what's in a genre? – truth = patchwork, authenticity = quilt

Today I was flipping through (and consequently getting quite addicted to) Seattle's new (and get this, free!) enthusiastically creative City Arts Magazine. I came upon a nice column on the "vagrant" lifestyle of the freelance writer (a relate-able read)and then a nice collage of excerpts from author and UW Professor of English David Shields' new book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead cut and pasted next to a series of email back-and-forths between Shields himself and his former MFA student and Associate Editor of City Arts Bond Huberman. I found myself enthralled...

Here are some quotes from the article (taken from Shields' book, words I really liked, regardless of the tone of the linked book review) I unknowingly circled, starred and triple underlined with my pen (an unconscious reaction to an increase of interest in whatever I happen to be reading):

"There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating one, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark."

"I write to say, 'You're not the only one.' I write with the full faith that the reader I envision is hungry for my talk, because I know how hungry I am for reports from the trenches, stories that might help me map my way."

"Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent information."

"An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagines. We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. 'Fiction'/'nonfiction' is an utterly useless distinction."

"Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings."

"Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we're in need of at the time we're reading."

"You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real."