Creative Nonfiction: A virtual conversation with Lee Gutkind

When in 1999 I began working on writing an undergraduate unit on creative nonfiction writing one name come up across all my Internet searches - Lee Gutkind. Before I started researching, I knew creative nonfiction was taught widely in writing schools across the USA, with its popularity and profile having developed rapidly over the last decade. So much so that (as Nigel Krauth can testify from personal experience) creative nonfiction was the’buzz’ area of the 1999 American Associated Writing Programs Conference held in Albany, New York, a conference which was attended by 1400 delegates. What I did not know was who stood at the centre of this whirlwind… In order to introduce Professor Gutkind as the Keynote Speaker in the Creative Nonfiction strand of the Writing 2000 Conference, I have constructed this (creative nonfiction) virtual interview from our email conversation and by utilising excerpts from the author’s published works.