Lee Gutkind

Collects the stories of nurses at all stages of their careers as they discuss their experiences and their profession.

True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

I Wasn't Strong Like this when I Started Out

Introduces the genre of creative nonfiction and suggests techniques for writing stylized true stories, offering writing exercises and advice on scheduling, selecting subjects, framing, and editing.

The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between

You Can't Make this Stuff Up

Citing recent challenges to the classical process of writing autobiographically, an analysis of the discipline of writing creative nonfiction evaluates its boundaries in order to clarify how to write both truthfully and artfully. 10,000 first printing.

Everything You Need to Know about Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction

Keep it Real

A collection of twenty-five narrative essays originally published in the journal, Creative Nonfiction, includes works by Lauren Slater, John Edgar Wideman, and John McPhee, with commentary by the authors following their pieces.

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

Every year, one in four American adults suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder. In these true stories, writers and their loved ones struggle as their worlds are upended. What do you do when your father kills himself, or your mother is committed to a psych ward, or your daughter starts hearing voices telling her to harm herself--or when you yourself hear such voices? Addressing bipolar disorder, OCD, trichillomania, self-harm, PTSD, and other diagnoses, these stories vividly depict the difficulties and sorrows--and sometimes, too, the unexpected and surprising rewards--of living with mental illness.

True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

Show Me All Your Scars

Gathers a collection of creative nonfiction writings that range from immersion journalism to personal essays to explore the genre's potential and influence.

The Best Creative Nonfiction

A complete guide to the art and craft of creative nonfiction--from one of its pioneer practitioners The challenge of creative nonfiction is to write the truth in a style that is as accurate and informative as reportage, yet as personal, provocative, and dramatic as fiction. In this one-of-a-kind guide, award-winning author, essayist, teacher, and editor Lee Gutkind gives you concise, pointed advice on every aspect of writing and selling your work, including: * Guidelines for choosing provocative--and salable--topics * Smart research techniques--including advice on conducting penetrating interviews and using electronic research tools * Tips for focusing and structuring a piece for maximum effectiveness * Advice on working successfully with editors and literary agents

Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality

The Art of Creative Nonfiction

true stories of becoming a teacher

What I didn't know

Dorothy Allison

Beth Ann Fennelly

Features twenty-three true stories of women in the South defying tradition and flirting with sin, including contributions from an array of individuals, including divorcees, professors, lifeguards-in-training, debutantes, and lapsed Baptists.

True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly

Southern Sin

Hattie Fletcher

Creative nonfiction is the literary equivalent of jazz: it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, voices, and techniques—some newly invented, and others as old as writing itself. This collection of 20 gripping, beautifully-written nonfiction narratives is as diverse as the genre Creative Nonfiction magazine has helped popularize. Contributions by Phillip Lopate, Brenda Miller, Carolyn Forche, Toi Derricotte, Lauren Slater and others draw inspiration from everything from healthcare to history, and from monarch butterflies to motherhood. Their stories shed light on how we live.

From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine

True Stories, Well Told

Alice Bradley

In these 23 original stories, mothers and fathers from all walks of life—straight, gay, single, surrogate, biological, adoptive—explore the challenges and rewards of parenthood. Here, among other adventures, parents fall hopelessly in love with newborns, secretly fear having made huge mistakes, race to finish birthing at home before the paramedics arrive, struggle with the bureaucracy of international adoption, despair of ever getting a one-year-old to nap, are nearly broken by colic, encounter other judgmental parents in birthing class, learn how to parent children with special needs, and more. Together, these thoughtful, searing, often hilarious essays map the grand (and sometimes terrifying) journey that begins with each new life.

True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love

Oh, Baby

Joanna Clapps Herman

Thoughtful, poignant, and hilarious personal essays collected by the editors of Creative Nonfiction explore the meanings of Italian-American identity. In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of family—Louise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named “the drunk” because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri’s account of a summer vacation séance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy. Lee Gutkind, founding editor of Creative Nonfiction, the nation’s premier nonfiction prose literary journal, and Joanna Clapps Herman have brought together artful essays by novelists, scholars, critics, and memoirists from across the country. The pieces are as varied as their authors, but all explore the unique intersections of language, tradition, cuisine, and culture that characterize the diverse experience of Americans of Italian heritage.

New Essays by Italian-American Writers

Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the “godfather” of the genre “When [Gutkind] stops to look back on his own evolving perspective . . . [and] reflects upon his writing career, the choices he made . . . he puts himself, and us, right back in the moment—and the results are vivid, ambiguous, emotionally resonant, fascinating.”—Lucas Mann, Washington Post In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction—true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies—offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders—doctors, lawyers, construction workers—who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences. Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gutkind’s book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.

