An Interview with Jean-Luc Bouchard, Shenandoah's New Creative Nonfiction Editor

Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Jean-Luc Bouchard on his new position as Creative Nonfiction Editor for Shenandoah. Bouchard discusses his thoughts on creative nonfiction and what draws him to the form—notably its capacity for stylistic experimentation. Interested in genre as both a site of limitation and of transgression, he also shares his experience with journalism, fiction, and humor. Finally, Bouchard speaks to Shenandoah’s legacy as a home for creative nonfiction and the types of writing he hopes to publish during his tenure. Shenandoah opens for creative nonfiction submissions November 15th.

You come to Shenandoah with an impressively diverse body of work; your writing has found a home in many styles, fiction and nonfiction alike. What is it specifically about creative nonfiction that keeps you coming back to the genre despite your time with other types of writing?

In my heart, I’m a generalist—as a reader, writer, and editor, I have a lot of enthusiasm for a wide range of genres, topics, forms, etc. When I teach, I frequently invoke literature and media beyond fiction and nonfiction because they’re helpful creative models, but also because there are so many compelling, original, daring texts that we can use as inspiration. I have a lot of love for writing that draws inspiration from divergent, unexpected sources, and a lot of love for writing that gains propulsion and depth from the author’s own obsessions and research. You’ll find this type of work in every creative genre, but it’s especially prevalent in creative nonfiction.

In addition, I’m always seeking out writing which is conscious of its relationship to risk, and which actively exploits that risk. In fiction, risk frequently shows up in creative design and subject matter. But in creative nonfiction, risk is built into the foundation: along with creative design and subject matter, you’ll find risk in vulnerability, risk in an author’s argumentative skin in the game, and risk in projected expertise concerning the real world. Both fiction and creative nonfiction, when they’re done well, will illuminate something new about the real world, but only in creative nonfiction is that the baseline expectation.

The term “creative nonfiction,” not unlike the term “literary fiction,” is often used to invoke a particular set of expectations—an archetypal style that foregrounds literariness in contrast to other more distinctly utilitarian nonfiction forms. Especially for our purposes as a literary magazine, in what ways do you emphasize “creative” as an important adjective characterizing nonfiction? Do you see a distinction between creative nonfiction and other nonfiction genres? What makes nonfiction “creative,” exactly?

I think there is something useful to gain from trying to identify the distinction between “creative nonfiction” and “nonfiction.” In my opinion, that distinction is a matter of intent. If there are significant, intentional elements of creative design and artistic expression in the text—so much so that the work would be unrecognizable without their presence—then I consider it “creative nonfiction.” I don’t believe you need to have a first-person perspective present in the text for that creative element to exist, nor do I believe that CNF has to be either narrative or lyric. But if the text’s voice, structure, and meaning work in tandem to create a piece of writing that prioritizes something other than the purely informative and/or entertaining—if it prioritizes the experience, interpretation, and emotional and intellectual impact of its reading—then I consider it CNF.

Could you tell us a little more about your time before W&L? What was your relationship to writing before coming to Shenandoah? What from this time do you hope to bring to the magazine?

True to my generalist heart, my road to Shenandoah and W&L was a winding one. Out of undergrad, I worked for a number of years as a writer and editor for digital media and journalism companies like BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Quartz, and Medium. I also worked brief stints in book publishing and tech, as well. Outside of my day jobs, I was publishing nonfiction, humor, and fiction as a freelancer for online publications like Vox and literary magazines like the Paris Review. Since 2017, I’ve also been a features contributor to The Onion.

In 2021, I decided to return to school to seek my MFA in creative writing from UNC Greensboro so I could focus on writing, teaching, and editing the genres I love, including creative nonfiction. I genuinely couldn’t be happier about coming to W&L and Shenandoah this year; among other things, I’m hoping my experience with journalism and humor will help inform my role as Creative Nonfiction Editor.

Your time in journalism and your own reporting (I’m thinking of pieces like “I paid $47 an hour for someone to be my friend” and “Inside the Wild Stock Market for Politics Where Traders Bet on Our Next President”) brings me to my next question. How do you see the relationship between creative nonfiction and the demands of journalistic writing? What about the relationship between academic writing and creative nonfiction?

I absolutely adore journalistic writing, and consider literary journalism to be one of the core subgenres of creative nonfiction. As a reader of a lot of popular nonfiction and journalism alongside creative nonfiction, I have a healthy appetite for informative, research-centered writing, both on its own or when layered into narrative nonfiction, memoir, cultural criticism, etc. When journalistic writing is layered into memoir or critique, as Jia Tolentino often does, I view it as more of a craft tool than a standalone genre—its demands are different from the demands of straight journalism, because they are dependent on the demands of that particular piece of CNF.

