Do you have a personal anecdote you could share about a writing project that required research?

Fenton Johnson:

When I started my last book―Keeping Faith:  A Skeptic's Journey Among Christian and Buddhist Monks―after many years of research and reading and piles of notes from books and interviews―I had no idea, none, what was going to emerge from the pile. So I lit candles before the goddesses Avalokitishvara (learning and wisdom) and the Virgin Mary (you know her) and prayed:  Let something come out of this mess. Please. In the course of the research several people revealed to me that they'd been sexually abused by monks at the Trappist monastery where I had been doing my research and which I'd been familiar with since my childhood. That was a curve ball that was completely unexpected and that brought terror into my heart, since I couldn't ignore their stories even as they explicitly did not want them used. This proved a great challenge, as great as I've faced:  How to honor my commitment to portray the monastery fully and three-dimensionally, and how to honor their stories without giving away their identities.

Ander Monson:

Research always changes the direction of your writing. That's why it's valuable. I rarely go into my research with a sense of what I expect to find. In writing an essay that started with an investigation of Mountain Dew-flavored Doritos, for instance, I ended up visiting a tortilla chip factory in Michigan, finding my way into stacks of research on the subfield of food science called sensory evaluation, which tries to quantify the ways in which we perceive the taste, mouthfeel, texture, smell, and so on of every food we eat. The more I read about this, the more interested I got in the idea of flavor profile and what it means to like something, which is an amalgamation of childhood memories, unspoken desires, and behavioral training, and the more I started to realize that what I was writing about was not just why we like artificial flavors, but why we prefer the flavors of Doritos to plain corn tortilla chips, which is to say why we prefer exaggerated or fake accounts of our exciting lives to the plain regularity of our real lives, which is why we are drawn to all these memoirs, even if they are not properly true.

Fenton Johnson and Ander Monson on Writing Nonfiction

How has nonfiction changed in the last twenty years? Do you think contemporary nonfiction lit writers feel the responsiblity to be good historians any longer?

Ander Monson:

The most obvious two changes in nonfiction over the last couple decades are 1) the invention of the term (if not the sort of writing that it describes, which I suspect has always been there) "lyric essay," referring to an essay that has the stuff of essay (thought, logic, a meandering nature, a desire to sift through, explore, and understand the world) but applies the tools of poetry (associative logic, song, sound, linguistic beauty) to the sorts of things that essays tend to tackle; and 2) the ongoing James Frey-sparked conversation about what sorts of liberties are acceptable for nonfiction writers to take with their material, which has coincided with the development of the American term "creative nonfiction."

The idea of the lyric essay is close to my heart, and I am excited about what it offers writers. It offers us a different sort of engagement with the world, where we can play with language and form and beauty as a way to process, understand, and essay the world.

The rules of nonfiction haven't changed, I don't think; the job of the nonfiction writer is still to start with the world and delete the vast majority of it so that what's left on the page connects and makes a different kind of meaning. But I do think that the way readers read nonfiction has changed somewhat, that readers are increasingly wanting their nonfiction to do for them what fiction has done for them: they want to be entertained by narrative. And they want to know their entertainment is true.

Fenton Johnson:

All writers of any count have a responsibility to be good historians―which is not to eliminate creativity from history, not at all.  Much of our most influential histories are among the most creative (see for starters: The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament).  But one works from the real, tangible, sensed, lived, imagined world and has a profound responsibility to bring it to life on the page.  What image is more vivid and more true than the surreal opening sentence of Kafka's The Metamorphosis?  "Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a giant insect."  

The lazy writer betrays history, i.e., human experience, by lying about it. The creative writer sees in history's gaps and challenges the opportunity to...be creative. Eduardo Galleano's fantastic histories of South America grab us exactly because they are true not only to specific events but also to the dreams and longings and emotions that underlay them―love, greed, hate, revenge, exaltation, joy―these are the stuff of his nonfiction engine.  No historian could be more conscientious―or truer to life.

The big change in nonfiction has been how it's published.  Twenty years ago conscientious, smart editors had time to shepherd projects closely.  Now corporate conglomerates have pared editorial staffs to the point where they no longer have that time, and all of us are poorer for the loss, readers and writers.