Sometimes, when I tell people I’m about to begin an MFA program in non-fiction, they ask why I wouldn’t rather write fiction. Maybe this is because the popular conception of a creative writing workshop is of one that teaches fiction and creates the next generation of novelists, and most writing classes teach people how to write short stories. Non-fiction is a more slippery beast, and usually people follow up the “Why non-fiction?” question with “So that’s, like, what—memoirs?”

Well, yes. That, and a lot of other things. Non-fiction as a genre is more about the one thing it’s not—that is, fiction, the made-up stuff—than what it includes, which is, basically, Everything Else. I am hoping that, after a few months in the program, I’ll have a better idea of just what Everything Else entails.[1]

I still don’t have a well-formed answer to either the Why Non-Fiction or What Is Non-Fiction? question. My first answer is usually that I don’t know. I don’t know Why Non-Fiction. I’m not even sure exactly what I’ll end up doing for three years, in this workshop. I’m not sure what kind of pieces I’ll be asked to write in my classes, or what criteria my teachers will use to assess our efforts, or what my “book-length manuscript” that every MFA is supposed to have completed by graduation is going to be about. I guess I’ll find out. This lack of foreknowledge doesn’t really bother me; it’s exciting, if anything.

But beyond “I don’t know,” the simplest, most direct answer might be that I’ve always preferred the non-fiction I’ve written to the fiction. My fiction seems too self-conscious and labored. And, since it’s almost always based on personal experience, why not just remove that filter and write it as a True Story? I just know that I don’t want to spend three years writing short stories about people falling out of love, small-town ennui, and a drug-addled upper-middle-class.[2] But I don’t necessarily know why non-fiction is any more preferrable.

A more pragmatic response to the Why Non-Fiction? question is that I feel, when I graduate in three years with an MFA, thirty-one years old and just as clueless as I was when I started, I might be just marginally more employable (or, more accurately, a sliver less unemployable) than I would be if I had been writing fiction for the last three years. I could go into the magazine or newspaper business, for example. I could write music reviews. I could go back to work reporting on City Council meetings for my hometown newspaper.[3]

In my more self-indulgent moments[4] I have fantasies about writing long pieces for the New Yorker, like the one in this week’s issue: “The Home Front” by George Packer. It’s about a man in Des Moines who lost his son in Iraq and remains deeply conflicted about the war there, and who constantly agonizes over the question of whether his son died for a just cause. It does everything I feel a non-fiction piece should: it studies a person’s life deeply, provides accurate and respectful reportage, and connects the personal with the macrocosmic by contrasting one person’s loss and pain with the spectacular mess that this country’s leadership has made of its war, and their seeming disregard for the actual lives of the actual people they’ve sent to prosecute that war.

But it’s not so much the piece’s political aspect I find compelling[5]—it’s more the care that so obviously went into it, especially the parts about the soldier’s father, which are extremely moving.[6]

The fourth and final answer I might have to everyone’s question is anecdotal. I was over at Kate and Aden’s the other night, sitting on their couch directly in front of their window AC unit. I remarked that I love window AC units because their smell always reminds me of my grandmother’s house, which we visited every summer during my childhood. Kate complimented my knack for remembering details like that, and I said, That’s why I want to write non-fiction.

[1] I will also probably have a better appreciation for cheap whiskey.

[2] Besides, AM Holmes, Denis Johnson and Nick Burd have already covered that ground far better than I could.

[3] Just kidding. I hope.

[4] (and really, what do writing workshops provide us if not a long series of self-indulgent moments?)

[5] Contrary to what you might expect from The New Yorker, the piece doesn’t offer easy vindication for the magazine’s leftist readership, but rather focuses on the ambiguities that thwart the rhetorical battle plans of both political extremes.

[6] And as long as I’m on the topic of magazine pieces, I’ll add that I’ve chosen to hold at a very skeptical arm’s length the discouraging and often whiny Harper’s piece that Lynn Freed just published, comparing MFA programs to hellish Guantanamos of existential and artistic oblivion.