire to eat (or “ecstatically kiss”) her baby, leading her to ask a curious question: “Why did I see my son’s milky cheeks and feel an overwhelming desire to consume him?” To attempt an answer to the question, she couldn’t just narrate her experiences. She had to do some research, which led to more questions. She describes some of these questions in “On Writing ‘Philematophilia’”:

Research gave me guesses, but mostly it gave me a new puzzle—why is there all this science on erotic desire and so little on the kiss? The greeting kiss, the subservient kiss, the pleasure kiss, the goodbye kiss, the French, the peck, the make-out marathon? I found studies that suggested touch helped me bond with my son, but nothing confidently or concretely declared why such an appetite might announce itself in me with new motherhood.

Brimhall’s engaging essay was born not only of a personal feeling and experience, but also genuine curiosity and focused research.

What I hope you discover when conducting creative writing research is the inevitable interconnectedness of everything. I don’t mean that sentence to sound mystical or metaphysical. I mean it literally. It should be reassuring to you that anything in the world is appropriate fodder for your writing. Anything at all: gravel, TV commercials, shoelaces, kissing, toothpaste, fire, snow, garages, mitochondria. It’s up to you as a writer to find and tease apart those connections in ways that will be compelling to your reader. There is great joy in writing (and reading) when you can also learn new facts about the world, and by no means is research a tool only applicable to creative nonfiction. You may be inspired to conduct research for fiction and poetry, too.

Exercise: Curiouser and Curiouser

The seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal believed that “the chief malady of man is restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.” For Pascal, curiosity was akin to vanity, suggesting that it challenged one’s faith in God. I’d like to repurpose that phrase “restless curiosity,” suggesting that in it lies the basis of all good research, as long as you are not “curious to no purpose.” The genuine desire to learn something new can lead to significant insights that inform your essays if you tap into the natural human instinct to look for suitable answers to questions.

For this exercise, recall a specific, memorable time when you consumed or interacted in some way with a popular cultural artifact. This memory should be something that you find yourself inherently interested in, something that you are already somewhat curious about, if not deeply informed on. The above examples include a children’s book, a movie, and a video game, but you might focus on a TV show, a commercial, a comic book, a song, an album, a concert, a sporting event, a podcast, a board game, and so on. Render in concrete images everything that you can remember about your experience and the circumstances surrounding it. Activate your “restless curiosity” by devising a list of creative research questions about this cultural artifact. When and where was it created? Who created it, and why? What were the circumstances that led to its popularity? What can you learn about this artifact that you don’t already know and that would reveal something about the phenomenon itself? Now describe scenic details of the environment where and when you experienced it, including as many of your senses as possible. Explain what the experience of this artifact meant to you then, including perhaps what it means to you now as you’re remembering it. Integrate information you have gathered in your research, allowing yourself to pause and reflect on how this research has changed your understanding. Depending on how much time you have in your class this exercise could be the basis for a full-blown essay, or it might remain only a brief passage to be developed later.      

Exercise: A Personal Prehistory

Our individual circumstances might look different, but we have all had some experience as part of a family, whether you’re related biologically or not. Families represent the first ways we came to understand ourselves in relation to others. While creative nonfiction allows us to tap into our own memories and life stories, another ripe opportunity for research is to dig into the life stories of older family members, especially if those people are still alive and available for an interview. Leila Christine Nadir’s “Cold War” delves not only into her own memories of growing up with an Afghan father and American mother but also the story of their meeting in college in the 1970s, some of which is based on her questioning her mother about the details:

“In college your father sexually harassed me,” she quipped angrily when I pushed her on the subject. “I passed his house on my way to class. He sat outdoors smoking cigarettes and yelled at me from his porch. He said one day I’d marry him, that I was going to be his wife, and I told him to leave me alone.”

Because she interviews her mother, Nadir is able to begin her quest to understand her parents by eliciting a small but telling detail, developing and complicating the image throughout the essay. Rather than being able to interview someone to get small details, Andrew Jones’s poignant, second-person essay “Recipe for Reloading” relies solely on memory and speculation as he paints a loving portrait of his dead father in the context of reloading shotshells in his garage. Jones knows that he can learn more about the recipes for reloading shells the way his father did if he would consult “one of the small, spiral-bound books your father left waiting for you on his workbench.”

For this writing exercise, select an older family member to write about. You may decide to begin in your own personal memories of this person, but you should consider casting back further into the past as Nadir has done. If possible, interview your family member, asking them details about their lives. If that is not possible, consider consulting other resources, artifacts, or relics of this person. How do these images and scenes influence the way you think of this person? How have your memories changed, if at all?

