![]() ![]() Researching a book about transplantation, “Many Sleepless Nights” (W.W. Like walking through your living room dozens of times, but only paying attention to the sofa when suddenly you realize that it is missing. Our personal distance is a by-product of my own technique as an immersion journalist – my “fly-on-the wall” or “living room sofa” concept of “immersion”: Writers should be regular and silent observers, so much so that they are virtually unnoticed. Over the past three years I had observed Bart Griffith in the operating room a number of times, and although a great deal of conversation takes place between doctors and nurses during the long and intense surgical ordeal, he had only infrequently addressed me in such a direct and spontaneous manner. With a brisk nod, the lead surgeon, Bartley Griffith, a young man who pioneered heart-lung transplantation and who at this point has lost more patients with the procedure than he had saved, looks up, glances around and finally rests his eyes on me: “Lee,” he says, “would you do me a great favor?” ![]() “On the roof,” she announces, meaning that the helicopter has set down on the hospital helipad and that a healthy set of organs, a heart and two lungs, en bloc, will soon be available to implant into this woman, whose immediate fate will be decided within the next few hours. Now the telephone rings a nurse answers, listens for a moment and then hangs up. This is a scene I have observed frequently since starting my work on a book about the world of organ transplantation, but it never fails to amaze and startle me: to look down into a gaping hole in a human being’s chest, which has been cracked open and emptied of all of its contents, watching the monitor and listening to the rhythmic sighing sounds of the ventilator, knowing that this woman is on the fragile cusp of life and death and that I am observing what might well be the final moments of her life. It is 3 a.m., and I am standing on a stool in the operating room at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in scrubs, mask, cap and paper booties, peering over the hunched shoulders of four surgeons and a scrub nurse as a dying woman’s heart and lungs are being removed from her chest. It will appear in “More than the Truth: Teaching Nonfiction Writing Through Journalism,” which will be published in the fall of 1996 by Heineman. ![]() My essay below, “The 5 Rs of Creative Nonfiction,” is dedicated to that mission. Creative Nonfiction provides a forum for writers, editors and readers interested in pushing the envelope of creativity and discussing and defining the parameters of accuracy, validity and truth. ![]() Jane Bernstein, Steven Harvey, Mary Paumier Jones, Wendy Lesser and Natalia Rachel Singer ponder the spirit of the essay (and e-mail!), while I continue to reflect on and define the creative nonfiction form.įrom the beginning, it has been our mission to probe the depths and intricacies of nonfiction by publishing the best prose by new and established writers. From the roots of traditional journalism to poetry and fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Steinbach, poet Diane Ackerman and novelists Phillip Lopate and Paul West, have helped expand the boundaries of form and tradition. The writers in this issue represent the incredible range of the newly emerging genre of creative nonfiction, from the struggle and success stories of Darcy Frey (“The Last Shot”) and William Least Heat-Moon (“Blue Highways”) to the master of the profession, John McPhee. Many writers featured in “The Essayist at Work” will also be participating at the conference – an event we hope to continue to co-sponsor with Goucher for years to come. In the future, we intend to publish special issues on a variety of topics, but this one is especially important, not only because it is our first, but also because it helps to launch the first Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers’ Conference with the Goucher College Center for Graduate and Continuing Studies in Baltimore, Md., a supportive and enthusiastic summer partner. The cover is different, and although it is our habit to center each issue around a general theme, the essays and profiles in “The Essayist at Work” are narrower in scope. “The Essayist at Work” is our first special issue.
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