The Disappearing (Reappearing) Literary Journalist

I backed into a career in literary journalism, a disappearing subgenre of creative nonfiction, accidentally because I wrote bad poetry.

- BY ROBERT W. FIESELER

Or rather, I should clarify that, in my early 20s, I wrote narrative poems that actually wanted to be journalistic feature stories—lacking any focus on form or line but obsessing over experiences of real people whose lives played out like cinema. My graduate poetry advisor, frustrated but also delighted while reviewing a particularly inchoate sonnet of mine, asked about my writing process and then pronounced, “Bobby, you're reporting your poems.” This gave me pause.

“Doesn't everyone get out there to interview their subjects?” I asked.

“No, Bobby, most poets don't have that skill set,” she reassured. “They're either too shy or too lazy. Usually, they armchair Google a few things and fabricate the rest.”

Several decades later, I’m a literary journalist. That means I went to graduate journalism school instead of finishing up an MFA. In my magazine-, novella-, and book-length nonfiction, such as my latest queer history work American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, I aim to artfully report the “actualities” of society. It’s about getting past the who/what/when/where of breaking news and marinating on the why in human nature. As a “Fourth Estate” storyteller (tasked to watch the three estates of government), I share the same fundamental mission as any news correspondent to inform the public and hold power to account. But literarily speaking, I also worship at the sensorial altar of reality and believe that the truth of how things occur, the wild unfolding of existence uncorrupted by poetic license, holds the password to prosaic beauty—the realm of Byron's “stranger than fiction.”

I recognize that I might be an endangered species with these writing appetites. The near extinction of research-heavy journalistic feature assignments in the non-