It’s a Monday morning in early September and before me stand the desk, the computer and my calendar.  After a long, busy summer, it is time re-enter life as a creative nonfiction writer, speaker and teacher.  In truth, a part of me is still on the beach with my beloved kids where we savored the waves around our legs and the steady pulse of the wind in our faces.             Now it’s time to get to work.  With a cup of tea on the desk, I decide to click on Facebook.  I tell myself this is the gentle, calm way to re-enter but then I find a note from a peer.  She warns I’m about to be sued by a stalker.                 No wonder I didn’t want to come back to my life.
            If you don’t know, creative nonfiction, or CNF, is a genre of artistic expression where the writer explores emotional resonance via literary technique.            Memoir, a subcategory of CNF, is the pairing of memory to the literary devices we find in fiction to include characterization, setting, scene, plot, arc and concrete detail.             William Zinsser, who edited Inventing the Truth:  The Art & Craft of Memoir, defines memoir (a sub-category of CNF) in this way: “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid.”             I like to teach that memoir is memory mixed with classic art and the result can be a healing transformation of the self and the reader.             What I don’t like to teach, or talk about anywhere else, is the blowback which includes being harrassed.             My pal on Facebook told me how my stalker had called her on the phone for weeks.  No message.  Finally, she picked up the phone out of pure annoyance.              “Let's hope he stays away from you,” my colleague concluded.             He won’t.             I have been threatened with litigation by this guy, on and off for twelve years now.  This guy has been dogging me since 2000.  He calls my publishers, he calls my employers, he calls my friends, he even stops people on the street.  He writes to those who comment on Amazon, he writes to the media and he has even had called me.              The backstory is that he was a guy I lived with for about three years when we were kids.  I was eight.  He was about eleven.  He wasn’t even a character, except as a peripheral presence.  In fact, I morphed him and his older sister into one composite character.  The best artistic choice was to keep the camera pointed at his mother and his youngest sister, both who had dealt the most brutal blows of my past.  Their actions, in my memory, were more than enough to set the emotional tone.  While yes, I had been abused by all of them, I chose not to make a big deal about every injustice.  What was the point of a laundry list?  What I wrote conveyed the point of misery and the story carried on.  
            CNF and memoir evolve even as I write this.  For a long time, memoir was lumped into biography, even though memoir is not biography in the most traditional sense.  Nor is it fiction.  So what the heck is CNF and what is memoir?  To understand the genre, we must understand story, the form of communication that humans used to comfort one another around the fire while the unknown lurked in the darkness beyond the edge of the light.  Story evolved to help explain the complexity of human life by focusing on a specific series of events.  As it evolved, we learned that good storytelling required at least some exclusion.              As Voltaire wrote, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.”              Very early in the genre’s establishment, perhaps too early, came the work of literary critic Barbara Lounsberry who wrote The Art of Fact.  Published in 1990, Lounsberry laid out four characteristics of CNF to include subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind, exhaustive research, use of the scene and fine writing.  Lounsberry writes, “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.”            I say “too early,” because after twenty years of CNF production, most writers in the genre will admit they struggle with the criterion of verifiable fact.               Melanie McGrath, author of the memoir Hopping, writes, “Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have re-imagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it.”             My stalker doesn’t allow for re-imagination or reconstruction.  This guy only holds to the argument that I got my facts wrong.  He writes, “To the extent that we shared the same experience, your memories should be my memories.”              But here’s a question.  Why would I interview my abusers?  What gives him or his memory any credibility at all?  Isn’t going to the abuser actually going back for more abuse?  And don’t his current actions, threatening, extreme and relentlessness, prove the very emotional truth I wrote in my book: I was an orphaned child at the mercy of a bizarre cast of un-evolved characters who abused me?
