Plenary Address: Mary Cappello

The best thing “creative nonfiction” did as a category was to incite a definitional crisis around the genre of nonfiction; the worst thing it did was to extract that quality that is essential to our being alive—“creative”— and use it as an empty signifier. “Creative” as a descriptor almost always promulgates a falsehood: that some people are creative and others not; that some acts are creative and others not.
- Mary Cappello, ‘Propositions; Provocations: Inventions’

An abundance of recent work in literary studies deliberately complicates, interrogates, or thwarts the distinctions according to which writing is typically organised: such work sits at, blurs and redraws the fuzzy boundaries between the critical and the creative, the personal and the impersonal, the fictional and the non-fictional.

One of the few things that writers engaged in this kind of practice tend to have in common is a deep discomfort with the labels that get attached to their work; such labels often seek to re-categorise the deliberately uncategorisable. And yet, for a whole host of practical reasons – not least the ways in which their work is mediated by academic departments, bookshops, and other institutions – writers cannot afford to be uninterested in the work that such descriptors perform.

This colloquium will ask: are the categories in question only and inevitably experienced by writers as an imposition? If work of this kind aims in part to treat the practical circumstances of writing as conditions for its perennial reinvention, then might these organisational categories also provide opportunities for writerly practice?