By Daniel W. Lehman and Joe Mackall
It was a wintry afternoon in what was then a rough neighborhood in Washington, DC, and a colleague and I were out scouting pictures and stories for the neighborhood newspaper we’d started in 1972. Our wanderings that day led us out for a news feature on a new city playground, where we watched kids shoot hoops, scramble up and down sliding boards, and pump swings until ropes went slack with their soaring. Just then, two rollerskating kids caught our eye; both careened in circles about the playground, then blasted toward where we stood just outside a chain-link fence. Nearer, nearer, nearer. They leaped as one, hurtling themselves a few feet up the fence just as my colleague snapped a photo.
Later that afternoon, we stood together in the newspaper’s makeshift darkroom and watched a latent image emerge and bloom in the chemical developer bath. Before us, the kids drew life, faces ecstatic with the leap, hands gripping chain, bodies sprawled against the fence. Stop bath. Hang to dry. More than fifty years later, the image still haunts and thrills me: kids utterly free and mostly trapped. I worked the better part of three years to understand that photo and the city stories that lay behind it. No doubt I learned more during those years than my readers ever did, but I tried like hell to get the truths I discovered into narrative form.
Meanwhile, my colleague and I developed hundreds, maybe thousands, of photos in that darkroom. None was as good as the one of the kids on the fence, but it was a kick to see an image emerge from blank paper in the developer bath. And now it strikes me: in all those photos taken during all those years, not one was a selfie. Not one took form instantly from the blink of a phone. Like the reporting and storytelling surrounding those painstakingly developed photos, it all took time, face-to-face contact, exploration, and patience.
Fair warning: I turn 74 this year, so you might want to cut off the old man before long. After all, I’ve read nearly thirty-five thousand would-be River Teeth pieces in the twenty-five years since I’ve been a River Teeth editor. For the past sixteen years, we’ve used online submissions, but before that I had nine years of tearing open envelopes, reading paper essays, and stuffing replies in SASEs. (Recognizing that acronym will probably date you.)
Age notwithstanding, I’m not going to tell you to get off my lawn. In fact, I’m going to invite you onto my lawn. Look around while you’re here, get to know the neighbors, knock on doors, find out what’s happening. Hear their stories. We both know it’s all a lot easier now. Everyone’s phones take instant pictures with an ease and clarity I could only dream of on that city playground. We google 100,000 facts in an instant. Yet I wonder if capturing so many images and so many facts so quickly and so easily has blinded us to the lasting value of any one of them, of seeing something emerge on paper and exploring the truth beyond it.
Of course, I root for every submission that comes across our transom. Will this be the one that makes my jaw drop? The one I can’t wait to see take form in the pages of our journal? There have been so many of those over the twenty-five years, and each has been like a favorite child. The best ones tell stories that make a difference, that matter to us, maybe even change us. So that’s why I offer this challenge. If a piece is too easy, too much like snapping a selfie without considering how it may change someone, keep working. Keep exploring. Keep looking around for the people and stories your readers simply can’t put down. Like our favorite pieces over the years, some will be narrative reporting; others will be memoir. Still others will essay their way across topics, while others might be critical pieces that help us consider more deeply this genre we’ve come to call creative nonfiction.
The best might merge all these elements but most likely won’t emerge instantly or myopically. They’ll develop over time in the bath of memory, observation, and reflection. Jamaican poet and memoirist Safiya Sinclair hit on this truth while discussing her new book, How to Say Babylon with the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I started thinking about writing a memoir,” she said of her book that blends her memories of growing up Rasta in Montego Bay with a deep history of Rastafarianism and its complicated place amid her family and community. “But the wounds were so fresh. I was having recurring nightmares. I needed to let five years pass . . . [and] I had to become a Rastafarian historian from the ground up.” Ultimately, her book turned its gaze outward as well as inward, developed over time, achieved public dimension amid deep and often painful memory.
As with Sinclair’s book, the best nonfiction won’t be easy to classify. But it will make a difference. For my part, Sinclair helped me understand those kids on the fence more clearly. Fifty years melted for me as she made her story theirs—and mine. We hope the essays here wield similar power. It’s the fiftieth issue Joe and I have put together (with immense help from Jill and Mark and Todd in Muncie and so many others over the years). Thank you, all.
