Truth
Hila Ratzabi - { I Don’t Care if Your Memoir is True, and Other Thoughts on Truth and Fiction }
Jessica Gross - { 2 Train, End to End }
Michael Henson - { Maggie Boylan }
Alissa Heyman - { I Married a Skull } { Shortly After the Wedding }{ The Silent Treatment }
Lynne Procope - { Doing It for Love } { The Poet Addresses Saartjie Baartman; The So Called Venus Hottentot. }
Tim Raymond - { Small }
Jaime Warburton - { This Is Not a Poem About a Dream } { - Red Moon Last Night }
Untruth
Shelly Oria - { Integrity }
Sheila Thorne - { Betrayal }
Jennifer Duffield White - { Blue-Sky Treason }
We Don't Know and They
Won't Tell Us
Tamiko Beyer - { We Don’t Know and They Won’t Tell Us ~ Poetry in the Space of Possibility }
Adam Auerbach - { Illustrations }
Simon Perchik - { Five Untitled Poems }
Lynne Procope - { The Mortal Danger of Redheads }
Hila Ratzabi - { I Have to Show My Appreciation to You for Rescuing Me from This Setting }
| An Introduction to Issue 7 by Anne Hays |
When we originally dreamt up the mission statement for Storyscape Journal and the genres defining the pieces we would accept, the truth was on my mind. I had recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and had spent the previous two years obsessing over that slippery but definitive word: creative. When nonfiction is creative it becomes journalism’s once removed step-sister, and yet eerily the family resemblance remains. Does creative mean I can embellish quotes if the nuts and bolts of the quotes remain? Can I truncate time, or conflate characters, if it results in a tidier narrative? Any retelling of a story is also a refashioning; it’s the writer’s perspective on a version of reality—this I accept. But still, I feel a guilty conscience when condensing or omitting events, nearly always, though a slicker narrative seems to demand it. Where does the line lie between truth and invention? If my narrative becomes too tidy, should I label it Non-Creative Fiction instead?
So many writers I respect have had issues with critics over their nonfiction, from Geoff Dyer to Alexandra Fuller to David Sedaris (who no one really questions anymore—he’s just too damn funny). And so when I started the journal with Shelly Oria and Alanna Schubach, both fiction writers, we created these three categories to poke at something that was happening, both in fiction and nonfiction. And then came the series of fake memoirs: James Frey’s memoir was revealed as embellished merely months before our first issue. Mary Karr wrote a scathing denouncement in the New York Times (cleverly titled “His So-Called Life”). Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences, and recently Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, only re-inspired the ludicrous gravity of our mission: to mess with contemporary literary categories delineated by truth.
We’re publishing Issue Seven on the curtails of Tom MacMaster’s exposed-as-fictional Syrian lesbian blog and its maddening political ramifications, and so it seems only fitting that we invited three writers to explore what our created categories mean to them: Hila Ratzabi on Truth, Shelly Oria on Untruth (her piece is itself a work of fiction), and Tamiko Beyer on We Don’t Know and They Won’t Tell Us. These three pieces head each section, where you’ll find prose, poetry, audio, and art, as usual.
We hope you enjoy the issue.