I’m also deeply drawn to structure—especially structures borrowed from writing outside of traditionally literary genres like journalism, academic writing, self-help, popular business and science writing, technical writing, theology, video game writing, and so on. I’ve found creative nonfiction to frequently be on the forefront of this type of structural pragmatism, with authors like Maggie Nelson masterfully blending academic writing into her CNF, among so many other genres. My curiosity on academic subjects doesn’t shut off the moment I pick up a piece of creative writing, so I’ve always appreciated authors who are able to combine academic rigor and specificity with creative design.

Nonfiction writing invokes a certain relationship between the aesthetic and the existential. Because nonfiction promises to speak to the real world directly, a coherent sense of reality is necessarily implicated. Do you feel nonfiction must display a loyalty to some semblance of the “real”? Therefore, are realism, verisimilitude, and representation emblematic of the genre—necessities even?

As much as I advocate and enjoy experimentation during the writing process, I am also a reader and writer who appreciates the creative advantages of constraint. Some of the best work I’ve ever read is dramatically improved by the constraints inherent to CNF, not least of all the adherence to the truth. So I do believe that nonfiction has to display a loyalty to some semblance of the truth, but for subgenres like memoir or personal essays, I don’t always know the best way to assess that “truth” as a reader. Nor do I know if that work is the best use of our time, as readers.

Once again, I tend to defer to our perception of intent. In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick argues that, “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.” I’ve always found Gornick’s argument helpful, because it places the emphasis on how the work presents the relationship between the author and their thorough, self-aware interrogation of the subject. Conveniently, when that effort is prioritized, it doesn’t just tend to produce more truthful writing, but all-around more compelling writing as well.

Humor is important in your writing. Can you talk about your interest in humor, and how do you see its intervention in literature and writing?

I was always interested in humor and satire as a kid, and sought it out in every form: in novels, in plays, in TV and movies, in songs, in stand-up, in memoir. The first professional writing I ever did was as a freelance writer for sites like CollegeHumor, and then as a staff humor writer for BuzzFeed. And because I still serve as a features contributor for The Onion, humor writing continues to be a regular routine in my life. Outside of pure humor and satire writing, however, humor tends to find its way into a lot of my more “serious” CNF and fiction.
When I employ humor in writing that isn’t strictly humor writing, I’m intentionally using it as a craft technique to improve pacing, to affect ethos, etc. Humor is a wildly versatile tool for CNF writers—for one thing, it’s a gateway emotion that allows readers to more quickly and intensely feel other emotions like fear or anger. Structurally, it’s incredibly helpful for quickening the pace of a section of writing that is slowing down. But more than anything, it is fun. I don’t ever want to devalue that; we like humor because it’s fun, and that’s the predominant reason why we create humor and seek it out. There is a lot of room for the things we love in the writing we create, and that includes writing that otherwise contains any multitude of heavy, intense, difficult subjects, as well.

Of all your writing I read in preparation for this interview, “Little Boxes” was the most beautiful and the piece I highly recommend all our readers take the time to seek out. I can’t help but think of this essay as an access point into your philosophy around writing and a companion that has illuminated our conversations around literature. As a braided essay, it approaches creative nonfiction with an openness; it blends many traditions together simultaneously. Likewise, the thematic concerns of the piece, namely the desire for, resistance against, and failure to conform to conventionality feels appropriate for a writer who himself has written across genre and whose chosen genre, nonfiction, resists being a little box itself. Can you tell me more about this piece?

That’s very kind of you to say. I do think “Little Boxes” is the most self-aware piece I’ve ever written, to the point that I ended up cutting a number of sections off the original draft that were commenting on the structure of the essay itself. As I said earlier in the interview, I’m appreciative of and fascinated by creative constraints. But I’m also fascinated by unpopular external perceptions of things like compartmentalization. Being constrained is one of my biggest fears—literally constrained, so that I can’t move my arms and legs—but I can’t deny that I constrain myself and others all the time in non-physical ways. Some of this serves as a defense mechanism or survival technique in a difficult world (some of which I explore in the essay), but some of it is just plain limiting.

“Little Boxes” looks at some of the impulses I have to strategically put myself into different boxes, which sometimes looks like cutting myself off from others, but which can also look like providing myself a safe, easy-to-understand framework to chip away at larger issues from a manageable starting point and distance. That same instinct shows up all the time when I write and edit, and while it can be helpful in giving me clear footholds for drafting or revision or critique, it’s something I have to actively question and fight against, too. Sometimes, it isn’t helpful to avoid seeing the forest for the trees, or to view a work as a whole before you view it as a series of smaller components.

