UnderOneRoof

The Textbook

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, Third Edition. McGraw Hill, 2019. 304 pages.

View the book at McGraw Hill

Why This Book

Tell It Slant takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” It is one of the most widely used guides to creative nonfiction, and it fits this course unusually well:

• It is organized by the material of a life. Part I, “Unearthing Your Material,” moves through memory, family, place, history, identity, the arts, and research — nearly the exact path of our sessions.
• It teaches the forms we practice. Part II covers the personal essay, the lyric and segmented essay, the braided essay, and the hermit crab essay — a term Brenda Miller herself coined (see Brevity’s “Consider the Platypus”).
• It takes ethics seriously. Its chapter on “The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction” addresses truth, memory, and writing about real people — essential for a memoir of neighbors.
• It is written for adult writers. The prose is clear and warm, each chapter closes with writing prompts, and the book ends with an anthology of model essays and chapters on revision, writing communities, and publishing.

Chapters and Sessions

• Chapter 1, The Body of Memory — Session 3
• Chapter 2, Writing the Family — Session 3
• Chapter 3, “Taking Place”: Writing the Physical World — Session 1
• Chapter 4, Gathering the Threads of History — Session 6
• Chapter 5, The Body of Identity — Session 2
• Chapter 6, Writing the Arts — Session 8
• Chapter 7, Glorious Facts: Research and the Research Essay — Session 7
• Chapter 8, The Tradition of the Personal Essay — Session 2
• Chapter 9, Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction — Session 4, 9
• Chapter 10, Mixed-Media, Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Digital Works — Session 8, 9
• Chapter 11, The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction — Session 5
• Chapter 13, The Writing Process and Revision — Session 10
• Chapter 14, The Power of Writing Communities — Session 10
• Chapter 15, Publishing Your Creative Nonfiction — Session 10

A Recommended Second Book (Optional)

For those who want to go further with memoir: Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Gornick’s distinction between the situation (what happened) and the story (what the writer came to understand) is the best short account of memoir’s double voice, which we study in Session 3.