My thoughts about my buddy Joe are not easily relayed in a public forum, so I’ll just sound two notes here. Those long drives together to Boston or Iowa City for nonfiction conferences (some all-night or through deep snow) were remarkably bracing as we explored this special form of writing, shared our hopes, our histories, our disappointments, our loves. Pretzels and Cleveland baseball and the open road sustained us. And finally, that joy we share when we find a piece we just have to publish and see it take shape in our journal. Thank you, my friend. —DWL
After not attending the AWP conference for five years thanks to Covid and my neuroses, I showed up in Kansas City in February. I went straight to the River Teeth table, where editors Jill Christman, Mark Neely, and Todd McKinney had assembled a collection of smart, young graduate students to work as interns for the journal. I met everybody, immediately forgetting their names—not owing to their character but to my decrepitude. Within minutes of hanging around our table, I heard an intern talking to a curious young writer, saying to her, “We publish essay, memoir, literary journalism . . .” The word that landed with force was that tiny, lovely, first-person plural pronoun we. That smart, young intern had likely not yet been born when Dan and I founded River Teeth twenty-five years ago. But this intern was invested; she had a kind of ownership in our journal, as we hope countless readers and writers have had for twenty-five years. And while that does make me feel a bit old, that was not my first thought. That inclusive little pronoun acted on me. We, as in, “We the people . . .” and “We hold these truths . . .”
Arguably, for too long the “I” has reigned supreme in our culture and also in the field of creative nonfiction. I’m not suggesting that everybody write in first-person plural of course or any other point of view. Each piece demands its own POV. What I am suggesting is that, while we should absolutely tell our own stories, we should remain cognizant of the way our stories intersect with other stories, other people. We must. Perhaps we ought to spend more time looking outward, searching for what connects us, believing it still exists.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, most of the discussion around our discipline concerned where to draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. What can we do and not do? What can we get away with and still not violate the contract implicit between a creative nonfiction reader and writer? What about composite characters? Where does emotional truth fit in? What about conflated scenes or timelines? We also spent endless hours discussing the ways the memoirs and essays we wrote could affect those we loved and wrote about. “I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I have to write this story.” According to James Baldwin, “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” To my ears, at this moment, Baldwin’s quote seems a bit quaint, even if ever true. Of course we “excavate . . . experience,” if we write of others—or even of ourselves. But excavation of a life also demands responsibility. As my friend and cofounder Dan Lehman has said, and I’m paraphrasing: When a person dies in fiction, a character has died; when a character dies in nonfiction, a human being is no longer on the Earth. This maxim will never be untrue. We can’t afford to forget that.
One of my favorite writers, John Williams, author of Stoner and two other novels, captures the essence of what I believe we’re always attempting to do when we write. And it’s this: “I write of human experience so that I may understand it and thereby force myself into some kind of honesty.” Williams was referring to fiction, but I believe it applies to creative nonfiction writers as well. Williams’s sentiment is not merely aspirational. We ought to linger on the words “human experience,” “understand,” and “some kind of honesty.” Isn’t this essentially what we’re always groping for anyway?
For twenty-five years, I’ve been a hardliner when it comes to “making shit up” in creative nonfiction. That’s fiction. However, and of course, as long as your reader knows what’s going on because you’ve told them, you can include fiction with impunity. What I’ve always raged against is writers “making stuff up” because they believe it’s better for the piece. Years ago, a student was writing a memoir, and in one harrowing scene, her father’s driving drunk and she’s flying out of his truck as they round a curve. She thought she was twelve when this happened, but she was actually sixteen. She insisted (her right) that the scene and the memoir worked better if she were twelve. So she kept it that way. I get it. I believe, however, that changing your age in a memoir because you like it better becomes fiction, and I never want to discover, after reading a piece of nonfiction, that I have not read a piece of nonfiction. Worse, she missed a tremendous opportunity to mine the imaginative elasticity of creative nonfiction. Go ahead and write the scene, showing that twelve-year-old girl hurtling out the passenger seat of a battered Ford truck going fifty miles an hour down a country road. After you write the scene as if you were twelve, reveal to your reader you were actually sixteen, and then “excavate.”
Why were you so sure you were twelve and not sixteen? Why is the age of twelve so important to you? What does that reveal? What might you now “understand” about “human experience” that will force you into achieving “some kind of honesty.” This is the marrow of human experience. This is a fucking goldmine to creative nonfiction writers. The student merely recounted the lie she’d told herself, and now it’s on the page, with readers none the wiser.