On the Ground

Sometimes, you may need to do research only to find one small fact that fleshes out an essay you’re working on. What kind of trees grow in that region? What was the unemployment rate in 1982? What caused the fall of the Roman Empire? You might find quick answers to these questions in a book or online, and then the research process is over: you have your answer and can move on to the important work of writing itself. At other times, however, you may be inspired to do research on the ground, immersing yourself in a place or contemporary context in order to learn about it more deeply, more immediately. For the purposes of this class, you might be unlikely to do the kind of intense, immersive research that requires a lot of advanced planning, time, and expense, but it’s hard to replace direct experience when writing about a topic. For instance, if I were to pursue my proposed essay above about Disney, I could not go back in time, but there are some things I could do. In addition to purchasing a book I remember having as a child, Pinnochio and his Puppet Show Adventure from the 1970s, I might decide to watch the new Pinnochio movie in the theater itself. Perhaps I could stream the older version of the movie from 1940. What I would be doing here is supplementing book research with experiential research. Such experiential research offers you as a writer the potential to develop a scene rather than rely solely on narration. In this case, I would have occasion to describe the taste of popcorn, the feel of the seats, the sound of the projector, the light flickering on the screen. Who knew research could be so much fun?

A good example of an essay informed by on the ground research is Matthew Oglesby’s “A Quiet Procedure,” mentioned briefly above, in which the author visits the abandoned Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. The essay tells the history of this institution’s role in the American eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, but it is animated by Oglesby’s presence in the place itself:

Dead as it was now, I could see the Colony as it had once been. The women dressed and out of bed, tending the cows and pigs and chickens, plucking vegetables from vinewrapped garden stakes. Their tiny bent figures, pulling up weeds and trimming hedges, hauling buckets of water and heaps of unpinned laundry. The women assigned to kitchen duty shuffle along the narrow avenue towards the cafeteria, looking almost identical in their standard-issue cotton dresses, gray as the morning, gray as bucket water, wraiths of mist curling about them.

The author does not actually see these vividly described women, but because he is on the ground, he is invited to imagine them in a way he might not have otherwise been able to do. After being shown the building where sterilizations took place, he realizes that “in my past attempts to imagine the Colony, I was most interested in the landscape and atmosphere of the place,” but the “larger story here—and the one I was missing for so many years—is the story of power and how those who have it use their privilege to subjugate the weak.” Not only did visiting this place allow Oglesby to describe it in specific, concrete ways, but he might not have arrived at this important insight about power and privilege, connecting it eventually to our current political situation: “Controlling female sexuality and reproduction are still charged topics…. We still criminalize mental illness. We still criminalize poverty. Minorities and immigrants are still considered undesirable populations.” This essay is steeped in research, but were it not the author’s direct experience, it would never have been brought to life and made so immediately relevant.

One subgenre of creative nonfiction that relies on complete immersion in on the ground research is travel writing. There is no need for our purposes to detail the long history of travel writing from the ancients to today. Rather, I only want you to keep in mind that the spirit of all travel writing is a desire to render a specific place from a new point of view, offering an audience a glimpse into a location that is likely unfamiliar to the reader: its culture, its history, its landscape, its food, its language, its people. The key to good travel writing is to do so from your own unique perspective, through your authentic voice. Travel writing is never simply a faithful report on what the writers sees and does—though that is part of it. Rather, it should convey something of the observing consciousness as well.

Travel writing highlights the pleasure of conducting research in creative nonfiction, not writing about what you already know but rather learning something new and writing toward what you want to know. Pico Iyer, one of the foremost travel writers working in English today, says, “We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” Open your heart. Open your eyes. You don’t have to be a seasoned expert as a travel writer. Rather, you must approach a place as a conscientious outsider writing to other interested outsiders.

In her travel essay “Like Losing Three Sardinias,” Barbara Haas recounts a trip to a winery in Balaclava on the Crimean Peninsula, describing the landscape in meticulous, scenic detail. While tasting a wine, however, she experiences the deep, bloody history of the place, which had been on her mind:

That first mouthful embodied exactly the terroir and conveyed a direct incarnation of the vineyard itself. The flavor was very expressive of Balaclava, its spirit and physiology, the way grapes and culture had entwined here for millennia. The flavor bundled within it even that day in 1854 which included indelibly the tragedy of war.

