Kinkaid and Lott: Understanding CNF just a little bit more...

To anybody else, a simple yellow dress from a person’s childhood would probably not garner more than a few sentences of pleasant but fleeting nostalgia. To Jamaica Kinkaid, her yellow dress deserved an entire essay. Kinkaid’s “Biography of a Dress” is a stirring reflection on a particular event in her childhood that revolved around a yellow, homemade, poplin dress. However, unlike what the title suggests, the essay is not about the dress her mother made for Kinkaid when she was a toddler. Yes, I must concede that there was a lot written about how the dress was made. On the other hand, upon closer inspection, all that talk about the yellow dress merely served as a vehicle for Kinkaid to show us (rather than tell us) a particular part of her childhood and how she remembers her mother. In fact, as I finished reading the essay, I got the notion that the story was more about who her mother was in relation to her rather than what the yellow dress was in relation to a two year old. Kinkaid goes on and shows us how she, as a two year old, thought of what was going on around her. By doing so, Kinkaid deliberately shows us who her mother was as well. What makes this essay different from what I have read earlier (Didion, Alexie, and Beard) is precisely that, it wasn’t about what happened in her past but rather who she was in the past. Yes, this theme is somewhat reminiscent in Jo Ann Beard’s “Out There” but Kinkaid’s explanation of who her mother was in relation to her (and in effect, who she was in relation to her mother) takes it to a whole other level.

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More often than not, when a writer writes about the definition of a term, their intent is to carry you from Point A (the question, the term) to Point B (the answer, the definition) in a precise and concise manner. Bret Lott doesn’t do that. What he does is nudge you (push sounds a little too violent) from Point A to wherever you decide to go to between Point B and Point Z. Perhaps I tried to milk the analogy a little bit too much there but I would like to believe that I’ve made my point. Lott’s essay “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction” is exactly what the title tells us it is. Lott gives us several possible definitions that he gathered by reflecting on what other writers like Philip Lopate, Derek Kidner and even Michel Montaigne have said about writing such pieces. However, the main point of the essay is Lott’s argument that, as a writer, one owes it to himself or herself to find a definition of CNF simply through experimentation. He explains that “ we can no more understand what creative nonfiction is by trying to define it than we can learn how to ride a bike by looking at a bicycle tire, a set of handle bars, the bicycle chain itself.” (p.270) In essence, we can really only come up with a definition of CNF if we try to write creative nonfiction. There’s no substitute for trying. Nevertheless, despite all of this, the one thing that left an impression in me is Lott’s “last element” in his essay. The reason we write creative nonfiction is because it is “our responsibility as human beings to answer for and to our lives.” (p. 276)