By Jeffry Catalano
Dr. Theresa Kulbaga teaches creative writing, gender studies, and courses in women’s autobiography and memoir at Miami University. She is the author of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education (with Leland Spencer), as well as numerous articles about women’s nonfiction literature and feminist pedagogy. She is a Teaching Artist with WordPlay Cincy, where she runs a creative writing and spoken word program for teens called Word Up. She is on the Miami faculty union negotiating team, and she is faculty co-director of the Ohio Writing Project. She hikes every day with her dog and writes using at least three different colors of ink at a time.
It’s been said that we all have a book in us. What if that book was the story of your own life? What do you think it would take to write your life story? Dr. Kulbaga, who teaches creative nonfiction, made a great point about the genre at the start of our extensive conversation about it. Her insight related to the immense level of creativity that goes into the genre. She said, “If you like, imagine writing a short scene from your childhood (at least ten years ago or more), including details and dialogue, and you’ll see what I mean.” Initially, I felt confident that I could pull off such an exercise. I felt confident in the same way some people try to disparage modern art. “A kid could do that” is often what such critics say, isn’t it?
Writing a memory, how hard could it be?
My inflated sense of confidence dwindled the more I thought it over. I wondered if my memory was lucid enough to perfectly recreate a scene from my life set ten years ago or more. Sure, I could remember some of the crucial details of a memory from that long ago, but I didn’t know how I could bring it to life on the page. I didn’t know how I could turn what was in my head into a detailed and vivid story, one that would hold a reader’s attention. Writing one little scene from my life suddenly seemed like a monumental, near impossible task. If I started sweating over writing one scene from my life, I wondered how many creative nonfiction authors were able to write entire books about their lives.
Even though I had studied creative nonfiction in Dr. Kulbaga’s course, EGS 323: Creative Nonfiction Writing, three years ago, I had made one of the many incorrect assumptions people make about the genre when thinking I could easily write a memory from my life. Writing your life story is not nearly as easy as you think it is.
I’ve been fascinated by the genre ever since I took EGS 323. Through the class, I was introduced to a number of incredible authors like Mary Karr, and I’ve routinely sought out titles in creative nonfiction over the past three years. I think on some instinctive level, before Dr. Kulbaga proposed her creative nonfiction writing exercise to me early in our conversation, I remembered just how much creativity the genre requires.
I found this especially true in the case of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, which was the first book we read for class, and, as I later realized, was my first exposure to a genre I would develop a life-long fascination with. I had read memoirs before, but never one like Karr’s, which read more like a great work of fiction than a rote autobiography.
The Liars’ Club remains one of the most immersive memoirs I’ve ever read. When I touched on Karr’s book with Dr. Kulbaga, she reminded me of everything I loved about it, and why it felt so different to me than the standard memoirs I’d read before, which mostly only recounted the facts. She spoke about Karr’s incredible sense of humor, her unsparing portrait of her childhood trauma, and her unforgettable narrative voice. Dr. Kulbaga said, “You can hear East Texas in every word.” I couldn’t agree more, and talking about the book made me want to read it again. The Liars’ Club was an absorbing read, not a cursory presentation of the facts, as so many memoirs are.
Maybe this is why one of the blurbs for Karr’s book, written by none other than Stephen King, is as follows: “This is the real deal; funny, painful, and hotter than Texas in September. This is what the memoir is supposed to be.” That’s some praise.
One great book can engender a love for an entire genre. I can’t think of a better book to kick off a course on creative nonfiction than The Liars’ Club. It’s one of the genre’s finest (as Stephen King attested to) and shows readers and writers alike the exciting possibilities of memoir. After my peers and I read Karr’s book in EGS 323, we were exposed to an incredible variety of creative nonfiction titles that included a poetry collection, a graphic novel, and an essay collection mixed with nature writing.
Dr. Kulbaga’s class not only showed me and my peers the rigorous level of creativity that is required for creative nonfiction, but how it can take many different forms and subgenres. After EGS 323, my perception of the memoir was never really the same.
The poetry collection we read for class was Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. Even for a neophyte poetry reader like myself, I found Woodson’s book very accessible and enjoyable. I would consider it essential reading for anyone interested in reading a different kind of coming-of-age memoir. David Smalls’ Stitches was the graphic novel we read in class, and it was a haunting read and unlike any other comic I’d read before. I grew up reading comics as a kid, so I’ve read my fair share through the years. However, I’d never read a graphic novel memoir before.
In the same semester I took EGS 323, Spring of 2021, I read Stitches and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic for Dr. Cotugno’s class, Popular Fiction. In a single semester, I was introduced to a unique take on the graphic novel, and it helped reinvigorate my long-held love for comics. I couldn’t recommend Stitches or Fun Home enough to any self-respecting comic book fan.
Perhaps the most esoteric book on Creative Nonfiction Writing’s syllabus was Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s 2020 essay collection of memoir and nature writing, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. The book was still a fairly new release back in 2021, and now, from what I’ve recently seen online, is a certified New York Times Bestseller. A writer can hardly ask for better recognition than that.
