ENG 470: Creative Nonfiction

A nice tribute to Joseph Mitchell from a 1992 NYT book review. “Mr. Mitchell’s art is to elicit history from an enormous range of people, and then to cause their words to fall into a shape that gives the reader none of the agony the unreconstructed reveries of these long-winded men might have done…. Though Mr. Mitchell loves the Bowery preachers and the tavern owners and the gypsies of old New York, his favorite figures are the men who lived and worked on New York’s waterfront. In presenting the people he wrote about — often homeless, always eccentric — Mr. Mitchell seems to me to be posing a tacit question about the character and value of his own life, of life itself.” 

Good discussion today. 

For those interested in learning more about Padgett Powell, here’s a 2006 interview with him in the Believer, which discusses some of the blue-collar work he did before becoming a writer (”You always miss being around hard people without imaginary issues”) and his relationship to “Southerness” in his writing (”Actually, the idea of having a position at all with respect to characters or Southernness…strikes me as the wrong thing to do”).

Here’s the link to the 9/29  NYT story on Eatonville, FL, made famous by Zora Neale Hurston’s stories. “‘We’re very cautious about how our story is told,’ said Hortense Jones, 59, a lifelong resident and member of the town’s oldest church. ‘It needs to be right.’”

Class, we’ll meet in BEC 238 starting Monday. Thanks for your cooperation.

DG

Good meeting everyone today. I was impressed with your engagement and thoughtful reading. Keep up the good work.

Some advice: To download, view, and print files, you’ll need a computer with a high-speed internet connection and an up-to-date copy of Adobe Reader or other free PDF viewer. For some weeks, I’ve combined the readings into one file for easier downloading. Please let me know if any links are broken.

DG