About: Susanne Antonetta

Susanne Antonetta (Suzanne Paola)’s most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Awards for her Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001) and A Mind Apart (2005), include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award winner, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, an Elle Reader’s Choice finalist, and many others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, and other venues. She is half-time professor at Western Washington University.

Posts by Susanne Antonetta:

Womanly Regard: Gender and the Act of Making Nonfiction

Lately, as a new member of the VIDA Genre Advisory Committee for creative nonfiction, I’ve been wrestling with a paradox: I am addicted to facts, an inveterate snoop incapable of writing through the kind of invention that makes good fiction, yet I wrote nothing in creative nonfiction form until my forties. In college, I wrote what I called prose poems and fiction. I wrote poems, too, which were bad and beside the point here, but the prose poems and fiction both: a) consisted of factual material and b) often suffered as a result. (more…)