Where Nonfiction Belongs
Timmah Ball on small press
Reading nonfiction that avoids easy classification has led me to write nonfiction that is difficult to classify, because it frustratingly—and sometimes delightfully—doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. This elusive category could also be described as experimentalism, hybrid essay writing, literary narrative nonfiction, zine-making, autotheory and ficto-criticism, although the last two have been subsumed or at least collapsed into the autofiction genre, which has been experiencing a comeback in contemporary novel writing. As Christian Lorentzen articulates in the article ‘Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is ‘Autofiction’?’:
The term ‘autofiction’ has been in vogue for the past decade to describe a wave of very good American novels by the likes of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Jenny Offill, and Tao Lin, among others, as well as the multivolume epic My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. These are books that invite readers to imagine they might be reading something like a diary, where the transit from real life to the page has been more or less direct.
The phenomena, as with many trends in North American literature, translates into Ozlit, with a number of recent titles falling into this category, such as 7 ½ (Christos Tsiolkas), Now That I See You (Emma Batchelor), Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life (Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle) and the truly astonishing Permafrost (SJ Norman). Saying nothing about the quality of these titles, trending autofiction is a category that I would like to resist miscategorising or comparing with nonfiction that is difficult to classify. But it is worth highlighting that these confusions are as exciting as they are troublesome. Exciting, because nonfiction writing that doesn’t belong is the type of writing I want to see. Troublesome, because for both the unconventional nonfiction writer seeking entry into the Ozlit literary industry and the reader seeking unusual nonfiction books, the pathways and therefore the books largely don’t exist.
Despite a phenomenal list of First Nations nonfiction titles that fit within more standard modes of publishing such as memoir, critical race theory, feminism, history and visual art, (see Fiona Foley’s Biting the Clouds, Veronica Gorrie’s Black and Blue, Alexis Wright’s Tracker, Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s re-released Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, Larissa Behrendt’s Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling and Chelsea Watego’s Another Day in the Colony), very few nonfiction books released by the Ozlit industry interest me. Maria Tumarkin’s acclaimed Axiomatic and Anwen Crawford’s No Document were thrilling in form and subject matter while Quinn Eades’s All the Beginnings: A Queer Autobiography of the Body captivated me physically, emotionally and intellectually. Yet the power of these books seem largely singular: usually published by small, left-of-field publishers such as the now-defunct Brow Books, Giramondo and newcomer Upswell, which promises a list of writers who will ‘turn the world upside down’, it has resulted in little change in the mainstream publishing landscape.
This is intriguing on a few levels. From one perspective it is crudely obvious: such books are considered ‘too risky’ for commercial publishers, who often cite a certain level of unprecedentedness in the form of ‘comp titles’ (i.e. being able to name previous offerings that already exist on the market as a comparison, for the express purpose of gauging demand and/or sales). Yet this has not stopped nonfiction writers from continuing to experiment with form and content, especially as cross-disciplinary exchanges between art and writing thrive, just as complex identities and narratives demand formats that break convention. As a result such writing predominantly exists online: facilitated by the internet’s accessibility which encourages play and experimentation, unusual and compelling work are often found in places like Runway Journal, Cordite and Running Dog. Difficult to classify, this type of writing traverses criticism, poetry, essay and digital methodologies where artists and writers produce hybrid work that combines variations of text, audio and visuals. This reminds me of a conversation I’ve had about my own emerging practice, which haphazardly exists on the periphery of the mainstream through occasional commissions in established literary journals and invitations to writers’ festivals. But it always feels more exciting when I work on the outside, through self-published zines such as my most recent publication Do Planners Dream of Electric Trees? This also reminds me of the time a friend invited me to record a poem for a 3CR community radio program in 2020. When I asked if I could read something a little more prose- or essay-like they agreed. After sending my recording, the following email exchange occurred:
Hey Timmah - I'm just editing the show. I'm just wanting to check if you want us to refer to the piece as a poem or essay?
Ohh I don't really know!! Maybe go with autofiction, although I do like the idea of writing stuff like this and calling it an essay!
Sometimes they say prose, sometimes they say poetry? Is that ok? Can edit it if not, so let me know!
