174 EVERYDAY: The Exquisite Intricate Suppose I begin with the facts? A boy leaves his childhood home. He is to journey to a new land. A new existence is to be made in this foreign place. Tere is nothing remarkable in these facts. It is an oft-told tale of immigrant life that is the stuf of everyday occurrence. So, for now, I will set this aside. In this essay I attend to the art of relaying the factual. I explore the techniques and trends of the genre of Creative Nonfction by relying on the best resource at hand: fellow writers who are exponents of this genre. What follows are excerpts from email conversations with my community of writer-friends, conducted in June 2018. In these exchanges, I deliberate with essayists, memoirists, and cultural critics on the subject of writing about real life – the everyday, if you will. I wanted to get a sense of how and why they write in a form that I describe as fact rendered in imaginative expression. Stephanie Abraham, a Los Angeles-based writer who contributes to various print and online publications, in addition to serving as a cultural and flm critic, shared with me the defnition of CNF that she fnds most useful. She relays the description of the genre by Lee Gutkind, founding editor of the magazine Creative Nonfction. Gutkind says that his magazine defnes the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told” … In some ways, creative fction is like jazz – it’s a rich mix of favors, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself … Te word “creative” refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfction – factually accurate prose about real R. Benedito Ferrão (Adapted from a Talk Delivered at the 25th Iligan National Writers Workshop, 2018)