Breaking Into a “Secret Genre”—on Creative Nonfiction
“When I talk to students, especially younger students,” says Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind, “they have no idea that creative nonfiction hasn’t been around forever. But it hasn’t. It had existed before, but never as a genre. It was like a secret genre.”
Because Gutkind had been writing creative nonfiction since the early 1970s and having trouble finding publishing outlets outside of “the big deal, slick magazines like or ,” he decided to launch his own journal (now a magazine) in 1994 and says, “It really sparked a creative nonfiction revolution. Finally, with the