No stress at all!!! Anything is fine with me, you actually just got me on a philosophical tangent on how to describe experimentalish writing that is loosely nonfiction but not exactly memoir!!!
Ok phew! Haha sorry for sending you down that rabbit hole. Or maybe it’s good?
Nah it's great, I would love to redefine the essay!
I mean, who doesn’t want to break the essay from its shackles? And is there anything better than someone thinking that a prose poem stream of consciousness wherein I take the piss out of Courtney Barnett songs and live in New York with Tommy Pico (which of course never happened) could be an essay. But there is evidence suggesting that these writings—which I’ll refer to now as essays—do belong somewhere. In 2019 I was asked to judge the now-defunct The Lifted Brow & RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Nonfiction. Jean Bachoura won and several other incredible writers have either been shortlisted or taken out the top prize between then and 2020, the year the prize discontinued. But only one past winner, Eloise Grills, appears to be releasing a full-length nonfiction book forthcoming with Affirm Press, which, based on Grills’s publishing history will surely result in arrestingly unusual longform graphic essays as they are known for. Again, the rarity of these opportunities isn’t surprising—‘nonfiction’ is a slippery form, and experimental prizes don’t often result in book deals when even the hottest trends and most desired genres can take years to result in a book. If anything, this underscores the magnitude of Grills’s achievements, whose previous publications such as Sexy Female Murderess, Death in the Dog Park and If You’re Sexy and You Know it Slap Your Hams were either self-published or with indie publishers such as Glom Press and Subbed In. So, if we accept that on some level mainstream publishing isn’t hugely interested in experimental nonfiction, then where does it belong?
A review by Leah Jing McIntosh in 2021 surveyed significant releases by the indie press sector. These initiatives are distinguishable from small publishers because quite often these outfits are literally ‘independent’, run by volunteers in their homes, and which espouse the Do-It-Yourself ethos. In the review, McIntosh states that ‘small press is often overlooked in the country. It seems an odd oversight, particularly in a place so enamoured with the Western literary canon.’ She goes further to explain that ‘small press is a labour of love, underpinned by a beautiful, unwavering belief.’ Small presses are significantly underrated even as books published by these outfits have either been shortlisted or won major literary awards, such as The Open by Lucy Van (Cordite) and Stone Fruit by Lee Lai (Fantagraphics) which both appeared on the longlist at this year’s Stella Prize. We can also look to Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite), by Charmaine Papertalk Green, which won the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 2020 and the Victorian Premiere’s Literary Prize for Literature in the poetry category in the same year. But self-published books are often dismissed as if these avenues are somehow amateur or too marginal, sometimes associated with the derogatory label ‘vanity press’. Like the work published through indie presses, these works are generally regarded—at least by industry eyes—as ‘unprofessional’ or ‘below standard’ which is often the whole point—that is, to produce books that aren’t suited to the industry, published by writers and publishers who aren’t at all interested in pandering to exacting and arbitrary standards around ‘marketability’ and ‘digestibility’. I only mention this because this mentality is unlike those that can be found in visual arts or music, which thrive on artist-run initiatives and Do-It-Yourself record labels and distros, while indie publishing receives little if any adulation outside of a cult audience. If independence is a reflection of an artist’s credibility and a testament to their innovation outside of institutions, it continues to be ignored—or at best, not taken seriously—in the literary arts.
That said, we can consider Matthew Reilly, one of the very few successful self-published authors in Ozlit, who published his first book independently at twenty-two after being rejected by every major publisher on the continent. It is hard not to question whether it was merely an issue of timing, since many writers of exceptional talent experience years of rejection before any success, if at all. His trajectory is the stuff of urban legend: rather than wait for an ‘official deal’, he got a bank loan, printed a thousand copies of his first book Contest (1996) and convinced numerous bookshops around Sydney to stock it, which attracted the attention of a commissioning editor from Pan Macmillan. Decades later, the industry may on occasion consider him a maverick for that act alone, but his airport thriller Ice Station and subsequent titles do little but affirm the appetites of the mainstream. Perhaps he’d have created a more unusual body of work and even differentiated the market if he continued self-publishing, although he would probably not have received much attention, or have been successful on a monetary level.
