the corresponding essays.
I sit there quietly in my tiny café chair. I wish I had a fork so I could stick it in my eye.
- Cathy Day
The conductor and his light had disappeared! There are those whose hearts would throb faster under such circumstances. We were without light, and far, far under the ground...
- M. S. Beach
It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if any one would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into—hell with the lid taken off.
- James Parton
Beneath its soot and grime [you] will discover in Pittsburg one of the most picturesque cities in America. Here [you] will find nothing stolen from Europe--nothing derivative. It is the very quintessence of what one is in the habit of styling "American."
- Charles Henry White
Everything in the hotel was black; not black to the eye, for the eye teaches itself to discriminate colours even when loaded with dirt, but black to the touch. On coming out of a tub of water my foot took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I trod barefooted on a path laid with soot.
- Anthony Trollope
It was your whole body that knew those sidewalks and streets. Your bones ached with them; you tasted their hot dust in your bleeding lip; their gravel worked into your palm and knees and stayed, blue under the new skin that grew over it.
- Annie Dillard
Like a people, a city grows its own legends, passes its lore down to younger generations.
- Stewart O'Nan
Billowing clouds of fire blossom from the dark to metastasize into orange and scarlet plumes. The sun is coming apart.
- Hilary Masters
The business was a gift from my family to me, painstakingly built over 50 years. As the last person in the line of succession, I felt an obligation not to let that gift slip past me into oblivion.
- Jeremy Smerd
Our childhood belonged to an age without automobiles, without labor-saving electrical devices, without radio, television, or aeroplanes.
- Ethel Spencer
Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers.
- Tom Junod
A need to go slowly, to register each detail of violated terrain competes with an urge to get the hell out before some doped-up fool without insurance or a pot to piss in comes barreling out of a side street and totals my new Volvo wagon.
- John Edgar Wideman
The industrial detritus of a fading culture stretches for mile upon unrelieved mile on these riverbanks: abandoned furnaces, mill buildings, railroad tracks and bridges, storage yards, pumping stations, pipelines, transmission towers. The American steel industry lies dying in its cradle.
- John P. Hoerr
I didn't for a second think of what I was doing but I came close to killing him. I felt neither righteous nor horrified, not even saddened, more than anything a little amazed at what I did.
- Gerald Stern
I think about the slow decline of my own accent as a sad contrast to Cope, who, in the face of professional ridicule, not only kept his dialect but turned it into a trademark.
- Elena Passarello
Red Whittaker, like George Patton in World War II, ignited among his troop of rookies a nearly maniacal dedication, as well as an overpowering exhaustion.
- Lee Gutkind
Beneath the ruins, we cast about for form and function as if their residue still hung in the air. I believe it did. I knew that men had built and run the machines around us. I could peel back the layers of time, rediscover their work and dreams.
- Erin Tocknell
Like so many immigrants in cities all over the world, Seifu Haileyesus, owner of Tana Ethiopian Cuisine, is capitalizing on the romance and sense of exoticism that a foreign culture can bring to a relatively homogenous place.
- Mark Kramer
It wasn't easy being with my grandfather at times. He was the boss: No was no, and yes was yes. He broke rules and bent rules and made new rules along the way. But once part of his world, you hung on tight for every fantastic, unbearable moment.
- Kathleen Rooney Mara
You could call my family's collection "quaint," "eccentric," "sort of nerdy." "Pickles," you'd say. "They collect pickles. Right." And maybe, anywhere else, it would be strange. But here, we are not the only ones.
- Anjali Sachdeva
People do all sorts of drastic things when they find themselves stuck in a cycle where the life they are leading doesn't add up to whom they want to be: I found myself wearing a giant puppet costume on a stage at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
- Missy Raterman
Anthony Trollope
originally published in 1862
James Parton
originally published in 1868
Ethel Spencer
originally published in 1983
Annie Dillard
originally published in 1987
Tom Junod
originally published in 1998
Hilary Masters
originally published in 2000
Lee Gutkind
originally published in 2006
Jeremy Smerd
New!
Erin E. Tocknell
New!
Kathleen Rooney Mara
New!
Missy Raterman
New!
