As a writing exercise, I was once told to pick someone in the room and describe them — what they wore, what they looked like, how they spoke, how they moved  — and then to invent a “why” for each observation. Why is he wearing that shirt? Because he keeps forgetting to do laundry and this was the last shirt that didn’t smell rancid.…

There’s no shortage of seriousness in the modern landscape of creative nonfiction. Week after week, The New York Times’ Bestsellers List exalts narratives exploring the horrors of our world: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me at 84 weeks on the list, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle at 436 weeks on the list, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy at 119 weeks on the list, to name a few.…

On a warm evening in early September, approximately eighty Ohio Wesleyan Students and eighty faculty members gathered in the Benes Rrooms for the school’s first Diversity Summit. The two dozen round tables were littered with small yellow pads and pens, boxed dinners, and signs with labels proclaiming such topics as “coalitions across student groups,” “Faculty and Staff collaboration,” and “Intersectionality.”…