But it is within the continually overlooked margins that the nonfiction I am seeking might belong. Two recent nonfiction titles, Uncle Hercules and other lies: 16 essays about almost nothing by Patrick Lenton and Echoes by Shu-Ling Chua, were released through what can be called micro publishers. While Chua’s essay collection reaches an intertextual literary quality that is lacking in Lenton’s both are great examples of nonfiction that mainstream publishers may have ignored. They are exciting finds, but seemingly rare. As I await my order for the highly praised self-published hybrid collection Working From Home (may ở nhà) by Emma Do and Kim Lam, a quick scan of small press organisations suggests that most are working in poetry, graphic novels or fiction, with some producing multi-authored collections or other work that loosely fits within memoir or autofiction. The value of these publications is enormous, especially given that these literary categories find it difficult to gain publishing opportunities. But I am left questioning why there isn’t more nonfiction coming through this area of literature. ‘Nonfiction’, as in, the slippery difficult-to-classify type of nonfiction. Arguably, genre-redefining essayists are ploughing away at work that will eventually find a more mainstream home, but this will take a significant amount of time to gestate until they find that place in the mainstream landscape, traces of which is already happening in the U.S.
For the purposes of this review, I recently emailed Dan Hogan, publisher and editor from micro press Subbed In, who rightly reassigned the lack of experimental nonfiction back on to the commercial sector. Believing that because experimentalism largely exists online, its absence in print or book form dissuades writers from attempting to author such books, reducing any potential readership for a market that already barely exists, even if the appetite is there.
As Hogan explained:
I find the type of nonfiction being produced by mainstream publishers and larger publishers to be narrow and increasingly homogeneous. Of course, they would never admit this. Publishing in Australia is extremely ‘risk’ averse across the board but I find this fear is mostly concentrated in forms that are traditionally coded as being poetry and/or nonfiction. I say ‘coded’ to reflect the major publisher conceptualisations of what can and can’t be good nonfiction and poetry. I think there is an interesting overlap between the state of nonfiction and poetry publishing given that most poetry is essentially nonfiction anyway. The problem begins with the fact that the publishers with the most capital also own the means of concept production. This is why I think there isn’t more interesting or experimental or non-traditional nonfiction coming through small indie publishers despite the gap; it is possible that there is not a huge amount of it being written due to the (almost) inescapable forces of capital that have conditioned readers to accept things about what nonfiction can and can’t be. A drought of experimental nonfiction works on shelves has, I think, created a situation in which less writers are producing such works.
Part of the answer also rests in nonfiction’s slipperiness, or as Dan further articulated, publishers’ inability to ‘fathom selling a book that might be at home in multiple sections of a bookshop or, worse, award categories—the work can and must only be one thing.’ And while this undefinable categorisation is hugely appealing to many it aggravates a publishing industry in need of marketing strategies for a book so as to pander to mainstream or commercial interests. This is almost laughable because it assumes that ‘we’ as people are made up of one identity, and belong in one category. In Lenton’s preface to Uncle Hercules, he explains that:
So, it’s with this entire disclaimer that I announce:
Every single one of these stories is the truth. They all happened to me. They are all real.
They are also all, in their own minor ways stuck together with lies. Lies to help them flow, lies to give them resonance and lies because the human memory is only a construct. Lies because the idea of subjective truth is a philosophical fallacy.
Acknowledging that the ‘truth’ in nonfiction writing is tricky and inherently interpretable subtly undermines the rigidity of mainstream publishing where such books must fall into specific categories such as ‘biography’, ‘memoir’, ‘historical’, ‘essay collections’, ‘true crime’, ‘popular science’, ‘politics and government’, ‘society and culture’ and ‘art and music’. Lenton alludes to the complexity and creativity of nonfiction which is far more porous than what the structure of conventional publishing allows. The meandering short stories/essays that follow are grounded in the ordinariness of the everyday. But within this banality we can assume Lenton is embellishing events with the purpose of illuminating issues that are important to the writer. While some of Lenton’s stories lack punch there is an enjoyable lightness and comic tone which makes Uncle Hercules engaging to read. In its most heightened moments essays like ‘Melbourne is a city no a self-help book, Swimming and other unnatural things and Some but not all of the worst jobs I have ever done’, leave the reader with a brutal sense of the absurd.
