Process Diary #13 📚

Truth in literary nonfiction—and how far a writer can extend it.

Several years ago, in 2016, I served as a panelist for Whose Truth: Writing the Truth in Literary Nonfiction—a public forum where writers discussed their approaches to memory and fact within their writing.

At the time, I was working on a piece about death and dying in agriculture, which involved working alongside student farmers at Warren Wilson College and shadowing them as they went about their daily chores: feeding the pigs and mucking the stalls; fixing roadside fences and repairing tractor engines. In the hours before and after classes, I watched as newborn piglets were castrated with razor blades, tagged, and placed back into their pens; my stomach, not yet hardened by farm work’s occasional gore, churned itself into knots. Over time, and after interviewing several members of the crew, I developed a narrative through line that focused on three students in particular—Landon, Thom, and McKenna—as their individual stories represented aspects of a much larger theme I hoped to convey in my writing: that death isn’t any easier to process just because you have control over it. There were several hours of interviews that didn’t make it into the final piece, and what had started for me as a vague interest in agricultural work became a full-blown piece about farmers’ interpersonal relationships with each other and the animals, as well as the more complicated relationships that they have with themselves. These students formed years-long relationships with animals that they knew would ultimately be sent to slaughter, and what I became most interested in—probably because I hadn’t arrived there myself, with my own grief—was how they continuously mustered up the strength to do it.