The Australian Association of Writing Programs

The Creative nonfiction: ethical concerns and other issues APWN workshop begins today. Its still not too late to join if you are interested. I'm sharing my first post with everyone as a taster. 

After more than two decades of hoaxes and scandals perpetrated in the name of creative nonfiction, we are going to use this workshop to survey current concerns and issues for writers of creative nonfiction, assess these in terms of what challenges and opportunities they offer for both writers and publishers, and look forward to possible future directions for the genre.

 We are going to start today with ‘the author’ and how authors represent themselves to their readers. This is because a measure of authority comes from this identity for readers. There is, however, a long tradition of authors using pseudonyms or noms de plum, that goes back long before the advent of the creative nonfiction label. At times, these authorial pseudonyms have been used for what can be classed as acceptable reasons, at others to confuse and deceive.

 In the late 17th Century, ‘George Psalmanazar’ (real name unknown), wandered around Europe proporting to be a cannibal prince from the ‘exotic orient’. He made up an alphabet and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704, he compiled these observations into the book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. When Psalmanazar died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax, were published. His entire life was revealed to have been one long work of dramatic fiction.

 The 19th Century reference, Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, was hoaxed by a staffer who, paid by how much he wrote, invented famous Americans and wrote biographies for them.

 In 1894, the 2,500-year-old lesbian love poems of ‘Bilitis’ were published. They were later found to be actually the work of the scholar Pierre Louÿs.

 In the twentieth century, an Englishman who for years impersonated a native American, ‘Grey Owl’, wrote autobiographical books, lectured, and even visited the British royal family to tell them stories about his life. He wasn’t found out until shortly after his death in 1938. His influential books are credited with starting the conservation movement in Canada.

James Norman Hall, author of Mutiny on the Bounty, invented the prodigy poet, ‘Fern Gravel’, whose inspired young musings were published as Oh! Millersville to rave reviews in 1940.

 In 1944, the Australian Angry Penguins literary magazine published a series of poems by ‘Ern Malley’, a poet whose early death would have made his amazing work forever obscure had it not been unearthed by the magazine. The works were then published elsewhere. The editor of Angry Penguins was prosecuted and convicted by an Australian court when the poems were found to be obscene. However, ‘Ern Malley’ was an invention of two poets who invented both Malley and his corpus in a single afternoon. “Literary fashion” they noted “can be so hypnotically powerful that it can suspend the operation of critical intelligence”. Malley’s poems are today included in anthologies such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. 

In 1952, the best-selling book The Search for Bridey Murphy told of a woman who, under hypnosis, channelled the personality of an Irish woman from the previous century. She didn’t.

‘Araki Yasusada’, a survivor of Hiroshima whose influential poetry has been published in major journals, also does not appear to have ever lived.

 More recently in Australia, we (in)famously have supposedly Ukranian-born author ‘Helen Demidenko’, who won various important literary awards for her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, but who was later found to be the Australian-born Helen Darville. There is also ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’, the eloquent indigenous writer whose autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, turned out to be a fictional work by male author, Leon Carmen. There are many others. 

To tackle this element of ethical concerns about creative nonfiction, I would like all participants to comment on this question, using either the examples below, or adding their examples in their answers – these can be as brief or as lengthy as you like! :

Decades ago, theorists told us the author is dead. Who cares about who wrote the works above, or any other creative nonfiction texts? What is of central importance is the text and what it tells us as readers.