            As writers of CNF, the bottom line question is this:  Are we lying?             Yes, some writers of CNF do lie and they are busted for it—swiftly, decisively and with hard evidence. Who doesn’t cringe at the mention of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, outed by The Smoking Gun website? Frey, who claimed to have been imprisoned for a full year, didn’t even go to jail.             A public spanking by the Media Mama of our time, Oprah Winfrey, made Frey pay the ultimate price (and also made him a fortune and a career).                No upstanding memoir writer watched the Frey story without squirming.  We all asked ourselves that question:  were we lying and more specific to myself, I had to ask if lied as well.               My answer is a definitive no—these people exploited and terrorized an orphan.  That is the bottom line truth. I did my research and I assembled as many hard facts as I could.  My intention, as the genre allows, was to study my own memory, unearth the images that lived within my subconscious and conscious mind and then to allow metaphors to arise.  The result was Blackbird, the story of a child lost in a very hard world that didn’t seem to give a damn.             When it came time to publish, Simon & Schuster asked me to either produce proof for my memory or make changes to protect us from litigation.  Because I didn’t have documentation and because my interpretation of the events of the past could be inaccurate in the specific detail, I altered genders, names and locations to such a degree there would be no way anyone would ever connect real people to the characters in Blackbird.            My stalker was so well shrouded by this change, he wasn’t even included in the abuse narrative, other than as a detached observer.              Still, for all of these years he has chosen to actively out himself and his mother.  My stalker must let the “world” know he was that guy and that his mother was that mother. 
            As I look back now, I believe he was the middle child in that family, and his current behavior is classic middle child acting out: “Hey, world, pay attention to me.”             This is funny, sad and from the world I occupy, a little scary too.  He threatens someone he admitted to once abusing, which if I’m not mistaken is more abuse.             The guy just doesn’t get that Blackbird isn’t about him, his family, or even his mother.  It’s about a little girl who lost her mother, her father, her brother, her home and even control over her own body as she was forced to yield to the power of those around her—and yet somehow persevered.                 Bernard Cooper writes, “only when the infinite has edges can I create art.”  Cooper omits fact from some of his stories.  All CNF writers must make these kinds of choices.  Things stay, things are cut, story is cobbled together from what we remember and we push ourselves towards the goal of emotional resonance.              Mimi Schwartz, who wrote Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line? tells the memoirist to: “Go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters.”            Blackbird may not have hit every fact perfectly but it does nail emotional truth.  Once done with that book, you feel what a little girl feels.  That is the requirement of CNF and that is the victory of Blackbird.             Readers know, as do writers, that memory is not credible on a factual level.  Judges, lawyers and even juries know this.   Each of us sees the same thing from a completely different perspective and what colors our perspective is previous experience and conditioned responses.  It’s the classic car crash scenario: six witnesses see one car hit another yet when the cops conduct interviews every account is different.  My stalker’s own mother, the one I wrote about in Blackbird said as much in Salon.com, back when my Stalkers campaign began.  She said, “Twenty people can see an accident and they each see something different. There are differences in memories from person to person, as is natural…”             Each of us has a memory and no matter how flawed to another, the memory is who we are.  Memory is experience captured and does not live on the surface.  Memory grows and emerges from the process of writing.  Memoir is that final product of working a memory forward and creating a story around the meaning of experience. 