M. S. Beach
originally published in 1868
Charles Henry White
originally published in 1908
John Edgar Wideman
originally published in 1984
John P. Hoerr
originally published in 1988
Stewart O’Nan
originally published in 2000
Gerald Stern
originally published in 2004
Cathy Day
originally published in 2008
the Pittsburgh Sound
Elena Passarello
New!
Mark Kramer
New!
Anjali Sachdeva
New!
Save the Dates!
Creative Nonfiction will celebrate Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary by publishing a collection of new essays about Pittsburgh, to be launched at a reading by the emerging writers whose essays have been chosen for publication. The event is part of the American Shorts Reading Series and will be held on Thursday, October 2, 2008.
The event will be part of the 2008 Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference, which will offer engaging speakers, writing workshops, panel discussions, readings and networking in Pittsburgh October 2-4, 2008. The theme, Writing about Science & Technology, is inspired by CNF's longtime home, a city whose social and economic life has always been intertwined with science and technological innovation.
In addition to the Pittsburgh in Words reading, featured events will include an evening with Lawrence Krauss, bestselling author of The Physics of Star Trek, and a panel discussion with Corey Powell (Discover), Virginia Morell (Science and National Geographic) and CNF's own Lee Gutkind.
A series of intensive writing workshops will be offered on October 2 and 3. Topics include research and writing about science and technology themes, book proposals, query letters, writing dialogue, characters, the creative process, and how to turn facts into art. Manuscript review workshop will also be offered.
For information on tickets, schedule and registration please visit the Creative Nonfiction website.
Generally, creative nonfiction is a way of writing that combines relevant and enlightening information (journalism), with ideas presented by the author (personal essay), inspired by the in-depth experiences of the author (memoir) or others (biography), and written with artful clarity (poetry). In creative nonfiction, everything you say must be true—you can’t make stuff up—but you can use the literary techniques of fiction writers—dialogue, description, plot—in order to make your story as compelling as a novel. One way or another, the creative nonfiction writer must always be telling a story—writing in scenes, invoking a narrative.
Despite the confusion surrounding its definition, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing genre in the publishing industry, as well as in the academic world. More than 15 years ago, I started the first program to offer an advanced degree (an M.F.A.) in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. There are now many more programs worldwide, including two additional ones here in Pittsburgh, at Carlow and Chatham universities. At least a half-dozen universities in the U.S. and Australia even offer a Ph.D. in creative nonfiction.
Key to the development and expansion of the genre, however, was the establishment of a journal—Creative Nonfiction—dedicated to publishing new writers with good stories to tell and important things to say and to offering a forum for discussion. Unlike mainstream magazines and newspapers, CNF is open to new ideas in narrative construction and pieces of various lengths, voices and orientations. No holds barred—except literary excellence. Because Creative Nonfiction is based in Pittsburgh, I like to think that our city is the birthplace and the epicenter of this style of writing. Its roots are here. So, as the city celebrates its 250th anniversary, we offer this special project, “Pittsburgh in Words.”
CNF has published some of the biggest names in the genre—John McPhee, Lauren Slater, Mark Bowden, Diane Ackerman—but it is also a central part of our mission to discover and develop new voices. Unlike most other magazines and journals, we coach and mentor emerging writers as they work, helping them develop their voice and awareness of literary structure. “Pittsburgh in Words” especially reflects this mission; it features new work by seven writers with a connection to the city, some of whose creative writing has never before been published.
To find these writers, we sent out a call for abstracts all across the United States, seeking new stories expressing not only what is true and meaningful about Pittsburgh, but also a purpose and a mission beyond the experiences related. We received more than 60 proposals for stories about subjects ranging from childhood memories of traveling to Pittsburgh for special occasions, to the history of the Heinz pickle (and the pickle pin), to biographies of long-gone landmarks.
The seven essays we eventually commissioned, considered together, capture a city at a pivotal stage of development; they convey not only Pittsburgh’s rich and complicated history, but also the excitement of the present as the city struggles to reinvent itself.
