Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of numerous articles and books, including Many Sleepless Nights, he is currently Professor of English at The University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

Brendan Cahill is Editor in literary fiction and nonfiction at Grove Atlantic in New York.

Rebecca Skloot is a freelance writer who attended the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. She is currently at work on her first book.

Cara Ford is the creative nonfiction editor of nidus.

Ford: I'd like to begin by having all of you talk about your involvement with the creative nonfiction genre, in relation to your own jobs and your own interests in reading and writing.

Gutkind: I got involved in creative nonfiction when it was called New Journalism. I was inspired by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Lillian Ross and other people who were published in the New Yorker, who wrote in-depth, story-oriented, scenic, dramatic true stories. And I began writing that in the 1970s and have published six or eight books that are done in this way. During this time I have seen New Journalism become New Nonfiction, become Literary Journalism, become Narrative Nonfiction, become Creative Nonfiction. It has all these different names but what is so compelling and inspiring is that it allows you to be both a journalist and in some respects a novelist, a story teller, and you blend the two in order to tell the most dramatic story possible. I also started teaching in this form. I mentioned to Brendan that I am one of the first, I think, to teach this dramatic nonfiction in college and at the graduate school level. In the early nineties, after a tremendous fight that many of us had in trying to secure some sort of foothold in the academic world for the genre, I decided it was time to start the first literary journal devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction. No one had ever done this before. I called it Creative Nonfiction. We started with three thousand dollars, and we've been alive since 1993. We're doing very well. In those three areas, those are the three things I've been really interested in: writing creative nonfiction, reading creative nonfiction, and teaching creative nonfiction. And making it continue to grow in the literary world.

Cahill: I'm an editor at Grove Atlantic in New York, editor of literary nonfiction and fiction. I think what's so exciting about creative nonfiction is that it allows story and narrative to be created from elements that provide information and create a way of understanding the world through things that have happened, and bring them alive for people in a whole new way. The revolution of New Journalism in the 1970s, the use of fictive techniques to create scenes and character and dialogue, is really important to the book length works of the nineties. This style of writing has become a dominant form in creative nonfiction, more so than other forms of traditional nonfiction: science, journalism, popular science, history, biography, all of which are using these techniques more and more. Young writers are pushing the boundaries of what they can do story-wise, both in a sort of neo-Gonzo tradition and the sorts of stories that they tell using these techniques. Technique is still evolving and fresh and bigger than ever.

Skloot: I'm a full-time freelance writer. I have the same view that Lee does that it's not so much journalism as it is creative. By day I write articles for journals and newspapers around the country: Popular Science, New York Times. I'm also working on a creative nonfiction book. I try to apply the techniques of creative nonfiction to everything I do. The definition of creative nonfiction is a little fuzzy. When people think of creative nonfiction they tend to think of long magazine pieces for the New Yorker, or they think of books, and a lot of it is using the tools of the trade, like scene and dialogue, even in book reviews and shorter articles. The biggest reason I came to an MFA program rather than a journalism program was because I wanted to learn more about the elements and techniques of creative nonfiction, rather than the inverted pyramid. I wanted to apply the literary techniques to my writing rather than go the other way. I do mostly science writing. One reason I think creative nonfiction is great in science writing is that it allows you to use personal stories to explain how science actually impacts people's lives. I think Susan Orlean does similar things. I remember reading her in my hometown paper and being amazed at how accessible she made other people's worlds. My interest in writing creative nonfiction is more toward writing about other people's lives rather than my own, because I like to be a part of theirs.

Gutkind: I've been asked this a thousand times and am never quite sure of the best answer: Why is creative nonfiction so popular now? We were doing it in the 1970s. Tom Wolfe said back then the novel was the king. Why is creative nonfiction the king genre now?

Cahill: My speculation is that nonfiction has always trumped fiction overall in sales. That alone indicates something. The demographics show male readers more often buy nonfiction. I think a reason why we're seeing books now taking on these forms, as opposed to the magazine articles of the 1970s, is because it took a while generationally for it to filter from the sort of smaller scale platforms to the point where the techniques were developed so they could be used by these writers, first by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, what have you. The book form allowed these writers to broaden their smaller articles. As it moved more into the mainstream, these techniques were discovered to get deeper into the lives of characters, getting into their thoughts and world and creating it for people on a whole other level of intimacy than traditional journalism techniques would allow. And I think now these sorts of literary techniques are beginning to penetrate into other more traditional nonfiction genres, like memoir, to the point where you have...Angela's Ashes, and the fact that Frank McCourt is reconstructing conversations and reconfiguring parts of his life.