            So what are the rules as we carry forward in CNF and memoir?              First, understand what memoir readers expect.              Vivian Gornick in The Situation and The Storywrites: “Truth in memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.  What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”            From the perspective of ethics, the modern writer of CNF and memoir must work hard and the reader must feel this effort in the prose.             Second, change names, descriptions and so forth if you are afraid of getting sued.  Cover your butt and make sure your publisher’s lawyer helps too.             Third, refer to areas of memory discrepancy in the actual prose as we see in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club when her narrator tells the reader that her sister, Lecia, if telling the story would adamantly disagree with Karr’s accounts.              Fourth, include disclaimers or Author Notes.  These are vital to memoir and act as a kind of a warning label that lets even the most dull-witted absorb the message: Reader, be aware.  The most comprehensive I’ve seen in a long time is in Cheryl Strayed’s celebrated memoir Wild:  “To write this book, I relied upon my personal journals, researched facts when I could, consulted with several of the people who appear in the book , and called upon my own memory of these events and this time of my life.  I have changed the names of most but not all of the individuals in this book, and in some cases I also modified identifying details in order to preserve anonymity.  There are no composite characters or events in this book.  I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.”            Fifth, acknowledge that you are at a specific level of emotional evolution at the time you create, refine and even publish your work.  Admit your limitations around telling the truth.   Tell the reader you are doing your best.  It’s all anyone can ask.             I tell my own students that they are the first draft they create and after that first draft is done, they are done with that part of who they were.  By the act of writing, evolution of consciousness has taken place.  To be fully aware of how we change via our writing will take time and integration.  Yes, a writer can revise several times but since publication is what we are after in order to sustain ourselves, there is no assurance the evolution of consciousness will be seen and integrated with full awareness.               If we are only going for total evolution and higher consciousness, well, we should never seek to publish our memoirs.  Or we should wait a dozen or more years because, as all therapists will attest, consciousness takes time.              I am not the same person who wrote, edited and published Blackbird.  I was a young woman who had just barely stepped on the path leading towards self-awareness.  Since Blackbird, I have crafted three more memoirs, written countless essays, studied a variety of therapeutic techniques, have studied and practiced meditation and have earned an MFA in creative writing.  Twenty years of my life have gone into self-exploration and I will admit that I am still “in process.”   To include this admission in a work of CNF and memoir feels fair.             Sixth, CNF writers should not be required to align their memories with those of their abusers.  The writer can do their best to accumulate as much factual evidence as possible but we all know that most abuse to small children is nearly impossible to prove.  It also common that the abused will distort and even diminish the facts in order to make the abuse seem less painful and debilitating, which I actually did when I wrote Blackbird.  Finally, it’s very common for abusers—especially of children—to deny the abuse and counterattack to re-direct attention from their abusive actions.             I believe the most effective tool a CNF writer has is the word itself.  Write about the abuse, make it clear that you did not verify your story with your abuser and that yes, you might have a fact or two wrong but that you did your best.  This is a simple fix to the problem I struggle with, one I wish I could have applied to Blackbird. And it’s the truth.
            This genre—like all forms of life—also evolves.   CNF and memoir churns out by the freighter load, books are published and readers fork over their hard-earned cash to take them home.              Where there were once no CNF or memoir writing programs in universities, we now see them nearly everywhere.              Where there were once no texts to guide us, we now have books on CNF and memoir style-books that fill the shelves of the local book stores.              In his essay, Blacktalk, memoirist Richard Hoffman suggests the surge of memoir is a backlash against distortion.  “The ascendance of memoir…may be a kind of cultural corrective to the sheer amount of fictional distortion that has accumulated in our society.”            From this, I take that he means we have long twisted our truths into culturally acceptable forms while missing something essential about our true selves.             I would widen Hoffman’s reasoning to include that emotional truth has been too long hidden within the psyche.  Humans hunger for a full expression of being and of life.  What is more full and satisfying than our emotional lives?  What is more full and satisfying than sharing our emotional lives with others and being seen?  And what is more tragic—and abusive—than denying someone else’s emotional truth?            
As for my stalker, well, his current level of engagement, via threats and intimidation (he recently gave me a deadline to recant aspects of Blackbird publicly or face legal retribution), demonstrates the level of consciousness that I, as the informed reader, must accept.  He is stuck in an abusive cycle of blame and hungers for vengeance.  His target is the child I used to be, the very one he called on the phone back before Blackbird hit big, to apologize. “You were the one we all abused,” I remember he said, “what we did to you haunts me.” Yes.  Let me admit that this quote could be inaccurate.  Let me also admit that this is the essence of what he told me and what he told the therapist who facilitated the call. If I have a vision of the future, it is this: I want him to stop bugging me.  I want him to stop calling innocent bystanders and tormenting them, too.  And I want to challenge him to point his pen inward to write a story of his own life, his own memory and his own level of consciousness, revise it and then get it published.  I would adore watching him stand up to the unrelenting scrutiny of his critics, as I have learned to do.             Vision set aside, I accept that I cannot change my stalker, I cannot even change the world, I can only change myself. As within, so without.  CNF is my life’s work, so it’s time to get back to the job at hand.