annotated source 03.12

Levy, EJ and Kyoko Mori, Maureen Stanton, Ryan Van Meter, Patrick Madden. Is the Midwest Reshaping Creative Nonfiction? A Tribute to Fourth Genre. AWP Converence. Chicago, 2012.

This was a group of writers who had published Fourth Genre, a journal of creative nonfiction, reading personal essays that dealt in some way with the Midwest. I felt like the label of the Midwest was more of an excuse to get five essayists together to read great essays, because the focus was more on their work than it was on the relationship to the Midwest. The Q&A right after the reading was where the Midwest was discussed in depth, however. This was useful to me because it demonstrated the style of personal essays that are currently being published. While some were more traditionally essayistic, others were mainly narrative; all were enjoyable, traditional or not, but personal essays are more loosely defined today than they might have been when Classical British essayists were writing their essays. I might perhaps be a little too narrow-minded in saying that, though, because I'm sure that many other essays were being published alongside the Classical essays, while they may not have been defined as such based on our current qualifications of the traditional genre. Questions of genre are typically fascinating and frustrating at the same time, because it is so often loosely defined and fuzzy around the edges. I will have to be careful not to be short-sighted when I attempt to define what I feel like IS the classical British essay.