How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne'er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction

The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting

An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the "godfather" of the genre "When [Gutkind] stops to look back on his own evolving perspective . . . [and] reflects upon his writing career, the choices he made . . . he puts himself, and us, right back in the moment--and the results are vivid, ambiguous, emotionally resonant, fascinating."--Lucas Mann, Washington Post In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction--true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies--offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders--doctors, lawyers, construction workers--who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences. Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gutkind's book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.

How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne'er-Do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction

DIVDIV“A welcome and poignant account of the intense human and political dynamics of a major children’s hospital that will have a substantial impact on the way you view children and their care.” —The New England Journal of Medicine/divDIV Lee Gutkind is a master at stepping into the worlds of medicine and revealing the unique desires, characteristics, and stories of the people therein. For One Children’s Place, he spent two years at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, observing not just the patients but also their nurses, surgeons, therapists, administrators, and families. What he found was an institution that excelled at responding to the needs of the children who stayed there, from the professionals who dealt with the unique problems of hospital furniture and design, to the nurses and social workers who became unwaveringly close allies to their young charges, to the doctors who undertook risky new procedures to save lives./divDIV Brimming with hope and animated by fascinating anecdotes, One Children’s Place is a powerful portrait of heroism and heartbreak, by one of America’s foremost nonfiction storytellers./divDIV/div/div

Inside a Children's Hospital

One Children's Place

ÒIn Mexico,Ó writes Ilan Stavans in the introduction to this provocative new collection on Mexican culture and politics, Ò [the essay] is embraced as passionately as a sport.Ó While the American essay may be personal and confessional or erudite and academic, it is presumed to be truthful. By contrast, the Mexican essay pushes the boundaries between fact and fiction as writers seek to make their opinions heardÑin literary journals, in newspapers, and even on cereal boxes. ÒWhat is real and what isnÕt in a Mexican essay, only God knows,Ó concludes Stavans. In Hurricanes and Carnivals, Lee Gutkind, a pioneer in the teaching of creative nonfiction, brings together fifteen essays by Mexican, Mexican American, and Latin American writers that push the boundaries of style and form, showing that navigating ÒtruthÓ is anything but clear-cut. Although creative nonfiction is widely thought to be an American art form, this collection proves otherwise. By blending fact and fiction, story and fantasy, history and mythology, these writers and others push the bounds of the essay to present a vision of Mexico rarely seen from this side of the border. Addressing topics that include immigration, politics, ecology, violence, family, and sexuality, they take literary license on a whirlwind adventure. C. M. Mayo shows us Mexico City as seen through the eyes of her pug, Picadou; Juan Villoro examines modern Mexico through the lens of demography; Homero Aridjis uses the plight of nesting sea turtles to document a slowly changing Mexican attitude toward natural resources; and Sam Quinones documents the decline of beauty-queen addiction in Mazatl‡n and tells us about the flower festivals where, according to lore, only two things matter: hurricanes and carnivals. For readers interested in a literary view of contemporary Mexico, as well as students of the creative nonfiction genre, this volume is essential

Essays by Chicanos, Pochos, Pachucos, Mexicanos, and Expatriates

Hurricanes and Carnivals

Although organ transplantation is the preeminent medical miracle of the last quarter of a century, Many Sleepless Nights is the first book to go beyond the headlines and describe the patients who have embraced this last chance to hold on to life, the intricate medical procedures that can save them, the surgeons and nurses who work in this emotionally charged world, and the ethics which complicate this miracle high-tech therapy. Lee Gutkind was granted unconditional access to the world's largest transplant center - the University of Pittsburgh's Presbyterian-University and Children's hospitals, where there is an organ transplant every eight hours, 365 days per year. For four years he immersed himself in the frantic night-and-day world of transplantation, living side by side with transplant candidates and recipients, jetting though the night with organ procurement teams, monitoring patients with surgeons and nurses, observing in the operating room, participating in the ethical and psychosocial evaluations of prospective patients which help to determine who will receive scarce organs. During his four years at Presbyterian and Children's Hospitals, Gutkind established close relationships with many patients, and his portrayal of them, living and sometimes dying under unbelievable stress, is a moving and dramatic statement about the capacity of human beings to endure. Many Sleepless Nights also outlines the history of organ transplantation and tells the story of the large and complex medical teams behind the operation. It captures the tension of the search for viable organs; the pressure decisions about which patients, among many, will receive them; and the surgery itself.Its vivid portrayal of the transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl - a man obsessed with saving lives - shows how a major innovator in American medicine functions during days and nights of extreme pressure.

Many Sleepless Nights

Kate Luce Angell

Collects essays on the human experience of the natural world by contemporary contributors, from Joyce Carol Oates's "Against Nature," in which she considers resistance to nature writing; to Diane Ackerman's swim with whales in "The Moon by Whale Light." Original.

Great Writers on the Great Outdoors

On Nature

Pagan Kennedy

The director of the Human Genone project discusses the new technology behind personalized, genetic medicine and uses the perspective of doctors and patients through case studies to discuss what this means for the future of health care. Original.

Lee Gutkind

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