Writers call these days the Golden Age of nonfiction – from “This American Life” and “StoryCorps” on the radio to every blog and Twitter feed and Facebook update in the world, we’ve never spent more of our time telling – and spreading – our stories.
And “nonfiction,” mind, isn’t something practiced only by black-clad Starbucks denizens hunched over their journals. Like M. Jourdain, in Moliere’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” who was thrilled to discover that all his life he had unknowingly been “speaking prose without knowing anything about it,” we must remember that our own stories are nothing but garden-variety nonfiction. And that by knowing a bit about what nonfiction means, we can get better at telling and sharing them.
The stories masterfully told live at the Monti are nonfiction; the documentaries at the Full-Frame Documentary Film Festival are nonfiction, as are the stories told in print, in image, and in sound by the festival’s patron, The Center for Documentary Studies. The Triangle is awash in resources for telling stories, and this year we’ll use those resources, in person and online, to craft stories, to tell stories, and to share them with one another and with people hungry for story all over the world.
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