Several of these stories, perhaps unsurprisingly, begin with the writers’ grandparents: Kathleen Rooney Mara recalls a 1973 trip to Canada with her grandfather, Art Rooney Sr., for a tour of shrines and racetracks, and her essay meditates on memory’s power to soothe grief. Jeremy Smerd chronicles the rise and fall of M. Berger Co., a wholesale company founded by his grandfather in 1945, and examines his generation’s conflicted feelings about choosing (so far) not to go into the family business. “Pod City,” by Anjali Sachdeva, whose grandparents both worked for Heinz, examines the connections between her family’s feelings for its collection of company memorabilia (ketchup clocks, pickle ornaments) and the city’s ambivalent attitude toward change: “The emotion that holds Pittsburgh in its grip isn’t a simple longing for times gone by,” she concludes. “Instead, it’s a potent mixture of nostalgia and guilt, the sort of thing the Germans must surely have a word for.”
The other writers are transplants to Pittsburgh, but their relationships with the city and its people are no less complicated. Myron Cope’s death inspires Elena Passarello, who moved from Georgia to attend the University of Pittsburgh, to try to explain the appeal of Cope’s ragged scratch and to remember her own linguistic struggles to fit in here. Erin Tocknell recalls the last spring of the 20th century, when a course taught by Carnegie Mellon University professor Dave Demarast gave her a new appreciation of the ruins she rowed past during grueling early-morning practices on the Allegheny River with her college teammates. Mark Kramer juxtaposes a story of modern immigration, set at Tana Ethiopian Cuisine in East Liberty, against stories of earlier immigrants, such as John Arbuckle and Andrew Carnegie, and considers the role modern immigrants will play in shaping Pittsburgh’s future. Finally, in “In Pursuit of Puppets: A Pittsburgh Romance,” Missy Raterman tells how she shook off a growing malaise she blamed on Pittsburgh itself—the low cost of living and the city’s many attractions, paradoxically, left her feeling adrift and directionless—and came to find herself operating a life-size puppet onstage at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
“Pittsburgh in Words” also features some of the best true stories ever written about the city and its people, by some very well-known writers—Annie Dillard, John Edgar Wideman, Stewart O’Nan and many others. CNF almost always publishes new work, and it is rare that we have the opportunity to reach back in time and rediscover lost literary treasures. Assembling this collection, combining emerging writers with those buried by time, has been an honor and a delight.
As a whole, “Pittsburgh in Words” demonstrates that our city is more than the sum of the usual stories told about it. True, you will find steel mills here, and football and pierogies and rivers—but that’s just the beginning. And in this collection of compelling, electrifying, enlightening narrative nonfiction prose, you’ll also discover one of the city’s best-kept secrets: Pittsburgh is a place for writers, and it always has been.
Finally, on that note, I would like to express my gratitude to the city for providing Creative Nonfiction a home for the past 15 years. Unaffiliated with any university or institution, the journal has been generously supported by many local foundations and organizations, including The Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (with which we now have a book series), the McCune Foundation, The Pittsburgh Foundation and others. This special issue, “Pittsburgh in Words,” is supported in part by The Heinz Endowments, which have also supported other CNF projects.
Pittsburgh in Words is supported in part by a generous grant
from the Heinz Endowments.
Editor: Lee Gutkind
Managing Editor: Hattie Fletcher
Assistant Editor: Stephen Knezovich
Editorial Assistants: Maddy Lauria, Kim Olsen, Julia Zebley
Project Coordinator: Vivienne Shaffer
Design: Mona MacDonald
Website: Francis Pitt
Can words explain a city like Pittsburgh, with its rich history, complicated geography, and thriving communities? Over the years, countless writers—who grew up here, or moved here, or were just passing through—have taken up the challenge.
In celebration of the city’s 250th anniversary, we’ve collected some of the best true stories ever written about Pittsburgh and its people. They cover topics from coal mining in the 1860s to the difficulties of being single here in the 21st century—and they all share a fascination with, as Stewart O’Nan puts it, “the real Steel City, the city that’s shared imaginatively by all long-term Pittsburghers. … People and things we as Pittsburghers know, whether they’re true or not.”
Some of these stories are old, and some are new —and some are still being written. We hope you’ll find some of your favorites here, as well as many surprises. Happy reading!