Week 6: "What Sacagawea Means To Me" & "Time and Distance Overcome"

I’m really struggling with this creative nonfiction unit. I just don’t understand how nonfiction can be creative. Writing my own creative nonfiction, I feel kind of stifled and smothered, like I did in my AP Literature class last year when we had to write historical fiction. I couldn’t just write like I normally do, in the way that comes so easily to me- I had to do research and incorporate it into my story, and that made what should have been an enjoyable assignment for me a grueling chore instead. I had the same difficulty with our first creative nonfiction assignment.

The pieces of creative nonfiction we were assigned to read only added to my confusion. Although “What Sacagawea Means To Me” was the less confusing of the two for me, I felt like it was just a bunch of fragments of essays haphazardly thrown together. The first paragraph, which talks about a hypothetical amusement park where for a nominal fee one can step into Sacagawea’s virtual shoes, could certainly be further developed and placed into one of those dystopian novels that are all the rage right now. The second paragraph grabbed my attention from the start with “Sacagawea is our mother. She is the first gene pair of the American DNA.” Right away, I was intrigued and hoped for some elaboration. Unfortunately, the rest of the paragraph didn’t follow up on these claims, instead discussing Sacagawea’s death, and drawing parallels between it and the early colonization of America. The third paragraph shifts focus entirely away from Sacagawea, mentioning all the other people involved in the Lewis and Clark expedition, which seemed irrelevant to me. Then in the fourth paragraph, we are finally introduced to what we can probably call Alexie’s central argument: that America is a land full of contradictions. This argument is strengthened in the final paragraph when she states that these contradictions are echoed in herself and in Sacagawea. I wondered why Alexie didn’t introduce this idea of contradictions right off the bat and dedicate the entire piece to it. The paragraphs of this piece individually made sense to me- but together, I think they fail to be cohesive.

“Time and Distance Overcome” seemed even choppier. The first half could have stood on its own as an examination of the effects of the invention of the telephone on society. The second half could have stood on its own as a history of lynching in the United States. The final paragraph is the only part of the piece that is creative, because it is the only place where Biss ties her own experiences, beautifully recounted, to the collection of facts that form 90% of the piece. I also thought there were far too many of these facts, and felt they were simply listed off rather than explained and developed, especially towards the end. Hopefully creative nonfiction will make more sense to me after reading a few more example works.