David Shields Visits During Creative Nonfiction Week

Last Thursday, author David Shields kindly visited us over at Columbia College during Creative Nonfiction Week, a week-long celebrated event presented in collaboration between the English, Journalism, and Fiction Departments (and this year co-sponsored by the Departments of Radio, Film & Video, and Critical Encounters). Shields joined past presenters Alex Kotlowitz, Art Spiegelman, Jamaica Kincaid and many others in celebrating a very diverse and widely discussed genre that continues to grow more and more in both its readership and authorship.

On his newest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Shields spoke about the versatility of the Nonfiction genre, and on much of the controversy surrounding its credibility in an age where “memoir” is the only word needed for a piece of Nonfiction to be widely marketed. “The book is an anti-manifesto manifesto,” he said, adding that writers should “try and use the book as a source of your own work.”

“The main point of the book was to rescue Nonfiction as literary art—the really rich tradition of Nonfiction going back to St. Augustine and maybe earlier, as an attempt to ask the most serious questions in the most attentive way.” The book, which is a compilation of Shields' own thoughts as well as the thoughts of his predecessors and contemporaries, is a keystone of modern cultural criticism, urging us to ask all the right questions about whether the things we find important today are really important—mostly, the media we choose to consume.

The project began, Shields said, as “a course packet in the early to mid '90s. I started developing this course on the self-reflective gesture of the essay and on documentary film. It developed into this huge, big blue binder, with literally thousands of quotations—all from people talking about the glory of the essay form.”

“The book is a transitional text,” he continued, “one that has one foot in the digital world and one foot right there in traditional book culture. For readers, there [if the book were digitized] would be an open-source site in which readers would fill in the citations and when you got the citations correct the text would turn red or something.” A clear hint at Shields' okayness with the idea of using New Media within the Nonfiction genre. “The conventional novel,” he said, “the literary novel, is no longer congruent with contemporary life,” mostly because “we're obsessed with reality because we experience hardly any of it. As a result we're pretty numb, pretty bored, and we crave the real.”

And Shields, as always, has left us with poignant thought. “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings,” he said, pulling an already-attentive audience even closer. And he takes his bow and wraps everything up nicely with a paraphrased thought from the late David Foster Wallace: “We're existentially alone on the planet. I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling. The very best work constructs a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness.”