Coming September 2024 from Sublation Media

At the NonfictioNOW writers’ conference in Phoenix on Nov 1-3, 2018 (a few days before the midterm elections), I asked my fellow writers and professors of nonfiction the following questions: How do you know what you believe? Do you have any absolute beliefs? Is there such thing as “truth”? What is ‘nonfiction” and is it “true”? What do you think is the difference between “truth” and belief? If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in ghosts? Why are you here and not canvassing for Stacey Abrams?

The consensus answers: I have no absolute beliefs, though I do believe in the power of art; there are no absolute truths other than that there is no truth; my sister and I are estranged; there are no ghosts except psychic luggage; I probably should be canvassing for Abrams, but I’ve lost faith in the process.

Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Q-Anon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have weaponized the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation: poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current “crisis” in “nonfiction”-journalism-“media.” If the perceiver, by her very presence, alters what’s perceived, Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over.

Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chavez; Italian space lasers modified voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 attack—this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky’s underground man. God is dead, so everything is permitted. Or is it?

How We Got Here consists of interviews with more than thirty NonfictioNow [correct term?] attendees; eighteen brief 2-Truths-and-a-Lie videos, to demonstrate the precariousness of truth, especially now; and a slideshow / TED talk (on speed) / montage / soundscape / voiceover / monologue / intellectual history of the last 170 years, in which we argue that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.

David Shields, Director, Producer, Writer

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-four books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

A senior contributing editor of Conjunctions and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the PEN/Revson Award, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-starred in, was released in 2017 (available now on Vudu). He wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (available now on Sundance Channel, AMC, Amazon, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Tubi). Sight & Sound named Lynch one of the five best documentaries at the International Documentary Film Festival Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA). In his rave review in the  New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote, “The film’s relentless rhythm overwhelms and overpowers you. Random acts of terror, across time and space, reveal themselves as a pattern: it’s a gradient of American carnage.” Shields also co-wrote the feature film I’ll Show You Mine, which was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass and was named runner-up for best film at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2022.

James Nugent, Editor, Writer, Motion Graphics, Music

James Nugent is a writer, songwriter, and filmmaker. He edited and composed the music for the 2019 film Lynch: A History, which directed by David Shields. Nugent is the songwriter and singer for the bands Mountain Con and Berkeley Pit, which have released a number of albums. His songs have been featured in films and on television.

Robin Hemley, Producer, Story Consultation

Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020; Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His widely-used writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold over a hundred thousand copies and has been in print for 25 years.

Hemley’s work has been published and translated widely, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes (in both nonfiction and fiction), The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir. His short stories have been featured several times on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Iowa Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, and Creative Nonfiction. He is the founder of the international conference NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  

Hemley is Inaugural Director of the Polk School of Communications at Long Island University-Brooklyn, Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing, Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing, and University Professor. The co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction and co-founder of Authors at Large with Xu Xi, he has had artist residencies at The Bellagio Center at Lake Como, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell Colony.

Nicole Walker, Producer

Nicole Walker is the author of eight books, most recently Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet(2019). She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Longreads, Georgia Review, and Southern Review. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.

Erik Sather, Videographer, Editor

Erik Sather is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. His films, Jewish Caviar and The Tiny Things, have been featured at the Denver, Oaxaca, Marina del Rey, and Wine Country film festivals. The Tiny Things is distributed by Silicon Beach He currently works for Northern Arizona University's President's Office, producing and editing short films that highlight the work of scholars, researchers, and artists.