Far Edges of the Fourth Genre

Sean Prentiss is Assistant Professor at Norwich University. He has had essays, poems, and stories published in Brevity, Sycamore Review, Passages North, ISLE, Ascent, River Styx, Spoon River, Nimrod, and many other journals.Joe Wilkins is Associate Professor of English at Linfield College, and is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry, and two collections of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs and Notes from the Journey Westward.

• Contents Introduction Mary Clearman Blew - Walking Home Ander Monson - Essay as Hack Brenda Miller - Writing inside the Web: Creative Nonfiction in the Age of Connection Dinty W. Moore - Rivering Bob Shacochis - How to Wind the Clock of Your Days: Notes on the Nature and Function of Time in the New Millennium Jonathan Rovner - Refresh Robin Hemley - Lines That Create Motion Joe Wilkins - Night Nancer Ballard - Bald in Back with Three Heads: Wrestling with Time in Narrative Nonfiction Joy Castro - Grip and Getting “Grip” Lia Purpura - Advice and On Writing “Advice” Sean Prentiss - Eternal Sunshine of the Nonfiction Mind: A New Philosophy for Understanding Truth and Creative Nonfiction Judith Kitchen - Gone A-Sailing: A Voyage to the Edge of Nonfiction (in Which I Follow My Own Exercise for Writing about a Photograph) H. Lee Barnes - Memory, Language, and Truth in the Written Moment Kim Barnes - The Art and Absence of Reflection in Personal Nonfiction: What Is the Why? Erik Reece - The Act of Writing: Speak and Bear Witness Acknowledgments Contributors

Prentiss and Wilkins have collected a strong and engaging group of writers to not only examine the form and function of the twenty-first century essay but also to contemplate how the essayist attempts to reconcile the layered realities of what’s real, what’s remembered, and what’s online. Here is an essay collection with edge.—Jill Talbot, editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction