| Introduction: Creative Nonfiction: An Adventure in Lyric, Fact, and Story | 1 |
| I. | The Art, the Craft, the Business | |
| Why I Write | 6 |
| But Tell It Slant: From Poetry to Prose and Back Again | 8 |
| A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay | 14 |
| Saying Good-Bye to "Once Upon a Time," or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction | 25 |
| Finding a Story, or Using the Whole Pig | 34 |
| Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character | 38 |
| Researching Your Own Life | 45 |
| Taking Yourself Out of the Story: Narrative Stance and the Upright Pronoun | 50 |
| The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner | 57 |
| As Time Goes By: Creating Biography | 67 |
| Twelve Years and Counting: Writing Biography | 85 |
| Not the Killing but Why | 97 |
| Every Hell Is Different: Notes on War Writing | 101 |
| The "New" Literature | 104 |
| Surviving Overseas | 114 |
| The Comfortable Chair: Using Humor in Creative Nonfiction | 122 |
| Getting Published | 130 |
| Avoiding Self-Censorship: A Guide to the Detection of Legal Land Mines | 140 |
| II. | Aftershocks--Responses to the Genre | |
| Learning to Breathe After the Memoir | 158 |
| Excerpts From Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer | 162 |
| One Nation, Under the Weather | 164 |
| Becoming the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction | 170 |
| III. | Creative Nonfiction Reader | |
| The Woman Who Slept With One Eye Open | 182 |
| Basha Leah | 191 |
| Excerpt from "Tacos and Manna" | 205 |
| Portrait of My Body | 214 |
| What They Don't Tell You About Hurricanes | 223 |
| Excerpt From Irving Berlin: A Life in Song | 230 |
| It was a time of hope, that was the thing (1927-1930) | 240 |
| The Shadow Knows | 256 |
| All Things Censored: The Poem NPR Doesn't Want You to Hear | 270 |
| Prisoner AM-8335: A Postscript | 277 |
| Sarajevo I | 283 |
| Emergence | 299 |
| Ah, Wilderness! Humans, Hawks, and Environmental Correctness on the Muddy Rio Grande | 307 |
| Maps | 319 |
| Murder | 327 |
| Going Back to Bisbee | 331 |
| Flying in the Middle of Art | 357 |
| Contributors | 368 |
| Index | 374 |