“Little Boxes” feels very much in conversation with your short story, “Pinned.” Both pieces, but especially “Pinned,” are concerned with the overlap between control, desire, and self-destruction. Could you tell us more about “Pinned”?

I really appreciate you drawing a connection between these two pieces, because I hadn’t thought about their clear symmetry before now. But you’re right: in “Pinned,” a character is literally constrained in the way I described above, and he becomes deeply dependent on the main character of the story.

Writing “Pinned” was really exciting, because the process basically resulted in two very different short stories. The first draft of “Pinned” was written from the perspective of the character who becomes constrained, and although he is also the more toxically dominant and outwardly smug partner in the romantic relationship at the center of the story, he is also the character I sympathized with more easily while writing. When I finished the first draft, I was unsatisfied with how little emotional consideration the story had given the other partner in the relationship, a man who is outwardly meek and needy but whose true character is revealed once his boyfriend is immobilized. I ended up writing a new second draft that flipped the first-person perspective of the story to this needier character, so that we see every difficult scene through his eyes. It resulted in a story I enjoyed a lot more, in part because of how uncomfortable it was to inhabit the character whose entire personality is defined by an attraction to control and in being controlled. As I note above, loss of control is a very scary premise for me, and something I return to a lot in my writing.

Thinking more about the similarities between “Little Boxes” and “Pinned,” do you find yourself returning to certain themes or subject matter over and over again? Do you think of your broader work as a writer or editor as contributing to a larger coherent whole?

I do think you could categorize most of my essays and short stories over the past few years into a very short list of obsessions. One of them is the intersection of technology and loneliness. Another is compartmentalization and constraint. Another is the play between ambition and escapism. And the last is workplaces and worker identity. I’m constantly returning to these themes, which also frequently meld together in my writing. I don’t necessarily keep these themes in mind when I’m writing, but I am conscious of them when I am reading and editing, because I am always looking for work that can teach me new ways to view or challenge the topics I never get tired of reading.

What nonfiction pieces from Shenandoah’s past have stayed with you and continue to excite you as a reader? And where would you like your tenure as nonfiction editor to take the magazine? In other words: if you could invite prospective writers to send pieces to you, what would you ask them to send?

One piece I keep coming back to is Randon Billings Noble’s “Elegy for Dracula,” which was published in the Fall 2015 issue of Shenandoah. I love how confidently Noble jumps through time to tell her story—sometimes a day at a time, sometimes half a year, sometimes backward, sometimes forward—and how she blends narrative memoir with reflections on variations of Dracula in literature, film, and real life. The pace is so delightfully breakneck and the medley of topics so engaging that it never feels like there’s a wasted word or redundant thought. Instead, deceptively simple sentences have been sharpened to puncture as deeply as possible: “His reaction was bad. I spent the night at a friend’s. The next day I returned to my apartment to find that D. had moved out, but all of my book spines were marked with a smear of blood.”

Another essay that I love to revisit is “Memoirs of a Stink Bug” by J. D. Ho in the Fall 2021 issue of Shenandoah. From its very first line—“‘I never had stink bugs before I met you,’ my partner James told me recently.”—I was hooked on the interpersonal conflict of this piece, but Ho goes so much further than that. Ho incorporates extensive historical, scientific, and familial research into the essay in order to flesh out the significance of the stink bug as a symbol of xenophobia—of immigrants treated as “invasive species”—on both a literal and figurative level. It’s masterfully done, especially in its braided structure, and I won’t spoil the final paragraph, but the language flourish at the very end of the essay is what hits me hardest of all.

As Creative Nonfiction Editor, I’m hoping to continue Shenandoah’s tradition of publishing daring, original CNF that blends poetic lyricism with arresting personal truths. I’d also like to continue widening the spectrum of Shenandoah’s CNF to include more essays rooted in critique, research, literary journalism, narrative scenework, and most especially, a thoughtful mix of any or all of these above subgenres and techniques within the same piece.

For prospective writers interested in submitting to Shenandoah, I’d say that I’m seeking creative nonfiction rooted in the author’s obsessions and passions. I like to see writers actively grappling on the page with their chosen subjects, whether intellectually or emotionally. I’m also interested in CNF that is intentional about its structure and pacing—whether that is propulsive and playful, or meditative and reflective—and I always welcome CNF submissions that incorporate elements of research, literary journalism, and cultural criticism in addition to memoir, lyric essay, and personal essay. I love nonfiction humor and humor memoir as well as flash nonfiction, so I encourage you to submit those drafts, too!