Although divergent both in style and themes, Lenton’s book shares one of its most successful qualities with Chua’s Echoes. Both books effectively develop a distinctive design, layout and typography that distinguish them from run-of-the-mill trade publishing outputs. The size of these books is a huge indicator in itself, in an industry overrun with books that are almost awkwardly large. A key theme in Lenton’s book is tied together through images of fish which appear between each chapter. Along with the dynamic cover design and text layout it becomes an eloquent and arresting way to visualise a key message while avoiding deliberate symbolism or heavy metaphor which often occurs in personal essays.
Similarly, Echoes is designed with a beguiling awareness of the power of the personal. Photos by the author underscore the text, illuminating small moments and the intimacy of our personal belongings, the way we feel before the mirror and what this can say about who we are. It elevates the lyrical vignettes into something that conjures a certain hybridity, producing a similar impact to Beverley Farmer’s The Bone House or Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. Having jointly won the 2021 Small Press Network Book of the Year Award, Echoes is a delicate mediation on what is lost and found in the archive of diaspora and reflects Chua’s strength to reveal the gravitas of intergenerational change through the lens of small things, such as a dress, a song, or a mug of hot water. She writes about music that she might remember but is never quite sure:
A year or so ago, my father inserted a CD into the car’s player. ‘I don’t recognise this song.’ I said. As the chorus began, I realised I was wrong. The Melody was evidently wedged deep, dormant. Tears slipped as I continued driving. Dad said nothing.
Another time, while crossing Lonsdale Street to enter Melbourne Central, the lonely notes of an erhu stopped me in my tracks. I had never listened to the erhu growing up. Perhaps the nostalgia was imagined, perhaps not.
There are aspects of Echoes which fulfil nonfiction publishing’s appetite for personal feminist writing, as well as stories that revolve around the migrant and POC experience. At the same time it evades many of the less successful tropes that this genre—in particular, personal feminist writing—falls into, such as annoying fixations with the self that can leave the reader bored in a market made up of these kinds of reflections. Of equal significance is the book’s refusal to over-indulge in or play up trauma associated with racism and being a migrant, which usually forces writers to perform pain that is neatly resolved when the author charts a narrative of ‘traumatised minority’ to ‘good migrant’ that the settler nation-state endorses. In the blistering essay ‘Stories Without Borders’, Maria Tumarkin critiques the posturing that migrants—specifically those with refugee histories—are expected to adopt in order to find mainstream publishing success. She writes:
It takes a monumental and ongoing work of moral imagination to understand why people are prepared to starve, become terribly ill, get lost at sea, watch their children suffer, die—all to be able to come to Australia. This work of imagining cannot be supplanted by slogans, not even well-meaning slogans, like:
We are all migrants. (No, we’re not.)
We are all boat people. (Not even close.)
And perhaps this is why a nonfiction book like Echoes falls between mainstream publishing’s cracks. While not a refugee, Australian writers of colour like Chua are increasingly expected to deliver didactic versions of themselves, which lack the moral imagination needed to convey the profound bewilderment of dislocation. Chua’s delicate prose delivers something small and beautiful which embodies disorientation while refusing to pin it down. I continue to search for the books like it that exist outside of conventional publishing, knowing that their writers are there and that the wait is worth it.
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Works Cited
✷ Christian Lorentzen, ‘Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is ‘Autofiction’?’, Vulture 2018.
✷ Leah Jing McIntosh, ‘Small-press gems’, The Saturday Paper, 2021.
✷ Maria Tumarkin, ‘Stories Without Borders’, Meanjin, Volume 70, Number 2, 2011.
✷ Patrick Lenton, Uncle Hercules and other lies, Subbed In, 2019.
✷ Shu-Ling Chua, Echoes, Somekind Press, 2020.
Timmah Ball is a writer, zine maker and cultural producer of Ballardong Noongar heritage.