While the late Keith Waldrop described his 1993 book, Light While There Is Light: An American History, reissued by New York Review Books Classics in May, as a “fictional memoir,” Dalkey Archive Press, which reissued the book in 2013, referred to it as an “autobiographical novel,” and elsewhere it’s been described as a “poetic memoir.” This week, compose three short pieces about one single memory, each one to be described by one of these hybrid labels. How does your fusion of fiction and nonfiction shift when you’re thinking about the genre of your work in a different way? What kind of permission is granted when you add on a more imaginative modifier, such as “fictional” or “poetic”—and how does the “autobiographical” prefix work in tandem or in tension with a fictional element in place?
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