If asked to describe what creative non-fiction is, Jack Parlett would jokingly respond: ‘the thing you write when you’re supposed to be writing about something else.’ In earnestness, he would describe creative non-fiction as a form that ‘mediates the act of self-revelation.’ It allows the artist to bear all of themselves while also keeping what needs to be kept; to speak candidly about difficult experience while embracing that which cannot find language; it ‘allows us to move past received forms’ about storytelling and about ourselves, such that we may, in our accounts of something that has happened in real life, become something larger than our lives, that in turn makes our lives larger.

In thinking about this definition of creative non-fiction I am reminded, interestingly, of Quaker worship. Or rather I am reminded of its form: how a group of disparate individuals gather together in a quiet that is broken only when someone feels moved to speak. This act of speaking is called ‘ministry.’ Though the definition of ministry might differ depending on the person, to me it appears a combination of several genres of storytelling: there is often something of anecdote or confession; elements of prayer; always the mystical, given that ministry is often considered to represent, to some degree, not just the voice of the speaker but that of God, or the Light, or whatever term one uses to describe a force greater than themselves. Though ministry is often rooted in someone’s personal lived experience—the ‘non-fiction’ of our lives: doubts about an impending move, a friend who is ill, a job promotion—it also seeks to touch upon a universal common denominator between all people, something that might emerge in and from the gathered silence if it were given a voice. The resultant depersonalization of the personal is an innately creative process, I think, one in which something original is made of a familiar experience. And in an individual’s attempt to discern what of their lives can become ministry, there is a participation in that act of ‘mediating self-revelation’ that Parlett describes—a mediation that occurs not only on an individual level, but a collective one as well.

I started attending Quaker meetings three years ago. In the likely hundreds of meetings I have attended since, I have found that sitting in that silence has taught me a great deal about writing, and especially about writing 'creative non-fiction' about my life. In that quiet, I have sifted through my range of personal experiences in pursuit of its universal heart, which is, at the end of the day, the story I really want to tell— and this process of sifting has been my way of contributing to what Mary Cappello describes as the ‘uncommon archive’. And when I come to find the universal it is as if I am 'ventriloquized', another metaphor that Cappello uses and Parlett cites, by something beyond me. A voice that belongs to all of us suddenly speaks using my words, as I stand up to share what I am moved to say.