I don’t want to come off as a creative nonfiction cop. I’m a reader first and foremost. Like thousands of people, I loved Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prizewinning memoir Angela’s Ashes. I know that McCourt and his brother had been performing parts of their story for years before the book was published, and a great deal of their fictional material ended up in McCourt’s memoir. If the truth resides in the performance, I would argue that the book is nonfiction, even if exaggerated. Memories become stories after all, in their endless quest to be retained and retold. All I remember about the book is how much I loved reading it, how hard I laughed, how deeply I was moved. I regard McCourt’s memoir as an outlier, though—the exception that proves the rule. I always read nonfiction convinced the writer felt compelled to tell a nonfiction story and conscious of the fact that the writer was certain the story would only work if written as nonfiction. Why wouldn’t I?
Even talking about “truth” is fraught with trouble. You know how it goes. It’s all relative. I believe we’ve lost the luxury these days of engaging in the relativity of truth. My philosopher friends will laugh in my face. But we live in a time and in a country where nearly half the population has chosen to embrace its own self-satisfying “truth.” A lie considered the truth is still a lie. I wonder how this disturbing and fanciful reality will affect creative nonfiction writers. The good news is that most folks believing a lie to be the truth are likely not reading a lot of creative nonfiction. In a poem by the late C.D. Wright, the speaker asks this question: “And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken?” Some might say the word is broken, or that it always has been broken for them and their people. I’m sure truth resides in these positions. But the stakes have been raised for creative nonfiction writers. No matter what happens in November, even if a corrosive lie masquerades as the truth and manifests itself in some grotesque and dangerous way, we, and I mean we, will need a place to turn for “some kind of honesty.” If readers come to creative nonfiction for something true, that’s what they ought to get.
In many of my editor’s notes, I’ve written about the amazing people we’ve met and published, and the numerous good friends we’ve made because of River Teeth. I’ve tended also to write about people we’ve lost, so I won’t do it here, although I do want to note the recent passing of our friend Jon Franklin, a legacy editorial board member of River Teeth and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Thanks to the young folks at Ball State, River Teeth is all over social media, and I’ve been assured the journal is on several “platforms.” When we started the journal, Dan and I promised each other—not that we had to— that we’d read every single submission hoping like hell to accept it. We were readers and writers long before we founded River Teeth. We’ve never picked up a book and hoped for it to fail, so why would we read our yearly two thousand submissions that way? We’re always pulling for the writer, giving her the benefit of the doubt. We’ve rooted for every single essay, memoir, or work of literary journalism we’ve ever received. There’s nothing better than accepting a submission I’d have to call Dan about in the middle of the night. Rejecting somebody’s work hurts, although it hurts the writer far more. I know. Because Dan and I spent years in print journalism, we’ve always treated the journal more like a magazine than an academic publication. We’ve published our good friends. We’ve rejected our good friends. We’ve published ourselves and rejected ourselves. We’ve published people we don’t particularly like because the words on the page are all that mattered, all that ever matters. I forget the reviewer’s name, but one writer who critiqued book prizes believed our book prize guidelines were the most welcoming and generous he’d ever read. That kind of thing has always been important to us and will certainly continue being important, thanks to the large hearts at Ball State. (Dan and I will still read for the book prize.)
We’ve also managed our journal for over twenty years, consumed with the work we’d published, rarely paying attention to the journal’s budget. I’m oblivious to money half the time anyway. We really only cared about the writing and the story. About a decade ago, we published a sixty-five page piece that I never wanted to end. River Teeth has been a hundred pages long; some issues have been nearly three hundred pages. We didn’t care. For more than twenty years, every single piece we published was chosen by the two of us. No committee of twelve warm bodies got to weigh in on our decisions. Either I said yes to a piece or Dan did; usually we both did, eager to love every piece we read. We trusted our response to submissions. I read to save my life. Dan’s much more mentally sound, but he’s as much a lover of literature as I am, as we are. We trusted each other utterly. Perhaps a word about our partnership is necessary here. Dan is as steady as a stream. I am not. Working with me closely for a quarter of a century must be measured in something akin to dog years. If I’ve acted as the editor of River Teeth for twenty-five years, Dan has been editor for seventy-five years. (My lovely wife, Dandi, has been married for 105 years.)
We’re excited as hell about what our trusted and talented friends at Ball State have been doing with River Teeth for the last five years, and we applaud and support their ambitious goals for the future. Thank you, Jill, Mark, Todd, your fantastic staff, and wondrous interns.
I know this much is true: You can’t go on long road trips with just anybody. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for reading. —JM
