Speculative Creative Non-Fiction as a Portal
I’ve been enjoying Mira Ptacin’s To Catharsis and Beyond class at Writing Workshops. In her essay “Entering Through the Side Door: A Path for Approaching Your Truth in Difficult Material,” she offers formal advice on how to write about trauma. I love the class and highly recommend it (along with her beautiful memoir Pour Your Soul)! It’s been inspiring me to think of even more ways to “enter through the side door” or if you’re witchy — the side portal!
Speculative creative non-fiction is a portal which might especially appeal to witches. Laraine Herring defines speculative non-fiction in Brevity magazine as “an umbrella genre in which the questions of the memoirist’s book are addressed through speculative elements, which may include ghosts, metaphors, what-ifs, imaginative scenarios, and fantasies. It is memoir focused more on the possibilities of the internal world than the facts of the external world.”