By Bernard Quetchenbach

In my nonfiction writing classes, students often struggle with the nature of truth as it applies to their writing. How can one be sure about one’s own memory? To what extent should you research a topic when your impression of a thing, not the thing itself, is the subject of the essay?

A question of craft also sometimes comes up. Writers have obligations to different “constituencies,” not the least of which is the writing itself. What if an essay could be made better, for example, by tweaking one rendered scene to make it more clearly parallel to one that occurs later in the essay? Or what if your memory is incomplete, but there is one not unlikely element that would make the gist clear and resonant to readers?

I can think of an example from an essay I wrote many years ago about events that occurred decades previous to the writing. I wanted to describe the particular sense of being young and newly mobile. I wrote that I was “a teenager with new access to a car” or something to that effect. Actually, as soon occurred to me, I was probably in my early twenties. Ultimately I decided that the discrepancy was too insignificant to upend what I thought was an effective sentence rhythm.

Even years later, I’m not sure that that was okay. I’m pretty scrupulous when it comes to facts, and I know how to distinguish between what is and my reaction to it, at least insofar as any of us can do that. But in that one instance and, to be absolutely honest, in one or two others, I was unwilling to unravel what I thought, rightly or wrongly, was a downright poetic sentence.

In a way, I’m genuinely sorry. Nonfiction writing is as good a place as any to take a stand at a time when the whole idea of an objective reality beyond our prejudices and desires can seem hopelessly naive. But I can’t guarantee that I won’t make the same decision again if confronted with a low-stakes matter of remembered fact and a high-stakes matter of the music of words.

Bernard Quetchenbach’s most recent book is Accidental Gravity.  He is the author of poetry collections including The Hermit’s Place and Everything As It Happens. His poems, essays, and articles have appeared in a variety of books, journals, and anthologies; recent work can be found in Poems Across the Big Sky II ,Unearthing Paradise, Birdsong, and The Ecopoetry Anthology.