Speculate about creative nonfiction as an emerging genre in American literature. Long live nonfiction, the telling of real stories, the recording of the lives of real people. I think what people choose to write is always an artifact of their times. What I see in our current time is people telling their stories and others' stories, publishing life with a candidness and universality that makes those stories resonant for others. Perhaps nonfiction re-emerged because we live in an age of fast and often ungraceful communication.
Creative nonfiction is a sort of socio-historic genre, even a cultural artifact.
I believe the genre will finally come to find equal footing with other creative forms in ways it has not in the past. I believe, too, that if we look at how the ends of centuries send people rushing to various sources to find truth in one form or another, the writers of creative nonfiction are taking up that same search in their own way. Recently, I have found myself rejecting as myth an assertion I hear too often that the line between nonfiction and fiction is blurred and gray. I don't believe that for a moment. Now I find myself rejecting such classifying of techniques.