Throughout the trip, Haas is haunted by the past: “I found it hard to focus on the sommelier’s words as she curated the tasting for us, because my heart had not quite caught up just yet.” Rather than focusing solely on the pleasant experience of the wine tasting, she opens her heart, as Iyer suggests we do, to learn more about the world around her, sharing her thoughts and feelings with the reader. Hass’s essay reminds us that good travel writing must always be about more than just the travel itself. What the larger point is can only be determined by honest observation of the sensory experiences around you as well as an unflinching exploration of your interiority in the midst of travel.

Patrick Hicks’s travel essay “In the Ruins of the Third Reich” is based not on one trip to Berlin but many visits over the years since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989: “I’ve returned to Berlin many times since that first visit. What can I say? I love the place.” The benefit of a piece of travel writing describing many different trips is that Hicks was able to cover a lot of ground, including observations and deep historical research on a variety of locations, from the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate, to Hitler’s Führerbunker and the Holocaust Museum. Hicks ends by reminding us that travel writing is more than tourism. Other places and their histories have something to teach us, if we only pay attention. “To visit these places is to hope that fascism might never again march into the halls of power,” he writes. “After all, if it happened here, what’s to prevent it from happening again?”

Exercise: The Road Less Traveled By

This exercise will require you to go to an unfamiliar place in order to do experiential research. You need not travel to another country as Barbara Haas and Patrick Hicks did, but you should still think of it as travel writing anyhow even if you’re not venturing very far away. Choose a location (near or far) where you have never been, a place that is open to the public, where you might be allowed to spend a good amount of time inconspicuously—and where you might conceivably interact with other people. Observe all the sights, sounds and other sensory experiences around you. What do you notice, and why? If you’re able to do so without being noticed, you might find it helpful to take pictures or short videos of things you find interesting. At the same time, jot down the thoughts and feelings that you’re having that are related to this place. Before returning home, spend as much time here as you can, opening your heart and your eyes, as Iyer suggests, to whatever might come your way. From the external observation and the interior reflection in your notes, write a short scene meant to convey to an unfamiliar audience a sense of being in this place and what might be learned there. At the same time, develop a larger idea that you thread through the scene with narration. Depending on the angle you take, you might be required to follow up with book research, too. Here are some ideas of places you might visit and the larger ideas you might reflect on:

• Go to a diner or all-night restaurant where you can nurse a cup of coffee for a few hours. Reflect on your relationship to food. Develop ideas about cultural assumptions or phenomena around food and eating.
• Go to a highway rest area. Reflect on your relationship to travel. Develop ideas about road trips. Alternatively, take a ride on a local public bus or train, and develop ideas about public transportation.
• Go to a church or other place of worship. Reflect on your relationship and experiences with religion. Develop ideas about faith and belief. Alternatively, go to a cemetery. Reflect on death, and develop ideas about mortality.
• Go to a public park. Reflect on your relationship with green spaces. Develop ideas about recreation. Alternatively, go to a local sporting event you’ve never attended and develop ideas about the culture of sport and athletics.

In the News

The past has much to offer the writer of creative nonfiction, but research doesn’t have to be solely historical. Current events can inspire research for your writing as well. In fact, they remind us that we’re always immersed in the flow of history. Our job as writers is to pluck interesting stories from the unending sequence of things happening, day after day after day. Peruse any newspaper, and you will find the seeds of any number of interesting stories that you might cultivate. Remember Pico Iyer’s idea that travel writing allows us to “learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” What can newspapers not accommodate? Because one of the core principles of journalism is objectivity, their profession dictates that they must be more Baconian than Montaignian. Reporters are meant to write only about the facts of noteworthy events without diverging into other territory, personal or otherwise. As we’ve established in the first chapter, such divergence in creative nonfiction is an important feature not a bug.

Megan Sandberg-Zakian’s “No Relation” offers a perfect example of how to write an engaging piece of creative nonfiction based on current events. Her “restless curiosity” about the story of the African American birder Christian Cooper being harassed by a white woman, Amy Cooper, walking her dog in Central Park. Sandberg-Zakian’s initial observation that newspapers invariably noted that there was “no relation” between the two Coopers, leads her to identify with each of them for different reasons. She watched videos online of the event in question, looked up the history of the name Cooper, and conducted genealogical research, coming to understand more deeply our inevitable interconnectedness, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As you consider finding places for original material in your own writing, don’t forget that you can access newspapers for what’s currently going on in the world. Perhaps you will be even more interested in looking through local newspapers, where you might already have a previous connection or experience. The key to accessing the news as a source for creative nonfiction is to cultivate a personal relationship, even if it’s only your identification with one or more of the people involved. Find yourself in the news.