Why "creative non-fiction" is a term whose time is over

It had never occurred to me before what the genesis was of the term "non-fiction" for everything that is not fiction, including magazine articles, essays and journalism. This was brought home by a thoughtful, somewhat mischevious essay "Tilting at Windmills for Literary Non-Fiction" by Ken McGoogan in the Globe and Mail Books section, published Saturday.

This is an important topic for magazines to consider since they are often the seedbed and genesis of non-fiction books and churn out reams of so-called "non-fiction" with every issue. Many a bestseller has been an elaboration of an article commissioned by a Canadian magazine and many a Canadian magazine has helped finance a bestselling non-fiction work by buying articles based on works-in-progress.

Yet, somehow, non-novels and magazine journalism don't get the respect they deserve. (This is particular important on the eve of the awarding of the Giller Prize, the prestigious, richer and much better-known equivalent of non-fiction book awards like the Charles Taylor Prize and the CBC Literary Award for non-fiction.)

Defining something that's not a novel, short story or poem in the negative, even using the somewhat tortured term "creative non-fiction", doesn't work very well and somehow misses the fact that factual journalism and narrative history is the majority of what readers read and presumably like best.

McGoogan uses, as an example, the Canada Reads competition on CBC.

Why, year after year, does it focus exclusively on fiction? In the real world, fiction accounts for less than 35 per cent of the Canadian book market, even if you throw in thrillers and Harlequin romances. Clearly, Canadian gatekeepers have bought into the notion that fiction is the Heavyweight Division and the literary novel is the Main Event.

Fiction is as a general rule, here today and forgotten tomorrow, or at least most fiction is. "It's narrative non-fiction that will stand, for sheer artistry, against any novel published this season," says McGoogan.

Quick now, list the 10 most important Canadian books of the past 20 years. All done? If your list does not include Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, you have proved my point. One hundred years from now, when most of today's prize-winning novels have been consigned to the dustbin of literary history, people will still be arguing about that book. And Frozen in Time is just one example from the field I know best.

McGoogan was a winner of the Pierre Berton Award (notably given by the publishers of The Beaver: Canada's National History magazine) and recently published a fiction called Visions of Kerouac: Satori Magic Edition. In 2008, the BBC and the History Channel will broadcast a docudrama based on his narrative Fatal Passage. He worked as a journalist at The Toronto Star and The Montreal Star, spent more than a decade as books editor and columnist at The Calgary Herald and has written for Canadian Geographic, Calgary magazine, Explore magazine, The Beaver, Quill & Quire, B.C. Bookworld, Books in Canada, and The Literary Review of Canada.

He says we should abandon the terms "non-fiction" and "literary non-fiction" and "creative non-fiction" in favour of two fact-based literary genres, Narrative and Polemic, both on par with Fiction.

Where today we have two main categories, Fiction and Non-fiction, tomorrow we have three: Fiction, Narrative and Polemic. And that should translate into three G-Gs of equal prestige, three Giller Prizes, three Main Events - and 10 times the engagement.