Returning to the book after three years for this article, I was charmed by Nezhukumatathil’s delightful narrative voice all over again. Her nonfiction, largely autobiographical essays are wide-ranging in topic, and I went back over a few of the essays I remember enjoying the most like, “Calendars Poetica,” in which Nezhukumatathil details what it was like to write in the first year of motherhood. Some of her thoughts on the challenges of the writing process really spoke to me, as I think they’d resonate with anyone who writes on a regular basis for school or work or both.
I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (to shamelessly borrow a cliché), but you can’t help it with World of Wonders. I think the photo I took of the book’s cover, included at the bottom of this article, tells you all you need to know. World of Wonders has one of the most wonderful and whimsical covers of any book released in the past few years. It’s eye-popping and immediately grabs your attention. To say it would be the stand-out among a display of books in a bookstore would be an understatement.
The reason Dr. Kulbaga selects such a wide range of books for EGS 323 is two-fold. She wants to show how diverse the creative nonfiction genre truly is, and she wants to teach the kind of titles she’s enthusiastic about, in the hopes that her enthusiasm will rub off on her students. Dr. Kulbaga said, “I try to choose books that I am genuinely excited to teach, and I try to share that excitement, as well as my curiosity and fascination with the texts, with students. Excitement tends to be contagious in the classroom (at least I hope so!), and I am always thrilled to introduce students to genres they may not have read or considered writing.”
As a former student, I can attest to how contagious Dr. Kulbaga’s excitement for the creative nonfiction genre is. I wouldn’t still be actively seeking out titles in creative nonfiction if that wasn’t the case. Not so long ago, I read Hua Hsu’s riveting 2022 book, Stay True, in my spare time because this class still influences many of my reading choices.
According to Dr. Kulbaga, the study of creative nonfiction at the college level is still a relatively new development. I was surprised to learn that the genre was not considered real literature by many critics and scholars up until the 1980s and 90s. This is hard to believe, as the previously mentioned Stay True won one the highest literary honors, the Pulitzer Prize. The public perception of the creative nonfiction genre changed a few decades ago when writers began to experiment with the form of the memoir and the life writing genre became a phenomenon.
Recounting the boom life writing received while Dr. Kulbaga was a student, she said, “When I went to graduate school, the field of life writing was just gaining traction, and it felt very cutting-edge, and radically democratic, to examine the life narratives of regular people who were not celebrities or ‘important’ people in society. They were just everyday people from a variety of backgrounds with interesting stories to tell from their lives.” In my experience, the best memoirs I’ve read have been written by so-called everyday people like Mary Karr, whereas the celebrity ones I’ve read usually lack imagination.
Creative nonfiction is a very popular genre in today’s market. Dr. Kulbaga reminded me of how, whenever I or anyone else goes to the bookstore, they find large displays of nonfiction titles, many of which are memoirs. On a recent visit to the bookstore, I noticed Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous on prominent display. The novel, as many critics have remarked, is one of the best memoirs released in recent years. On creative nonfiction’s appeal to the general public, Dr. Kulbaga observed, “Readers are hungry for true stories of all kinds, and (like me) they are captivated and moved by authors’ imaginative and cutting-edge experiments with the genre.” She used recent releases like Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer: A Memoir as examples of exciting experiments in memoir.
The World of Wonders is the kind of book that needs to be experienced firsthand, as is In the Dream House, from the way Dr. Kulbaga talked about it. Machado’s book plays with genre and meshes styles as disparate as Gothic to Choose Your Own Adventure. Talking about such a fascinating book with Dr. Kulbaga shot it up to the top of my reading list. Genderqueer, to me, sounds like another exciting addition to the world of graphic novel memoirs.
Dr. Kulbaga believes creative nonfiction is the most exciting genre in literature to study today, and I think she makes a great case for it. The books covered in EGS 323 show how expansive the genre is and also disprove any misconceptions students might have about it. On some of the common misconceptions on creative nonfiction, Dr. Kulbaga said, “I think it’s a genre that’s misunderstood as boring to read or easy to write. It’s fun to watch students learn that the opposite is true!” Nearly every creative nonfiction book I’ve read in the years since I took EGS 323 has been well worth my time and mostly fun to read. And, if you think writing creative nonfiction is easy, just try and attempt the exercise discussed in the first paragraph of this article. It’s hardly as easy as one thinks it is.
Something I’ve always thought about when it comes to teaching is how difficult it must be for professors to choose what books to include on their syllabus. I asked Dr. Kulbaga about how she came up with such an eclectic syllabus for her class, and she told me how she reads a wide variety of genres at all times. She’s currently reading a novel, a poetry collection, a few literary magazines, and, as you might guess, a book with some autobiographical elements, Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. Dr. Kulbaga described it as “funny,” “moving,” and “riveting.”
Whenever I get the urge to read another creative nonfiction title, I remember the lessons of EGS 323. With the genre being as popular as it is now, I don’t think I’ll ever run out of books to read in the future.
